Decorated Veterans

What did it take to sing tenor to Jimmy Martin?

When he left Bill Monroe for a solo career, Jimmy Martin had to answer that question with a tenor whose power equalled Monroe’s. Martin found the perfect foil in Paul Williams.

A few years ago, Williams got together with two other Martin alumni – Doyle Lawson (who plays guitar here), and banjo man, J.D Crowe. They’ve made a couple of well-received albums, but when they hit the stage, they blow the roof off the dump.

In this clip, they’re joined by Jason Barie on fiddle and Dale Perry on bass – both of whom were members of Lawson’s band, Quicksilver, at the time. And though everyone is in top form, it’s hard not to single out Crowe’s return to a more traditional, blues-based style (He has said he learned a lot from Fats Domino’s piano playing) for his work with this group. This is his best picking in years!

Here they are with Williams out in front, singing one of his signature numbers, “The Hills Of Roane County”.

A Simple Song Gets Complex With A Second Look

I love this song, but I was hard-pressed to say what's extraordinary about it until I listened -- really listened -- to the lyrics.

"I fell in love in Cincinnati," Steve Gulley sings, following with the standard tale of a naive young man falling prey to a citified gold-digger, and a chorus that you wouldn't write home about. The final verse goes like this:

I wish that I was in Kentucky
With mama, and papa dear
But mama's gone now, and so is papa
And Kentucky's a long way from here

And, all of a sudden, the chorus makes horrible sense:

It's a lonesome feeling when you're traveling
Down a lonesome road, down a lonesome road
Nobody cares a thing about you
It's a heavy load, it's a heavy load.

The lonesome road is the Hillbilly Highway, both literal and metaphorical, that Appalachian migrants took to escape the poverty at home for the jobs to be found in the wealthy, industrial north.

More than one bluegrass pioneer made this journey -- Bill Monroe, Red Allen, and The Osborne Brothers, among others. Like this song's protagonist, The Osborne Brothers journeyed from Kentucky to Ohio. Eventually, they found musical success. Without the family, culture, and institutions that had sustained them back home, they found their share of loneliness and isolation, too.

This is Steve Gulley, Dale Ann Bradley, and Debbie Gulley with "Lonesome Feeling".

How Britain Got the Blues

There are some hysterically-funny moments in this documentary. To wit:

“The guts of American rock ‘n’ roll spilled out across Britain in 1957.”

Yuck! Sorry, Britain.

“The Thames Delta”, after the Mississippi Delta, for a blues-centric area of Britain.

Apology rescinded.

Keith Richards’s Muddy Waters impression had me convulsing with laughter. Most everything he says in this segment – especially about achieving authenticity – is gold.

In fact, that “Thames Delta” tag must have come from some half-witted journalist of the period, because everyone interviewed here is adamant that they in no way faced the poverty, hardship, and oppression experienced by the black blues musicians they so wanted to emulate. The way they contrast British middle-class life with the lives of their blues-playing idols is meticulous to a fault.

I wonder, though, that they don’t credit the trauma their parents experienced on a daily basis during the war. It must have impacted their parenting in some way. It’s not life as a black person in the Jim Crow South, yet it’s nothing to sneeze at, either. But I digress.

In subsequent segments, the tremendous contribution of British blues fans to American music is touched on, but only obliquely, and the assessment is far too modest.

The truth is that Americans would rather have lynched these seminal blues artists than seen them on tour. Blues music, marketed as “race music”, was so obscure that fans had to order it through the mail; it couldn’t be found in most record stores.

The first generation of blues musicians would have starved if they hadn’t been discovered by the British public, and brought overseas to tour and appear on television – all the things that should have been happening for them in their own country.

As much as they downplay it, these British blues musicians spoon-fed our own music back to us. If they had not, it would have remained a regional musical curiosity – not unlike bluegrass before college kids on both coasts discovered it.

“How Britain Got the Blues” is essential viewing for any music fan, and anyone who seeks to navigate the minefield of cultural appropriation with anything approaching intelligence and civility. You’ll find all six parts here.

Bluegrass vs. Mainstream Country

 It doesn't matter whether you're talking traditional or progressive. If you don't hear this high lonesome sound, this tension of emotional opposites, you're not hearing bluegrass music. These are the earmarks, the sounds and techniques that set true bluegrass music apart from even classic country, to say nothing of mainstream country.

Many people will tell you that bluegrass music was first heard in 1946, when Earl Scruggs introduced the sound and speed of the three-finger banjo roll to a national audience. That is true, as far as it goes.

But the sound of bluegrass was not complete until Jimmy Martin joined Bill Monroe, and Monroe moved everything up a whole step or so to make the most of his new lead vocalist and his unusual tenor range.

This. This is bluegrass.

Bill Monroe and Jimmy Martin with "In the Pines".

For much more about their relationship, read Richard D. Smith's exhaustive and earth-shattering Bill Monroe biography, Can't You Hear Me Callin'.

Rod Stewart B.D. (Before Disco)

My favorite Rod Stewart song ever.

Yes, children, once upon a time, Rod Stewart sang songs that could make you think as well as feel, and that’s the only reason I have a favorite song of his. There was a Rod Stewart before “Hot Legs” and “Da Ya Think I’m Sexy”.

No wonder he turned to the Great American Songbook. Imagine having to serve up that late-70s dreck night after night.

Anyways, here’s Rod Stewart with “Handbags and Gladrags”.

Anytime an oboist helps kick off a rock ‘n’ roll record, it’s a good day.

Glorious Again

This album was released around 1987. British pop was good then – Culture Club, Duran Duran, Ultravox, Spandau Ballet, ABC (I know, I know; sue me), but it wasn’t truly transcendent. Not until this record came along.

See, there was something of the symphonic in 60s Britpop – in the Motown sound and the music of The Beach Boys, too – that was missing when the Brits came roaring back to dominate the charts in the 80s. With this record, pop music was glorious again.

They were better known as XTC, but they released this album as The Dukes Of Stratosphear. This is “Vanishing Girl”.

How Bluegrass Grew

If a couple of college students named Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler hadn’t prodded Bill Monroe out of his bluegrass depression-era funk, moments like this might never have happened.

As it was, Monroe transformed himself over the years into a benevolent-ish bluegrass patriarch, sharing his musical wisdom with the generations that followed during post-show jams and random yet momentous encounters.

What was a dying, regional musical style became a movement, paving the way for musical pyrotechnics like this.

The Del McCoury Band, featuring mandolinist, Ronnie McCoury, joins Marty Stuart for a blistering version of Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide”.

Pure Bluegrass, Poisonous Times

How can you make a case for the exceptional quality of one recording when every recording made by this lineup was exceptional?

There was nothing good about Monroe’s life in this period: woman trouble; the bluegrass depression; the bookings in smaller, dreary venues; the hastening obscurity and increasing combativeness of the man that nobody had yet acknowledged as the father of bluegrass music – all of it was garbage.

Except the music.

During this period, Monroe made the most painful, incandescent, and enduring music of his life. It helped that he had an equally-troubled duet partner in Jimmy Martin (No, that’s not Martin in the video still, but Bill’s older brother, Charlie – speaking of problematic relationships).

This is “Poison Love”.

Invasion of the Hicks From the Sticks

On the eve of this show, gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen famously warned New Yorkers to flee the city because “the hicks from the sticks” were about to descend on Carnegie Hall. Apparently, she hadn’t heard that banjo pickin’ college students had commandeered Washington Square Park, ushering in the Folk Scare years before.

Flatt and Scruggs were warmly received. This album became foundational for any bluegrass music library. Bluegrass musicians kept invading Carnegie Hall.

And they lived happily ever after. With the possible exception of those folks who are horrified to find genuine country music in the blogosphere.

Here are Flatt and Scruggs with “Little Maggie”.

Melisma Done Right

If you’re remotely into traditional bluegrass and haven’t seen this video, you may have been living in a cave.

I’m not posting it to alert you to newly-unearthed footage, but to highlight the melismatic Scots-Irish vocal style that is one of the building blocks of bluegrass music. If there’s a better example of that influence at work, I don’t know where to find it.

This is Ralph Stanley and The Clinch Mountain Boys, featuring the astounding Keith Whitley on “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone”.

An Unexpected Pleasure

Critics loved it; fans hated it. The fans were expecting more psychedelia; what they got was … this.

Generations of country rock and bluegrass lovers – artists and fans alike – have been grateful to The Byrds ever since. Sweetheart of the Rodeo has been an incalculable influence on countless artists from Emmylou Harris to the Eagles.

Some might even blame this seminal album for the dilution of today’s bluegrass and country with rock and pop. They shouldn’t. Just listen to this straight-up, bluegrass version of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd”.

What Is Bluegrass, Anyway?

EDITOR'S NOTE: Re-upping this piece from November 3, 2017.

It's a question that has perplexed even veteran bluegrass artists, with the possible exception of Bill Monroe, who fathered the genre; a question revisited so often that, in bluegrass circles, it has its own acronym -- WIBA.

What is bluegrass, anyway?

You'll never hear the same answer twice.

Even I, in the relatively-short lifespan of this blog, have suggested different answers.

It might seem strange, but I was pushed to solidify my position on this issue after viewing a superb documentary called "How Britain Got the Blues", which I wrote about here.

The parallels between the way the Mississippi Delta blues gained popularity with British middle class kids in the 50s and the way American college kids embraced traditional bluegrass music just a few years later are striking: White kids, middle class, well-educated, on the liberal end of the socio-political spectrum, with a healthy respect for the original artists, a profound understanding that they had nothing in common with the life experiences of those artists, and the steadfast refusal to act as though they did.

Fast forward to 1996, and award-winning "bluegrass" wunderkind, Alison Krauss, interviewed by Jim Macnie for Rolling Stone in January of 1996.

"You and your band have changed some perceptions about what bluegrass can be and what country is," Macnie observes. 

Krauss: "I think whatever we have slipped by somebody is great. [Laughs.]"

It's hard not to think of Led Zeppelin, who have been sued more than once for ripping off traditional blues artists, and have demonstrated only the most flippant regard for the consequences of their actions. It's interesting to note that Krauss and Zeppelin's Robert Plant were romantically linked for years.

Could it be that what bluegrass is, has do to with morals and ethics?

For me, the answer is definitive: It's how you -- as a fan, promoter, journalist, DJ, publicist, record company exec, or artist -- treat the art and culture of people who have almost nothing but their art and culture to mark their place in the world.

It's whether you seek to redefine or replace that art and culture to entertain privileged, white audiences while reinforcing the idea that they and you are preserving an artistic and cultural expression that is both cutting-edge and authentic.

But, it's the 21st century! If you don't do bluegrass the way everyone else is doing it, how can you do it at all?

Theologian, Eugene Peterson, suggested a better way when he wrote, "The poor are not a problem to be solved, but a people to join."

Regardless of what their belief systems may have been, both Mike Seeger and his half-brother, Pete, exemplified this mindset in the way they collected, distributed, performed, and promoted American vernacular music, and the way they respected its original artists.

Sadly, though there are those who hold similar views today, they lack the prevailing influence on the culture that the the entire Seeger family had. Today's amateur musicologists look to American Idol and Madison Avenue for their promotional strategies, scorning preservation as drudgery, and an impossible task, besides.

If, as many bluegrass traditionalists claim, bluegrass music is dying, it's because the vast majority of "bluegrassers" don't believe they have a moral imperative not to kill it.

The Crooked Gospel Way

 Gospel music has always been a part of bluegrass music and culture; Bill Monroe, the father of bluegrass, designed it that way. “It’s got Methodist, Baptist, and Holiness singing,” Monroe said of bluegrass, naming three Christian denominations with three then-distinct singing styles.

Anyone who has an inside knowledge of bluegrass can point to artists, past and present, whose sanctimonious public personas hardly match up to their hell-raising, sometimes addicted, sometimes downright mean private selves.

Some people would like to use that knowledge an excuse to jettison gospel music from bluegrass altogether. After all, if these artists are in such bondage to their socially-conservative culture, shouldn’t we free them — and non-Christian bluegrass fans in the process — from it?

Sure, if you think they’re so ignorant, culturally-unaware, and disempowered that they need you to come in and improve their culture for them.

For those who are still in school learning about these things, that’s called cultural imperialism. It’s just as ugly when upper-middle class white Americans force it on working-class, Appalachian southerners as when the American government forces it on, say, Native Americans.

That said, bluegrass gospel music will be a regular feature here on Uncouth Utterance. Doubtless that will irritate the stuffing out of some of you.

I’m fine with that. Cultural imperialism? Not so much.

This is a very early recording of The Louvin Brothers from a live, local radio show with “The Gospel Way”.

Attitude

A tear-stained heartbreaker from the pen of the late, great Jimmy C. Newman.
 
It was The Johnson Mountain Boys who introduced this number to the bluegrass canon. Here they are with “Let the Whole World Talk”.

Just Like Old Times

Considering the epic feud -- or, was it? -- between these two, it's a wonder they ever got back together.

OTOH, perhaps it was inevitable. Many of the bluegrass faithful -- musicians, fans, and historians alike -- consider the Monroe/Flatt/Scruggs iteration of The Blue Grass Boys to be the first-ever bluegrass band.

Bill Monroe disputed that claim. Nevertheless, bluegrass bands revisit and remake the repertoire of this lineup more than any other. And, despite the brilliant lineups that came after, the only one that would cover as much artistic ground was the one featuring Jimmy Martin.

Unfortunately for the music, it is that feat of warp-speed artistic development that the bluegrass community has sought to emulate over the last 30 years -- so much so that most seem to have forgotten what real bluegrass sounds like.

Here, then, is an always-timely reminder: Lester Flatt with Bill Monroe, singing a bluegrass classic that they co-wrote – “Will You Be Loving Another Man?”

A Master Class In the Blues with Howlin' Wolf

So much going on in this video!

Someone's dad gets flustered, eliciting a disapproving murmur from the assembled U.K. hipsters, after which he introduces us to "Howling" Wolf.

Wolf enters, positively beaming, and puts everyone at ease ... well, except Dad, maybe. It is, after all, Howlin' Wolf's first U.K. performance. Given the circumstances he left back home, the thunderous welcome he gets must astound him no end.

He counts it off bodily for the rhythm section, which includes guitarist Hubert Sumlin and bassist Willie Dixon. They fall in behind him, just as easy as you please.

They continue like that, but the groove is so subtle, so insistent, that it's never boring. It's obvious we're going somewhere. Verse by verse, Wolf tells the story.

Somewhere around 2:53, the tempo picks up. It gets faster and faster, but the increase in tempo is so gradual that you don't really notice it until around 4:43, when the feel is suddenly one of pressing urgency. The patient acceleration combined with the insinuating vocal and the spare rhythm section calls to mind The Rolling Stones' "Midnight Rambler", which surely must have been influenced by this number.

Lastly, Wolf spends the whole song talking about a train, never once referring to public transportation.

This is the mighty Howlin' Wolf with "Smokestack Lightning".

Howlin' Wolf and America's Well-Heeled Racism

In 2017, New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, wrote a column entitled A History of White Delusion. In it, he cited a mind-boggling statistic: Over half of all whites surveyed believe that discrimination against whites is a larger and more pressing problem than  discrimination against blacks. They hold this belief despite the overwhelming statistics to the contrary.

Again via statistics, we know that all of these people cannot be fringe-dwelling, white nationalist Trump supporters. So, how did so many whites come to believe that white folks have it worse than anyone in America?

At least some of the credit has to go to editorials like The Rolling Stones Introduce Bluesman Howlin’ Wolf on US TV, One of the “Greatest Cultural Moments of the 20th Century” (1965) published on the Open Culture website.

The editorial begins with high praise for Howlin' Wolf, certifying his role as a titan of American socio-cultural change. Then, it gets ugly:

Really?

He was large, tall, and imposing, to be sure. But "[h]e seemed at any moment like he might actually turn into a wolf"? Only to someone who views black men as something less than human to begin with.

If Wolf seems a little edgy in that Shindig clip, maybe it's because he was in his hostile, openly racist home country, having to watch his back every second for fear of what people like the writer of this Open Culture piece might do or say. I mean, gee whiz, folks; the man known as Howlin' Wolf could turn into a ravening beast any second.

Ooooooohhhhhh!!!

The lone comment on Open Culture's editorial paints a picture that none of us ever saw in the history books. Read the final sentence and weep.

Yes, it's no wonder Wolf is "glowering".

Just one year before, he had been welcomed with open arms by white, middle-class British kids for whom he didn't have to tone down his act. Those kids took Wolf and other black blues musicians into their homes and into their lives, and the difference in his stage show is remarkable. He is warm, inviting, full of good humor, putting the audience at ease.

Oh, but America, America! At least we were the first to get him on TV, in spite of those nasty Jim Crow laws:

And so, American exceptionalism rears its ugly head on a website whose mission it is to provide educational resources at no cost. No, professor, Howlin' Wolf's first "national television broadcast" was not in the U.S., but in the U.K. In 1964.

If you think of yourself as an intelligent, left-leaning, non-religious, open-minded sort who loves to learn, you might very well consume an editorial like the Open Culture piece believing you had broadened your horizons when, all the time, you were solidifying your confirmation bias.

If half of America believes that whites have it worse than blacks, maybe it's because racist "educational resources" subliminally suggest, in the name of learning, that whites have given scary black folks the benefit of the doubt, and a warm welcome on their TV screens, long enough.

Life Lessons From Little Aggravations

A German girl, a big gamble, a tinny piano,  and a notoriously-prickly artiste combined to make this the biggest-selling jazz record of all time.

If you miss the full story and its lessons, you miss the miracle of this piece, improvised from beginning to end by Keith Jarrett.

This is the Köln Concert, Part 1. And, yes, you really should own the CD.

Reading Music, 2018

Some perennial favorites to commemorate World Book Day.

A Record For Record Store Day

I love The Stanley Brothers. Ralph’s banjo sound has been likened to the sound of flying ice chips. Indeed, they sent every note flying as though it would be their last. For Carter, it almost was – more than once. I think he knew he didn’t have long.

This gospel number goes a mile a minute, kindly like Brother Carter did. Here’s “That Home Far Away”.