Boney Earnest's Suburban Hilltop Tent Revue

Friday, March 31, 2006 ... 4:24 PM

Clawhammer Banjo

County Records has reissued three volumes of field recordings that apparently galvanized the urban hillbilly movement of the early 1960s to a degree I'd only ever seen credited to Harry Smith's Anthology. I heard about it last week on All Things Considered.

The records are called Clawhammer Banjo. A New Yorker named Charles Faurot made them, skipping down the eastern foot of the Blue Ridge, house to house and town to town. His field trip echoes the historic commercial ventures of early label scouts like Ralph Peer and John Hammond, and parallels the holler-hunts of his more familiar folkie contemporaries Mike Seeger and John Cohen.

Faurot visited Galax and Pulaski in Virginia, towns whose exit signs I've passed maybe a hundred times on Interstates 81 and 77. It's a superficial line, but it kind of warms me to draw it between my drive-thru familiarity with these towns and old-time banjo history. If I'm thinking of the right exit, Pulaski ("Pewlaski") tempts you off I-81 with all kinds of fast-food logos on the GAS FOOD LODGING sign, and then makes you drive about 3 lonesome miles down an unlighted stretch of two-lane road before you finally see the town lights above the trees.

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When I saw Sam Bush and Doc Watson a few years ago, Sam told us, with a practiced bear-baiting grin, that he thinks the banjo ruined bluegrass. He said he likes the "stomp" tempo of bluegrass. I think he meant that Scruggs-style banjo ruined bluegrass, and I think it's ironic that Sam Bush espouses a purer-than-purist stance toward the genre.

My feelings run along the inverse of old Sam's: I think Scruggs-style bluegrass flattened out the banjo, the way rocknroll mashed down blues and country musics. Post-Scruggs banjo is flashy impressive fun, but it blows right by me like a circus train. Old-time banjo, though, unreels light as a thread, and its shadow is monolothic, an Appalachian stonehenge. If you can link bluegrass to assembly lines and rush hour traffic and dishwashers, where do you find the material analogue for clawhammer banjo? It's a gestalt, a confluence of diasporas, trade winds and tragedies. Slavery, potato blight, coal mines. Africa, Ireland, the ragged Blue Ridge.

I don't like Buell Kazee's voice -- with his theatre-organ vibrato and rolling R's he sounds to me like the Cowardly Lion -- but his clawhammer self-accompaniment is otherworldly. On the old recordings, his frailing on an open-back banjo sounds spectral, detached from the plane of the song. It curls leviathan-like beneath the surface.

Hobart Smith, Roscoe Holcomb, Uncle Dave Macon: their frailing styles work to wildy different effects, all compelling. Ralph Stanley's clawhammer tunes have a lightning crackle missing from his up-picked stuff. And there's Clarence Ashley -- my favorite by a mile. Everyone loves "The Cuckoo" and "Little Sadie," and there's a reason for it. The whiplash tempo, the galloping snap of his thumb off the fifth string, the unhinged alto drone of Sawmill tuning that gives his blues licks almost Asian harmonies. His technique is austere and ineffible, light as breath but old and deep as a limestone cavern.

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A year or so ago my now-wife Betsy bought me an open-back banjo. It cost around $80.00 in a pawnshop. The frame is heavy and glazed brown, polished fibreglass maybe, with a plastic Weatherking head, like you'd see on a Pearl tom drum. The brand on the headstock reads CHICAGO. When she bought it, I researched the brand name on the web, and all I found was a couple of newsgroup posts iterating that nobody knew anything about the Chicago brand banjo. It's definitely mass-produced. There's no scrollwork, no inlay, no engraving. I wonder who owned it, sold it. It's not new; rust spots the crooks of the steel brackets, the back of the neck is notched from banging many table corners. The strings need changing, but I'm scared that if I move the balsa bridge, I'll never find its right place again. It stays in tune, and I like its blunted timbre. The sound of the strings struck with the back of my finger trots sock-footed across our hardwood floor.

I've learned a couple of three-finger rolls -- a pinch, an alternating something or other. They sound all right together, especially on a minor chord. But it's nowhere near as satisfying to pluck a banjo as to fall into a clawhammer groove. To turn over and over a chord and a simple melody like a notched wooden wheel: bum-ditty dim-bitty bum-ditty ding.

Probably the guy who owned this banjo was a folkie in the 1950s. A suburban guy like me -- office, lawnmower, vocational discontent. I think of those guys, stumbling on those old records, or initiated into them -- succumbing to that feeling off the old recordings of your head spinning into the fog of the past. Their girlfriends buying them their first pawnshop banjos. In bedrooms and on couches, practicing over and over "Little Sadie" and that mysterious "Cuckoo" hook, the miscegenation of the Blues and the Highland ballads. All those guys who listened over and over to Faurot's field recordings. I can't wait to hear them for the first time.

Brendan

6 comments | 7"

Thursday, March 30, 2006 ... 1:19 PM

A new Gillian Welch album: You heard it here second.

At last, Gil and Dave are rolling fresh tape. They've said in concerts that they make a point to expedite post-production -- meaning that once the mixes are in, it may only be a matter of weeks before we see the CD on shelves. With new songs, I'm hoping for a major shake-up of their setlist. It's a deep groove, three years worn, and frankly I'm sort of bored with it.

There's not a lot of info (and some misinfo; this will be their fifth record, not their fourth), but here is Billboard's scoop: Gillian Welch Gets Busy On New Album

Also keep an eye open for the ten-year anniversary special 2-disc edition of Revival, out within the next few weeks. It's an uncharacteristically un-iconoclastic stop-gap-filler, but that don't mean I won't grab it the day it sees the sun.

Brendan

0 comments | 7"

Thursday, March 16, 2006 ... 3:49 PM

Maybe Leno

I've been listening to Fox Confessor pretty continuously, and yeah -- it's fantastic. It's as dramatic delicate strong and emotionally bared as a candlelight vigil. If I'm being honest with myself, I think I still prefer Blacklisted; the sound of it just warms like a good jacket late in the autumn. But the new "Star Witness" and "Dirty Knife" hold that sense memory potential. We'll see how the feeling ages. Fox Confessor is a summer album, for sure. It casts long shadows and deep reds, like the magic hour in a Malick movie.

We're still unpacking the new hut and scrubbing down the old cave, but until later here are a couple of Neko videos.

Neko Case on Jay Leno
Check this out while you can; about a minute ago, youtube yanked it. The band sounds terrific. I'm happy to see the return of John Rauhouse, Neko's longtime banjo/steel/guitar picker. He's the guy plucking the antique archtop at stage right. I'm hoping all these folks take the stage at the Atlanta show.

Music video for "Maybe Sparrow"
I don't much care for music videos -- the lip synching, the listless strumming. I'd really rather watch true performance footage. But the animation here (by spooky artist Julie Morstad, who also illustrated the album cover) is pretty, if a bit too literal.

Brendan

3 comments | 7"

Tuesday, March 07, 2006 ... 10:42 AM

The Flood

"The Fox Confessor" is a Russian fairy tale in which a vengeful lady fox coaxes a rooster down from a tree with the threat of eternal damnation. I found it by searching inside books at amazon.com.

"O holy mother fox, your mouth is as honey, your words are kind, your tongue is sweet! But will you save me if you devour my body?" "I do not want your body nor your colored garment. I want to pay you back an old favor."

Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is the Neko Case record that hits shelves today. As if I need to tell you. I've got four of its 12 tracks on my cheap little iPod. At least two are masterpieces, frame-worthy. They glow serene at the surface, and their currents are troubled and bottomless. The upright bass tumbles, guitars twang and sway in the 'verb. It's all woodsmoke velvet and marbled mirrors, a feel similar to Blacklisted -- which is really all that I'd hoped for. But these songs are more natural in their space, sure-footed in the dark. Or more than that, the songs seem to have grown out of their space, which suggests a long incubation period. And much has been made in the current press blitz about the three-year production span of this record, but these songs sound not so much fussed-over as lived-in. They are wood-paneled rooms with the blinds down. It's like spending time in the Buried Child house. There's corn growing out back, and God knows what else.

Nickels and dimes on the fourth of July
roll off in a crooked line
to the chain-link lots where the red-tails dive
Oh how I forgot what it's like ...

(If I'm hearing that right.)

Man, I'm dying to listen to the other eight songs. We Earnests are in the midst of moving house, but the Tent Revue will return shortly with a full write-up on both the record and Neko's show at the Variety, for which we already have tickets. And yeah, the rest of my God-damn top 10. Meanwhile, hurry up and download last month's Grand Ole Opry featuring Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: Dimeadozen.org

Brendan

2 comments | 7"

Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"

SITES WHICH THE TENT REVUE RECOMMENDS

MUSIC
Flop Eared Mule
The Celestial Monochord
HickoryWind.org
Dig and Be Dug in Return
Modern Acoustic Magazine / Blog
The Old, Weird America
Honey, Where You Been So Long?

LITERATURE
The Greensboro Review
Mixed Animal
Night Train
Fried Chicken and Coffee
Mungo (This was the blog of my friend, the late Cami Park. Miss you, Cami.)
Staccato Fiction
Wigleaf
PANK Magazine

OTHER
Cat and Girl
Film Freak Central

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