Big Sound Saturdays: Old-Time Psychedelia

I imagine that everyone woke up like I did, sucking down your own personal version of a growler full of iced coffee (Spring & All, right?) and donning at least one item of mourning purple, asking the music gods What It All Means. So RIP Prince, the greatest!, holding hands with Hag and Lemmy and Bowie in 2016 heaven—this mix isn’t about any of you, but I place it at your feet!

Old-Time Psychedelia is actually a mix I’ve been sitting on for the past couple of weeks, because it’s so hard to untangle the wound-up-web of early 20^th century weirdo Americana into ten little bites. It all started with Willie “Red” Newman’s 1936 rendering of the classic “St. Louis Blues,” a W.C. Handy tune on acid that was a $15 gift from the record den of niche-infamous Joe Bussard’s unbelievable collection of 78s. When I played the hopped-up proto-version of “St. James Infirmary” on WTJU’s “Walkin’ Blues” a few weeks back, I got so many text messages that I had to turn my phone off. It’s hard to believe that there’s a person behind those lopeing, driving harmonica notes.

I promise you, intrepid Saturday listener, the whole mix is like this! Check “The Cowboy’s Dizzy Sweetheart” (by Goebble Reeves, “The Texas Drifter”) —a yodeler whose chicken sounds rival those of the DeZurik (or, colloquially, the “Cackle”) sisters—for more truly disorienting feats in sounds-coming-from-human-mouths, or Tommy Settlers with his “Blues moaner,” a kazoo that he makes do wild, nasty things in “Big Bed Bug (Bed bug Blues).” Or listen (god DAMN it!) when Bessie Smith tells both you and her Shakespearian chorus of hot jazz accompanists to “hear me talkin’ to ya” in what I think is one of her most un-genre’d and disorienting songs, “Moan, You Moaners” (or “Moan Mourners,” depending on what 78 you’re looking at).

I set Blind Blake’s beautiful, tinkly “Guitar Chimes” as inauguration into Sidna Meyers’ banjo dream “Twin Sisters,” into prewar Hawaiian steel trendsetters Kalama’s Quartet’s “Sassy,” an up-tempo romp through the history of vaudeville and medicine show crossings between Hawaiian and popular black, white, and Cajun entertainers’ touring circuits, rounded off by two gospels and a mourning song. Elder Curry’s “Memphis Flu”—a vibrant sonic celebration of life, death, and God in the face of the flu epidemic of 1918—was made as popular as it has been in its 1952 reissue in Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” and again in the three disc opus “People Take Warning: Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938” in 2007. And “Cuba 401” is the numbered shape note sheet music used by the oft-anthologized Alabama Sacred Harp Singers, singing a non-denominational and participatory refiguring of the solfege note progression into a gospel song.

Listen til the finish for the wonder that is the Segura Brothers’ “Bury Me In A Corner Of The Yard.” A medly of accordion and what sounds like a triangle or a cowbell with deriving, soaring lyrics sung in Cajun creole, it hollers over into a song that I’m saving for a different version of this mix, Blind Mamie Forehand’s “Honey In The Rock,” a blues sotto voce with guitar and some kind of bell, and back, deep, into the heart of popular, rural Americana. The perfect mo(u)rning song for a sunny Saturday in April.

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Big Sound Saturdays: Winter Sun

There’s this episode from the third season of the Twilight Zone where the sun never sets. Like a relentless fever dream, it gets closer and closer to the heroine’s high-rise apartment window, until her paintings of cool water begin to melt, her thermometer breaks, and—spoiler!—she wakes up, trapped, instead, in eternal winter, crying with relief. This is s u c h a dramatic thing to think about when it’s sunny out, but it’s all just to say that El Nino is really freaky on the west coast—same for global warming, everywhere—but I love California in the Blue Ridges. So, here! A toned-down twilight mix for that.

Big Sound Saturdays: No Bed of Roses, Vol. 1 (Classic Country)

“Civilization begins with a rose. A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples.”
– Gertrude Stein, As Fine as Melanctha

Genre-wise, contemporary country music is notoriously slippery. Even after its pop turn in the nineties, it wears a few different hats—alt country, pop country, country rock, bro-country, and country rap (hick hop!)—but the sound of each genre intermingles, so that alt-country NPR darling Kacey Musgraves still sings with the learned, dulcet tones of Carrie Underwood and bro-country denizen Blake Shelton “raps” his way through most of “Boys ‘Round Here”. Because country sound’s becoming so promiscuous, my pop country-hating pals usually resort to hailing the genre through its images. Tractors, country roads, beer, rednecks, true love, short shorts, God, and, unfortunately, the beach are the benchmarks of musical discernment. Reused and recycled, they form a veritable language of country pop.

I’ve already written for ACRO on country music’s landscape of body parts, and like the “crazy arms and legs” of country musical history, roses—the heart of this week’s mix—don’t sit in one single sound. As part one of No Bed of Roses, a new series for Big Sound Saturdays, I’ve pulled together a handful of songs from what’s turned out to be a staggeringly extensive list of country standards about the rose. “Yellow Rose of Texas,” “When The Roses Bloom Again,” and “San Antonio Rose” are oft-revisited, (I’ve pulled the clean version of “Yellow Rose,” which has, like much early country music, its origins in minstrelsy), with performances ranging from classic country to prewar country to western swing. “Honeysuckle Rose,” penned by Fats Waller and performed by the great Django Reinhardt, is now a well-worn jazz standard. Some of the more surprising tunes—“She’s a Hard Boiled Rose,” sung by Wilmer Watts & the Lonely Eagles, a group of Piedmont textile workers from Gaston County, North Carolina, for example, or the insinuating instrumental “Rose of Caracas” by Neville Marcano, “the growling tiger of calypso”—snuggle up to and elide the histories they’re birthed from. Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s version of “Death of Queen Jane,” Child Ballad #170 with its most likely origins in the 16th century, mourns that “the red rose of England,” Queen Jane herself, “shall flourish no more.”

Gertrude Stein’s jingling, staccato poetry is so apt for the country rose. When she penned “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” in “Sacred Emily,” Stein redirected language, focalized the dependence of each discreet word on its referents and its context, and celebrated its continual redefinition through rhyme, repetition, re-contextualization, and sound. If “civilization begins with a rose,” the “rose” is language’s first iteration, progressively deracinated and rescripted as the associations we have with roses take over the rose itself. What is Ben Hall’s “Rose of Monterey” against Prince Albert’s “Waltz of Roses?” Billy Murray’s “Baby Rose” alongside Charlie Poole’s “Budded Rose?” Meanings multiply, confusing and emptying the rose as it floats its crazy thorns through sonic space. “It continues with blooming and it fastens clearly upon excellent examples,” sure. Now try to hear, a la Stein, what roses sound like.