Big Sound Saturdays: Spring and All

It is spring. That is to say, it is approaching THE BEGINNING.

Yes, The Beginning. Welcome, spring! This mix sits squarely in the 10-ish year period of 1966-1977, plus an irresistible tune from 1987—the year of the mystical collaboration of Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt—and the wonky, dulcet tones of Josephine Foster in 2005. At its center, Merle Haggard’s “Ramblin’ Fever.” RIP!

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Big Sound Saturdays: Sanatorium Blues

S.A.: Ushering in a month of guest mix-ers, P.F. gives us an extensive collection of heavy jams that are either tuberculosis related or T.B.-proximal. Check out @digamericana and digamericana.com to see some of the other stuff he’s working on, and settle in for the night – this one’s a doozy.

Big Sound Saturdays: E Mama Ea (Old-Time Women’s Voices)

I do feel like I’ve tempted fate too long, shying away from the prewar revenants that I love so much, so this mix sits squarely between 1916 and, ok, a little post-war, 1950. E Mama Ea is a mix dedicated to the fact that while “female musicians” is emphatically not a genre, the dexterity, tremor, and occasional audacity of the metaphoric and actual female voice is always, emphatically, worth celebrating.

As is my wont, these songs are mostly American, gospel, blues, and game song-centric. “Rolled and Tumbled” is Rose Hemphill’s rendition of a well-worn delta blues later popularized by fellow Mississippi resident Muddy Waters, recorded here in 1959 by Alan Lomax in the same session that first captured the voice of Mississippi Fred McDowell. The penultimate track, a prewar white gospel number also recorded by Alan Lomax and named, here, “The Airplane Ride”—“The Heavenly Aeroplane” elsewhere—is a wonky paen to God and technology that calls out to the Nugrape Twins’ even wonkier “There’s A City Built Of Mansions,” an ode to the difficulty of thinking through largesse without thinking through capitalism.

And then, the opposite, A.C. Forehand and the delightfully-named Blind Mamie Forehand’s “Honey In The Rock,” sotto voce with triangle. Washboard classic “Worried Jailhouse Blues,” from the voice who immortalized “Some Cold, Rainey Day,” the great Bertha “Chippie” Hill. The robust and quite honestly, kinda sonically phallic talking tuba call-and-response, Sharlie English’s “Tuba Lawdy Blues.” The sweet soft hand-game song, “Little Girl, Little Girl,” recorded here in 1936. Parchman Farm inmate Mary James’ foot-stomping invective, “Make The Devil Leave Me Alone,” backed by a chorus of prisoners in 1939 and collected by the unduly obscure Rosetta Reitz on her Rosetta Records label roughly forty years later.

I’m pleasantly surprised at how intimately these songs sing together, Cleoma Breaux’s Cajun rendering of “When You Wish Upon A Star:” “It’s A Sin To Tell A Lie,” recorded thirteen years before Disney was to release Cinderella, out of Lata Mageshkar and Saraswati Rane’s performance of “Jab Dil Ko Satawe Gham,” which I pulled directly from Sargam, an Indian film from the year 1950. We hear from hot jazz bandleader Thelma Terry (and her Playboys!) two songs after the Turkish “Soyledi Yok Yok,” sung by Neriman Altindag (with both released on separate albums by the deeply hip label Dust-to-Digital). I mined the Ethiopiques archive for Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrau’s “Homesickness,” and Florida Atlantic University’s amazing Judaica Sound Archives 78-rpm Sound Collection for turn of the century New York Metropolitan Opera singer Sophie Braslau’s “I Love You Truly.” And still, at the beginning, the piercing “Light In The Valley,” by ladies L. Reed and T.A. Duncans, followed by the perplexing and lovely “E Mama Ea.”

“E Mama Ea” was recorded by Mme. Riviere’s Hawaiians to a 78 rpm disc before the year 1948. Because a prewar Hawaiian music discography doesn’t seem to exist, I can’t find the year of the recording, the label, or the location. I do know that it was first picked up in 1981 by the now-obscure Folklyric imprint, then again by Portland-local Mississippi Records for “I Don’t Feel At Home in This World Anymore” in 2007. Less obscure—though not by much— than the recording details is Madame Riviere, a French woman who formed a band with Hawaiian steel guitarist Tau Moe and his wife, Rose, when she was sent to study in still French-colonized Tahiti in the 1920s. “Ea,” from what I can tell, is multiply-signifying, political at heart: Hawaiian sovereignty, but also breath, respiration, spirit, and rising up, becoming erect and powerful. I wonder if Mme Riviere, a colonizer whose face is lost to us, knew it?

Big Sound Saturdays: Working For the Man

It’s apt that Working for the Man is out today, a Saturday, because it was on a Saturday that Labor Day was originally celebrated. Actually, Labor Day started on Saturday, May 1st, 1886—“May Day,” “International Worker’s Day”—as a strike, in demand of an 8-hour work day.

Big Sound Saturdays: Ramblin’ ‘Round Your Town

When Waylon Jennings had a hit in 1974 with “Ramblin’ Man” off of his eponymous album, the song had already walked, in peripatetic stride, the far-out rambling exchange of 20^th century American music. Charlie Poole & The North Carolina Ramblers, one of the earliest recorded old-time country string bands (famous, in part, for the standard, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down”), cut “Ramblin’ Blues” as early as 1928, but we can assume the tune is much older. Save for the Hackberry Ramblers, whose Cajun-laced western swing is a little outside of standard genre-fare, the ramblin’ songs that I’ve compiled stick within the confines of prewar and acoustic blues, old-time country, outlaw country, and the folk revival.

Where Robert Johnson’s ramble is a disconcerting polyphony of voice and shrieking guitar, “mean things on my mind,” most of these artists puff their chests out while they wander. Hank Williams’ classic “Ramblin’ Man” consolidates his aura of romantic untouchability; a caution that hearkens forth to Jennings’ ramblin’ machismo 23 years later, and Memphis Minnie’s “Nothin’ In Ramblin’,” recorded 11 years before Williams’ tune, throws it back, hanging up her own wandering hat, getting married, and settling down. Rambling, of an etymology that’s tantilizingly, poetically unknown, could be a digressive wandering of body or of mind—unsystematic contemplation, unrestrained ambling, “easy riding.” No wonder it was picked up so zealously by the “outlaws,” so enamored with the masculine tradition of aimless philosophizing.

Fittingly, “Ramblin’,” Barbara Dane’s throaty walk through “your town,” is actually a reworking of hobo pioneer Woody Guthrie’s 1944 “Ramblin’ ‘Round.” It’s a beautiful thought, to wander freely, and these songs pay tribute that’s sometimes careful, more often wild and big.  Dane’s reworking of Guthrie’s alienation—“I’ve never met a friend I know, as I go rambling around”—makes me think this tradition has meat on its bones, isn’t just a walking boy skeleton of outlaw lust and male alienation. And truly, all of these songs hold up, especially, funnily, together.

Big Sound Saturdays: Saturday Morning Coming Down

I’ve never really felt summer come slowly. Winter is always a crash-and-burn disaster, so bad that I forget it annually, and spring is sudden and confusing, Charlottesville alighting with still-too-cold undergrad summer gear and the uninsistent southern laughter of men and women about to go home. Now that it’s mid-May, the East coast is alternately drenched and bathed in the happiest early summer sunlight, and all I want to do is lie down and be swallowed by it.

I made a mix for that! All kinds of country, a little gospel, a little folk, some slant-blues. Karen Dalton’s holy warbles are the sneak-up, crooning “love is blind” into Bobby Charles’ cool invective, “you gotta give me all the love I want.” I threw in a few classics—Billy Joe Shaver’s blithe farewell to his “bottom dollar,” Dave Van Ronk growling the original “Baby Let Me Lay It On You,” a faux-Hawaiian version of “Soldier’s Joy,” Riley Puckett singing the hobo lullaby, “Ragged But Right,” that dates back to at least as early as 1900 and makes me feel justified, in all its confidence, for causing some kind of scene. A mix for sitting still, “Milky White Way” paces us, and Jake Fussel’s “Raggy Levy”—a cover of the Georgia Sea Island Singers’ call-and-response song by the same name—is a sit-down shimmy. “Cairo Blues,” with its unrelenting “KAY-row,” has a place on my ongoing list of heart-rending yelps. There’s fife and Hawaiian slide guitar, four-part harmony and organ, the great and eternal Doug Sahm! Happy summer, ACRO friends. Things are only looking up.

Big Sound Saturdays: C-H-I-C-K-E-N vol. 2

Today, S.A. continues our journey into a beloved and weird American musical trope: the eternal chicken! 

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Welcome to feature number two of ACRO Collective’s C-H-I-C-K-E-N series; all jump blues, R&B, hot jazz, and jive. I walked into this with big dreams of ‘60’s rock and Hasil Adkins chicken-punk, but these sounds overcame me: Big Joe Turner bending “Shake, Rattle and Roll” into “Chicken and the Hawk,” Billy Ward and the Dominos with their overwrought moanings, the anthropomorphized chicken clucks of Slim & Slam! You get a real sense of the hand-holding between hot jazz and early country music from some of these tunes, particularly Zeb Turner’s chicken-ified “Walking the Floor Over You,” and the chicken even stands to usher in the early soundings of rock ‘n’ roll. Listen up for the stacked, scooping harmonic bursts in Andre Williams’ “The Greasy Chicken,” the proto-Wall of Sound bumping of “Little Chickee Wah Wah,” and take a look at Mabel Lee performing the Chicken Shack Shuffle in an on screen celebration of Tillie’s Chicken Shack, in Harlem, 1943. “A Chicken Ain’t Nothin’ But A Bird,” maybe, but this bird’s stuck with us. We owe each other this chicken dance!

Special thanks, once more, to Dave Rogers, WTJU-FM’s own Professor Bebop, for sharing many of these songs with me. Looking forward to collaboratively magnetizing the chicken ad infinitum!

Weekly Dance Break: American Oxygen (Rihanna)

This week’s dance break is a little bit different: less about relaxation and more about content. Rihanna’s “American Oxygen” can probably be read “straightforwardly” as a song praising the American Dream, but the imagery of its music video, spliced with footage of the KKK, Martin Luther King, and race riots, begs a more complicated question.

 

Big Sound Saturdays: Rock ‘n’ Roll Dad

Here at Acro Collective, our favorite saturday jokes are dad jokes, and our favorite Saturday sunshine sound is dad rock. S.A. slingshots us back into childhood with this sweet springtime dad rock playlist. Listen in, and don’t forget to call your pops today.

My radio childhood comes in fragments of Neil Young, Bob Dylan, and baseball. My dad used to call his secret friends and scheme their fantasy league while I leaned against the back seat window and covered my ears to what’s become so central to the way I’ve listened ever since. I’ve always assumed my dad was never self-conscious about how much I hated Dylan in my early teens; on my end, the horror of playing something in the car that he wouldn’t approve of hardly ever made it worth risking. It’s not a problem anymore. Years later and now an “adult,” I’m eternally jamming to the flexible genre of late ‘60s and early ‘70s dad rock.

Far be it from me to limit the purview of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Dad! Driving the fifteen-hour shot from Charlottesville, VA to Newport, RI with a friend of mine last summer was my most recent reminder that dad rock takes many shapes: my dad would probably shrivel into a raisin at the prospect of cruising the coast to the tune of Queen or Styx, just like if I had an EDM dad(???) I might’ve leaped out of that window that bore my preteen forehead for so many years. Take this, then, as an essential oil, or a certain brand of cigarette—this dad is of the contented springtime variety. For this Saturday afternoon, he’s really trying to relax.

My own Rock ‘n’ Roll Dad probably wouldn’t sign off on everything in here, but in all honesty, I put some of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard into this mix. George Harrison’s “Apple Scruffs” is hazy and elated, with melty harmonies that make me confused about where music could possibly come from. The Velvet Underground’s demo of “I Found A Reason” makes me want to spin around in personal circles until I take off like a joyful twenty-something UFO. The Zombies’ “This Will Be Our Year,” Johnny Cash’s cover of Billy Joe Shaver’s “Old Chunk of Coal,” and Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On I’m A Radio” are some of the happiest, most bare-facedly hopeful songs ever recorded. Since in the deep-dark heart of late ‘60’s-early ‘70’s Americana it’s hard to find exuberance unlaced with grief, lots of these tunes lean into the death-in-life undershadow: The Face’s bittersweet “Ooh La La,” Dylan’s lolling “Peggy Day,” The Byrds’ country crooning version of “Nothing Was Delivered,” Doug Sahm’s begging “Wallflower,” Love’s only sort of silly “Alone Again Or.” As always, Linda Ronstadt exalts in her pain, betting “No One Ever Hurt This Bad” before Nick Drake’s peripatetic “One of These Things First” and the Rolling Stones’ rollicking “Prodigal Son.”

The one I hold closest, though, is Townes Van Zandt’s “I’ll Be Here in the Morning,” released in 1968 on his debut album, For the Sake of the Song. For the Sake of the Song housed what would become many of his big hits in the countriest form he’d ever play them, stripped down in subsequent albums as he honed his folk sound. “I’ll Be Here in the Morning” is the kind of song my dad would’ve played me when I was stubborn and little if he’d heard it first—it tumbles out of itself, with a cheery harmonica and up-tempo that dialogues quietly with lyrics that promise commitment so insistently that you can’t help but wonder what could’ve happened to make the narrator need to promise to begin with. Singing through the history of country and rock—borne of the myth of the family and the myth of the outlaw—Van Zandt swears an end to his rambling that “resolves” in the minor. Again, the undershadow; Alone Again Or; Little Miss Queen of Darkness. Thanks to my Rock ‘n’ Roll Dad for the reminder that rock ‘n’ roll is for thieves and profits, mooring its ships on tempered American turf.

Big Sound Saturdays: Heartbreak Playlist

Editor’s note: We’re really excited about this recurring feature from the brilliant S.A., where every week she offers us a playlist culled from the best of American folk, country, blues, and more, along with a brief guide/introduction. So sit back, pour yourself a glass of whiskey, and hit play. 

In a memorable segment for “This American Life” (here), Sarah Vowell names Johnny and June Carter Cash’s abiding romance “the greatest love story of the 20th century.” Borne of the single most famous family in Country music history, June Carter was already married when she met Cash backstage at the Grand Ole Opry—the same Cash who was addicted to pills and liquor, who dreamed one night of the hellish mariachi horns he arranged into Carter’s lyrical “Ring of Fire,” who she was to marry and leave a clean, happy, Christian life with, who was buried next to her just shy of four months after her death.

“Oh What A Good Thing We Had” is nestled in the middle of Johnny and June’s first joint album, Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter, released seventh months before their marriage and boasting a cover of Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe” and the raucous love song “Jackson.” The guitar jingles mime the platitudes Johnny and June croon to one another—“sunshine and showers” punctuating the “milk and honey”-essence of their love—except sung in the minor, notes descending, “gone bad.” Itself a great American tragedy, Oh What A Good Thing We Had sings as an in-joke with a punch-line occluded by the glitz of Country stardom and grime of country outlaws—a “long walk by the river” whose lead-up and fall-down we’ll never really get to know.

American music is at its best when it begs us to dance through our tragedies. Loneliness is borne not just from Dolly Parton’s child-killing tragedy ballads or Memphis Minnie’s plaintive moaning in “Crazy Crying Blues,” but from the Everly Brothers’ irreverent “Bye Bye Love,” the cloying “Tears on My Pillow” (sung by Little Anthony and the Imperials, who are memorialized not only by Olivia Newton John in Grease, but also by great American mythmaker Tom Waits in “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis”), in the friendly intimation of the Girls of the Golden West: “oh darling, you’re breaking my heart.”

Bessie Banks reincarnates this deep-down heartbreak with her invective “Go Now,” where Barbara George taunts it, Waylon Jennings deflates it, and the great and powerful Linda Ronstadt refuses it outright. Already sanctioned a country classic by the time Gram Parsons performed it with the Burrito Brothers in 1969, “When Will I Be Loved” is usually a song of bombast; insistent, insolent, and really, really loud. Gram Parsons singing that tune is like Sonic Youth covering The Carpenters’ “Superstar”—he pleads with a jagged sadness that harbors the old defiance of the Country classics. It’s this veneer, this Johnny-and-June-jingle, that makes you want to move.