Big Sound Saturdays: Pussy Cat Rag

Say fellers, I lost my little pussycat! Can you help me find it?

Thus spake Zarathustra, and the Lord saw It, and he said that It was good. This week’s mix is all about pussy! I do love a thinly veiled innuendo. Even though slant-songs like these do abound in old-time music, songs that are plain and simple About The V are a much smaller sub-genre. And lieu of a full-blown write up—I don’t want you to feel jet-lagged before you soak in every word of these goofy ass tunes—I’ll leave you with a few fun facts and, this time, a playlist. These titles are too good to hide.

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Big Sound Saturdays: Tired Man, Vol. 1

Punchin’ cows sure don’t arouse me anymore

I’m getting’ tired of listenin’ to the coyotes snore

Oh, sleepin’ on the Rio Grande is makin’ him snore –

I’m a tired cowboy

Just a tired guy!

Welcome, pals, to the dustbin of history; the never-ending tale of the Tired Man! The story of men being “fed up with it” is just called “History:” “Make it new!” quoth irate facist Ezra Pound, and modernism gets an audience! Fuck capitalism!, quoth Marx, and the dancing table becomes commodity magic! I know it’s glib to refract a broad moral history through the single lens of male fatigue, but what I’m saying is that these songs of men feeling bored and agitated and sleepy—mostly, obviously, because of a woman—cast a broader, and deeper, line when they get all shuffled together.

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: Whiskey and Cigarettes

Oh my god DAMN I’m so EXCITED to share this one!!! Do you, listening pal, have any idea how many songs there are about whiskey in the blues & country cannon? The first thing I learned, after having gone through ten different versions of “Rye Whiskey” (including “Rye Whiskey Waltz,” “Way Up On Clinch Mountain,” and my favorite, “Bon Whiskey”—“Rye Whiskey” in Creole), is that there are also lots of songs about beer! Gin! Rum! I love these songs because they range from unapologetically wasted—Harry Choates’ “Rye Whiskey,” recorded in 1946, includes slurring and hiccups—to transubstantial, (this one for another mix) Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Drinking of the Wine.” Also, though, because lots of them do the thing where they try to fit so snugly into the pastiche of their own sounds that they end up sounding like a radical, whacked-out riff on the regular stuff:

Big Sound Saturdays: Happy Colorado Day!

Today, like every August 1^st since 1876, marks the anniversary of Colorado’s statehood, first ushered in by President Ulysses S. Grant just a year before he passed the debt-laden and recently reunified torch to Rutherford B. Hayes, seventeen years after the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush wooed a concentrated group of white settlers into the state, twelve years after the Sand Creek Massacre borne, also, from white settlement, and 100 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On this, Colorado’s 135^th anniversary, we reckon with the fraught history of Western expansion just as we stand in awe of this crazy, craggy place! Katherine Lee Bates wrote the lyrics to the oft-recycled “America the Beautiful” after gracing the top of Pikes Peak in 1893, and hers is one of a far-flung legacy of mountain memorialization, picked up, most frequently, by country music.

Big Sound Saturdays: Country Christmas!

We had this tradition for a while at WKCR-FM: Once a year, 36 hours straight of live programmed country music, the annual Country Music Festival. It was full of secrets! The overnights are always the hardest to cover, so we peppered them with country couples, truck-driving country (and the sub-genre, mark me, of alien-versus-trucker races), and my favorite: every midnight, an unannounced hour of country Christmas.

Country Christmas flies an unbelievable wingspan—transitioning from Christmas carols to the ever-growing realm of undeniable pop in the 1940s, it’s still a genre that carries some weight and some more Billboard chart-toppers. In 2003 alone, Jimmy Wayne’s “Paper Angels” was at #18 on the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart, Marty Stewart’s “Even Santa Claus Gets the Blues” hit #55, and at #30, Kenny Chesney’s “All I Want for Christmas Is a Real Good Tan,” birthed from the exhausting and oft-reiterated genre of Beach Music (weirdly, like the murder ballad, country-songs-about-the-beach is looped into genre blankets but not really talked about on its own).

Which is to say! I (mostly) kept my cool this first round and pulled almost exclusively from the 1950s and 1960s: Tex Ritter, Eddy Arnold, Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn’s “Good Old Country Christmas.” I listened to so many country Christmas songs that I actually started to confuse the two genres. Like, not all country songs are Christmas songs—blasphemy!—but is every kinda classic Christmas song just really “country?” It’s crazy how well “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” (not included here, you’re welcome) fits with Leroy Van Dyke’s sound, how easily Gene Autry (track 5, you’re also welcome) sings “Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane).” Hank Thompson’s scooping, bluesy intro to “I’d Like To Have An Elephant For Christmas” is just one of many markers of country music’s dark tonal (and often lyrical, melodic, referential…) underbelly, but maybe Christmas carols have that, too?

In any case, diving into a mix like this is dizzying, but don’t let it defeat you. Leading in with a cautionary tale by the great Ferlin Husky—“Christmas is holy, not a holiday”—I’ve thrown Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters’ paean to Hawaiian country music “Mele Kalikimaka (The Hawaiian Christmas Song)” in with Hank Snow’s Christmas boogie and Tex Ritter’s Christmas polka and even included a couples duet, Red Foley and Judy Martin’s “Our Christmas Waltz.” Even though some of these songs are, I admit, deeply stupid (Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Christmas Dinner” is a long, jingly catalogue of hot holiday foods), there’s also beauty—Faron Young’s “You’re The Angel On My Christmas Tree”—and Brenda Lee’s disorienting “I’m Gonna Lasso Santa Claus,” a cowboy vigilante battle that paints Santa as the great withholder and teen dream Lee as a blonde, bedazzled Robin Hood.

Anyway, it’s kind of like Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere today, and I thought we might as well celebrate. From the Louvin Brothers, ACRO Collective, and I, Merry Christmas, all the time!

Big Sound Saturdays: Strange Love

When I was a teenager I dated a boy who put his pillow in the freezer so we could stay cool when we snuck into his bed in the California summer. In the beginning of college, a guy who spent his spare time tightrope walking and hanging with his dad’s pets. After him, one with a shadow mustache who’d lean against his junked-up soil-brown car and smoke a cigarette in plain view of my parents, which, honestly, still “gets” me. A guy who projected PBS’s live reenactment documentary about the Carter Family across the entire face of a ten-story building. A sweet man, now, who prowls like a wolf and sleeps like a caterpillar. There are through-lines in my romances, but they’re mostly wildly different from each other. Even my woozy nervy feeling morphs. Lately, I’ve been feeling it big enough to make a mix that sounds the thick of it.

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.

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: Crazy Arms

American music—country music, especially—is littered with body parts. There’s no word in the English language for the object-animation of Faron Young singing “hello, walls” or George Jones coaxing each piece of his house furniture to life in “The Grand Tour.” “Personification” is too simple when the walls literally, naturally, talk back. These songs sit, to me, in a confusing pre- and late-capitalist space: wisdom resides in places and objects are animated by their use, on the one hand, and things have value irrespective of their production on the other. Singing “well look here, is that a teardrop in the corner of your pane?” is sweet and lowdown, but it also (knowingly) treats Young like an object amongst objects. It’s probably worth lingering on why that metaphor is so available, so funny, and so sad.

When emancipated from the body, “cold shoulders” and knee bones work similarly to singing windows and memory-filled chairs. In “The Jukebox of History,” Aaron Fox writes beautifully on this kind of object confusion: because country music—always stereotypical and personal, objective and subjective—sets the categories of “true” and “false” in motion, “solid ‘objects’ become speaking ‘subjects,’ and heartbroken ‘subjects’ consume themselves as commodified objects.” Driven by what Fox calls “the metanarrative of Desire,” feelings and people are thing-ified; in the metanarrative of Loss, things turn into “speaking, feelingful presences.”

Jerry Jeff Walker’s wistful “About Her Eyes” is an aubade to “her eyes, her face and her hair,” buoyed by the kind of desire that’s languid and comfortable and tangled in the wailing wa-wa that hearkens to George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. It’s a strange song, if only for the incongruity of all the floating parts of “her” face and the sheer airiness of the piece altogether. In a tune that sings of hiding and sailing on a breeze, sent off with the blues falsetto that hurls out and up, Walker’s crooning about his lover’s body parts disturbs the concrete referent of the piece and questions the capacity of music to really point and hold to anything.

The most famously freaky of the batch, Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms” is an ambling, peripatetic, hopeless tune, where the “crazy arms that reach to hold somebody new” seem, at first, to be hers—the betrayer—second his, the scorned, but their severance from the body is the real point of it. Breaking up, in “Crazy Arms,” is nonsensical. It doesn’t compute. It happened, though, and the undeniable reality of this impossible act actually morphs lived reality into a place where arms can act on their own, a kind of mystical object-oriented magic. Even if “this ain’t no crazy dream,” “these treasured dreams I have for you and me” are lodged in Price’s “troubled mind,” and the entire plane of country-song existence collapses, also, within it.

Wynn Stewart’s “Unfaithful Arms” performs a similar apocalypse of light and darkness collapsing together, but the thingness of the cheater—her arms, not her body—manages to sort of abscond her from guilt. And the great Dolly Parton, easily one of the most creatively out-there country singers ever to’ve graced us with “Little Andy,” removes Bobby from “Bobby’s Arms” completely. It’s a safe-space utopia, insistent, I think, that the only way to achieve such a perfect comfort is to have the body, ditch the man.

Bobby’s arms they are warm when he holds me

Bobby’s arms always comfort and console me

When I’m in his arms hold tight, I know everything’s alright—

Just as long as I’m inside Bobby’s arms.

Not every song on here is a country song. “Big Leg Blues” is a classic blues tune, Ruth Brown’s “Lucky Lips” is a goofy proto-rock ‘n’ roll love song, “Snap Your Fingers” and “Knee Bone” are early folk/blues from Mississippi, and “Skip” Spence, the Beach Boys, and Linda Perhacs are steeped in rural psychadelia. Still, for floating body parts, country really carries the crown. My iTunes alone has 18 songs about blue eyes! If desire morphs people into objects for consumption, the body, like a machine, loses its products through its fragmented methods of production. Arms are for holding, but it sits wrong when they are also for love. Country is brilliant in that way. When the Man in Black laments, “I’ll always get a cold shoulder from you,” he knows the problem is that a shoulder can’t love you. Hello walls, definitively. These songs are a handful of milagros, little talismans that praise just as they denigrate. Listen with your ears.