The Lost Chord #1: Dylan in Tennessee, John Prine, and More
Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself...
As Jagger once said.
There's a quality of mystery about all good music. A secret that lies at the core of great songs that insists that you bring something of yourself to them. We're not always aware of this mysterious presence but its absence is immediately apparent. I'd been thinking about this when the opportunity to do this column came along. So, I decided to do the first installment about it.
Then it occurred to me that maybe the first time out should be a sort of introduction. If I'm going to write this for a while and expect you to read it for a while, then you ought to know who I am, why I'm qualified, and how qualified I am to write about music for The Oxford American.
Music is important to the magazine. It's one of the things I love about it. Not just the Music Issue—from the very first, there's always been an awareness of music. Even if what you're reading is not explicitly about music, there always seems to be blues or Americana or rock & roll playing in the background. That's the guiding hand of Marc Smirnoff at work, and I salute him for it.
So just a little autobiographical background, and an enumeration of my qualifications:
1. I've always been hooked. My first memories are of 78s, and a hand-cranked phonograph my grandmother owned. We called it a Victrola. The 78s were Victor Records by Jimmie Rodgers, The Carter Family on Bluebird, Gid Tanner & The Skillet Lickers. Also, like most kids growing up in the working-class and rural South, I was exposed to the Grand Ole Opry, it seemed to always be on the radio. Listening every Saturday night to the Carters and buck dancers, sawing fiddles and claw-hammered banjoes, troubadours that were "walking the floor over you." Later, I fancied myself too sophisticated for such carryings-on, and began to listen to mainstream pop music ("I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"): doggies in the window, little things that meant a lot, Italian crooners singing about amore. As a kid, I had a little spiral notebook wherein I charted Billboard's Top 10 every week. Elated when a favorite song went up a notch or two, depressed when it plummeted like a burned-out rocket. I did this for years, and I never realized how truly weird it was until I just now saw it in black and white.
The first yellow-labeled Sun Records out of Memphis changed all this. The young Elvis Presley, before he was diluted and adulterated and made safe for mass consumption, seemed alien. He came on like some genius hybrid of James Dean and Mozart. He truly didn't sound like nobody. There was WLAC, the radio station in Nashville that played the blues all night, all night: Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, the Staples, and Swan Silvertones at two o'clock in the morning. Those teenage years, my radio stayed on my bedside table. It was my best friend, and the DJs' voices coming out of the darkness, Gene Nobles and Hoss Ellen, felt close to soulmates.
2. Later, Dylan reordered music. He made songwriting palatable for T.S. Eliot and the French symbolists. I like to think that I was one of the first to bring Dylan records into Tennessee. I discovered his music in New York whiskey houses, fell under the spell of his first two albums. Through them, I went backwards into the old folk and blues songs that were his influences.
A girl once broke up with me over a song. I was forced to choose between someone I was truly fond of, and a song that annoyed the hell out of her. Sadly, the girl is long gone, but all these years later, I still have the song. (Editor's Note: See latest SoLost episode for the full story.)
3. Janis Joplin once yelled at me and shooed me out. This was in a blues bar in the Old Town section of Chicago. I had been drunkenly insisting that she and Big Brother & the Holding Company do "Mr. Tambourine Man." They did not perform it.
4. Kris Kristofferson told me about working as a janitor in the Columbia studio in Nashville while Dylan was recording. He said he listened to him and watched him at the piano writing the songs for Blonde on Blonde. He said it was something you do not forget. It was impressive just hearing about it. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be there.
5. Writing Provinces of Night, my second novel, I was living alone and listening obsessively every night to the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music. Dock Boggs and Richard "Rabbit" Brown came back from the dead and took over my book. It was an unforgettable experience and I was later surprised at how much of my fiction has music running through it.
But writing about oneself grows tiresome for both of us. You get the idea—you'll either read it or you won't. I'll just briefly mention a couple albums I've been playing, then next month we'll talk about mystery, or my vote for the first great rock album, or the greatest singles of all time. Or maybe Kenny Brown's new album, which I just received but haven't played yet. Or perhaps my critique of Rolling Stone's "70 Greatest Dylan Songs"—if Marc can bitch at length about True Grit, I should be allowed a few words about this somewhat odd list.
Various Artists: Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine
(Oh Boy Records, 2010)
If anyone ever deserved a tribute, it's John Prine. When he came along in the early '70s, he was called "The New Dylan," but he turned out to be an absolute original—"The First John Prine." His albums on Atlantic and Asylum still stand up, and would meet anybody's criteria for a great record. Songs like "Mexican Home" and "The Late John Garfield Blues" could have been written by no one other than Prine. Long regarded as a songwriter's songwriter, he's paid court here by folks like Connor Oberst and The Avett Brothers, and other artists from Americana's top shelf. If no one else could have written those songs, maybe no one else can quite sing them. Prine is an underrated interpreter of his own material, and most of these lose somewhat in the translation. They're professional and pleasant to hear, but there's a bland "So what?" feel about most of them. Drive-By Truckers do a great job with "Daddy's Little Pumpkin," an underexposed hymn from The Missing Years. And Oberst pulls off his take on "Wedding Day in Funeralville," a wonderful song from Prine's absurdist period. But when Prine does "Mexican Home," it's dense and hypnotic and claustrophobic—one of the best songs on Sweet Revenge, which is a dense and hypnotic and claustrophobic album. The song sounds very personal in Prine's reading, and maybe no one else should even attempt it. To pay tribute to Prine, get Rhino's boxed set, Great Days, or buy the Atlantic and Asylum albums and discover obscurities that fell through the cracks of time, like the epic "Down By the Side of the Road," or his take on Chuck Berry's "You Never Can Tell."
Or better yet, have several beers and play Diamonds in the Rough all the way through at three o'clock in the morning—now that's a tribute.
Hear this! "Daddy's Little Pumpkin" by Drive-By Truckers
The Jake Leg Stompers: Hill Country HooDoo
(HooDoo Records, 2010)
Maybe jug-band music is coming back. Works for me—what the world needs now is not love, as The Supremes once sang, but more kazoo players. The best thing that I've heard lately is Hill Country HooDoo, by a band I'd never heard of, The Jake Leg Stompers. Not exactly jug-band, and not exactly anything else, the record has a loose, good-timey feel, reminiscent of Geoff & Maria Muldaur, at their peak, or early Lovin' Spoonful crossed with The Memphis Jug Band. In fact, they do "KC Moan," an old Memphis Jug Band song (I love this song; I'd listen to it by Englebert Humperdink or Robert Goulet) as well as Blind Blake and other lost music from the '20s and the '30s. The outfit hails from Middle Tennessee but is assisted here by North Mississippi performers like Jimbo Mathus, Rev. John Wilkins, and Luther Dickinson. If you can listen to "Keep It Clean" without a smile breaking out across your face—there's no hope for you. You should just rush out and buy a Kenny Chesney record.
Hear this! "Keep It Clean" by The Jake Leg Stompers
—William Gay
