Rolling Country 2006 Thread

http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/statusainthood/archives/2006/01/country_music_g_1.php

i am in the middle of reading deloria for the book, can you tell me more about his work in relation to pop culture, i only know him as (a radical, important and cogent) theologian.

Edd, I'm not making sense of this passage, especially the statement "blues was really underground before about 1960 or so when Fahey and Calt and those guys rousted Skip James and Son House out of their obscurity." Interestingly enough, a couple of months ago I read Elijah Wald's Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues, and the impression I got was that "blues", not "jazz," was the basic name for nearly all black popular music between the wars that featured singers rather than instrumental soloists. So a lot that we might in retrospect be calling black pop or rhythm and blues or jazz was all lumped together under the name "blues"; and the reason so much of this stuff is no longer called blues is that starting with John Hammond, white people tended to narrow the definition of "blues." And (if I am remembering/understanding Wald correctly), the broad usage of the term "blues" by black people carried over into the forties and fifties, so if you were to ask a black person in those decades to name a blues musician, they'd name someone like Louis Jordan or Dinah Washington. Blues was not underground, even if Skip James and Son House (who'd never been stars in the first place) were underground. The people Don mentioned - B.B. King, Nat King Cole, Bobby Blue Bland, et al. - were all called blues singers and were all popular black entertainers, as of course were Big Boy Crudup, Junior Parker, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Big Joe Turner but also a whole bunch of West Coast guys with smoother styles who've therefore been written out of history. A gentle smooth number like Chuck Berry's "Wee Wee Hours" would have been considered blues every bit as much as something like "Hoochie Coochie Man." So your original question about the difference or nondifference between jazz and blues singing is on the mark, but from the other side, as it were.

As for Teagarden - yes, I've heard him referred to as a jazz guy, but who knows what he was referred to in his time? (And what about Louis Prima?) The fact that Elvis veered more towards Junior Parker and Big Boy Crudup and Kokomo Arnold than towards the Carter Family - whose material probably wasn't altogether different from those blues guys'; didn't they do their own equivalent to "Mystery Train"? - may be why someone may have called him blues, if anybody did.

According to AMG, neither "Strokin'" nor any other Clarence Carter song charted country.

Gotta be the case. Last time I saw her on TV she lives in one of the pit desert towns on California, making it hard to believe she'd care what the Voice publishes unless it was pointed out with the admonition to launch a protest. So please to remove "lock 'n' loll"
from that review, y'know.

You'll want to be on the lookout for Copperhead's "Live & Lost." Southern rock band with guitar density equiv to "Big Boss Man" by the Headhunters. (Although the copperhead is the northern Pennsylvania strain of the eastern cottonmouth, or water moccasin, so maybe they should have called themselves, Massassauga, the native American name for it and risked getting picketed.) Listening to it repeatedly convinced me my dislike of bands like the Drive By-Truckers is legitimate. Tunes-wise, it has
some good ones although the titles make you think "dreck."

And it has no relationship with the stoner rock contingent that tries
to regularly pass itself off as southern rock or influenced by Skynyrd/ZZ/blah-blah, anything classic rock to get you to listen to the same old horribly bowdlerized Sabbath ribs (and if you think this means I'm talking about The Sword, a contender for most foolish and annoying Texas band I heard late last year, you're right).

Killer version of "Whiskey & Mama" and it's not even the second or third best song on the disc. "Keepin' On" would be great for CMT and all of it would be like Keith Urban if Urban turned up the guitar,
added a loud organ and sounded as classic rocker who rides a motorcycle as he looks. Vocals don't sound Urban, they sound Ricky Medlocke.

Funny, these days I'm getting the best sounds off the frustrated and desperate vanity pressings distributed by CD Baby. If you can sift them on-line, not at CD Baby proper [and I'm not giving away my patented trade secret on how to do it, sorry, although ask private] there are surprises surprisingly easy to find. Which you can't locate via Google or by reading webzines, although -after- you find them, you can track down one or two reviews, almost always on web-only publications in Europe in foreign languages where they are still big on US classic rock. [Thanks Google "translate this page" tab.]

I think a lot of DJs were making the connections as soon as they heard the rockabilies' records; likewise some of the less up-tight press. Guralnick cites a Billboard review of "Good Rockin' Tonight" from Fall 1954: "Elvis Presley proves again that he is a sock new singer with his performances on these two oldies. His style is both country and r.&b. and he can appeal to pop." And another Billboard review from December 1954: "...the hottest piece of merchandise on the...Louisiana Hayride at the moment is Elvis Presley, the youngster with the hillbilly blues beat." Not exactly visionary criticism but kinda accurate. (We should collectively vow to reintroduce the adjective "sock" to the rock crit lexicon.)

if Pete Holsapple
was really Paul Westerberg,
and was on steroids

so, saw the Townes Van Zandt documentary last night. very sad, very troubling. you get the sense that VZ was this still figure around which the normal world whirled, and in everything he said there was this catch, this pause, before he smiled in the most fatalistic way possible. yet I found him very funny indeed, and I found myself admiring the way he simply didn't seem to care about fame, money, backup singers...and although I admire Guy Clark's music, I have to say that if there's an award for "enabler," it seems to me Guy Clark might well get it, as he lived with Van Zandt and seemed to idolize him beyond all reason. the creepiest moments came with Nashville DJ Ralph Emery, who was, uh, taken aback a bit by Townes. and it was even creepier when VZ played his big hit "Pancho and Lefty" on some Nashville Now TV show complete with goopy backup singers and band; he sounded neutered, out of it. but when Townes played Lightnin' Hopkins he seemed most himself, to my ears, so maybe the thing is that he was really a bluesman as well as a songwriter's songwriter...I haven't totally decided yet just how great a songwriter he was, some of what he did falls into my blind spots, but he was damned good, if not "the world's greatest songwriter" (I mean, Randy Newman?). so, fine film, even though it seemed to lay Townes's later problems on electroshock therapy and seemed to gloss over any other tendencies by saying that "Townes was the kind of kid you find in every family who could get anyway with anything, and who didn't care about all his advantages."

http://home.comcast.net/~eddycee28/

no, I don't remember that it did. it seemed a bit hazy and incomplete on his family history, actually. and it seemed to gloss over the conflict over the rights to his music (between Eggers and his family), too.

"Sunlight Breaks In" and "Just Like Me" (off *Tracks* by Uncle Billy's Smokehouse from I guess Worcester, Mass, or thereabouts) are like Guns N Roses crossed with Alice In Chains doing country-rock fit for CMT; the guy's high register actually pulls off its Axl attempts.
(The rest of the album is excellent too, but more hard rock than c&w.)