This week Mahlerman treats us to some outstanding Americana…
The tradition of playing music at home, all but dead in broken Britain, flourishes still in atomized America and produces, along with the reality-wannabies, a never ending stream of talent in the performing arts. And the music they produce usually has a perfectly natural feel to it, as something does if you are familiar with it, and it becomes as natural as breathing. The first two bands below can all play each other’s instruments, and this skill adds to the homogeneity of the whole group. The therapeutic value of introducing kids to music at an early age has already been proved beyond doubt, most recently in Venezuela with El Sistema, now producing spectacular results in Scotland of all places. It makes me wonder again at the folly of successive recent governments who have seen fit to marginalize music tuition and appreciation in schools, to the point where music no longer exists in many of them.
Opening for Bob Dylan earlier this month in Ohio, and performing music from the Piedmont region of Carolina, the Carolina Chocolate Drops enjoy a huge following by keeping alive the string-band playing of that area. Played not just by Caucasian musicians from Appalachia but, as black fiddler Justin Robinson explains ‘the black folk get left out of the history books, but they were a big part of the string tradition’. Here, the wonderful foot-tapper Cornbread and Butterbeans will give you the flavour.
Another trio and sometime quartet of multi-instrumentalists, The Low Anthem hail from Providence, Rhode Island, and produce a sepia-tinted soundscape of Americana using such musical museum pieces as Pump Organs, Jaw Harps, Musical Saws and a Stylophone to create a ravishing old-world sound, quite unique in modern music, and sitting somewhere between Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, with a twist of The Band. A few months ago we featured the quirky beauty of Charlie Darwin on these pages; today the grave beauty of To Ohio from the same period.
They broke the mould when they made poet/musician Stephin Merritt and his band The Magnetic Fields. Recently hailed by the NY News as ‘one of the greatest American songwriters to emerge in the last two decades’, his actual worth, though considerable, lies somewhere below that high-water mark. Here, a particularly spooky piece that, in a couple of minutes, sums-up his off-centre charm with words and music in harmony.
It makes you blind, it does you in,
It makes you think you’re pretty tough,
It makes you prone to crime and sin,
It makes you say things off the cuff,
It’s very small and made of glass, and grossly over-advertised,
It turns a genius to an ass, and makes a fool think he is wise,
It could make you regret your birth, or turn cartwheels in your best suit,
It costs a lot more than it’s worth, and yet there is no substitute,
They keep it on a higher shelf, the older and more pure it grows,
It has no color in itself, but it can make you see rainbows,
You can find it on the Bowery, or you can find it at Elaine’s,
It makes your words more flowery, It makes the sun shine, makes it rain,
You just get out what they put in, and they never put in enough,
Love is like a bottle of gin, but a bottle of gin is not like love.
The actress and singer Anna Kendrick is a big girl now, but back in 1998 on the stage of Carnegie Hall she was just 13 when she remade the Showboat classic Life Upon the Wicked Stage with the ample help of the Kit-Kat Girls from Cabaret. Appearing completely at home up there, we can only imagine what Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II would have made of this ‘update’.
Wonderful stuff, MM, especially Stephin Merritt, even if my diabetes forbids extended listening to thirteen-year-old American girls, garlanded by garter-belts or not.
A question: having just spent a week reading up 19th century minstrelsy (i.e. white – and even more grotesquely sometimes black – Americans in blackface singing about ‘Old Zip Coon’, ‘Jump Jim Crow’ and so on), would I be right in thinking that the seated male singer in the Carolina Chocolate Drops is playing what minstrels called ‘the bones’ (thus ‘Mr Bones’, who sat on one side of the minstrels, and ‘Mr Tambo’, on tambourine, who sat on the other; ‘Mr Interlocutor’ was in the centre). The illustrations I have seen (http://bit.ly/cCqXHk: see right hand player) suggest that I could be right?
Mahlerman, you are a marvel – last week the Conductors, and now this!
Keep ’em coming, that’s all I can say…
A fantastic selection MM, loved every one!
Great stuff Mahlerman. Watching Mr Bones reminded me of my old dad trying to teach me how to play the spoons – an inglorious failure. I enjoyed them all, even the Dylan leaning Stephin Merritt. There’s hope for me yet.
Yes JG, you would be right in thinking etc… and if you have more than a passing interest in ‘the bones’ perhaps I can steer you toward this site – http://www.playdembones.com News to me that the sight of half-a-dozen nubile girls cavorting around in suspender belts would be a problem for you….but what do I know?
I’m receiving a belated but wonderful musical education from you, Mm. Thanks.
I loved that first one in particular. It reminded me of some of Taj Mahal’s tracks, which I have on vinyl somewhere and haven’t played for twenty years. I think someone who would know recently said early black music owed more than was recognised to Gaelic singing. I’d love to know more about the cultural backdrop to these early musical exchanges – how did they work around slavery and segregation I wonder. Can anyone recommend a good book?
I have an ‘obsolete’ book (labelled Los Angeles City Schools) – A Pictoral History of the Negro in America. There’s text as well as photographs.According to the book, “early in the 1920s Hall Johnson, who had been a violinist in the Shuffle Along Orchestra, formed a group of young Harlem singers to present Negro folk songs simply, unencumbered by over-elaborate arragnements”. If you listen to this clip from The Green Pastures, sung by the Hall Johnson Choir, you’ll hear Gaelic merged with Gospel.
Thanks Susan – lovely.
Been racking my brains about where I’d seen the Carolina Chocolate Drops before and just realised they closed the Review Show a while back. They were awesome.
Love is like a bottle of gin – how brilliantly bonkers! Curiously original selection, Mahlerman – enjoyed all of these diversely musical clips.
Well Gaw, the whole subject of the link between the Irish and the Negro in early 19th Century America is a fascinating one that must have been covered by a scholar somewhere. My own background is Protestant Irish, and I remember being gripped by a discovery many years ago of a phrase describing the Irish of that time as ‘Negroes turned inside out’ and Negroes as ‘smoked Irish’. I bought a very dull book on the strength of the title ‘How the Irish Became White’ – but found it badly written and quit after a few dozen pages – but although it didn’t say as much, I’m sure there must have been an overlap of musical styles as Irish married into Negro families, creating mulatto children. I know that the Paddies were considered hard workers when they arrived in droves and, as a result, they took the menial jobs that had been taken by Negroes until that time, leading to the black races being considered ‘lazy and idle’. That can’t have created much ‘harmony’?
There’s a new book out called The Chitlin Circuit that’s getting rave reviews, about the men who played the music in the dive bars of the south that would one day become the inspiration for rock & roll