The Killing Floor

It's Not Dark Yet: Blues Songs of Social Consciousness

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

 



3/30/13

Mike Mellor: One thing I love about this series is that not only do we get to jump back and forth across a century of recorded music, but we also get to put contemporaneous things together that were/are artificially segregated.

Last week we talked about songs from the American Folk Revival which, from my perspective, is a direct product of Post-War American class and race politics. The genre represented the unionized American Left in the lead-up to World War II and rather quickly aligned itself with the African American Civil Rights Movement (AACRM), which only makes sense since the community was based on song hounds and ethnomusicologists who had been doing their field research in the Black communities of the South for decades. Of course such allegiances made them natural targets for the henchmen of McCarthyism and ruined many of their lives, but it turns out to have worked wonders for their legacies because once the Second Red Scare died down these musicians became icons for left-leaning Baby Boomers. This is all fantastic but what always gnaws at me is that almost all of the household names that sprung from the movement were white. Woody Guthrie? Burl Ives? Pete Seeger? Peter, Paul and Mary? All white. It's true that Harry Belafonte also became a household name, but it was for fucking "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)".

The theme this week is blues songs of social consciousness, a genre that to me seems inextricably tied to the Folk Revival even if you aren't going to see a PBS special or a Time Life Collection infomercial about it. A lot of the names you see bandied about in talk of the Folk Revival made songs like this, pointing out the injustices in their lives and communities:

Brendan Hogan: That's an interesting point, and one that I think is still a thorn in the side of folks who like things organized in terms of black and white, or in this case blues and folk. The notion that blues music is folk music, in that it can share the same interest in social consciousness and substance, is foreign to some music fans. Many times I have heard people say, "Oh, blues music is fine so long as it's kept in bars," as opposed to listening rooms and other folk venues. That's horseshit. It's ignorant, insulting, and frankly, representative of the type of racism that still exists in this country, swept-under-the-rug and ignored. That kind of attitude in the music world leaves musicians in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't straightjacket, artistically. And it's not unique to today.

Big Bill Broonzy's "Black, Brown, and White" is a great example of a true folk song of substance sung by a man who was a blues star of the "race records" era. What he was saying in that song managed to piss off everybody, which is a daring feat. Polite, bourgeois, white audiences just discovering Broonzy didn't appreciate their usually good-humored songster in overalls highlighting their complicity in societal racial inequity, and black audiences didn't like being spoken to in the terms Broonzy uses in the song ("If you're black, hey brother; get back, get back, get back").

Of course, what they all missed, and what their universal dislike of the song highlighted, is Broonzy's ability to tell the truth in song. If that's not the mark of a good folk song I don't know what is. And if you're upsetting everyone, as opposed to only one group, it means you're saying the right things.

I feel like blues musicians today encounter the same problems. That's why so many of them are still in bars.

Mike: Did anyone else catch that kind of flack?

Brendan: I can't think of any other blues musicians who caught the kind of flack Broonzy caught. Maybe it's because, in the case of "Black, Brown, and White", his message was so direct and unapologetic, but I also think it's at least in part due to the fact that he was successful in crossing over. White audiences wanted him to be a genuine country boy, while the black audiences who were more familiar with his R&B music probably didn't appreciate his catering to whites.

It's a different scenario with someone like Josh White. He became prominent with the Café Society crowd pretty early on, so he was preaching to the choir, so to speak, when singing this:

Mike: Of course. Café Society is where the "Harlem Renaissance" and the "Folk Revival" met. I put them in scare quotes because they are thought of as entirely separate movements, even though they happened in the same city, one immediately after the other with certain young folks of the former being elders of the latter.

This goes back to what you said about structural racism. The very notion of segregation is to appeal to the perceived advantages of living in a vacuum—as if it lends a sense of righteous purity—when biology, society and art have forever been thriving in intercommunication and dying in isolation. Art is communicable Darwinism; a great expression from one is adopted by another and adapted to other circumstances, then adopted by another and adapted to different circumstances, ad infinitum. If the same concept applies to both our genetic structures and our social structures it must be at the core of who we are. Art, in its openness and communicative abilities, must express not a nostalgia for what was good from the past, but recreate that timeless good for the immediate moment over and over again.

Dr. King knew that, and that is what makes him the transcendent figure of the AACRM, which of course is the thread holding all of this conversation together. He understood that the socio-historic fight in which he was engaged was one of conservatism v. timelessness, and that timelessness always wins in the end. And it wasn't only the white establishment that was conservative; the Nation of Islam was pretty conservative, too. After all, a theology of black supremacy is just as racist as a society of white supremacy.

There's a Mavis Staples song about Martin and the larger movement that I think captures this sense of timelessness:

Brendan: That's well said. Art, and particularly music, is in a position to affect change in the world in a way that other forms of human communication aren't. Maybe it's because of the broad appeal of music, or the way it can literally move you, but there is something about a message couched in the form of a song that is going to have a deeper impact than just words alone. Which is why it's interesting that folks like Staples, J.B. Lenoir, John Lee Hooker, and countless others from the most segregated corners of society have used their influence as musicians to affect positive change. In the face of systemic oppression, forced poverty and unspeakable violence, how easy it would be to say we're coming after you instead of We'll never turn back?

Champion Jack Dupree is another one. He grew up an orphan at the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs. As a young man he was a successful prizefighter, then a cook in the Navy and a POW during World War II. After the war, he recorded quite a bit in the US, but wound up moving to Europe for the reasons so many jazz and blues musicians did during the '60s, where he lived out the rest of his life. This was one of the last songs he recorded:

Mike: The simplicity of both of those songs is tremendous. It's amazing, when given eyes to bear witness and a voice to speak the truth, how plain things can be so powerful.

That's an excellent point, by the way, about how protest songs never resorted to violence or revenge. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote about the lack of revenge fantasies in African American history. His basic argument is that the We're coming after you impulse was not nearly as strong as the Leave us the fuck alone impulse. Since he's probably more knowledgeable about this than both of us combined, let's let him have the final word on this one.

Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Myth of Harriet Tubman, 1/3/2013:

I recently finished Kate Larsen's excellent biography of Harriet Tubman--Bound For The Promised Land. Tubman, like any mythical figure has had her exploits elevated beyond actual events. But even in Larsen's historical telling she emerges as a super-heroic figure. It's true she didn't shepherd 200 slaves out of Maryland. The number was more like 70--which is to say, given the logistics, a lot.

At any rate, I've done a lot of thinking on the place of myth in African-American history. Django aside, we don't really have many avenging angels. Reviewing the primary documents of the time, I don't even detect much taste for mass vengeance. There's often a taste for particular vengeance on particular people, but more than anything there's a strong desire to be left the fuck alone. Actions, like absconding with oneself, are usually set in motion by the threat of sale and the disruption of family ties. At first I was surprised by the lack of race hatred. But when I thought about it, it makes sense.

Race hatred among whites was not irrational devolution. On the contrary it served an actual political purpose--defining the borders of citizenship, manhood and the broadest aristocracy ever created. Race hatred among blacks is just vengeance. It doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't offer access to anything you didn't have before. Even if you look at the actual ideology of black nationalists what you will find more than "Kill Whitey" is "Leave us the fuck alone." Whereas integrationists wanted to be left alone here as Americans, separatists wanted to be left alone elsewhere. But both wanted to left alone.

Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from 8pm-midnight.

Listen online or at:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans

It's Not Dark Yet: Songs from the Folk Revival

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

3/23/13

Brendan Hogan: Last week's 10:00 feature on new music was a lot of fun. The more and more we get into these themes the more I'm realizing that we are only scratching the surface on these things. That's a good thing, though. Despite how deeply or passionately we may delve into something in our personal lives, there's always something else to learn. I know I learn a lot from you, and I hope people who read these find them a good jumping off point for their own listening, too.

This week's theme will be the Folk Revival of the 1950s and '60s, an era that served as an important bridge between the two halves of the last hundred years.

Mike Mellor: Yeah, books have been written about most of the themes we discuss and we reduce the discussion to a handful of paragraphs. We need to be thankful to the researchers and authors who have provided so much insight into what we love; you can never get that depth of knowledge from a wikipedia article. Me being a librarian & blogger and you being a musician & DJ, we know that the knowledge we pass off in snippets is stuff we obtained in larger, more authoritative hunks from historians, scholars and other musicians. What they do makes it possible for me, at least, to be a good dilettante.

I can't resist making a proto-Folk Revival choice to start. If there were a Mt. Rushmore for American culture Woody Guthrie would be on it. His life was immense and instructive and I would argue that his cult of personality is the aesthetic base of the American Folk Revival movement. Obviously, lots of other people contributed to it and Woody stole bits, lyrics and licks from most of them, hut his posture, politics and prose styles form the feeling of the scene.

As you mention the bridge between halves of the century, the most enduring contribution Woody made was as the living, breathing, thinking Dust Bowl refugee. By singing the Dust Bowl songs he was speaking for all victims of the Great Depression, their lost pasts, compromised futures and difficult present. That's pretty much the template for a Bruce Springsteen song, isn't it?

Brendan: I think there's no denying Woody's impact on American culture and his influence on some of the most successful musicians of our day. To me, Springsteen's  Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad are direct descendants of Guthrie's storytelling style. It's a style that seems to stretch back to Greek mythology, doesn't it? Tell the story plainly, cast your characters in myth, have clear heroes and villains. The difference with Guthrie is that he was singing of the people, for the people, casting them in the role of hero, and telling their stories in three minute chunks tailored for radio and record.

What I especially love about The Asch Recordings is the clarity of Guthrie's playing on them. His whole thing was to just bust out a song, as is. I don't think he gave much thought to the presentation of what he was playing or singing; in fact perfection was probably antithetical to his point. The sound of the recordings themselves are of quality, so there is nothing to get in the way of the loose simplicity of his delivery. That quality makes a recorded song more accessible than one that sounds slapdash or hastily recorded. You can really hear why they were so influential on the next generation of "folk revivalists".

Odetta borrowed Guthrie's simple style of guitar playing, but her overall delivery was far more intense to suit the material she was singing. Listen to her version of "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho". It's pure Odetta, straight from the black church and presented very directly. She was very good at using the guitar strumming to create a dynamic range that served her vocal, and therefore the story or message of the song.

Mike: Would you say that the directness of writing, playing, singing and recording are characteristics that define the genre? Are there examples in the genre that are not like that? Or did the instances where the artists didn't do that mark an evolution into another genre?

Brendan: Joan Baez is good example of someone whose technical proficiency on guitar and vocal is very much a part of her sound, but I don't think anyone would dispute her relevance as a folk revivalist. She's never really strayed from that, either.

And that's not to say that Odetta, or any other artist of the era, isn't proficient in their own way, but generally-speaking the folk revivalists were more about getting the point across than about technical proficiency. There's a genuineness about that approach which is appealing.

Mike: Oh, you're talking about virtuosity. Now I get it.

Plenty of them were virtuosos on their instrument, none moreso than Dave Van Ronk. Just listen to his "Sunday Street".

Brendan: First, I'm thrilled that you included a live version of that song from Dave Van Ronk. I had never seen film of him performing before! His playing is so idiosyncratic, which is evident just by hearing him on record, but seeing him play is really cool because his finger-picking style is so "wrong". He uses the thumb and two fingers in his right hand, where "proper" technique would have you use three fingers. So, I guess that keeps him far from the virtuoso category, but show me another picker with that style.

Other people play using the two-finger method, but none of them sound like the next. They're all unique. People who play by the book all sound very similar; very tamed. I guess that goes back to my point about the singularity of the style of many of the folk revivalists. They were trying to get to the message with the least amount of resistance. No indoctrination on account of little proper musical education. What's more "folk" than that?

But your mentioning "Sunday Street" also brings up another subject: Dave Van Ronk was maybe best known for interpreting older traditional music from sea shanties to dixieland jazz, but he wrote "Sunday Street". At what point do the folk revivalists cross over into singer/songwriter territory? Is Bob Dylan part of the folk revival? How about Joni Mitchell or Fred Neil? Neil wrote "Everybody's Talkin'", a massive hit for Harry Nilsson in the late 60's, but he also did this:

Mike: I told you I was a dilettante.

You could answer those questions with musical beginnings. Dylan's first important work came directly out of that Greenwich Village scene, after having hunted down Guthrie in a mental hospital and meeting Ramblin' Jack Elliott there at his bedside. He also knew Van Ronk very well. I think he certainly belongs in the group, even though he famously turned his back on it.

Joni—in my mind anyway—is in the lineage after Dylan's evolution of and then out of the folk revival, writing idiosyncratic poems as songs. And Neil, he worked in the Brill Building for Christ's sake, and wrote some pretty awesome hits for the rockabilly guys. This is all actually a very good example of how cultural scenes weave in and out of each other across the mainstream.

Brendan: Exactly, and that's why labels for artists are at best placeholders. But the movement on a broader scope was real. The folk revivalists acted as a conveyor, pushing American spirituals, cowboy songs, folk ballads and blues into the second half of the 20th Century. And they did it by putting their own mark on the music, and in some cases creating entirely new styles in the process.

That's the whole point right? It was a revival, after all, and when you revive something you give it new life.

Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from 8pm-midnight.

Listen online or at:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans

Time Capsule: At the Origin

Time Capsule is a series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

 

At the Origin


Exactly a week before equinox, keeping track, sun surprised us this morning after weekend clocks pushed forward. Light reaching for darkness inside ourselves. Right in front of us the winged spindle, considered an invasive species from Asia here in Maine, & especially radiant in autumn, then more aptly named, burning bush, is a target for birds trying to survive merciless winter. Just yesterday a band of hearty house sparrows attacked it in a way I hadn’t seen before: red berries already consumed, the birds resorted to eating leaf buds, leaving stalks bare. We’ve set yellow & purple tulips in a vase before the bay window looking out over the fallow shrub trying to keep spring near at hand. Next to that: a letter from a friend; an old postcard of the Tour Eiffel; & a small photograph sent from Joe Schuyler of a snow-laden tree in Madison Square Park with cardinal perched on a branch between tree & Flatiron Building across the way. Birds themselves today help get at the origin of “experience” with Latin roots, ex-periri, meaning “the traversing of a danger,” hoping in weeks & months to come, we might do the same.

FURTHER STUDY:

Flatiron Building

It's Not Dark Yet: New Songs

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

3/16/13

Mike Mellor: So, it's fundraising time again. I know you won't bring it up here, so I'll do it:

WUMB relies on membership donations for a disproportionate amount of its operating revenue. Quite literally it is the only station in Boston that plays the kind of music we talk about in this series, and the same goes for a lot of the music I write about elsewhere on this blog. It's also where you hear (the amazing) American Routes, Mountain Stage and Albert O's Highway 61 Revisited. It's something worth supporting, so do it.

This week's theme is new music. Some of my lifelong favorites have put out records in the last few months and for the most part I've been really pleased with them, especially Richard Thompson's Electric. Thompson puts out a lot of product and the results have been inconsistent since 1999's absolutely perfect Mock Tudor, but this is the best record he's put out in 13 years.

Recording at Buddy Miller's house and having him produce the record probably has a lot to do with it. Thompson is remarkably steady with his songwriting and guitar-playing styles, and I think that has been his downfall for the last decade. He needed a collaborator to send him in new directions and challenge his creative process.

Miller lives in Nashville, and there is one song in particular that sounds born to be an Americana "hit" for somebody like Delbert McClinton or T. Graham Brown, or even Robert Plant:

Brendan Hogan: Thanks for the plug. It's the people's radio, so it has to be supported by the people.

There's already been a lot of good new music this year, so I think it's worthwhile to take a look at some of it. The new Richard Thompson album is definitely one of the best. He's a guy who can go deep, and I agree that if the production stays out of the way his songwriting and playing shines through.

It feels weird to say about RT, but everyone can suffer from a heavy hand. It's not everyone who can take advantage of being pushed in the way that I'm sure Buddy Miller is capable, though. That man can get sounds, and to a musician as prolific as Thompson, it must be like being served a pitch right in the wheelhouse. The record has been stripped of anything unnecessary and left only the essence of what makes Thompson great. My understanding is that the whole album was recorded in four days, which goes to show the high octane of creative energy both guys are running on.

The new Kris Kristofferson record stays out of its own way, too. I've heard people say he sounds like a tired old man, which is a complaint I don't understand. What else should he be? The album is called Feeling Mortal, and that's exactly what it sounds like.

It also helps to remember that Johnny Cash was sounding every bit his age on his last recordings, and while I'm not comparing the two, it's testament to Rick Rubin and Don Was as producers to just get out of the way of that, not to try to force a voice or a playing style into places it can't go. You'll get a far more genuine record that way.

Mike: Kris is another one...I've literally been listening to him my entire life. He won me over as a kid with the song "If You Don't Like Hank Williams (You Can Kiss My Ass)". It was the only time I could say ass in front of my parents without getting in trouble.

If somebody complains that he sounds like a tired old man, they clearly don't know Kris's catalog. Every new composition on this album has a thematic/stylistic counterpart from the classic era of his career (1966-1974). He's been writing like this since his 20s and singing like this since his late 30s. The only differences are he sounds a little happier now and the tired sound comes from old age instead of from burning the candle at both ends.

I think we've talked about this in person, but I feel like Johnny Cash ushered in a new era in popular music where performing songwriters can work their craft for an appreciative audience all the way to the grave. This has been true in the fine arts for centuries, and we seem to always have performers living off their past glory in old age, but it's a pretty new phenomenon in such a young person's game as recorded popular music to let the old dogs have resources and creative control to do things their way. We're starting to see it with Dylan, Willie, Prine and Waits, too.

Brendan: It's definitely a new phenomenon. The idea that an artist can cultivate his or her craft over a lifetime is nothing new; in fact I think it was expected. It's the idea of the artist as pop culture icon that is new. Dylan, Prine, Cash, Willie, Waits and Kristofferson have each managed to sustain their craft as artists while also maintaining their relevance in the marketplace. And they've done it with their own finesse, which is a difficult balancing act. So to be turned off by sincerity; well, I guess I just don't get that.

Mike: Me neither.

Another guy who's a little younger but shows every sign of being on that path is Nick Cave. He's been doing whatever he damn well pleases since he formed The Birthday Party in the late '70s. Since then he's consistently been juxtaposing ideas: Christian imagery of savageness and grace; an overwhelming appetite for the romantic and insatiable lust (and occasionally a middle school locker room sense of humor); life-affirming beauty amidst gruesome violence. The main difference I see between young Nick and old Nick is that now he favors third person where he used to favor first. It's as if his characters are on paths he's already been down, and he likes to send them heaps of trouble.

His pet topic of late seems to be young people finding their way—with all their confusion and optimism and hormones—through a contemporary world that appears near collapse on many levels (economic, environmental, moral). "Water's Edge (Will of Love)" is the song off his new Bad Seeds album that really gets to me:

Brendan: Hearing that makes me think of Tom Waits' "Downtown Train" and the carnival he refers to where all the Brooklyn girls stay and never win. Both songs are describing a chaotic charade that no one can succeed in, but one which still carries on. Both Cave and Waits are on the outside looking in, with the distinction being that Waits' character is in his moment and in love, whereas Caves' character has seen his best days gone by. It's a brilliant song and I love the way he sings it.

It's no secret how much I like Laura Marling's music, so you can imagine I was pretty excited this week when I got to hear a track off her forthcoming record. Laura is so young and has come so far artistically already, that I really look forward to seeing how far she'll develop her craft.

The arrangement on the new song is more sparse than on her previous records, and while I can't make assumptions about the production of the record as a whole, the thinner treatment really leaves the song wide open. The less there is to prop up a song, the more it can stand on its own. Laura's songs have always been little masterpieces, so it's cool to possibly expect a record that approaches them in a simpler, more direct way.

Mike: That's an interesting observation. I guess a Brighton, England beach and a New York City subway car aren't so different after all.

I really like how this song builds with just the four of them. Marling on guitar lets in the B3 sounding like a pea whistle, which lets in the bass, which eventually lets in the drummer, whose just playing cymbals, I think. She moves from picking to chords, the drummer picks up a bass drum beat, and then what sounds like a tambourine, the B3 picks up momentum...and she's so solid a singer she sounds the same even as she has to be heard over the increasing noise.

And that verse: "Truth about desire, they say / Is the need to breathe for another day / Truth I hear about regret / It's the hardest truth I've come to yet." She is in the zone.

I know you've been on the Marling train for a while, but I've been waiting for the next stop in her artistic development. If this song is indicative of the album I'm on the train.

Brendan: Glad to hear you're on the train. It's strange: In the past I might never have been exposed to the amount of new music I find myself exposed to now, if not for the radio gig I'm working now. I've never been one to have my finger on the pulse, so-to-speak, nor do I care about buzz. But it is cool to keep up on things, because there is good music being made.

I think it's easy, especially in this post-Woodstock Baby Boomer legend-making world, to fall under the romantic assumption that anything worth being said has already been said, or that the iconic figures who made their statements a generation ago can never be equaled. That's bull. Great new things are still being made today, some by old masters, some by people much younger than you and me. To believe there's nothing left worth being said, well, you might as well pack it in.

Mike: Great new things are being made by this guy and this gal our age, too, and this young dude. And we could play this game for hours. People talk a lot about how the contemporary economy is real tough on musicians, but that doesn't mean the music they make is lesser, or that economic forces can make the creative well run dry. Capitalism is less than 500 years old; making art is primeval.

Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from 8pm-midnight.

Listen online or at:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans

 

Time Capsule: Take What Comes

Time Capsule is a series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

 

Take What Comes


Nothing cavalier, or taken for granted. Sun came out, penetrating dark crevices. A friend & I, in separate places, heard joyful, humble sounds of birds welcoming the turn. Told her, again, don’t know how birds survive. Can’t imagine one night in winter gulls have to get through. Today, all I want to do is make something of solitude. Solitude, closely accompanied by dreams & memory. Last night she & I stood before a long dream stone, where women’s faces emerged from folds, indentations. Called them all “Slavic.” In another dream on board a large ship, ascending narrow stairs, asked a boy going down how many flights I had to climb to reach deck. Not too many, his laugh intimated. Two, to be exact. There, on deck, my nighttime solitude of multitudes. (They were all decked out, too!) Back to earth & memory. Yesterday someone asked me, “What’s going on?” Couldn’t answer right away. What is going on with me? Could only offer an anecdote of what occurred hours earlier, when we came eye-to-eye at eye-level with the red-tail hawk before it swooped a few feet over her right shoulder to perch right above us on a light pole. Things suddenly deepened with meaning. The person who asked the everyday query stopped short, & thought. “Perhaps you should take it as an omen?” Yes, I agreed. Omen. Good or bad. I’ll take what comes.

It's Not Dark Yet: Femme Fatales

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

3/9/13

Brendan Hogan: I had a lot of fun with the song interpretations over the last couple weeks. There's just so much out there. This week we'll shift gears again, though. You and I have discussed this before: There's so much bravado and machismo in American music. It's part of the character. But bluster hides an insecurity, and it leaves open the possibility for table-turing, so-to-speak. So this week we'll hear from femme fatales in song; the deadly antihero of American folk music.

Mike Mellor: Yeah, the "black widow", or the "bad bitch" in hip-hop parlance. She's a staple of folklore at least back to the Tanakh, when Delilah seduced Samson into willful powerlessness. There's a song about that, as you know, popularized by Grateful Dead and brought by way of the Rev. Gary Davis, by way of Blind Willie Johnson, by way of God knows who. I've always had a deep fondness for the way Black culture used Old Testament stories for strength in their very specific tragic circumstances and this one has a levity under it that most of them don't.

Brendan: Yeah, Delilah's one of the baddest going. The prototypical femme fatale. What do you think is the correlation between this story and Black culture?

Mike: I'm not a theologian or an ancient historian but from my understanding Samson appears in the Book of Judges, which is a cyclical series of stories. The Israelites piss off God, God punishes them by putting them in the hands of their enemies, they repent, God sends a "judge" to lead them out, rinse and repeat. Samson was the judge who was supposed to deliver them from the Philistines.

Long story short, God's plan for him is to go to Philistine and wipe those motherfuckers out. On the way he falls in love with a Philistine girl, shit hits the fan, he loses his girl, loses family members and has more encounters with loose women while intermittently killing thousands of Philistines. Then he falls in love with Delilah, who is also Philistine. Delilah is fine as a motherfucker, but she's in cahoots with those motherfuckers, and she keeps probing Samson about what makes him so strong.

The common misconception is that his hair made him strong. God made him strong, and one of God's orders was that he never cut his hair. What happened is he kept teasing Delilah by saying this thing or that thing would make him lose his strength, but each time she tried it didn't actually work, until one day he said it came from his hair. She called a dude to cut his hair while he slept, his oath with God was broken, God jetted, Samson was weak and he was suddenly mortal...and outnumbered.

He strayed from the righteous path because messing around with some evil gal seemed better at the time. He and therefore all Israelites paid the price.

Now consider the lives of the first few generations of African (American) slaves. You're separated from your family, community, language, landscape, everything...captured, brutalized, and shipped as the human beasts of burden for a commercial enterprise on another continent. The only thing your cruel overlord motherfuckers give you is a propaganda education in Christianity, which ironically starts with stories of a star-crossed people suffering absurd persecution to win the love of a monotheistic God.

By the religion's very own metaphors, your class of people is in a struggle to prove to God that you are worthy of ultimate love, while God punishes your mistakes by throwing awful monstrous people in your way to fuck you up. You are an Israelite, the white people are Philistines and someday God will send you somebody to deliver you from bondage. But you have to watch out for those Delilahs, the agents of ruin masking as agents of pleasure.

Brendan: Brilliant. It is a story of oppression and searching for ways to climb out of misery.

I think the femme fatale can play a role that is a means out of suffering as well. That's why I love Nina Simone's version of "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera. Pirate Jenny isn't waiting to be delivered from misery and oppression. I interpret it as a story of coming to her wit's end and doing the "rising up" herself against her aggressors....with a little help from her fellow "pirates" in the black freighter. She's saying, "You people can gawk while I'm scrubbing these floors; while I'm taking constant shit from you. But the ship is coming in and we'll have your heads." And I love that it's Pirate Jenny, too. Not Pirate John. Am I wrong to think a femme fatale can play the role of empowerer, too?

Mike: I don't think so, especially in the 20th-21st Century. If anything it represents an evolution of the femme fatale as class struggle and feminism became major issues in the Modern West.

The traditional femme fatale leads you into danger by her manipulation of her desirability, mainly because that is one of the few powers women had in society. But as that changed with women voting, earning wages, engaging in economic and political struggles, etc., the nature of the archetype must change. Instead of bringing ruin to people by way of her desirability, Jenny is ruining people because people don't desire her, or value her humanity. But the fact remains that she is the agent of ruin.

Brendan: That's a great point. Focusing that kind of power onto a love interest is a familiar theme in folk music, whereas as using that power as a source of empowerment confuses the issue in a really interesting way, which helps make "Pirate Jenny" a great song. Evil is a kind of power, after all.

But as far as the kind of evil found in/with love, there are few who capture it better than the Delta musicians of the '20s and '30s. Take Robert Johnson's "Kind Hearted Woman". I still don't know if he's singing about one woman or two. If it's two different women, then the kind-hearted woman can't hold his interest like the evil-hearted one can. And if she's one in the same, what a complicated character she is: So evil that she'd kill him just to have it on her mind, just to know she did it, but yet he can't leave her alone. Now that's power.

Mike: That's a great question. If it is the same woman, is he being sarcastic by calling her kind-hearted? Is he saying she's the kind of person who'll turn on you? Acts nice but is plotting your demise? Or is she just a sociopath?

Brendan: Good point. I wonder if "kind hearted" is an odd regional term, or another part of the dialect that has since fallen out of use, like nation sack has. Either way, evil is the trumping call in Robert's relationship with that woman.

Mike: And that's not the only relationship he had with evil...

Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from 8pm-midnight.

Listen online or at:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans

 

Time Capsule: Time has a Way

Time Capsule is a series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

  

Time has a Way

Love has no need for fiction. –Julia Kristeva

I.
She was right to ask if I remembered being that young after stumbling on a photo from forty-six years ago. Vividly, I suppose. But recollection of the geography embedded in & circumscribing the shot taken on a Belgian street is the true test. Some traveling routes may prove vague, others etched. After a week in London, two days after disembarking the ferry out of Dover, in Calais, the three of us pooled $200 to buy the grey 1955 Citroën Deux Cheveaux, (spending the first day there at a sidewalk café drinking Stella Artois, & sleeping it off in a boxcar, when well past midnight gendarmes rousted us before train left railyard for who knows where?) Headed to Arras to fill out required paperwork to insure the thing. On to Brussels. Rotterdam, where at the bar along the waterfront (newly reconstructed after major WWII bombing), Dutch patrons listened to an admission of my desire to write; Amsterdam, where instead of visiting Red Light District, stuck with jukebox & Oranjeboom; in Bremen, Axel befriended me & talked about writing; Hamburg, reminding me of Boston; København; Helsingør, lightness of two Swedish towheads striking deeper than whiteness in Hamlet’s ghosts; Berlin, divided, & beyond modern; the awful shock of Dachau; past Checkpoint Charlie, where one had to purchase six East German marks before entering East Berlin, found Brandenburg Gate, broken. Onto Köln, its majestic cathedral, & path to sleep by the Rhine, where Morgan* announced he was splitting for Paris. Told Ward we’d have a feast, if we drove to Stuttgart. (Mrs. Tauber now lived there, former cook at the nursing home my grandmother worked at in Roxbury, which we’d always get to past the Hi Hat Lounge Miles played & recorded at on Columbus Ave., the old man pointing it out saying, Those were the days, then under the El to Montabello Road.) She & ninety-year-old sister fed us one sunny-side egg, half tomato, & black coffee = banquet for the eye in memory.


II.
Left Tim there with the car in order to hitchhike along the Autobahn to Munich. Met Charlotte Appleton in the back of a crosstown bus. Talked her away from her two traveling companions in order to accompany me by train to Salzburg, down to Rijeka, then slept on deck the $5.00 overnight mailboat to Split, where I dreamt of writing, & swam in the clear Adriatic. Bus to Belgrade. Gunmetal-grey Belgrade. Eight days seemed wasted trying to hitch out of Belgrade. Afternoons back to the $1.25 barracks room, wondering if others would take up any of nine extra beds. Fled by plane to Venice. Beograd to Venice, contrast etched in memory. Titian in Venice. Hostel separated genders in Venice, & we became estranged, Charlotte Appleton & I, but stayed together long enough to hitch to Pisa & Rome. Who shows up in Rome, but Tim still with the car. He’s headed to Capri, so I tag along down to Naples, & find that bamboo fishing pole, line, & lone hook. I must have been mad. I was mad. Delirious, & free. Tim & his girl & I slept on the beach, or in a gazebo. All of Monte Solaro burned down one night. Tim returned to Naples to fetch the Citroën. I met the sexy sixteen-year-old, who’s younger sister found the letter to someone else in the pages of my book, Escape from Freedom, left on the blanket, while she & I found love in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Lovesick by a purloined letter, I made it back to Rome, hitched with an older woman artist to Nice via Genoa & Monaco, where on the first day on the beach in Nice gendarmes took my passport, tossed me in back of a paddy wagon & placed me behind bars. At last, making a name for myself, when the lieutenant called it out beyond the jail cell. Nice, where I stayed for three weeks, & might have met Matisse, if grandmother had taken me there in 1954, instead of New York City. Back in London, after three months on the road, Ward, Morgan, & I traced our separate ways. Morgan’s Costa Brava may well have outshone my Yugoslavia at the Time, but Time has a way of bringing out a certain shine, even on gunmetal grey.


*Not entirely invisible in the 1967 photograph, what with his suitcase, sleeping bag, & gear on the sidewalk, + hand, eye, & head behind the camera.

FURTHER STUDY:

Towhead
Escape from Freedom
"'O guarracino"

It's Not Dark Yet: More Interpretations

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

3/2/13

Mike Mellor: Hey, what's the topic this week?

Brendan Hogan: Want to continue the covers? I was actually thinking that yesterday because there are a lot more good songs.

Mike: If that means I get to pick Richard Thompson's cover of Britney Spears' "Oops!...I Did it Again", then yes!

Brendan: Wait. They have to be covers of good songs, not novelty songs.

Mike: Funny you should say that. I swear to God the first time I heard the original version I thought to myself, "Hey, wait a minute...I kinda like this song. If you take out the awful production and the awful performer, it's actually a good pop song." I even stole a copy off of Napster, burned it onto a CD and stuck the disc in my desk drawer. I wanted to listen to it, but I didn't want anybody to know.

It took Richard Thompson to help me overcome my shame..

Brendan: I don't believe in feeling ashamed of what you like, but I also don't think that song fits the context of the theme. If the theme was Polished Turds, then I'd be on board. It's not that I don't like the song simply because Britney Spears sang it. (And by the way let's point out that she "sang" it. She didn't write it; two of the FOURTEEN producers who manufactured that album wrote the song). I just argue it's not a great song, and therefore doesn't fit the criteria of the theme hour for this week's radio show.

Mike: Does this mean I can't pick Taco's rendition of "Puttin' on the Ritz" either?

Brendan: No versions of "Puttin' on the Ritz" either. The argument for including Shawn Colvin's version of "Crazy" can be made, though.

Mike: I just googled that expecting Willie Nelson, not Gnarls Barkley! Please make that argument, sir.

Brendan: To me, it's an example of a good pop song written from a seemingly genuine place. The original was recorded using samples, drum machines, and other modern pop music production techniques, and Shawn Colvin just applied a more stripped-down treatment using finger-picked acoustic guitar, vocal, and rhythm section.

That kind of re-working usually shows whether a song can stand up. I guess the difference I see in "Oops!...I Did it Again" is not so much whether it's revealed to be a good song in the hands of Richard Thompson, but that it is a totally fabricated thing to begin with. I've never been a fan of the let's get together and write a hit approach to songwriting. Something about it isn't genuine unless it's done well.

Mike: I see what your saying; at its base the song itself has to meet certain criteria of artistry. I've been a fan of Cee-Lo Green since the days of Goodie Mob. I know that André 3000 has received a lot of accolades in his career for sophisticating hip hop, but I think in the entire Dungeon Family Green is the only one who has made a mark as a lyricist.

Another great pop song that got a lot of renditions in its hey-day was The Band's "The Weight". My favorite version is by The Staples Singers. In a lot of ways I think of it in the same light as how we were talking about John Hammond's Wicked Grin last week. The Band wrote amazing songs, many of which were heavily influenced by gospel and rhythm & blues, but as charming a singer as Levon Helm was, a song structure like that is built to be sung by someone like Mavis Staples.

Brendan Hogan: I agree. A lot of people have covered that song nearly to death. But The Staple Singers' version is a great example of music circling back around on itself. It's North American rhythm & blues backwoods gospel folk rock. I like the re-arrangement of the hook of the song, too. It's a nice twist; throws your ear off a little bit. And, you're right, Mavis' voice is so big and authoritative that it fills a space and takes on a different persona than Levon's did, but without doing his original vocal take a disservice.

I think it's important, when covering a song, that it be inhabited by yourself without ignoring or cancelling out where the song came from. Steve Earle is a master at that, especially when covering songs of his mentors and heroes. He does a great version Guy Clark's "The Last Gunfighter Ballad". It has all the intensity you expect from Steve Earle without overpowering the finesse and detail of Clark's writing. A perfect tribute song.

Mike: Yeah, I know this song from Johnny Cash's uninspired version from the '70s. Earle treats it with the seriousness it deserves, without necessarily losing the black humor. Come to think of it, that's his style in general; mostly deathly serious but with an ability to laugh every once in a while...

...as opposed to Randy Newman, whose primary lyrical tool is humor. I can't always enjoy Newman's arrangements or performances of his own songs (he's a little too drawn out and asymmetrical with his piano playing), but when they're in the right hands they sure can be great. I Love Levon Helm's version of "King Fish", a song about one of my favorite figures in American history, Huey P. Long.

Brendan: Levon with his daughter Amy and Larry Campbell. What's not to like? His drumming style is like B.B. King's guitar playing: I know it from one note (or snare hit). But... that's a topic for another discussion.

Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from 8pm-midnight.

Listen online or at:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans