Category Archives: Music

HOOTENANNY

Posted on by

Dornan's is a funky old recreational complex located inside the Grand Teton National Park not far from Jackson.  It's been going since about 1948 and has become a local institution.  It has cabins and a couple of restaurants and a grocery store and every Monday night it hosts a hootenanny in a roofed-over dining area next to its “chuck wagon” — an open-sided kitchen with grills and barbecue pits where you can buy dinner and beverages.  Around it are picnic tables, including one inside a teepee.

Local musicians sign up to play a couple of songs each at the hoot, and most of them are quite good.  On our second night in Wyoming the musicians in the John Carney birthday crowd — J. B., Hugh, Eli and John himself — signed up to play a few sets.

The “backstage” area, a lawn behind the dining/performing structure, where I mostly hung out because you could smoke there, was quite a scene, with musicians tuning up, showing each other new licks, or going over the songs they were about to play.

Corinne Chubb filmed the Carney Cowboy Band numbers on her tiny HD camera.  Here are a couple of the songs they played, up on YouTube:

“Dance”

This is a new song by J. B., and one of the best he ever wrote — a country waltz which, like many country love songs, is about older folks, married folks, keeping the flame alive.  To me, it's an instant classic — as good as any country waltz ever, and that's saying something.

“Everyone's At Sea”

This is an old song, written by Hugh in 1970.  Hard to explain how important it is to those of us who met and first heard it back then — a kind of anthem which has carried us along together through the years . . . so many years now that it doesn't just take us back but forward as well, to the next time we'll hear it, and the last time we'll hear it.  Everyone's still at sea, and it's still all right — always will be.

There was one other lovely moment that night, not recorded, when a young girl with a guitar and a sweet voice sang “How Great Thou Art”.  There are a lot of young (as well as aging) hipsters in the Jackson area these days, but an older West and an older America are still present.  Many folks in the audience were singing along quietly to themselves with”How Great Thou Art”.  They looked as moved by it as I was.

The Tetons loom up majestically behind Dornan's, and only a religious song makes sense of them — you find yourself thinking, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills . . . whence cometh my help”.  An old line that still resonates with a hard-won wisdom, at least out in God's country.

WYOMING

Posted on by

I'm hitting the trail this week, heading north to Wyoming, whose official nickname is “The Equality State”, which commemorates the fact that Wyoming gave the vote to women in 1869.

I plan to see the painting by Frederick Remington above, which is in a museum up there, and to emulate its subject, without the chaps.

Let's ride.

MICHAEL BEATS IT

Posted on by

Demons drove him hence.  He was a beautiful young man who somehow got the notion that he was meant to look like Lena Horne.  He paid doctors to hack away at his face until it bore a grotesque resemblance to his dream.  It was reported that in recent years the surgery had caused his nose to collapse, requiring the use of a prosthetic device to hide the horror of it.  Poe alone could have dealt with the American Gothic tragedy of Michael Jackson's life — the life of a man who made and wore his own death mask.

The root of it was probably all too simple — the usual dad thing.  It's been related that Michael's dad, when Michael was a kid about to go on stage, used to tell him there were men with guns in the audience who would shoot him if he didn't dance fast enough.  He's been dancing fast ever since.  From childhood he was surround by crowds of people who couldn't say no to him — all of which was nothing as against a father who couldn't say yes.

He really was the King Of Pop, though — even if that was a title he first bestowed on himself.  Great pop music can unite generations and classes and races in its infectious magic.  As the tributes pile up on the cable news shows, Michael's music plays them in and out.  Almost all of it makes you want to dance — and makes you sad that Michael was dancing to a different beat in his head when he made it . . . the beat of a death march that has finally reached the burying ground.

All that wonderful music we heard in its place was perhaps another illustration of The Nazareth Principle.

JUST BEFORE JAZZ

Posted on by

Thomas Riis's fascinating book Just Before Jazz examines the influence of black composers and performers on American musical theater between 1890 and 1915 — that is, just before the era in which the modern book musical began to take shape.

The songs of black composers were very similar in many ways to the popular songs written by white composers, even the white composers of operettas.  A number of black composers in this period (like Will Marion Cook, below) were highly sophisticated, classically trained musicians, capable of writing and performing in any style.  (Many of them were “slumming” in popular theater because of barriers to their involvement in more refined areas of practice.)

What distinguished their work was the incorporation of the sort of syncopations found in ragtime, which became a popular sensation around the turn of the century.  Their work didn't emphasize such syncopations to the degree that ragtime did — they were more like stylistic inflections — but they thrilled audiences of the time.

Among the most popular songs in this period, an astonishing percentage were written by black composers, and they included not only minstrel-type songs but ethnically neutral ones.  It was the purely rhythmic lilt that made the difference.

Almost all of these songs were first done for musical shows originating in New York City, often in Broadway productions, leading Riis to argue that black composers bear the primary credit for introducing black musical strains into the American musical.  Berlin and Kern and Gershwin weren't “reaching down” into an exotic black musical culture for inspiration — they were responding, artistically and commercially, to developments in the world of musical theater all around them.

You have to wonder why these black composers aren't better known today.  Partly it's because the lyrics of many of their songs are offensive to modern ears — the “coon song” was a typical genre, with its caricatures derived from minstrel shows.  As black songwriters became more powerful, however, they toned down the uglier aspects of these caricatures, leaving stereotypes comparable to those attached to other ethnic groups like the Irish and the “Dutch” (as Germans were once called.)  These stereotypes aren't congenial to our present tastes, perhaps, but they aren't exactly vicious, either.

More importantly, these black composers failed to achieve wider celebrity, and failed to enter our cultural memory, because they could not participate fully in the flowering of musical comedy in the later decades of the 20th Century.  Their songs were bought and performed by white performers in vaudeville, were sometimes interpolated into shows with white casts and were disseminated nationally via sheet music, but in the theater, they wrote primarily for all-black shows.  Broadway had a place for such shows, but it was a limited place.

Black composers were very rarely hired to provide complete musical programs for shows with white casts — they never became part of the mainstream of producers, musicians and writers who created the ordinary run of Broadway musicals.  White composers adapted the style of their black peers within an establishment that stayed predominantly white.

So today, when we hear Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien singing “Under the Bamboo Tree” in the movie musical Meet Me In St. Louis, we likely have no idea that this song, a monster hit in 1903, with a tune that is still familiar and still infectious, melodically and rhythmically, was written by three black men, James Weldon Johnson, his brother Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole.  Below, a portrait of Cole and Rosamond Johnson:

But the past, of course, as an old Russian saying has it, is always unpredictable.

A ROOM SOMEWHERE

Posted on by

I'm a child of rock and roll.  The first song I remember hearing on the radio, when I was seven years-old, was Elvis Presley's “All Shook Up”.  I don't have a distinct memory of hearing “Hound Dog”, which came out a year earlier, on the radio but I remember some of the cultural fall-out it caused.  I lived in a tiny town in rural North Carolina at the time, and a kid in my first-grade class who lived on a nearby farm brought his guitar to school one day and played the song for us.  I guess it was the first time it dawned on him that knowing how to play the guitar might be seen as a cool thing by his peers.

I remember seeing Elvis perform the song on the Ed Sullivan show, later that year.  A year after that, Jailhouse Rock was the first movie I was ever allowed to go see at night.

I can't say, though, that any of Elvis's songs got to me at that age.  They were just part of the landscape — part of the soundtrack of everyday life.  I didn't really start to appreciate Elvis until I was in my twenties, and didn't own recordings of any of those early hits until then.

The first popular music that got to me came on an LP record.  It was the first LP record my family ever owned, bought to play on our first record player, which my dad brought home as a surprise one day in 1956 and which looked something like this:

It's possible that the LP came with the set, but more likely that my dad bought the player so he could listen to the LP.  It was the Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady.

This LP was even more popular than Elvis's LPs back then — the My Fair Lady cast recording still holds the record for the most weeks on Billboard's top forty charts.  If my dad bought our first record player just so he could hear it, I'm sure he was doing what tens of thousands of other Americans were doing at the same time.

The extended-play LP — which could fit 26 minutes of music on a side — was only four years old in 1956.  It was developed primarily to fit all the songs from a typical musical on one record, and it was the cast recordings of popular musicals like Kiss Me Kate and My Fair Lady that really established the format.

My dad loved the recording of My Fair Lady and played it over and over.  The song I remember him liking the most was “A Hymn To Him”, with the refrain “Why can't a woman be more like a man?”  The song that got to me was “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” with its sweet melody and its air of longing:

All I want is a room somewhere,
Far away from the cold night air,
With one enormous chair —
Oh, wouldn't it be loverly?

I'm not sure what I might have been longing for back in those happy times, but the feeling of it struck a chord.

My family always bought the recordings of the big hit Broadway shows — The King and I, Flower Drum Song, Camelot, The Sound Of Music, Funny Girl.  I always loved them, played them over and over, found myself touched by the ballads in particular.  For all that, I never thought of Broadway show tunes as “my music” — when I got to the age when I could choose my own records to buy, they were records of folk and then rock music.  The show tunes were just hidden away somewhere in my heart . . .

. . . until one day, very late in life, I realized what they'd meant to me, what good companions they'd been, what good companions they are and always will be.

“Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” from that 1956 LP still takes me back with uncanny efficiency to the den in my family's house in Belhaven, North Carolina where I first heard it at the age of six.  No other version of the song does this.

Julie Andrews, by the way, was only twenty years-old when she recorded it:


NOBODY CALLS FROM VEGAS JUST TO SAY HELLO

Posted on by

The country singer Vern Gosdin has died.  I only knew Gosdin from a couple of duets he did with Ralph Stanley on Clinch Mountain Country.  I should have realized that anybody Ralph Stanley wanted to sing with was worth investigating further but it took Ivan Shreve's appreciation of Gosdin at Thrilling Days Of Yesteryear to get me on the case.

You might say that Gosdin works the same territory as George Jones, with a less distinctive voice — but it's a fine voice, all the same, and Gosdin's choice of material is superb.  Gosdin is, quite simply, one of the great country performers, at his best just over the borderline of despair.  He sings songs for barrooms late at night, in those hours when heartbroken men realize that the beers haven't made them forget anything at all.

I'm partial to one of his songs that's a bit less characteristic, a tale of long-distance heartache and anger featuring my home town — “Nobody Calls From Vegas Just To Say Hello”.  I do wonder, though, why Las Vegas always has to take the rap.  Nobody calls from anywhere just to say hello.

Don't wait as long as I did to check out Gosdin's work — it's great stuff.

I FEEL A CHANGE COMING ON . . .

Posted on by

. . . and the fourth part of the day is already gone.

That's a line from the new Dylan album, Together Through Life, due out on the 28th of this month.

The song, “I Feel A Change Coming On”, has been seen by some commentators as reflecting the dawn of the Obama era, and that might be part of it — but I think it's mostly about the possibility of change in old age.

There was a time, back in the Sixties, when young folks might say, with some truth, that older folks couldn't really get what Dylan was singing about.  Today, older folks might say that young folks can't really get what Dylan is singing about now — that you need some serious mileage on your odometer to feel the depth of the ragged wisdom roiling around in his new work.

I mean, could any young person fully comprehend what these lines from the same song mean:

Well now what's the use in dreaming?
You got better things to do.
Dreams never did work for me anyway,
Even when they did come true.

I don't think so.


                                                                                                                                    Image©Bruce Davidson

The photo by Bruce Davidson on the cover of the new album has some relationship to this idea.  The kids making out in the back seat of the car have no idea where they're going — they aren't looking out to see.  They don't know yet, to paraphrase another song on the album, that beyond their embrace lies nothing.

THE SUBTERRANEANS, PART 2

Posted on by

In my earlier post on the film version of The Subterraneans, I suggested that its producer Arthur Freed was probably attracted to Kerouac's novel because it offered him a chance to do a modern-day version of La Bohème, with modern-day music, specifically the be-bop jazz that so inspired Kerouac and the people he wrote about in the book.  I can't imagine that Freed himself was much inspired by be-bop, but he had a collaborator at MGM who was, in the person of André Previn.  Previn had recently been the musical supervisor on Gigi, Freed's last great conventional musical, but also performed progressive jazz as a pianist with small combos in clubs.  He was someone who could bridge the gap, musically at least, between the Freed unit at MGM and the world of the beats.



On one level it was a canny commercial calculation.  Twenty-eight years later playwright Billy Aronson had the idea of doing a contemporary musical based on La Bohème and began collaborating with composer Jonathan Larson on what became Rent, one of the most successful musicals in Broadway history.

The difference between the The Subterraneans and Rent was that Rent was written, eventually almost entirely by Larson, from inside a modern Bohemia, as Kerouac's novel was.  Larson was employed as a waiter in a diner in downtown Manhattan while he worked on the play and Kerouac was pretty much perennially beat, even when he became famous, mostly due to his heavy drinking.

The film version of The Subterraneans, by contrast, was written from the outside looking in — it simply reeked of inauthenticity.



This is a bit surprising, since the script's credited author was Robert Thom (above), who went on to achieve a kind of immortality as the writer of several cult-movie classics, including Roger Corman's Crazy Mama and Death Race 2000.  He had a wild, transgressive vision, much like Kerouac's, and it's odd that he was so tone-deaf to Kerouac's voice and milieu.

Perhaps Thom was heavily rewritten, but in any case the result was dreadful.  Kerouac's (and Puccini's) tragedy was given a happy ending, and Kerouac's interracial couple was transformed into an international couple, the Mardou Fox of the novel, half black and half American-Indian, becoming the exotically French Leslie Caron.

Those changes alone wouldn't have been necessarily fatal — the real disgrace was that the actors were given preposterous cornball pseudo-beat poetic lines to spout — lines that would have made Kerouac gag, and that branded the film as irredeemably square . . . irredeemable even by the music, which is quite wonderful.

Sarah Vaugn and Gerry Mulligan and Previn himself appear as performers on-screen, and Previn's underscoring has a plausible jazz feel, fresh and original.  (A soundtrack album, below, was released on LP and is now available, with additional material, on CD.)

The rest of the film is just an embarrassing reminder of what might have been.

You have to give Freed some credit, though, for ambition and intuition, if nothing else.  He knew a good idea when he saw it — a radical one for its time — even if, in this case, he didn't quite know how to pull it off.

IF IT WASN'T FOR THE IRISH AND THE JEWS

Posted on by

On Patrick's Day I wrote about Mick Moloney's wonderful album of Harrigan and Braham songs, McNally's Row of Flats.  (You can buy it here, and you should.)

I hear from the artist that a follow-up album is due out in October, called If It Wasn't For the Irish and the Jews, covering songs from later in Edward Harrigan's extraordinary career as a creator of musical shows.

I can't wait!

PATRICK'S DAY PARADE

Posted on by

Before George M. Cohan, before Jerome Kern, there was Edward Harrigan.  He wrote comedy sketches about immigrant life in New York City at the end of the 19th Century, later expanding them into full-length musical shows which became wildly popular.  He and his partner from an earlier career in minstrelsy, Tony Hart, performed in the shows, for which Harrigan wrote the songs, with music by David Braham, sometimes called the American Offenbach.

The songs on their own were just as popular as the shows but aren't widely known today, which is a shame, since they're wonderful — sweet, tuneful evocations of working-class life in Manhattan when folks from all over the world crowded into urban ghettos and tried to figure out a way to live together, to be Americans together.

Mick Moloney has recorded a delightful collection of Harrigan and Braham songs, including their wonderfully cheerful “Patrick's Day Parade”.  (You can buy Maloney's album here.)

“Patrick's Day Parade” moves me because it records the joy of people who were in their time so proud to be Irish and so proud to be Americans, and somehow saw no difference between the two kinds of pride.  “We'll shout hurrah for Erin go bragh and all the Yankee nation!”  We're unspeakably lucky to live in a country where such a paradox makes sense — where all of us can be proud to be Irish, even if our ancestors never set foot in the Emerald Isle.  It's the kind of cultural
appropriation that's part of the miracle of America.

People have likened America to a melting pot, but it was never that — more like an Irish stew.  The beef stayed beef and the potatoes stayed potatoes . . . it was the combination of disparate things that made the dish so satisfying, and still does.

So as one American to another — Erin go bragh!  (Or, as Michael O'Donohue used to say, in the true spirit of Harrigan and Hart — Erin go bragh and panties!)

SKYLARK

Posted on by

Richard “Wendell” Cordtz died last year.  He was only in his fifties, about my age, so it came as a shock and still seems very strange.

He was one of the genuine characters I knew in New York for most of the years I lived there — an actor and stage director and singer.  I didn't know him well but I saw him fairly regularly because he did a cabaret act with another friend of mine, Hugh McCarten.  They billed themselves as Dr. Wendell and Mr. Hugh, Hugh providing piano accompaniment to Wendell's song styling.

Wendell had a wry and often very subtle sense of humor, characterized by a kind of sly irony hinting at the outrageous and delivered deadpan.  It was a kind of mask, which would fall away when he smiled his sweet smile and suddenly seemed like a child.  He was always very mysterious to me.

When musician friends visited from out of town there would sometimes be musical soirées at Wendell's loft.  The last time I saw him was at one of these, not long before I moved away from New York.  He sang a song I always associated with him, “Skylark” by Johnny Mercer and Hoagy Carmichael.  He sang it beautifully, without any irony at all.

I have a recording of Dr. Wendell and Mr. Hugh performing the song, about a year before Wendell died.  Listening to it it's impossible to imagine that Wendell is dead — easy to imagine that he's just gone off to follow the skylark somewhere . . .

4 NOVEMBER 2008!

Posted on by

Well, tomorrow is the big day — five of the Randolph Scott/Budd Boetticher Westerns are going to be released on DVD for the first time, including Boetticher's masterpiece Comanche Station.  The box set will mark a major moment in American film culture — a chance for many to see these extraordinary films for the first time.  Though not as profound as Ford's Westerns, spiritually speaking, Boetticher's oaters are almost as exquisite cinematically, though in a subtle, quiet way.  They're largely about the way men, on horseback and on foot, move through landscapes, inhabit space, and how this activity reveals who they are and what they're about.  On that level they're examples of pure cinema, since only cinema can operate on that level.

Apparently there's some sort of election going on tomorrow as well, which will also be worth paying close attention to.  I've posted a link to this clip before, but give it another look as we await the morrow's events:

“When the Ship Comes In”

This is Bob Dylan, joined by Joan Baez, singing Dylan's song at the march on Washington, 28 August 1963, the occasion of Martin Luther King's “I Have A Dream” speech.  In the song, Dylan, twenty-two years-old, envisions, like King, a time when the dreams of the civil rights movement will be fulfilled.  Like King, also, he draws on Biblical imagery, on the rhetoric of prophecy, which alone seemed appropriate then to such awesome hopes, bucking such awesome tides.

Today, the hour when the ship comes in may feel as though it was always inevitable.  Back then, it was only proclaimed with assurance by voices crying in the wilderness, by those who put their strongest faith in God's justice, not man's.  The times when the two converge are rare, times of jubilee.

THE VOICE OF PROPHECY

Posted on by

The Biblical tradition of prophecy is not exactly about predicting the future, except in this sense, “If you don't get your act together, God is going to kick your front teeth out.”  It's a gentle reminder of the laws of spiritual physics.

A prophet speaks the words of our ancestors, delivers the collective wisdom of millennia, reminds us of the clear and present consequences of immediate choices.

Prophets channel things, crystallize vague signs that portend changes in the weather.  Strictly speaking, they don't prescribe, or preach, or even condemn — at least not from a personal perspective.  They're just strings that vibrate in the wind.

Being a prophet can't be fun — it requires suspending the prerogatives of the self, wandering around homeless, listening to voices no one else can hear.  You have to be a little crazy.  When Bob Dylan sings “There's not even room enough to be anywhere” he might well be describing the plight of the prophet.

It's interesting to think of Dylan's voice as prophetic, in the antique sense.  In 1964, the Beatles told us how much fun the 60s were going to be.  Not long afterwards, in “Like A Rolling Stone”, Dylan told us what the 60s were going to cost us.  Not many people listened.  The song only made sense in retrospect.

Astonishingly, Dylan, who'd helped a generation grow up, stuck around to help that same generation grow old.  Along the way, he kept delivering shocks.  He became a born-again Christian and turned himself into a joke for many.  In this phase he composed a series of modern Gospel songs that we can now recognize as a brilliant contribution to that particular tradition of American music.  In retrospect, again, it seems like a dazzling, moving achievement.

He's never left the road, the hard grind of touring.  There were times when he was so wasted on stage that no one could tell precisely what song he was singing.  Then he'd rebound, rework his old songs so they seemed brand new again.  His last two albums can stand with the best of the work that made his name forty years ago.

At almost every concert over the years he's sung “Blowin' In the Wind” — the song that made it hip for young white kids to support the Civil Rights Movement.  He sings it for people who might only be seeing him that one time, who want to say they've heard the iconic song live.

He may have other reasons, too.  He may believe that people still need to hear the song — to remember all the questions still blowing in the American wind.  Some of them will be answered on 4 November, for good or ill.

In any case, it's a good time to remember where the song came from — an old spiritual called “No More Auction Block”, where Dylan found the general shape of the tune and the inspiration for a new variation on the eternal lament over American slavery and its echoes down through time.

On The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (actually an official Dylan release) you can listen to “No More Auction Block” sung by Dylan at the Gaslight in Greenwich Village in 1962.  He was twenty-one years-old.  “Many thousands gone,” the song says, speaking of those who died in chains on American soil, and by extension those who died in the chains of an unjust society, those who died fighting the injustice, or perpetrating it.  Dylan doesn't claim to speak for any of them — he's just transmitting their sorrow, their hope, their repentance, just reminding us that their voices are blowing in the wind, and asking us to listen.  You can hear Dylan himself listening as he sings the song.  It's what prophets do.

VOICES FROM THE REAL HEARTLAND

Posted on by

Ralph Stanley, surviving member of the immortal Stanley Brothers bluegrass duo, just did a radio ad for Barack Obama addressed to his fellow citizens in southwest Virginia.  In it he commends Obama as a good family man — something that's important to folks in that part of the world.  I wish the national media could talk more about the issue of (real) family values, which Obama lives and John McCain hasn't.

A few years ago Ralph put out an album of duets with various musicians younger than himself called Clinch Mountain Country.  Ralph's wife said her favorite duet was the one Ralph did with Bob Dylan, “The Lonesome River”, and it really is something — a couple of voices with the bark still on singing from the ageless heart of America.  It's a great track and great album.

Check it out.