tag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:/blogs/touchstonesTouchstones2018-07-30T11:39:49-04:00MARK LUCASfalsetag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:Post/53656252018-07-28T11:51:03-04:002023-12-10T12:18:11-05:00The Choctaw Ridge 50<p><span class="font_large">A Southern Gothic Mixtape </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Here's something I worked up for my South class at Centre, an outline sketch of some roots and branches. Even though books and movies have held the big flags for Southern Gothic over the years, it's more than a little interesting to lend an ear to the soundtrack that's been out there in the swamps, hollers, and airwaves all the while.</span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">1. Bobbie Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The gold standard. The handwritten 1967 ms. of the original 11-verse version is in the Faulkner Room at the University of Mississippi. Gentry laid down the track as simple vocal-and-guitar, after which a Capitol Records suit told the session producer, "Just put some strings on it so we won't be embarrassed. No one will ever hear it anyway." A whole world opens up out of table-talk fragments as real as blackeyed peas. Is Choctaw Ridge cursed or do people just make their own trouble? Callousness, manipulation, silence, and division fill the spaces of the family portrait. Seems there's more than one kind of virus going around. Mystery deepens the resonance of it all. Why did he jump? The song never says. Pass the biscuits, please. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">2. Robert Johnson, "Cross Road Blues" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The site: where Highway 61 crosses 49 outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, says the prevailing legend. RJ prays, God turns away, darkness falls. Looks east, looks west: no love, no friend, no deliverance. You can run, you can run, but it's hopeless . . . if the hellhound's on your trail? Bottleneck slide--that eerie likeness of a wail--makes the notes between the notes that make the blues. From the famous Gunter Hotel recording session in San Antonio, 1936, two years before his murder by poison. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">3. Rosanne Cash, "Money Road" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The Tallahatchie Bridge, Robert Johnson's grave, and the grocery store where Emmitt Till was marked for death--all three are on Money Road. Sacred tragic ground. "You can't separate the violence, racism, and history of the Deep South," Cash told an interviewer, "from the profundity of the music and literature that came from there. The fact that William Faulkner lived down the road from Robert Johnson, who lived down the road from Eudora Welty, who lived down the road from Howlin' Wolf, who lived down the road from Pops Staples . . . it's almost inconceivable." </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">4. The Louvin Brothers, "Knoxville Girl" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">From <em>Tragic Songs of Life</em>, 1956. Motiveless malignity. The darkest, cruelest, most freakish of all the Appalachian murder ballads. Waltzing along in that melodious brother harmony. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">5. Gillian Welch, "The Devil Had a Hold of Me" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The speaker feels the devil at her sleeve each stage of life from babyhood to deathbed. (What did she do to the butcher's boy? It's creepier left unsaid.) GW is the contemporary laureate of dark-minded old-time. The song is from Nashvegas 1998 but both the banjo and the stark dualism could be Black Mountain 1898. The prefab "Southern Gothic" playlist on the Spotify Browser has 100+ mostly contemporary items, approximately half of which take their modern cue from this song. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">6. The Steeldrivers, "Ghosts of Mississippi" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Corn whiskey can take you there: the crossroads where legend says Robert Johnson traded his soul to Satan for the guitar genius that seemed to emerge overnight. The crossroads protocol is that you hand your guitar to the devil at midnight. He re-tunes it, plays a song, hands it back, and the Faustian exchange is complete. Now you can sing like Chris Stapleton, play slide like Mike Henderson, and keen like this whole band on fire. But a ghost of Mississippi will smile back in the mirror. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">7. Sacred Harp Singers, "Idumea" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">"And am I born to die?" Sometimes the frontier-Protestant <em>hymns</em> are so frightening that they're Southern Gothic. Song by Ananias Davisson, compiler of <em>Kentucky Harmony</em>, the first shape-note hymnal of the South (1816). This 1920s-era performance is by Alabama's J.T. Allison Sacred Harp Singers--in the ferociously percussive and all-out a cappella attack of shape-note that'll make your hair stand on end. The Battle of the Crater scene in the movie of <em>Cold Mountain</em> uses this for soundtrack. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">8. Tony Joe White, "Polk Salad Annie" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Well, it is a shame when your mama's working on the chain gang. But Annie the wildchild knows how to make do. This greasy swamprocker is on the high spirits side of Southern Gothic. It could be the Rough South soundtrack for a Harry Crews story or the watermelon tale in <em>Suttree</em>. Recorded in Muscle Shoals, 1968. Written by White (b. Oak Grove, Louisiana) under the influence of Bobbie Gentry: "I heard 'Ode to Billie Joe' on the radio and I thought, man, how real, because I am Billie Joe, I know that life. I've been in the cotton fields . . . . I know about polk because I had ate a bunch of it." Polk as in pokeweed, a traditional forage food in the South. If you're going to be a stickler, yes, it's poison. It's edible if the leaves are picked young and boiled three times to make sallet, cooked greens. White's grunts and swamp licks are not about having the sallet. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">9. Jesse Winchester, "Step by Step" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Maybe the devil smiles because it's so much fun to slick that ladder. Shrewd blues burner from Memphian JW--who can't get in step with the carefree climbing. This song plays behind the closing montage of Season 1 of <em>The Wire</em>. Talk about "trouble down below." </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">10. Patty Loveless, "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The title line comes around five times and every repeat has a new context. The last verse is set up perfectly by the delusional joy of the preceding one. The song unfolds like a Greek tragedy. Harlan is as cursed as Thebes. The songwriter is Darrell Scott, son of London, Kentucky. Pikeville-born Patty Loveless's version is the best of five, all excellent, that were used as the theme music of FX's <em>Justified</em>. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">11. Emmylou Harris, "Deeper Well" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">A quest narrative that drives forward like an enigmatic nursery rhyme. It's a story song but the narrative is buried deep in those mysterious images. From Harris's mood-drenched masterpiece, <em>Wrecking Ball</em> (1995). </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">12. Ralph Stanley, "O Death" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Folk spiritual at least a hundred years old. The hieratic melisma of the chorus sounds at least a thousand years old. Stanley sings it the Primitive Baptist way of his raising in Clinch Mountain country, Virginia. The man's increasingly desperate pleading is going nowhere in this deathbed dialogue with the icy-handed and icier-hearted power. It's both terrible and powerful that this is the sound coming out of the Klan Wizard's hood in <em>O, Brother, Where Art Thou?. </em></span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">13. Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys, "In the Pines" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The distilled essence of the high lonesome sound. What train is this anyway? "I asked my captain for the time of day. He said he throwed his watch away." One of the best Southern Gothic moves, across forms, is to intimate the uncanny without going full paranormal. Lead Belly recorded a version of this number known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", but the song originated, author unknown, in the Southern mountains. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">14. Jerry Reed, "Amos Moses" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Tall-tale shenanigans. The detail of the lost sheriff is just for fun. This lyric reaches back to 19th-century roughneck grotesquerie of the Sut Lovingood type. Jerry Reed, a Georgian, didn't know much about real Cajuns--thus the stereotypes played for comedy- but he did know how to embody the backwoods yarnspinner role. Most of all he knew how to play the fire out of any kind of guitar. It's a Telecaster here, hammer of the honky-tonk gods. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">15. Guy Clark, "Mud" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The early bird gets the worm. The second mouse gets the cheese. The world's wise saws cancel each other out. What we've got is mud. This is a song off Clark's <em>The Dark</em> (2002). </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">16. Lucinda Williams, "Ghosts of Highway 20" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Doesn't get any more Southern Gothic than this. Greg Leisz and Bill Frisell's guitars evoke everything Poe meant by miasma and Faulkner by effluvium. I started watching <em>Sharp Objects</em> last night. Wind Gap is one of the spectral exits off Williams' Hwy 20. If Lucinda had cutter scars they would spell out <em>secrets</em>, <em>final days</em>, and <em>repent</em>. I recommend listening to this recording in an optimal acoustic space. A jelly glass of Weller 12 with a single branchwater cube worked for me. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">17. The Civil Wars, "20 Years" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Several tracks off <em>Barton Hollow</em> (2011) would be worthy. There's a masterful economy of both lyric and production in "20 Years." The strength of the genie comes from being confined in the bottle. Also, this song has a Poe-esque either/or: might be supernatural, might not. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">18. Bessie Smith, "St. Louis Blues" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">W.C. Handy said he first heard this tune in 1892. His arrangement became a standard. This is the 1925 Bessie Smith recording with Louis Armstrong playing those trumpet fills. The song is sometimes known by its first line--"I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down"--which supplies the title for haunting tales by both William Faulkner and William Gay. Faulkner's protagonist hates to see darkness fall because her estranged lover is waiting in the ditch to kill her. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">19. Rhiannon Giddens, "At the Purchaser's Option" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Song from <em>Freedom Highway</em> (2017). Giddens wrote this after seeing an antebellum newspaper advertisement: "FOR SALE, A remarkable smart healthy Negro Wench, About 22 years of age; used to both house work and farming, and sold for no fault but for want of employ. She has a child about 9 months old, which will be at the purchaser's option." </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">20. The Band, "Long Black Veil" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The Band was 4/5 Canadian, I know, but they lived and breathed Southern music and Levon Helm was the pure Arkansas, larger-than-life 1/5 and this is the best of many versions of this haunted Southern ballad first made famous by Lefty Frizzell. Lefty's songwriting, by the way, began with the letters he wrote while in jail for having sex with an underage fan. Letters to his wife. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">21. James Carter and the Prisoners, "Po Lazarus" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">A work song in the genus "bad man ballad," with roots going back to slavery. "The Prisoners" isn't a band name. They were the Parchman inmates chopping logs the day in 1959 that Alan Lomax came by with his recording machine. The bad man ballad is especially alive and thriving right now in hip hop. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">22. Wanda Jackson, "Funnel of Love" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">This kind of love funnels to nowhere good and no one knows it like Wanda, the Queen of Rockabilly. A 45 of this is what the immortal vampire and collector of all things priceless is playing in the opening frames of Jarmusch's <em>Only Lovers Left Alive</em>. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">23. Dan Tyminski, "Southern Gothic" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Title and core theme of the whole album (2017). Just released. It's disorienting to hear the Man of Constant Sorrow invite electronic beats into his world, but here we are, it's the cultural moment. Folktronica aside, the song is an emphatic example of the fascination right now with Southern Gothic as a target genre. Tyminski comes to the form from the inside, having spent three Southern decades with Lonesome River Band and Union Station, but one notices that Swedes, Brits, Californians, all flags of media folk, wield the term and employ the form à la <em>rom-com</em> or <em>western</em> or <em>biopic</em>. It's become a construction kit of sorts. This song would be more SG if it told a story but it otherwise digs into the kit with gusto: Spanish moss, guns and Bibles, Southern Baptists, shady preachers, dirty pols, cheating wives, a garden of good and evil, whiskey, pills, dope, and the Devil. Just needs a dead mule. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">24. Robert Earl Keen, "The Road Goes On Forever" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Who says chivalry's dead? Sherry's the scary one. Eight verses of narrative momentum, chock full of just the right details, every rhyme clicking into place like fate. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">25. Charlie Rich, "I Washed My Hands in Muddy Water" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">"I just know you're a good man." "Nome, I ain't. Must have washed my hands in muddy water." Would fit seamlessly into "A Good Man Is Hard to Find." </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">26. Lee Ann Womack, "Does My Ring Burn Your Finger?" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">"My dearly departed." Hmmm. Cool blues dulcimer too. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">27. Carrie Underwood, "Choctaw County Affair" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">From Choctaw Ridge to Choctaw County. Written by veteran Nashville songwriter Jason White after one of those bar conversations about what's missing from country music these days. The talk turned to Bobbie Gentry, "Ode to Billie Joe," and the genius of a story song with a mystery at the core. White headed home to his guitar wondering about the possibilities of a song titled "Choctaw County Affair." Soon thereafter the word <em>catawampus </em>was getting its best-ever use in song. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">28. James Carr, "The Dark End of the Street" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The forbidden. Dread, shame, sure exposure and punishment: "They're gonna find us, they're gonna find us, they're gonna find us." That great bridge and then the key change--hope? escape?--no, the inexorable darkness: "Tonight we'll meet" . . . at the dead end of the street. Last, where the gospel piano has been pointing toward an "amen" there's just a moan and the tremolo chord with which everything started. What a love song. All-time favorite of both Mick Jagger and Duane Allman by the way. Everyone from Aretha to Dolly has sung it. This is the deep soul rendering by Carr, bipolar son of a Baptist minister from Coahoma, Mississippi. Recorded at Royal Studios, Memphis, 1966. Written by Dan Penn and Chips Moman. Their goal, Penn said, was "to come up with the best cheating song, ever." It ends up being about any kind of pathological compulsion and concealment. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">29. Brenda Lee, "I'm Sorry" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The girl's <em>not</em> sorry. That chromatic drop in each verse is the first clue that something's off. Then listen to the frigid elocution of the spoken verse. She's got ice, no, novocaine, in her veins. And what after all did she do, which she indicates only with the underclass grammar and evasive passive of "that don't right a wrong that's been done"? And in what scenario would the seeming apology recipient also be the consoler offering an out? I think there are three characters in an insinuated narrative here, and one of them is a femme fatale of the nymphet kind, who knows perfectly well that love can be so cruel oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-O yes. "Little Miss Dynamite" (b. Brenda Mae Tarpley in an Atlanta charity ward) was 15 when she released this #1 in 1960. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">30. Dr. John, "I Walk on Gilded Splinters" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Fire-walking, le grand zombie, a yellow belt of choison, multiple call-outs of musician Coco Robichaux because his name just sounds so good--what else could you want? Here's Mac Rebennack in the Dr. John persona that drives his concept album <em>Gris-Gris</em> (1968). The eponymic John was the nineteenth-century two-headed doctor who was the first voodoo king of New Orleans. The song is a Crescent City gumbo of West African polyrhythms, hoodoo folk magic, and maximum electric mist. Side note: Dr. John's magnum opus with voodoo-heritage material is "Litanie des Saints" from <em>Goin' Back to New Orleans</em>. It's got the Neville Brothers, invocations of voodoo loas, one of those 12-finger Dr. J piano breaks, and a poignant melody that the nineteenth-century Creole composer Louis Gottschalk picked up from listening to slave songs in Congo Square. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">31. Johnny Cash, "The Wreck of the Old 97" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Disaster song classic. True story of the speeding mail train that went off the trestle at Danville, Virginia, September 27, 1903. Screaming whistle, dead hand on the throttle, the engineer scalded to death by the steam--grisly details are the core of the genre. This recording is one of those legendary Sun sessions in 1957. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">32. Doc Watson, "Tom Dooley" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Execution song classic. True story. Laura Foster was stabbed to death in 1866 in Wilkes County, NC, pregnant with Confederate vet Tom Dula's child (Dula is pronounced Dooley in mountainese cf. Grand Ole Opry). Dula was involved at the same time in a ménage à trois with two of Laura's cousins, one of whom had introduced syphilis into the equation. This threesome slept in a bed in the cabin of one of the girls' husband. A venn diagram might help, friends. "Grayson" was a Tennessee man who helped apprehend Tom. A former North Carolina governor was Tom's defense lawyer, to no avail. "Gentlemen, do you see this hand?" Tom said from the gallows. "I didn't harm a hair on the girl's head." The whole tragic scandal was followed with glee in the national papers. Doc Watson learned his version of the song from his grandmother. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">33. Larkin Poe, "Banks of Allatoona" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Blues-rock sister act from Georgia. Very now but their songwriting nonetheless bows to the Poe in that bandname. This tune could be a soundtrack for <em>Rectify</em>. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">34. Cassandra Wilson, "Sign of the Judgment" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">A haunting rendition of one of the old slave-culture ring shouts, source point of call-and-response in American music. Zora Neale Hurston and Alan Lomax recorded ring shouts in the Georgia Sea Islands in the 1930s. The apocalyptic lyric is half Ezekiel's vision of chariot angels and half fugitive-slave experience. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">35. Ray Wylie Hubbard, "Snake Farm" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Snake farms, gator pits, reptile houses--all are by definition Southern Gothic. This song is on the comic-grotesque side of things. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">36. Jeannie C. Riley, "Harper Valley P.T.A." </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Another score for Southern Gothic's laughtrack. Brandy Clark's "Big Day in a Small Town" is a recent song in the same key. What's really under there when you lift the lid on Mayberry? Something more like those towns in a Eudora Welty story? </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">37. Son House, "John the Revelator" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Apocalyptic gospel blues by the original tambourine man, Anonymous. There's a great Blind Willie Johnson version of this song in Harry Smith's anthology of the old weird America. And there's a killer resonator and drum version by Government Mule. But my personal favorite is this one, Son House doing it a cappella. Fall, crucifixion, resurrection, end-times--covers the whole Book. <em>Who's that writing?</em> House asks and asks, the tension ratcheting up all the while inside the unspoken companion question: <em>How does this whole thing end? </em></span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">38. The Country Gentlemen, "House of the Rising Sun" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Doyle Lawson, Ricky Skaggs, and Jerry Douglas all cut eyeteeth with this legendary bluegrass band. As for that soul-ruining house, it started its life in song as a whorehouse in long-ago England then made the Atlantic crossing into Appalachian balladry as a New Orleans bordello. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">39. Louis Armstrong, "St. James Infirmary" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Satchmo made the song famous in 1928. Appalachian versions known earlier probably have DNA from an 18th-century London hospital for venereal disease. The turns of the narrative from verse to verse are all kinds of strange. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">40. Bob Dylan, "Blind Willie McTell" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Bootleg tape with Mark Knopfler on guitar. The music is "St. James Infirmary," which Dylan footnotes after his fashion in the last verse. The lyric is a Nobelwinner's sojourn into Southern Gothic. McTell was the Georgia bluesman who among other fine things wrote "Statesboro Blues" of Allman Brothers fame. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">41. Porter Wagoner, "The Cold Hard Facts of Life" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Three chords and the truth? This is the kind of song that made me cringe at all things Nashville back in the day--the bland melody, the straitjacketed musicianship, the here we go again another cheating song. I still don't much like it but, brethren and sistren, this is one pitch-black item when you look a little closer, made all the pitch-blacker by the incongruity between the lyric and the countrypolitan package. What's cold hard true is that the new cold hard truthteller is a blasphemous sadist. He's still so much enjoying the screams and frantic faces that he invites the Lord to do the same. "Who taught who the cold hard facts"? Maybe God just learned something about one of the terrors of His creation. One other thing. The guy says he bought pink champagne but then he drinks a "fifth"--and champagne doesn't come in fifths. And all the while a murder-capable knife is apparently materializing in his hand. Which facts are the facts? I may be straining the soup too thin, but it's amusing to imagine a Poe-esque delusional narrator. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">42. Jason Isbell, "Yvette" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">"It's a family affair." Yvette's violation is about to end. There's a boy outside in the dark with a rifle and a scope. From <em>Southeastern</em> (2013). </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">43. Reba McEntire, "Fancy" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Another story-song gem by Bobbie Gentry. Reba made it her signature. Both versions are stellar, Gentry's production notable for the atmospheric drum work, Reba's for the bluesy acoustic guitar drive. The mystery of the "arming" scene comes off almost like Fancy receiving superpowers--"It was RED!" Then the mother's desperation becomes the core of the narrative and Gentry's evocation of it is a clinic in syncing melodic rhythm and vernacular accuracy: "Your Pa's runned off and I'm real sick and the baby's gonna starve to death." Even the fairytalish plot-turn has a killer line: "I might've been born just plain white trash but Fancy was my name." In its way the song knows all about the longstanding class prejudice against Southern white poverty too. (See Nancy Isenberg's eye-opening book for the four centuries of context.) Gentry, by the way, was raised by her grandparents in a house without electricity. Her grandfather loved possum stew and used to give Bobbie the tails for toys. A milk cow was traded to a neighbor for a parlor piano for the gifted girl. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">44. The Handsome Family, "Your Great Journey" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">This is the musical counterpart of Southern storymaking by the likes of Barry Hannah or Kevin Wilson or Karen Russell. The Great Speckled Bird is gone with the PoMo wind. A capital W weird re-do of country gospel. Dark, funny, and dark. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">45. Drive-By Truckers, "Sinkhole" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Bankerman, do NOT turn this character's bailout down. He'll serve you sweet tea and banana pudding then throw you in a sinkhole. Patterson Hood's ragged phlegmy one-take voice is the badge of authenticity and no subject is off limits for the DBTs. The focus is murderous rage here; it's incest, feuds, glue-sniffing, plane crashes, George Wallace, mass killings, and "the duality of the Southern thing" elsewhere. All backed by three guitars with amps at 11. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">46. Phil Madeira, "The Ghost of Johnny Cash" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Julius Caesar was elevated to deity status in the Roman Empire. The Southern Empire has a JC too. Also an HW (see "Midnight in Montgomery" and "The Ride"). And of course EP ("Black Velvet"--"a new religion that'll bring you to your knees"--plus Mojo Nixon's "Elvis Is Everywhere" for starters, not to mention Crying Night of the annual Graceland Vigil). The fringes of the idolatry are full-on Southern Gothic. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">47. Steve Earle, "Copperhead Road" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">A three-generation story song, moonshine to marijuana. Defiance as old as Stirling Bridge. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">48. Brook Benton, "Rainy Night in Georgia" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Makes the list for sheer atmospherics. "I feel like it's raining all over the world" is the Southern Gothic part of the lyric. Otherwise it's the melody and texture that carry the genre feel. This is the radio-hit version from 1969 with the legendary soul-guitarist Cornell Dupree backing South Carolinian Benton. Song written by Tony Joe White. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">49. Jean Ritchie, "Barbary Allen" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">Imagine it's 1930 and 8-year-old Jean Ritchie is walking the woods of Eastern Kentucky floating these ancient melancholy notes over the valley. The song is the story of two self-willed deaths. Sweet William of love. Cold Barbary of guilt. And now they're "burr-ied" where nature can heal what the human heart could not. Alison Krauss and Brad Paisley's "Whiskey Lullaby" is a 21st-century take on the same plot. </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">50. Nina Simone, "Strange Fruit" </span></p>
<p><span class="font_large">The lyric of the most wrenching Southern Gothic song was written in 1937 by a schoolteacher in New York, Abel Meeropol. By setting the horror against the backdrop of sweet Southern magnolias and gallantry, he extracts maximum irony and revulsion. The most famous version of the song is the one by Billie Holiday, who made it a devastating set-closer with the room all in darkness save for a single spotlight on her face. The version here by Nina Simone was recorded live in 1965 in the midst of Simone's most intense Civil Rights activism. North Carolina preacher's daughter--b. Eunice Waymon--who changed her name to sing "the devil's music" and become one of the great jazz and blues singers of her time. Accompanied only by her own restrained piano, she delivers this powerful song straight up.</span></p>MARK LUCAStag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:Post/406222012-11-03T09:05:00-04:002023-12-10T13:57:27-05:00Grits and Redeye Gravy<span style="font-size: medium; ">I must've been about five. This was small-town Kentucky, 1958, and my dad was letting me tag along to Saturday breakfast. He'd meet up with his pals and they'd shoot the breeze over sausage, hash browns, country ham, fried pies, grits and gravy. It was all bonhomie and that great lard-fried smell behind those plate glass windows. </span>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">The grownup talk mostly went over my head. I did pick up that <i>bless her heart</i> wasn't exactly good. There was also a mystery language from back in the kitchen. <i>Flop two, frog sticks, Battle Creek in a bowl</i>. When pancakes went out on the short-order window: <i>T</i><i>ire patches up!</i> There was Army slang too because my dad's cronies were vets. WWII, Korea. The corner booth was the DMZ.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Sam's Truck Stop had the jukebox, a wonder of plastic marble and glowing lights. No wallboxes in Sam's. You walked over to the wizard to put your coin in and choose your song. That was an extravagance we couldn't afford, but I loved just watching the magic of the mechanical arm and looking at all the passion of the music menu. A letter and a number away were "Tears On My Pillow," "It's Now or Never," "Devil or Angel." And wherever these singers went they had a party in tow: <i>and the Hurricanes</i>, <i>and the Imperials</i>, <i>and the Midnighters</i>. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">I deduced from my parents' reluctance to spare a coin for any jukebox that only rich or reckless people threw money around on things like this, so it was thrilling to imagine the hell-bound lives of the perfumed women and occasional pompadoured daddy-o who came up and chunked quarters in. Sam's is where I first heard Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Three.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Hamilton's Drugstore was my favorite breakfast spot because of the comics rack, the soda-fountain, and the fortune machine ("your weight and fortune"). There was even an album bin. I remember trotting over to my dad with a Ricky Nelson. Could we get it? There was some discussion at the table. Their taste ran to Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw. This was that dangerous rock and roll, however scrubbed. The pipe-smoking professor allowed that Nelson wasn't as bad as the others. At least it wasn't that Elvis no-talent. I could see my dad wanted to get it for me. He took me aside. It was just too expensive, he said. Later I discovered 45s across the street at the Ben Franklin. Fifty cents. When I was old enough for allowance I'd save up and that's where I'd go. "Big Bad John" by Jimmy Dean was the first one I ever bought. Later it was anything with a Stax label.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">I learned to read in Hamilton's. Garth Elementary too but my memory of getting it is wedded to the magazine corner of the drugstore. Back where I devoured comic books by the hundreds. One day the words in the talk bubbles of <i>Batman</i> and the rest stopped just being in the way. That comes back to me in the clearest memory wave. The letters started communicating and I tore through the whole DC and Atlas pantheons, camped back there on the lowest shelf of the rack.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Another thing about Hamilton's is that Uncle John would give me a quarter for a milkshake, which set in motion a beautiful rigmarole of scoop spoon, dipper cabinet, syrup pump, and a surgical-looking spindle, all enacted against a backdrop of chrome and mirrors and flanked by a tobacco-harvest mural someone had painted above the booths that lined the wall. The shake came in a foot-tall steel can that could last through two or three <i>Green Lanterns</i>. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Silver-templed Uncle John, my father's business partner and my grandmother's brother. The others had the crewcuts that meant hard work and no nonsense, but Uncle John had Cary Grant hair and a wink that let you know he knew what was what. In later years he would sometimes just disappear. Gone to Florida maybe. He was the only nicknameless one of those diner-booth lions. Such great names: Smack, Beef, Shorty, Little Doc. Handles worthy of Marvel demigods. My dad was Monk. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">They were all kind to me, "little Monk," but mostly I inhabited a knee-high invisibility zone, free to wander at will. I became visible once when they caught me pulling a wad of gum off the bottom of the table to chew. Seemed real funny to everybody but as far as I was concerned it just ruined my good thing. I'd been doing it for a year. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">I became visible another time after a jag of reading <i>G.I. Combat</i> comics. I appeared at their booth to ask how many Krauts and Japs they'd personally killed. Shorty, I learned later, was a Bataan Death March survivor. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>Leukemia</i>, I heard my parents say one day, their faces solemn. Mr. Hamilton was dying. I knew him as the nice man in the white coat who let me read every last comic book in that whole glorious back-corner rack. He only asked me not to wrinkle them so bad. Leukemia. Such a strange word. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">They're all gone now and I've got silver temples myself. Buttering grits and baiting the waitress one day, vanished the next. Carpe gritsem.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>MARK LUCAStag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:Post/406212012-02-19T02:50:00-05:002024-02-12T03:54:51-05:00Shall Be Released / Notes on BONES<span style="font-size: larger; ">I dreamed my friends staged an intervention. Enough is enough, they said, a</span><span style="font-size: larger; ">nd then they ripped the song mixes from my hands, put them in an envelope, and wrote FINISHED across the seal.</span>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">When I woke up, someone had taken wirecutters to my guitar strings. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">And so <i>Uncle Bones</i> is with the mastering engineer at last and will soon see the light of day. Which is good for at least two reasons. The first is that I can stop working on it. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span> * * * * *</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">Big thanks here for the playing of Bleu Mortensen and Jeneé Fleenor. The dobro, steel, and fiddle tracks of <i>Uncle Bones</i> aren't just shrewd and beautiful, though that would surely be enough. They also carry the story where the words leave off. How do you know the miller is going to destroy his fairytale? The dobro break. What was Orphie Coulter's eternity after he looked back? The answer is in the fiddle. What outrageous good fortune to have had Jeneé and Bleu be so integral to the making of this album.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span>* * * * *</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: larger; ">The PR teaser says, "Eleven tales from the starcrossed town of etc.," and it's true, I did think of these songs as a story-cycle as I worked on them. Even imagined dates--1899 for "Hezekiah," 1959 for "Grits and Redeye Gravy," yesterday for "Pick Up." Doubt it'll make any difference to the listener, and it doesn't need to, but it helped me see where I wanted to go. Songs about a myth-shrouded place dreaming in the shadows of two centuries.<br><br></span>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">1 Uncle Bones (1888)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">2 Take Me Back, Water (1817)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">3 Dragon Reel (1940)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">4 Every Day I Have the Greens (1936)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">5 Carrying Fire (1980)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">6 Grits and Redeye Gravy (1959)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">7 Hezekiah (1899)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">8 Big Bad Love (2003)</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">9 The Price (1939)<br>
10 Pick Up (Yesterday)<br>
11 Trouble (Today)</span></div>
</div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: larger; "><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span> <span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre; "> </span>* * * * *<br><br></span>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Uncle Bones." Orpheus was the first fiddle player the way I figure it. Our dark mountains are as mythic as Olympus. Caves, haints, curses, granny women. Labyrinths, shades, curses, sibyls. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Take Me Back, Water." Silkies in Appalachia too. This song came to me from the green water of Lake Herrington when I was looking for the site of Old King's Mill. It's still there, they say. Seventy feet down.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Dragon Reel." "The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass."--Cyril of Jerusalem. "Seek the ancient tones."--Monroe of Jerusalem Ridge</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Greens." Had been smoking my brains in old "strang" music when I made this. Charlie Poole, Gid Tanner, and such. Backwoods and buckwild.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Carrying Fire." "When he rode past, I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it--about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and he was fixing to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold. And I knew that whenever I got there, he'd be there. And then I woke up."--Cormac McCarthy, <i>No Country for Old Men</i></span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Grits and Redeye Gravy." From seed to harvest, the time is short. Carpe gritsem. Fried in dobro grease.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Hezekiah." Tale as old as the Babylonian Talmud. Walker Town was the original name for Hazard. 40-rod: shine so strong it'll knock you that far.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Big Bad Love." The wah guitar is actually Bleu on pedal steel. One of three co-writes with old friend Tom Thurman. The only instrument Tom plays is the movie camera, but he gives very precise musical instructions. Things like "This should be 59% Tony Joe White, 39% John Prine, and 2% Hunter Thompson."</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"The Price." Lost-love letter to New Orleans. If those old stones could talk, they wouldn't.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Pick Up." "Can you hear me now?"</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"Trouble." The last track is straight from the local newspaper. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">My favorite column has always been the "Police Blotter," that terse record of the last 24 hours of 911 calls. It's the temperature of the town and it has a style all its own. Place names are part of the 911 protocol and the mayhem erupts in such peaceful-sounding places: Shaker Heights. Patrician Place. The staccato delivery is another charm. "Caller's grandchild running wild." "Decapitated goat on Carpenters Creek." "Complainant's cousin just keyed car." "Caller from Iraq. Wife won't answer phone." "Irate male at Southern States has dumped baloney jar." </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">I'm not making this stuff up. Some parents really did sell their child in the Wal-Mart parking lot. It's comical at a distance maybe, but the blotter mostly registers genuine meanness and misery. It's the rawest, truest part of the paper, even sadder than the bankruptcies and divorces. Most of the woe is beyond the power of any policeman or ambulance driver to address. Is the caller who reports a mother who won't take her meds or a daughter who's a cutter really seeking the law? </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">It's usually one of four things: drink, drugs, animals, or family. Most particularly tequila, meth, pit bulls, and grandchildren. If you're into the zombie thing, you don't have to rent a movie around here. Just watch the crank vans unload into Kroger on Sunday. Spoon-deep temples, meth lice, open sores, melted teeth. And a pandemic of the common cold apparently. The Sudafed just flies off the shelf.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">Once upon a time when curses descended and there was despair in the land, people consulted the oracle. Now it's 911. 911-Delphi.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">The song was eight verses and five minutes long when it was born, a mighty big baby. Now it gets in and out in 2:23 with two blues-chant verses and a cheerful cabaret chorus. I wanted that chorus because what do you do when you're all cried out and you probably shouldn't laugh? You laugh. People can fill in the rest of the trouble on their own. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">"This is my town na-na-na-na-nah." Part of the video for that MontgomeryGentry hit was shot right here in Danville and this does feel like a Mayberry kind of place on certain golden afternoons. But it's also that police blotter.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">Jeneé pulled a gypsy fiddle out of her magic bag for this one.</span></div>
</div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "><br>
* * * * *<br>
</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; ">As I was saying, the first reason is that I can stop working on it. The second is that I can start working on the next one.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: larger; "> </span></div>MARK LUCAStag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:Post/406202011-01-30T03:30:00-05:002023-12-10T14:43:13-05:00A Certain Slant of Light<span style="font-size: medium; ">To: The Lucas List and All Our Inmate Friends<br></span>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "><br>
Salutations from the dark heart of winter. Are you about to lose your mind in the light-starved frozen woe of it all? You are not forgotten. Because here's a little something to push you on over the edge: "Graveyard Day"--free download at the bottom of the music page.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Mark Twain flung down the gauntlet long ago: "Everybody talks about the weather," he said, "but nobody does anything about it." Well, another Mark has done what he can: it's a weather song. Cascading harmonies courtesy the Thornton Twins. Backing tracks by the Persimmon Knob Rangers. So have a listen on us, if the words don't freeze in the air, and then chop up the piano for firewood.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;"><br></span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>MARK LUCAStag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:Post/406182010-09-03T12:40:00-04:002024-02-12T03:54:51-05:00Notes on DUST<span style="font-size: medium; ">DUST. Dust of Eden, dust motes in a movie-projector beam, dust to dust. The word just kept showing up. There's a legend that when Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise some loose grit blew into the outer darkness. If a grain gets in your eye, you’re never the same after. </span>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“Down in the Swamp.” In keelboat days the rivermen gambled and brawled in a section of New Orleans called The Swamp. I’ve moved it from Girod Street to the Vieux Carée but other than that, dead true. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">"Lost John." Folk song by who knows. I remember my grandmother singing scraps of it. Like everyone else who's sung this down through the years, I took some liberties. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“Last Things.” A passage. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“Circuit Rider.” Nine of ten perished but still they came, these wilderness nomads. Singing Old World hymns as they rode buffalo traces through the savage beauty of it all. Worlds colliding. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“The Sideshow.” Flannery O’Connor’s freakshow hermaphrodite was where this song started. Then I got to reading about Tom Thumb, which led to P.T. Barnum’s whole Congress of Wonders, and it all came together like this. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">"Gold." Was just a melody and a feeling, no words, until one day I started mumbling a favorite poem as a placeholder vocal. The lyric eventually went in its own direction but there's some Frost DNA in there. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“Whiskey RR.” Corned-up old wolverine who can quit any time he wants to.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“GTT.” Gone to Texas. What you painted on the barn, c. 1850, when luck had run out and it was time to leave. Fast. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“Bivouac of the Dead.” Words packed in salt and ice by Theodore O’Hara, 1847.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">“Dust.” The old Main Street movie houses have vanished from small-town America. The one I grew up with in Georgetown, Kentucky, was called the Glenn. My grandmother Hazel played piano there in the days of the silents. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<hr><div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">It’s a crazy, lonesome way to make an album, but I played just about everything myself. An old dreadnought and a Tele and a Mustang bass plus upright piano, B3 organ, a borrowed mandolin, and some shakers and tambourines. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">I had a peculiar sound in mind for the album and hammering away solo was the way to get it. A jackleg woodworker making sounds instead of cradles and coffins. My favorite carpenter, Cash Bundren from <i>As I Lay Dying</i>, was who I kept thinking of. Just a few antique tools and nothing but rough lumber to work with. Yet the adze and the awl and the auger were good iron and if Cash had anything, he had patience: “It’s like some folks has the smooth, pretty boards to build a courthouse with and others don’t have no more than rough lumber fitten to build a chicken coop. But it’s better to build a tight chicken coop than a shoddy courthouse.”</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Mostly I worked in the dead of night. That’s when it’s quiet here, in my house and in my head. As quiet as it’s going to get anyway. My studio is porous to cold and sound. Some nights I could see my breath as I waited for the dog down the hill to stop barking. Which he never did. But I grew in time to accept the dog. You can hear him in some of the soft passages. A tonal watermark. Guaranteed handcrafted, organic, local.</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">I keep a box of brown-edged paper here in my workroom. It’s the hundred-year-old, twine-tied manuscript of a novel that my great-great-grandfather wrote. <i>The Old Woodyard or The Secret of the Stone Vault</i> by William Wallace Porter. He was a stern businessman. Yet there that old box sits as if to say, <i>I was this, too. And I had a story to tell.</i></span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">This album is my twine-tied manuscript. </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Mark Lucas</span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>MARK LUCAStag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:Post/406162010-06-05T07:55:00-04:002023-12-10T14:24:22-05:00Theodore O'Hara RIP<span style="font-size: medium; "> He was on a plaque outside the Danville courthouse. That was the first I heard of him. The usual bronze recitation that leaves little impression: native son, born 18-something, lawyer, etc. Another politician, I figured. But then some words that did make an impression:</span><br><br><span style="font-size: small; "><span style="font-size:14.0pt"><span style="font-size: medium; "> On Fame's eternal camping-ground</span></span></span><br><span style="font-size: medium;"> Their silent tents are spread,<br> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">And Glory guards, with solemn round,<br> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">The bivouac of the dead.</span>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium;">The man was a poet. A dark-minded, brooding one at that. Personified glory was Victorian boilerplate, but that landscape of silent tents and the reverberation of the title line—they were original and stuck in my head.<br> Later at the mass grave at Perryville Battlefield I saw those words again. Then, as the years passed, also at Antietam, Gettysburg, Arlington, and Normandy. O’Hara followed me around. The other four lines of the bivouac stanza were usually included in these death-field inscriptions. They added the snare roll fading in the air, the sound-track of the eerie camp scene:</span></p><span style="font-size: medium; "> The muffled drum's sad roll has beat<br> The soldier's last tattoo.<br> No more on Life's parade shall meet<br> </span><span style="font-size: medium;">That brave and fallen few.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: medium; ">“Tattoo” in that older sense is such a fine word. The evening drum. Return to quarters.</span><br><span style="font-size: medium;"> Most poems are written on paper. “The Bivouac of the Dead” is written in stone. And iron. On cemetery gates and monuments from Washington to Guadalcanal to the Crimea, it’s the big daddy of military graveyard poems. The most lapidary American elegy. </span><br><span style="font-size: medium;"> Now it’s written in a song. I just got it in my mind that it should be molded into a folk song and that I was the one for the job. O’Hara and I both liked charged language, graveyard walks, and the nineteenth century. I was writing all these songs set in his world anyway. We shared a town and a state. The “stout old chieftain” of “Bivouac," Zachary Taylor, was even a kinsman of mine. O’Hara had been following me around for a reason. A co-write. I had thought the album was finished, but there was this one last song to do. Not because it could tap any imaginable listening trend—it’s insane from that point of view—but just because I had this strange compulsion.</span><br><span style="font-size: medium;"> As I began to hammer on the whole 12-stanza elegy for my three-minute lyric, O’Hara surprised me. History says the man was no pacifist. He was a gung-ho recruiter and officer for the U.S. Army in the Mexican War, the Confederate Army in the Civil War, </span><i>and </i><span style="font-size: medium;">a mercenary army that tried to conquer Cuba. War, as his famous poem renders it, is full of valor. Yet. It's also filled with anguish. Adrenaline-driven warriors gash each others’ flesh. Birds of prey hover over the decomposing slain. Haughty flags become trampled shrouds. Generals sacrifice rivers of gore from one generation after another. Honor and glory may be the headlines, but carnage, sorrow, and silence are the details. “Bivouac” has shadow as well as light is what I’m saying, and is richer for it.</span><br><span style="font-size: medium;"> O’Hara was no armchair soldier. He knew what it was to breathe the cannon smoke and ram a minie ball home. Was just back from the Mexican War when he wrote the poem in 1847. Had been wounded a few months earlier at the Battle of Churubusco. Wrote the poem when he heard about the devastating losses and battle-turning heroism of the Kentucky Second Infantry at Buena Vista. He understood all sides of war. Thus, amidst the abstraction-wielding grandiloquence, the touches of realism that give his war-poem grit. </span><br><span style="font-size: medium;"> I kept the grit in the foreground of our co-write. O'Hara raised no objections.</span><br><br><span style="font-size: medium; "> <img src="//d10j3mvrs1suex.cloudfront.net/u/50233/55612e199846b3a97bc96911a37caf0b355f6d20/medium/bivdark.png?1380282631" class="size_orig justify_middle border_" alt="" height="329" width="300" /></span>
<p> </p><br><br><span style="font-size: medium; "> * * * * *</span><br><br><span style="font-size: medium; ">Here’s the whole poem as the man wrote it:</span>
<p><br><span style="font-size: medium; ">The muffled drum's sad roll has beat</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The soldier's last tattoo;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">No more on Life's parade shall meet</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">That brave and fallen few.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">On Fame's eternal camping-ground</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Their silent tents are spread,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">And Glory guards, with solemn round,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The bivouac of the dead.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">No rumor of the foe's advance</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Now swells upon the wind;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">No troubled thought at midnight haunts</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Of loved ones left behind;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">No vision of the morrow's strife</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The warrior's dream alarms;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">No braying horn nor screaming fife</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">At dawn shall call to arms.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Their shivered swords are red with rust;</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Their plumèd heads are bowed;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Their haughty banner, trailed in dust,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Is now their martial shroud.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">And plenteous funeral tears have washed</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The red stains from each brow,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">And the proud forms, by battle gashed,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Are free from anguish now.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">The neighing troop, the flashing blade,</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The bugle's stirring blast,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The charge, the dreadful cannonade,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The din and shout, are past;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Nor war's wild note, nor glory's peal,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Shall thrill with fierce delight</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Those breasts that nevermore may feel</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The rapture of the fight.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Like the fierce northern hurricane</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">That sweeps his great plateau,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Flushed with the triumph yet to gain,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Came down the serried foe.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Who heard the thunder of the fray</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Break o'er the field beneath,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Knew well the watchword of that day</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Was "Victory or Death."</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Long had the doubtful conflict raged</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">O'er all that stricken plain,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">For never fiercer fight had waged</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The vengeful blood of Spain;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">And still the storm of battle blew,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Still swelled the glory tide;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Not long, our stout old chieftain knew,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Such odds his strength could bide.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">'T was in that hour his stern command</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Called to a martyr's grave</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The flower of his belovèd land,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The nation's flag to save.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">By rivers of their fathers' gore</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">His first-born laurels grew,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">And well he deemed the sons would pour</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Their lives for glory too.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Full many a norther's breath has swept</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">O'er Angostura's plain,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">And long the pitying sky has wept</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Above its mouldered slain.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The raven's scream or eagle's flight,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Or shepherd's pensive lay,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Alone awakes each sullen height</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">That frowned o'er that dread fray.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Sons of the dark and bloody ground,</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Ye must not slumber there,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Where stranger steps and tongues resound</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Along the heedless air.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Your own proud land's heroic soil</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Shall be your fitter grave;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">She claims from war his richest spoil--</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The ashes of her brave.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Thus 'neath their parent turf they rest,</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Far from the glory field,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Borne to a Spartan mother's breast</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">On many a bloody shield;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The sunshine of their native sky</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Smiles sadly on them here,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">And kindred eyes and hearts watch by</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The heroes' sepulcher.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Rest on, embalmed and sainted dead!</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Dear as the blood ye gave;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">No impious footstep here shall tread</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The herbage of your grave;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Nor shall your story be forgot,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">While Fame her record keeps,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Or Honor points the hallowed spot</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Where Valor proudly sleeps.</span></p>
<p> </p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Yon marble minstrel's voiceless stone</span>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">In deathless song shall tell,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">When many a vanished age hath flown,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">The story how ye fell;</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Nor wreck, nor change, nor winter's blight,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Nor Time's remorseless doom,</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">Shall dim one ray of glory's light</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium;">That gilds your deathless tomb.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p><!--EndFragment-->MARK LUCAStag:brothermarkmusic.com,2005:Post/406152009-09-03T15:25:00-04:002022-06-01T21:16:46-04:00Some Old Friends<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">People ask me what kind of lyric I like. This kind. Where the words are veiny. Cut them, they'd bleed. Items are in no particular order, though some hammered steel from St. Townes will more than do for a start. Press play in your head.<!--StartFragment--> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none"><i style="font-size: medium; ">Living on the road, my friend, / Is gonna keep you free and clean / Now you wear your skin like iron / Your breath as hard as kerosene—“Pancho and Lefty”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Kerosene breath. Harder than hard liquor. In the word according to Townes, the freedom of the road comes at cost of a flint shell. And Lefty’s not free anyway. He's owned by the guilt of selling out his pistolero comrade. He can scrub his conscience with kerosene, turn hide-tough as an armadillo, but never get the dust out of his mouth that Pancho bit down south. People call this song enigmatic and it does take some listens to figure out. Part of the draw as far as I’m concerned. The lyric repays your effort. Turns out, the story’s right there, just worked deep into that stoic telling. The drift-down fall of the refrain melody sings the melancholy of a world that can’t be trusted. Even the old federales are lying. Steve Earle says Lefty the road-wanderer was Townes himself and in a deep-buried way that's probably so. But what I always like is being told the story, not hearing somebody’s sleeve feelings.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>East of Giant’s Tomb there’s plenty of room, there’s no fences and no walls / And if you listen close you’ll hear a ghost down by Sandy Gray Falls / Through the tops of the trees you’ll hear in the breeze the echoes of a mighty yell: / “I’ll be damned, we’ll break this jam, or it’s breakfast in Hell!”</i><i>--Slaid Cleaves, "Breakfast in Hell"</i><br><br>I suspect Cleaves writes with pen on paper like anybody, but I imagine him writing with stonecutter tools. His great story ballads are chiseled, not penned. Why does he take all the pains that he does, all for so little worldly payout? I wonder about that sometimes. It makes me think of a passage in Cormac McCarthy: "That country had not had a time of peace of any length at all . . . But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart."</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>Dark waters rise and thunders pound / The wheels of war are going round / And all the walls are crumbling / Shelter me lord underneath your wings—Buddy and Julie Miller, “Shelter Me”</i></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">David's harp electrified in an apocalyptic hymn. Chaos at every turn. Mayhem all plural, even the thunder. There’s a William Blake quality in the imagery: strangeness, deceptive simplicity, cosmic sweep. Why does the lord have wings? And against flood and fire how much shelter will wings even offer? Stark half-lines alternate in call and response with the groaning guitar as the spirit sings in both faith and terror. The friction at the heart of the song scrapes back and forth, back and forth. While the whole thing rides on top of some of the wildest drumming ever recorded. Nothing fancy in this lyric word-wise and there doesn’t need to be. Its current is ocean deep.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">Scarecrow and a yellow moon, / And pretty soon a carnival on the edge of town, / King Harvest has surely come.—Robbie Robertson, “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Golden song from what is for me the definitive Americana recording, The Band’s second album. The holy grail of American roots music. “When you’re lost in that song you’re floating through a whole vast American story”: Greil Marcus. Robertson’s mind was full of Steinbeck when he wrote the lyric, he’s said, and I believe it. The whispered chorus is magic. The guitar lead on the out is too.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">I never thought I'd live to love the coal dust / Never thought I'd pray to hear the tipple roar / But, Lord, how I wish that grass could change to money / Them greenbacks fill my pockets once more—Jean Ritchie, “The L & N Don’t Stop Here Anymore”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">The outer world swept into the holler then swept away. Now kudzu, grass, and rust reclaim old railcars and the company store. Ritchie’s voice here is male—and why not? It’s a dumb-down of the art to conflate singer and song. Ritchie’s last verse is her miner’s sorrowful, compromised prayer. Bad as the old life was, he got hooked on the paycheck. Then the mines played out. The song is about human nature, not politics. Yet it’s also worth a stack of books on sustainability or whatever you want to call it. The melody has the ancient tones of the ballads Ritchie learned at her mother’s knee here in Kentucky.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">Who keeps on trusting you when you've been cheating / And spending your nights on the town / And who keeps on saying that he still wants you / When you're through running around / And who keeps on loving you when you've been lying / Saying things ain't what they seem / God does but I don't / God will but I won't / And that's the difference between God and me—Lyle Lovett, “God Will”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">That’s maybe not the </span><i style="font-size: medium; ">only</i><span style="font-size: medium; "> difference “between God and me,” but the man so single-mindedly bears down on the betrayal that it’s all just the one thing. The set-up for the chorus is masterful. You’re expecting a pity party thrown by the usual long-suffering faithful heart when, slam, that door bangs shut, the cliché is exploded, and the footwipe is nobody’s fool. So fed up he delivers some steely-eyed theology.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">If we could just get off that beat little girl / Maybe we could find the groove / At least we can get a decent meal / Down at the Rendezvous / 'Cause one more heartfelt steel guitar chord / Girl, it's gonna do me in / I need to hear some trumpet and saxophone / You know sound as sweet as sin / And after we get good and greasy / Baby, we can come back home / Put the cowhorns back on the Cadillac / And change the message on the cord-a-phone—John Hiatt, “Memphis in the Meantime”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">The Tennessee writer Peter Taylor contrasted Nashville and Memphis as if they were Athens and Sparta, and here John Hiatt does something similar. Country vs. soul. The front of the beat vs. the back. Heartfelt steel guitar vs. sin-greasy sax. I always thought Hiatt was singing "jumping-ass saxophone," but I looked the lyric up and it's officially "TRUMPET and saxophone." Good either way. To hell with enunciation. Beyond its rush of wit, the song is about something bigger than mere styles. It’s about the groove vs. the rut. Any kind of rut. A nice touch is the anticipated return home—with a fresh message. And the song is not only about finding the groove; it’s got a groove. The words dance all around that syncopated Cooder guitar.</span></p>
<p> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>Midnight fell on Franklin Street / And the lamppost bulbs were broke / For the life of me, I could not see / But I heard a brand new joke / Two men were standing upon a bridge / One jumped and screamed you lose / And just left the odd man holding / Those late John Garfield blues—John Prine, “Those Late John Garfield Blues”</i></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">It’s a lurching waltz, not a juke-joint shuffle, when everybody’s dancing those late John Garfield blues. Prine’s song is a powerful mood piece, very dark, but it’s not a relentless beat-down. Despite the desolation, part of the song’s power comes from the rueful humor of the bridge joke and “going away to the last resort.” The singer is just barely holding on, but what he’s holding on with is his gallows humor.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">“The way she did what she did what she did to me reminded me of you.”—Delbert McClinton, “B Movie Boxcar Blues”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">A great song for a lot of reasons. One is that it contains McClinton’s all-time moment of wry comedy. The road pilgrim offers his serial philandering in tender tribute. A lot of would-be funny songs suffer from the look-how-clever-I’m-being syndrome, but McClinton always delivers with a light touch. With cool. “Squeeze Me In” and “Monkey Around” are some other nuggets in this vein.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">Never would of gone to that side of town if it hadn't been for love / Never would of took a mind to track her down if it hadn't been for love / Never would of loaded up a forty-four, put myself behind a jailhouse door / If it hadn't been, if it hadn't been for love—Michael James Henderson, Chris Stapleton, “If It Hadn’t Been for Love”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">A murder ballad from the murderer’s point of view. Could’ve been written today or a hundred years ago. Has that timeless resonance. It’s also a love song, but there are no twining roses. The refrain insists over and over in mournful complaint, it was love. So he had to kill her. Step by step he keeps tracking back through the curse of it all, but not in remorse for the murder, the reason you might expect. His one satisfaction, the keening chorus reveals, is that at least she’s lying still. The song is 100% sentimentality-free. </span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">Well now, everything dies, baby, that’s a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back / Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty / And meet me tonight in Atlantic City—Bruce Springsteen, “Atlantic City”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Another persona song, stone true to its voice in every detail, racket boys to Chicken Man to “little favor.” And what a chorus, with its driving staggered beat, charged with all the currents of hopeless hope running through the four verses. All hell’s breaking loose and hell central is Atlantic City. So where’s the loser going? He’s taking his dead luck and his cold love on a bus to Atlantic City. For one big night in the face of doom. The version by The Band on Jericho is one for the ages. My notion of Americana is pretty elastic: stretches from the latest Alejandro Escovedo back to Depression blues and balladry. With stops along the way for the likes of a Springsteen in </span><i style="font-size: medium; ">Nebraska</i><span style="font-size: medium; "> mode.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">But the times, they got hard and tobacco wasn't selling / And old Granddad knew what he'd do to survive / He went and dug for Harlan coal and sent the money back to Granny / But he never left Harlan alive—Darrell Scott, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">The title line comes around five times and every repeat has a new context. This is the last verse—set up by the delusional joy of the preceding one. The song unfolds like a Greek tragedy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>He took a hundred dollars off a slaughterhouse Joe / Bought a brand new Michigan twenty-gauge / He got all liquored up on that roadhouse corn / Blew a hole in the hood of a yellow Corvette / A hole in the hood of a yellow Corvette </i><span style="font-style: normal; ">–-Tom Waits, “Gun Street Girl”</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">The man could beat two sticks together and make a great song. This one, a blues, features Waits’ minimalist guitar-thumping. There is a narrative in the song—the misadventures triggered by a bad-luck kiss—but it wouldn’t matter if there weren’t; the words and images are that alive.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; ">Broken down shacks, engine parts / Could tell a lie but my heart would know / Listen to the dogs barking in the yard / Car wheels on a gravel road / Child in the backseat about four or five years / Looking out the window / Little bit of dirt mixed with tears / Car wheels on a gravel road—Lucinda Williams, “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Fragments of memory from the point of view of a little child. Mostly the kid remembers the exasperated voices of grownups: “Can’t find a damn thing in this place,” “When I get back this room better be picked up.” A sad story of displacement—a family always leaving somewhere--, but the song doesn’t water down its sharp sense impressions by resorting to conventional complaint. The one constant in the child’s life, beyond the sound of tires on gravel, is music—Hank and Loretta on the radio.</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-size: medium; ">Sometimes Ramona calls me up and says come on down here it's getting warm / She runs everybody off and we, you know, it's a snake farm--Ray Wylie Hubbard, "Snake Farm"</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; ">Who made the lowdown rock I thought Lucinda Williams was going to after <i>Car Wheels</i>? Ray Wylie Hubbard. The man's rich and greasy roots-groove has just gotten deeper with every album. All anchored by a growling conversational lyric style that's a bit of a magic act. No matter how crafted the phrase, it sounds like he just thought of it. That's great . . . singing. There's a whole lot more to it than notes, people. And humor too, the best kind, because it's all about tone and not jokes.<br><i> <br>The scene plays in her head over and over again / There’s a movement beneath the streetlamp and the little 32 gun is in her hand / It barks like a dog, two three four, last call in the shadow / Now Jolee waits for the morning freight, going where nobody knows her name / Run, Jolee, run, Jolee, run—Ray Bonneville, “Run Jolee Run”</i></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">The sinister atmosphere is palpable. Jolee runs for her life then, act three, her little gun barks four times to defend it. The story unfolds in a well-crafted linear narrative that drives forward on the deep groove of the slithery rhythm guitar. The created world of Bonneville’s song is as alive as the moans of his harmonica. Props to Stan Campbell for telling me about Bonneville. Honor the songfinders. The biggest and craziest songfinder twist in my life is that it was my son who tipped me to <i>Swordfishtrombones</i><span style="font-style: normal; ">. Will was three when Waits made that record. </span></span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">A long time ago I left my home / For a job in the fruit trees / But I missed those hills with the windy pines / For their song seemed to suit me / So I sent my wages to my home / Said we'd soon be together / For the next good crop would pay my way / And I would come home forever / One more dime to show for my day / One more dollar and I'm on my way / When I reach those hills, boys I'll never roam / One more dollar and I'm going home—Gillian Welch, “One More Dollar”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">He never makes it of course. Welch’s homesick fruitpicker becomes the voice of all frustrated longing. He’s always just a dollar short. The three verses encompass a lifetime. First by the sweat of his brow, then by a desperate gamble, and finally as an old panhandler, he’s forever trying to come by the one more dollar that will take him home. The unkillable lift of the chorus delivers the pathos. An eloquent story in the plainest language.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">I've been to Georgia on a fast train, honey / I wasn't born no yesterday / Got a good Christian raisin' and an eighth grade education / Ain't no need in y'all a treatin' me this way—Billy Joe Shaver, “Georgia on a Fast Train”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">A man stands up for his dignity. Exactly how he’s been disrespected is left between the lines, but he knows he deserves better. Reminds me of Haze Motes in </span><i style="font-size: medium; ">Wise Blood</i><span style="font-size: medium; "> saying, “Any man with a good car doesn’t need to be justified.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom:12.0pt;mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:
none;text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>Now cousin Clifford, he got the good land / Right on the highway out by Air Base Road / Looks like a Wal-Mart waiting to happen / I mean to tell you it's a pot of gold / It's in the city limits, zoned commercial / Got city water and a sewer line / What with the base expanding from consolidation / It's worth a fortune and it oughta been mine / Glory glory hallelujah / Right back atcha, don't she look natural? / Don't look at me like there's something growing out of my head / Just cause that old bird's dead—James McMurtry, “Sixty Acres”</i></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Well, just because grandma willed him sixty acres doesn’t mean he has to be grateful. Cousin Clifford got the easy-money real estate. This song is a character study—of a Larry Brown kind of character, not a Larry McMurtry. The anti-hero malcontent on display is just telling the truth as he sees it. He’s got no tooth for farming, no reverence for the old homeplace and, “don’t look at him like there’s something growing out of his head,” no feeling for grandma. The chorus mocks pre-fab formulas of response, and the verses are one phrase after another of Rough South realism. All woven into the chant-like pulse of the song. I’ve heard some songwriters say you should “never make the singer look bad.” Glad McMurtry wasn’t listening. </span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">Did I show you this picture of my sweetheart taken of us before the war / Of the Greek and his Italian girl one Sunday at the shore / We tied our ribbons to the fire escape / They were taken by the birds who flew home to the country / As the bombs rained on the world—Patty Griffin, “Making Pies”</i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Look how deep a story can be told in a three-minute song. Did I show you this picture? First the one of her nephew, then the one of her sweetheart. Then other pictures: the bakery, Jesus on the church wall, ribbons on a fire escape. Finally the war: the whole monologue snaps into focus. The loss at the heart of the song, Sam’s death in the war, isn’t spoken, yet is all the more there by that fact. The thing too hurtful to say out loud, though it’s communicated in the melody. “You could cry or die or just make pies all days—I’m making pies.” A song that believes--in the listener among other things.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">I don't know the black dog's name / When I call him, he won't come / How'd I get this black dog / Lord, I never wanted one / Black Dog don't believe in sin / Think of where the black dog's been / Think of where he's been today—Jesse Winchester, “Black Dog” </i></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Sure, he knows the black dog’s name. It’s his own. The dark, disobedient part of the man’s own nature. The whole album was first-rate, but my brother and I lifted the needle to the groove for this song over and over back in the day. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>Do the rivers still run muddy outside of my beloved Casas Grandes? / Does the scar upon my brother's face turn red when he hears mention of my name? / And do the people of El Sueco still curse the theft of Gallo Del Cielo? / Tell my family not to worry, I will not return to cause them shame. –Tom Russell, “Gallo del Cielo”<br>{C}<!--StartFragment--></i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-pagination:none;mso-layout-grid-align:none;
text-autospace:none"><span style="font-size: medium; ">Only for a very good reason should a song be longer than five minutes. This song has that reason. It’s a whole novel in seven verses and four shrewdly shifting choruses. A border story in Cormac McCarthy chiaroscuro. Hola, my Teresa, does Brother’s scar still turn red?—I love that. A lot of history in fighting roosters. Thomas Jefferson and Queen Elizabeth were aficionados back in the day, but even Louisiana has criminalized it now. An old man down the road here once raised gamecocks for Batista.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">Look out kid, don't matter what you did / Walk on your tiptoes, don't try No Doz / Better stay away from those that carry around a fire hose / Keep a clean nose, watch the plainclothes / You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows—</i><span style="font-size: medium; ">Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues”</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; ">Off </span><i style="font-size: medium; ">Bringing It All Back Home</i><span style="font-size: medium; ">, which changed everything. What got brought back home was American rock and roll. Got fused with folk and doors flew open all over the place. You can have your symbolic readings of this song. I like it for the comic word-slinging and because it mocks the wretched do-this-do-that default mode of so much writing.</span></p>
<p><i style="font-size: medium; ">You know God walked down in the cool of the day / Called Adam by his name / But he refused to answer / Because he's naked and ashamed / Who's that writing? John the Revelator / Tell me who's that writing? John the Revelator / Tell me who's that writing? John the Revelator / Wrote the book of the seven seals--“John the Revelator”</i></p>
<div>
<span style="font-size: medium; ">Gospel blues by the original tambourine man: Anonymous. Great Blind Willie Johnson version in Harry Smith’s anthology of the old weird America. Killer resonator and drum version by Government Mule. My personal favorite is Son House doing it a cappella. Fall, crucifixion, resurrection, apocalypse—covers the whole Book.</span><br> <div><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>She found a match / She had to strike it / It was love / Or something like it--Gurf Morlix, "Worth Dying For"</i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: medium; "> </span>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: medium; "> </span>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; ">Everyone talks about his guitar and production work. And rightfully so. In fact if there's better studio magic than Rick Roberts on drums, George Reiff on bass, and Morlix on guitar and production, I don't know what it is. But when the long cold years roll away, he will be known as songwriter. <i>Diamonds to Dust</i> and <i>Last Exit to Happyland</i>--mortality meditations of the first water. The one above is a badass noir love vortex. Same fine vein as this next one. </span></div>
<span style="font-size: medium; "> </span>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<span style="font-size: medium; "> </span>
</div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>Full moon, she had a past, red wine, a dark past, hotel, she had a gun, bad girl, a big gun, room service, hair trigger, I’m getting nervous, she’d pull it, all night, hammer down, silk sheets, lead bullets</i><i>—John Hadley, Dave Olney, “Postcard from Mexico”</i><br> </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-size: medium; ">Cool song, braided voices, dame fatale, noir obsession, simple pieces, deep well. The back-and-forth delivery connects with the duality at the heart of the tale. The KaneWelchKaplin performance is a master clinic in real. </span><br> <div><span style="font-size: medium; "><i>Down by the creek where the water goes slow / The green-back heron and the moccasin know / All things come to him who waits / Yet he is lost who hesitates / Life and death just dancing around in the mud--Guy Clark, Buddy Mondlock, "Mud"</i><br><br>The early bird gets the worm. The second mouse gets the cheese. The wise saws, truisms, proverbs cancel each other out. What we've got is mud. Mud thou art and to mud thou shalt return. Brilliant song off Clark's <i>The Dark</i>. Doesn't hurt to have Welch, Rawlings, and Scott singing harmony either.</span></div>
<span style="font-size: medium; "> </span>
</div>
<div><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></div>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p><br><span style="font-size: medium; "><!--StartFragment--> </span></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-weight: bold; "><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: medium; "> </span></p><!--EndFragment-->MARK LUCAS