Boney Earnest's Suburban Hilltop Tent Revue

Monday, April 17, 2006 ... 2:41 PM

Solomon in Nashville

Solomon Burke will release a country music record in September, produced by Buddy Miller. Gillian Welch wrote one cut, and it looks as if she performs on the album as well, along with Emmylou Harris.

Here's the Billboard story:
Burke In A Country Mood On New Album

Burke was a Philadelphia preacher and Gospel singer, secularized in the 60s by Atlantic Records producers in a prototypical soul man arc (the reverse arc of the bluesman, who in mid-life trades his rough and rowdy ways for the pulpit). He's recorded country songs throughout his career, but never a full-on country album. In the Billboard article he says, "I didn't want to do a record like this in L.A., I wanted to come [to Nashville] and find the real deal."

So he goes to the Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue. Of which he says, "I feel like I've been at the university of country music." Miller, Harris, Welch, and David Rawlings, with their startling range of guest performances and songwriting credits and production credits and sold-out collaborative tours, seem to have entrenched their own alternative country (not to say Alt-Country) establishment in Nashville, coexisting and even cozy with the Nashville mainstream that their core audiences love to revile. These artists are all recent guests of the Opry. Emmylou is a member. Could it be that Music City is more complicated a culture than the DEATH TO NASHVILLE alt-fundamentalists need?

*

The Neko Case show was fantastic. More on that, eventually. Here's a mobile phone picture my wife took of the band as they tuned before the first encore.

Brendan

1 comments | 7"

Monday, April 03, 2006 ... 12:44 PM

Outtake reel

I cut the following bit from my March 31 post because it's excessive and sort of silly, and I couldn't integrate it with the other segments. But I realized yesterday that the 5th paragraph in that post is a non sequitur without it.

A couple of weeks ago I watched this 1994 documentary, High Lonesome: The Story of Bluegrass Music. It's more a collage of bluegrass plot points than a story (and I wish John Cohen or Roscoe Holcomb had gotten a mention for the term "high lonesome"). It does stick together some charming original footage of Ralph Stanley, a jolly Jimmy Martin, and Bill Monroe.

Monroe is disarming and humble, singing and chatting, buckdancing yodeling picking, and looking pensive running his hands over the walls of a deserted hillside cabin that we're meant to infer is the Old Home. I like the connection the film draws between Monroe's vision of bluegrass and the streamlined chrome of the nuclear age. I love to see hillbilly and Southerner stereotypes derailed. It seems peculiar, revisionist, that bluegrass is heard today as a backwater or even backwards music. I think we can thank the cultural tailings of Deliverance for much of the perception. I felt a jolt of satisfaction discovering that the pretty urbane Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith won a lawsuit against the producers of Deliverance for using his "Fuedin Banjos" without permission. Hey Jughaid, ain't them Hollywood slickers know thar's laws pertectin' intellectual property?

Brendan

1 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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