Thursday, February 02, 2006 ... 7:53 PM
Charlotte Skyline: Boney's Anachronistic Best of 2005, part four
6) The Carter Family 1927-1934 (JSP); Will the Circle Be Unbroken (PBS)
Last week I discovered that each morning, on my way to work, I drive past the recording studio where in 1965 James Brown cut "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag." It's called Studioeast. It's a brown-brick shoebox, hunkered between a crematorium and an appliance mart, across the road from Sharon Memorial Park & Cemetery. The neighborhood is one of those urban-sprawl commercial zones that mainly leaves the impression of stained concrete.
Back then, Studioeast was run by Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith, a multi-instrumentalist in jazz, swing, and country stringband music. He was also a songwriter, and a broadcast personality with a nationally syndicated TV variety show. In photos he looks dapper and kind of uptight. Even dressed down in flannel he less resembles a ramblin man than a Senator on vacation. Smith co-penned the tune "Feudin Banjos" in 1955, and later won a lawsuit against the producers of the movie Deliverance when they used his song without permission. His 1948 record "Guitar Boogie" helped popularize the electric guitar, and in particular the Fender Broadcaster, a Telecaster prototype. "Guitar Boogie" is also one claimant to that nebulous laurel, First Ever Rocknroll Record.
In 1965, James Brown and his band were in Charlotte for a tour date. In Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith's tracking room, they captured "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag" on the second take. Jimmy Nolen's guitar jangled and chirped, the horns hopped around. It was a new sound for soul music. The group played it slower and longer than what you hear on the Oldies station; Ron Lenhoff, Brown's regular engineer in Cincinnati, edited the Charlotte tape down from seven minutes, and then sped it up. You know the rest.
*
My wife and I had to drive to Atlanta to see Neko Case, and we last caught Gillian Welch in tiny Lexington, Virginia. Chris Scruggs made a Charlotte stop in July, and no one showed up to see him. Last month, Aerosmith's appearance here was a very big deal. The nightly news ran "Love In An Elevator" with the end credits. Charlotte in the 2000s seems filled with young bankers who drive SUVs and satisfy their groove with Hits of the 80s radio.
It was not always so. In the 1930s, Ralph Peer and other label scouts cutting hillbilly and race records in the field set up permanent facilities here, establishing Charlotte as the recording center of the Southeast. WBT, the region's first commercial radio station, featured top country acts such as Dave Macon, the Carter Family, and Bill Monroe. Running these days on 1110 AM, WBT has become the local dump for garbage such as Rush Limbaugh and Neal Boortz. Recently on a lunch break, I listened as Rush blustered on and on about how the just-announced indictment of "Scooter" Libby did not support the theory that Bush's case for the Iraq War was a deliberate deception. Rush kept predicting, "Now you're going to hear the left-wing media try to tell you ..."
In 1943, the same WBT gave the Carter Family their last gig. Maybelle, AP and Sara played the daily sunrise slot for one year. When they had fulfilled this contract the three original Carters split, and from Charlotte went their separate ways.
*
To paraphrase Sarah Vowell, it's fun to know about the history that visited the ground beneath your feet. For instance, the Delmore Brothers recorded here, and Uncle Dave Macon. Betsy and I wonder if Uncle Dave is singing about the Old Plank Road in northwest Charlotte.
A couple miles north of my house, REM in 1983 recorded their first LP Murmur. Was Alternative Rock born here? I won't argue that, but I'll suggest that you consider it -- Murmur. Also consider that in 1936, about two miles west of me, Bill and Charlie Monroe cut their first ten sides, including "Roll In My Sweet Baby's Arms," making Charlotte the Bethlehem, if not the Nazareth, of Bluegrass music.
Here in 1939, the Carter Family in their penultimate sessions recorded "You Are My Flower" and "Coal Miner's Blues." When their border radio sponsor moved to Charlotte in 1942, the Family came with him, though Sara was reluctant to go on with her music career. The previous year the group had held their last recording session in NYC, and Sara sang "Fifty Miles of Elbow Room." Sometimes I'm cramped and crowded here, and I long for elbow room.
The WBT studios were located on the corner of South Tryon St and 3rd St, in the Wilder Building. Maybelle's daughter June Carter would perform on the show, which ended at 6:15AM, and then head off to class at Paw Creek High School northwest of the city. June said of the WBT gig, "It was kind of a strained situation. My uncle A.P. and aunt Sara had been divorced." She may have understated the vibe; around this time Janette Carter, daughter of Sara and AP, recorded the aggressive suicide threat song "Last Letter":
Why do you treat me as if I were only a friend?
What have I done that has made you so distant and cold?
Sometimes I wonder if you'll be contented again
And will you be happy when you are withered and old?
I wonder about those months here in Charlotte. How it felt. Sara had remarried, but was unable until now to finally extract herself from her life with AP. I wonder why she stuck around. I come up with security, in all forms, however stifling. Money, the habit of just being there. The sense of responsibility to AP, whose long hounddog face must have haunted her each morning, the way his quavering baritone haunts the choruses of her songs. These are familiar feelings to anyone who first married too young, and was ready to quit long before awakening to the reality of moving on.
Sara Carter never let us know how she felt. The subjects of her songs are melodrama, tragedy, histrionics, holy ecstasy -- but her delivery is invariably cool and opaque. The bounce in Maybelle's clawhammer guitar scratch telegraphs her enthusiasm for the music, and AP's voice jumps in and out with the insecurity of a third wheel. Sara's readings are blank screens. All the country musicians looking up to her have projected upon her. The Carter Family have been called upon for credibility by folks from Johnny Cash to Freakwater, and I always wonder what these folks think they hear in there.
*
Just before Christmas I e-mailed the Carter Family Fold, hoping to get through to Janette, who ran the place, hoping to ask her about those last months her parents worked together in Charlotte. No one ever responded. I don't know if she would have returned the e-mail, but I just discovered that Janette was sick. She died three weeks ago on Sunday. The Virginia legislature adjourned in her honor, according to daughter Rita's statement on the Fold website. Rita also tells a good story there about Janette meeting Margaret Thatcher:
Mom smiled her sweetest smile and said, "Hello, honey, how are you?"
Information about the last year of the Carter Family is sparse. I wonder if anyone who'd remember it survives. The 2005 documentary Will the Circle Be Unbroken barely touches that period. Mark Zwonitzer skims it in his biography of the Family, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone. He tells us that the Family lived in the Roosevelt Hotel and that for breakfast they ate biscuits and gravy. He focuses on Maybelle's kids, the future of the Family. Drawing a straight line to the future from 1943, we see a parking lot where the Wilder Building stood. You can wait there on the corner of 3rd and Tryon hoping to pick up a Carter Family vibration, but you will only get a mouthful of car exhaust. The textile mill workers and furniture craftsmen who made up the country music audience of WBT have evaporated, their jobs gone to China, clearing the city for the young executives of Wachovia and Bank of America, who we presume prefer Rush Limbaugh's political analysis to the ancient maudlin ballads and blues.
Brendan
Saturday, December 17, 2005 ... 11:16 PM
(Jesus Christ, I'm only halfway done with) Boney's Anachronistic Best of 2005, part three
4) Lightnin Hopkins
Lightnin Hopkins kept coming up in 2005. In the Spring, I bought the JSP boxed set of Lightnin's sides from 1946-1951. Five discs, 120 tracks. One hundred twenty. Later in the year, Oxford American made Lightnin the heart of their excellent Summer Music Issue, giving appreciation duty in the magazine to three different authors. Each of the other artists was given one author.
Like a lot of folks around my age, I imagine, I first heard of Lightnin Hopkins as the title of an REM song. It's an uptempo pop song, major chords, not a blues song. As far as I can tell, all the song has to do with the man is the use of his name and a Stipeian bead-string of rural Texas imagery.
Hound bark on the track
Hound crow hold onto your hat
Lightnin' won lightnin' won
Low lands timberlands bad lands bird lands
But it put the name in my head, and it's one of those names that sticks, rolls into mind while I'm washing the dishes or tying my shoes. I say it out loud: "Lightnin Hopkins." I like the sound of it. Early in my blues self-education (I'm at about a 4th grade level now), I finally picked up a vinyl double-LP called "Double Blues." The back cover is a B&W extreme close up of the old guy's face. It's meant to emphasize his rugged windcarved sunbaked features. Every pore is vivid. The wrinkles creeping out beneath his sunglasses, the beard stubble on his jawline. He seems to be made of dried river silt.
The first record starts with Lightnin telling a story of how, at eight years old, he built his first guitar from a cigar box, a wood plank, and some screen wire. He took the box down to where Blind Lemon Jefferson was busking and showed old Blind Lemon how he could imitate the great man's playing. The crowd set Lightnin up on the bed of a truck and he stood there and picked along with Blind Lemon. Eight years old. He plays acoustic and electric guitars throughout his career, to different effects. He uses dynamics dramatically: wide empty spaces between fast, chunky licks, and graceful jumps between hard and soft attacks. Willie Nelson might have learned his vocal phrasing from Lightnin's picking. Lightnin's style is complete and autonomous; he brings his sound to the guitar. Lightnin on electric archtop, I imagine, sounds not much different from Lightnin playing a cigar box.
The primary quality of his voice is that it's avuncular. Not creepy, as Mississippi John Hurt sounds. John Hurt is the short uncle who works at the green grocer and whom you don't trust alone with the kids.
Lightnin is the uncle who can't hold down a job, shows up drunk to Christmas dinner, and tells dirty jokes in mixed company. His nephews idolize him. Like Clarence Ashley, Lightnin sounds, even as a younger man, ancient, wily, and bewildered. The range of experiences catalogued in his songs reads like a Flannery O'Connor anthology. In "Bald Headed Woman," he learns that his woman is fucking another man, and he demands that she return the wig he has bought for her. Lightnin frequently invented his lyrics on the spot (he called them "air songs"), but whether any single narrative is legit or apocryphal, he's so convincingly baffled at every misfortune, they can be nothing but true. I have nearly 200 of his tracks on my shelf, and that's hardly a dent in the man's discography. His catalogue is oceanic, in its breadth and its homogeneity. He nearly always plays in the key of E. He opens his every slow shuffle, and there have got to be thousands of them, with the same double-stop riff on the second and third strings, and he comes back to this riff constantly over the course of a song. All his thousands of tunes, maybe without exception, end with the same lick. On the second string, the B, it's tabbed: 0 2 0 3. It's a common blues lick, a turnaround, landing on the flatted 7th, unresolved. Everyone uses this lick at some point. After singing "Happy Birthday," little kids like to hang these notes with the lyric, "And many more." But Lightnin uses it as a signature stroke. He signs every song with it, as Van Gogh signed his paintings Vincent.
With the JSP boxed set, you can listen to Lightnin all night long and feel as though you've listened to one very long tune. He's no songster. Compared with a Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin's vocabulary seems tiny -- though I have no doubt that blues scholars and Lightnin completists can give me a million reasons why I'm wrong about this (and probably everything else I've said here). It's true that if you listen actively, you'll pick up variegations. He's got boogies and slow shuffles. Sometimes he plays with a small band -- upright bass and drum kit, the odd piano, and he audibly baffles sidemen with his expressive timing and tempo. He uses floating blues verses, and the common lover-leaving, highway-side, down-on-my-luck subjects, but his lyrics are political at times. Jim Crow is a topic, and maybe couldn't not be for a black man in Jim Crow Texas without conscious resistance. Vietnam, Korea, and WWII are all lamented and feared, though not blatantly protested. But if you're not listening for the nuance of each song and putting blank space between them in your mind, they soon wash together. That's fine, though. It all makes good fucking listening.
I have favorite Lightnin Hopkins songs. It is possible to fish a few from the ocean. I like "War News Blues" for its foreboding, its twilit apocalyptic a-bomb anxiety. I used to dream pretty often of nuclear war, so it speaks to me. I like "Bring Me My Shotgun," because I get a good chill from songs about lovers wanting to kill each other. The connections, see, are completely subjective. All true, deeply felt musical connections are. Technique skill signficance -- blah blah blah. Above the rest, though, of all 200-some sides I've heard, I like "Standin on 75 Highway," from Double Blues, best. It's the slowest, most patient, most spacious in its delivery, haunted and lonesome. It's got its ear to that wall.
5) Guero, Beck (Geffen)
From the bloated, overindulgent, shockingly overrated mope-glut of Sea Change, Beck emerges a fit, mature artist. I've heard all the criticisms -- familiar safe retread, whatever. Fact is, like it or not -- and you might as well -- Beck is the voice of a culture. He's our laureate. Intimate and topical, current and eternal, he drinks his whiskey out of the Harry Smith grail, and I'll stand on Greil Marcus's coffee table in my Chuck Taylors and tell him myself.
Down on the corner
See me standing in a makeshift home with a dust storm comin
In a long black shadow
Pull a hammer from a coal mine down where your daddy was workin
Comb my hair back
Strike a match on the bathroom wall where my number was written
Driving on the sidewalk
lookin' back at the sky
It's burning in the rearview mirror
Na na na na na, I better go it alone
Nuff said.
Brendan
Friday, December 16, 2005 ... 8:40 PM
Boney's Anachronistic Best of 2005, part two
3) Cold Roses, & Jacksonville City Nights, Ryan Adams (Lost Highway)
I've bought into the buzz around Ryan Adams this year, but I'm burnt out on it. Fans and press have tripped over themselves to slaughter the fatted calf for Ryan's return to twang, but I think that come the morning light, a lot of copies of Jacksonville City Nights will start bobbing up in the used bins. So many of the vocal performances on this record are just bad -- and not bad in a sustainably interesting way, but bad in a way that suggests to me a conversation like this:
Engineer: Eeesh. That was, uh ...
Producer: I know. It takes him six or seven takes to warm up. Roll back to zero.
Ryan (in the tracking room): All right, good enough. Next.
Engineer: Oh fuck, is he kidding?
Producer (over intercom): Yeah Ryan. That was pretty good. Let's get a few more, so we have some options in the mix.
Ryan: I said we're moving on. I wanna get out of here and get some sushi.
Still, I wonder how I'd feel about this record if it didn't include "Peaceful Valley." It's a plane wreck of a song, and its failure taints everything around it, destabilizes the record's entire dimension, like that jet engine in Donnie Darko. But I've harped on this enough. Clearly I'm the one missing something. I'd love for someone to convince me that my $15.00 was spent well.
I did, though, get plenty of mileage out of Cold Roses. I listened to it enough in the few months after its release to put it on my Best Of. It's purple Kool-Aid made with too much water: a diluted but pleasant enough summer refreshment. Good choruses, hooks and instrumental vamps are frequently stretched beyond their elasticity. The title track is a good example. A couple few tunes snap tightly and satisfying. Or one does, anyway. "Let It Ride," the blatant single -- meaning that it's blatantly good. You can just listen to it. The band gives an economical performance that's also deeply felt, bruised and moody and driving wobbily as if from a fight in which it got its ass walloped. It's solid country rock. (Also, any tune featuring a guitar hook bent by a Bigby and drenched in reverb has a leg up on winning me over. See the Sadies, and their work on Neko's Blacklisted.) Other tracks that still feel overdrawn, but manage to stand up above the rest: "Cherry Lane," "Sweet Illusion," "Beautiful Sorta." I'll listen to this record again next summer. Jacksonville City Nights, probably not.
Brendan
Wednesday, December 14, 2005 ... 10:36 PM
Boney's Anachronistic Best of 2005, part one
This weblog dosn't have much journalistic currency. I try sometimes, when something new interests me. I write about the shows I manage to see. I wrote about Ryan Adams and Steve Earle when their most recent records came out. I have no illusions that my finger is on any pulse.
But now's the season for Year's Best lists. I enjoy reading them. I'm only slightly embarrassed by how few albums released in 2005 I've actually heard, but I've heard few enough that I won't go on record about which songs albums artists guitar-solos hairdos and so forth I think are the best. I've listened to a lot of music this year, though, that came out of a lot of different years. It's all new to me. So here is part one of my 2005 Top Ten List of Best Music From Whenever, culled from the stuff I've been listening to for the past 12 months. Find old, new, borrowed, and blue in this Earnest wedding year.
1) Tim Easton, "They Will Bury You," Evening Muse, 7/8/05.
You have bottleneck slide on a crusty old flattop guitar, you have minor chords. Portentous lyrics that skim the collective dream. You have rasp. Mainly, you have atmosphere. Listening to this music gives you the feeling that you've got your ear to a thin wall between your own consciousness and American Mythology. Sounds goofy, I'll admit, but it's the feeling that flipped the twang switch in my head years ago. I heard it first in Grant Lee Buffalo and Mazzy Star, and then early Cowboy Junkies. I get it from Clarence Ashley, Skip James, and Neko Case. It's what I want when I go hunting for music: that bottomless depth, that ear to the wall. In a tiny nightclub, around four fans turned up to witness a Tim Easton suddenly turned hoodoo man, summoning this sensation of thunder rumbling your floorboards -- that summer storm feeling of the sky holding its breath. Listen at Tim's site.
2) Detroit Blues: Blues from the Motor City 1938-1954 (JSP)
Disc C, "Stop Breaking Down," Baby Boy Warren
Disc A, "Highway 61 Blues," Sampson Pittman
Baby Boy Warren came from Louisiana and cut his teeth in Memphis, but in the 1950s became a staple in Detroit's postwar blues scene anchored by the Hastings Street ghetto. Black folks moved up around the Great Lakes from all over the South to work in the motor plants. A lot of these guys brought the primal seed of the rural blues with them. It rooted in the concrete. It mutated in the assemby lines, hardened, buzzing with electrical current and the pumping of brass valves. John Lee Hooker hit a major stride in Detroit, grew up and out, crossed over to the lucrative white market.
Baby Boy Warren didn't quite. When the Hastings Street scene got bulldozed in the 60s, he quit music to focus on feeding his kids. He died in Detroit in 1977. I love his take on Robert Johnson's "Stop Breaking Down." I like Warren's gregarious delivery, predicting the pressed professionalist passion of Motown acts to come. I like the angular, workmanlike thrum of his band: saxophone, piano, drums, guitar, well-oiled, lit up. The factory has wrung out any traces of the Delta, of the individual bluesman's expressiveness. It's urban party music, loud and grinning.
Sampson Pittman, though, is pure individualism, acoustic expressiveness. He survived the misery of wild, lawless Arkansas levee camps and arrived in Detroit before the War, where he cut some songs and stories for Alan Lomax, after which he apparently disappeared. Lomax liked his rhythmic oral histories, but I think his best narrative is given by his slide guitar performance on "Highway 61 Blues." That's cheesy, I know it. But listen to it. The cut starts at a stomping Texas tempo, and Pittman with his dirtpile voice moans out a couple of floating blues verses. Then he goes out on a guitar break, and never comes back. If there are more words to this tune, he doesn't know them, or he's lost interest in them. He's given up on the lyrics, which don't belong to him anyway. Whatever he has to say, he has no use for words. The music spreads wide, out through his hands. The tempo picks up, but organically. His bottleneck licks are varied and simple. There's no rhythmic thunking of the bass strings like you hear in Delta blues. It's all melody, curling into the air like smoke.
Brendan
Making Notes: Music of the Carolinas
(Novello Festival Press, April 2008)
includes my essay, "Link Wray"
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
