Newly Unearthed Field Recordings

In today’s Sunday Times there is a great article about newly released black roots music field recordings compiled by folklorist John Work III. Note in particular the insightful take on the dynamics of Alan Lomax’s field recordings and the ways in which Work III’s acetates involve a shift in perspective.

Broadminded

Nowadays, it’s hard to hear the exquisite close harmonies of Ira and Charlie Louvin without thinking about the way that changes in historical perspective alter a listener’s impression of any musical performance. When the brothers from Knoxville, Tennessee sang in the 1950s and 60s, their lyrics–many of which were didactics and cautionary tales affirming the necessity of strict Christian morality–may have heartened true believers offended by the individualistic, secular ethos of nascent rock and roll. In those days, perhaps it was even possible to take their magnum opus Satan is Real on its own terms–as an earnest meditation on temptation, sin, and redemption.

While the musical purity of their harmony-propelled numbers for guitar and mandolin remains intact, today it is nearly impossible to listen to the Louvin Brothers without smirking at their dogmatic, sensationalist, and explicitly closed-minded take on Christianity. Nor is it easily to ignore the contradictions between the implicit humility of their homespun vocals and the arrogance of their loftiest moral sentiments, or between their unflinching behavioral imperatives and Ira’s own caustic mean-streaks tinged by his racism and severe alcoholism. The brothers’ decision to depict a devil with horns and a pitchfork on the cover of Satan on Real now seems like kitsch comedy.

Listening to a song like “Broadminded,” approximately 50 years after it was originally recorded therefore demands a multi-layered process of contextualization. To these ears, precisely because time has rendered quaint and hopelessly idealistic the Louvin Brothers’ line-in-the-sand preaching , it has ultimately turned their sentiments poignant. When the brothers sing “That word broadminded, is spelled S-I-N, I read in my bible, they shall not enter in,” and Ira’s mandolin echoes, the Louvins convey a sense of moral certainty that is not oppressive, but liberating. It fails to oppress because the Louvins lost the struggle–closedmindedness is today’s black sheep; it liberates because it is great music born out of ideological rigidity–suddenly a rare commodity in this age of irony, cynicism, relativism, and doubt.

The Very Thought of You

Made me want to write this.

Rhinestone Cowboy

My tribute to Porter Wagoner, from this week’s Independent:

He Just Came To Smell The Flowers

Dolly Parton is said to have joked about her break from duet partner and mentor Porter Wagoner: “we split over creative differences—I was creative, he was different.” As with all things Parton, there’s more substance here than meets the eye. Wagoner truly was different, and that was always what made him special. The man who introduced one of the great female country personalities to the world had a storied and singular career of his own that continued to flourish until his death last Sunday at the age of 80.

More than any other country star of his stature, Wagoner transcended superficial stylistic boundaries and labels. He was a fixture at country music’s most hallowed institution, the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, yet he was an Outlaw before Waylon and Willie—before the term even existed. He wore extravagant rhinestone Nudie suits well ahead of Gram Parsons, and though he sang with one of country’s great crossover stars, his idiosyncratic style was such that Waylon once opined: “He couldn’t go pop with a mouthful of firecrackers.”

Because he was never a man of his time he was never out of fashion, and at no point did the generational chasm between him and contemporary country music render him a nostalgia act. In his last years he recorded Wagonmaster, a powerful comeback album for Anti Records, opened for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden, secured his own entry in The Rock Snob’s Dictionary, and even submitted to an interview with Borat before the latter hit the big screen.
Most remarkable of all, though, is that this man who traveled so far from home never lost sight of it. Seeing him perform a two-song set at the Opry on a Friday night this August rekindled my hope that the future of country of music could be reconciled with its past. He did it with such ease that I wonder if it wasn’t the last thing on his mind.

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Buffalo’s Best: Willie Nile

That America is home to such a rich body of vernacular music has a lot to do with the size of the country and its cultural diversity. In the first half of the 20th century in particular–and to some extent even in recent years–regional styles and traditions have developed, sometimes in near isolation, and other times in conjunction with so many other styles that the results have tested the existing boundaries of categorization. The blues of the Mississippi Delta, Memphis and Chicago. The country of Appalachia, Nashville, Bakersfield. The jazz of New Orleans, Kansas City, New York. The folk of Washington Square and Everytown, USA. The soul of Memphis, Motown, Philadelphia. All this to say nothing of the many styles of rock and roll that have distinct flavors in distinct locales.

And then there are the many humbler hometowns, like mine–Buffalo, NY–that without birthing any style singular enough to reach the national radar, have quietly cultivated dozens of important musical talents over the years. While Buffalo can lay claim to a handful of contemporary and erstwhile stars–Harold Arlen, Rick James, Brian McKnight, the Goo Goo Dolls, Ani Difranco, Mercury Rev–it has also been the launching pad for a number of acts with less name recognition but as much or more talent. One such artist is singer-songwriter Willie Nile, a Buffalo native who became a Greenwich Village fixture after attending the University of Buffalo. While Nile has never achieved notoriety or financial success to match the critical acclaim he has earned, he has produced a handful of accomplished full-lengths since the early 80s, and two of these–his self-titled 1980 debut and 2006’s Streets of New York–have the timeless quality of classics.

With the literate-rocker aesthetic of a new wave-era Elvis Costello or Nick Lowe, Nile is, at his best, a man who tosses off wisdom and addictive hooks with equal enthusiasm and ease. “Vagabond Moon,” the first cut on his first album, still stands as Nile’s finest–a rush of exuberance and feeling that narrowly outdoes several other gems on the record, such as “She’s So Cold,” “That’s The Reason,” and “It’s All Over.” It is that last track, though, on which Nile shows that even without clever words, he can be devastatingly effective. “It’s all over” he sings endlessly and anxiously until the last repeat, at which time his voice rises to resolution and he tacks on the word “now” as if only just ‘now’ resigning himself to reality.

The James Talley Post

If you were in New York this past summer, and happened to be out with me at the Magician on the Lower East Side one warm evening, then you heard this already. But if you were not or did not happen to be, allow me to introduce, then, four dearest companions of mine, whose acquaintance I met just this July: the Capitol recordings of folk country bluesman James Talley.

The Devil In Bentonia

If you’ve seen the movie Ghost World–or if you read the inaugural post of my previous blog, Idiom Idiots–then you’re at most one degree of separation away from Skip James’s haunting blues masterpiece “Devil Got My Woman.” Seymour, the movie’s awkward country blues-loving protagonist, extols the record, telling his own devil woman, Enid: “…that’s a masterpiece. There are no other records like that. I actually have the original 78 of it in my collection. It’s one of maybe five known copies.” Enid had become acquainted with the cut via a compilation she purchased from Seymour at a garage sale and found herself playing it over and over on her portable record player. In the context of the film–in which Enid toys with, and inevitably tears apart, Seymour’s heart and life–the song’s ethereal quality is all the more transcendent. This being a music blog, however (for film analysis consult Good Plot), it feels appropriate to focus on the music-related claims Seymour makes about “Devil Got My Woman.”

In one sense, Seymour is correct in claiming that Skip James’s quintessential track is a singular masterpiece. James was very much an atypical bluesman–a proud man whose primary concern was for his own idiosyncratic artistry rather than his audience or the blues tradition to which he sometimes appeared tangential. James’s style, which was marked by disjointed, gloomy guitar licks played on an abnormally tuned guitar, was the product of his musical evolution in the metaphorical island that was his hometown: Bentonia, Mississippi. This was a local sound, however, and it is in that respect that it may be something of a stretch to say that “Devil Got My Woman” is unlike any other record. Enough of a musical community existed among James and his influences–most notably Henry Stuckey, the bluesman who is said to have taught James his signature tuning–that their sound was adopted by other locals such as Jack Owens and Cornelius Bright. The Bentonian school was a unique marvel to be sure–James simply wasn’t the only pupil.

A Tribute to Muddy Waters

Read my inaugural column for Another Place Another Time, a roots music feature for Delusions of Adequacy, here.

Attorney General; Executive Producer

It was the Talk of the Town in this week’s New Yorker that first allerted me to the new Janet Reno executed-produced compilation Song of America, though a few internet searches have since directed me to many other articles addressing the collection. The release of the 50-track recording this Tuesday is a development that can only be described as remarkably interesting. Move over John “Let the Eagle Soar” Ashcroft–there’s a new, old Attorney General who loves music about America. And here we were thinking that Ms. Reno was at the peak of powers during her famous Dance Party on SNL! Not only does Ms. Reno have the kind of ability to laugh at herself that has long been sought after in vain by politicians from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton, but apparently she also has pretty legit taste in music. I give her credit not because such trendy names as Devendra Banhart and Andrew Bird appear on the compilation but because of her idea for set–artists, old and new, performing songs about our nation. As Nick Paumgarten makes clear in his piece for Talk of the Town, Reno has an understanding of the rich and important relationship between American’s history and its vernacular music. If that weren’t enough, though, her hyperbolic enthusiasm for one Virginia Patterson Hensley is the coup de grace. “I think Patsy Cline was a genius,” she told Paumgarten. “I just wonder what the world would’ve been like if Patsy Cline had lived.” I fall to pieces.

Killer Country: A Jerry Lee Lewis Biography in Verse (Fragment)

Always he was still a sinner,

That much, he knew, it was inner.

But after hellfire struck him down,

Mid-stride, rocking music town,

He forsook shaking, balls of fire

To countryside he did retire.

Another time another place,

Led Killer to the penance face.

Filled with guilt and with regret,

Were his yodels, and they met

The twang, the moans, the pedal steel–

Roots redemption held appeal.

Still pentecostal contradiction

Was his muse, if not his diction;

Ivory makes many sounds

Hypocrisy though, knows no bounds

Milwaukee–stated Killies’ heel–

Disguised defying God was real.