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: 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: Make the Devil Leave Me Alone (Halloween Edition!)

At the Newport Folk Festival about two years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing a friend play the kid’s stage—a stone’s throw from the main stage, guarded by snack tables, and elevated very sweetly about one foot above ground. After his glowing introduction by two ten-year-old boys, he launched into a heavy, guitar-slapping slide rendition of Robert Johnson’s “Me And The Devil Blues.”

Weirdly, watching these little waifish five-year-olds walk towards his very scary version of a very scary song with dead eyes and inclined heads made me realize that listening doesn’t change all that much as you get older. The thumping talking-guitar that mimes the devil’s footsteps to the frantic falsetto realization, “me and the devil, walking side by side,” is totally mesmerizing, even in daylight, at Newport, surrounded by fifteen babies.

Big Sound Saturdays: Hot Meat (Songs To Bake To)

 

 

I guess it’s probably true that even if there are things in the world that are inherent goods, weather isn’t one of them. Winter people confuse me and I don’t want to talk about it. Fall and spring people make sense, opinion-wise, but the whole thing seems ultimately kinda milktoast; why not just go for it? I’m for the summer, and not just its beginning—the long haul, California’s dry desert heat, New York’s simmering trash swamp, Virginia when it feels like the literal surface of the sun. I like that body-bake feeling that makes you want to lie down and toast forever in the sun rays, I never want it to end!

 

Finding the best jams for deep summer proved trickier than I thought it’d be. No formula for vibes, I guess. Inspired by my best friend in California, who covers herself in literal olive oil when we lay coast-side and bakes her body like a big pasta, by ghost towns swimming in desert people and ants, swampy crocodiles and livid punk rock, noble pups panting in the sun, lazy Sundays and The Hawaiian Craze, I couldn’t decide on a single sound so I put them all together. Riding into the sun with Lou Reed (no truer words than “it’s hard to live in the city”), Hot Meat comes from Bjork’s early punk band The SugarCubes’ eponymous title—this mix is truly of Songs To Bake To.

 

Listen here, then, for Shadow Music from Thailand, Hawaiian tunes from Kalama’s Quartet, Kenyan guitar jams from the Mombasa Swingsters and country guitar twangs from Speedy West, Cambodian Bodega Pop from Touch Saly, soul-crushing reggae from the Soulettes, heavy rock from Pavement and swamp pop from Rod Bernard and Myron Lee & the Caddies. Hot jazz from the Nite Owls! Detroit R&B! Kurt Vile! The late and ever-great Townes Van Zandt! In truth, this mix is a little bit of an excuse to make public once more TVZ’s gut-wrenching and ever-so-small “Don’t Let the Sunshine Fool Ya,” but Hot Meat, in its thrust for sounding deep summer, sings the opposite, too. I kinda like getting duped by the summer. Maybe it’s a good exercise in letting yourself go.

 

 

 

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: 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!