Farm Report Roots

By Crispin Sartwell

Railroad, PA - Roots: it's a television mini-series and a cliche, and hence stupid and irritating. But it's also something real: indeed, it's a way of finding the distinction between what's real and what's not. Synth-pop or techno have their uses, but are fundamentally lost. Good popular music proceeds by digging into its place and growing. Roots, we might say, are what distinguishes the trees from the particle board.

That's why, when your seventy, you're not going to be listening to techno or even Philip Glass. You're not going to be listening to Faith Hill or Moby. You're not going to be listening to Justin or J-Lo. You're not going to be listening to Schoenberg or Cage. You're not going to be listening to David Bowie or Lou Reed. If you know how to suck up nutrients, you're going to be listening to roots reggae, blues, country, or maybe some old school hip hop.

Jeannie Kendall is an undervalued treasure of American culture. As half of the remarkably sweet, perverse, and kitschy father-and-daughter duo The Kendalls, she had a series of hits in the late seventies and early eighties. Jeannie and Royce specialized in cheating songs, and came up with the overwhelming classics of country infidelity, such as "Teach Me to Cheat." Jeannie actually sang duets in which she appeared to be cheating on her husband with her father, or alternately, cheating on her father with somebody else. The kitsch extended to the invention of the football cheating song ("A Dallas Cowboy and New Orleans Saint," Pittsburgh Stealers") surely the ultimate American music, while simultaneously the Kendalls made a series of records of deep, gentle beauty ("Thank God for the Radio," "My Baby's Gone").

Throughout all this, Jeannie was a great singer, a kind of paradigm: deeply rural in her nasality, but perfectly melodic. Comparable in quality to Dolly Parton or Emmylou Harris, she managed to come in under the radar and never quite got the recognition due her. Royce is gone now, and Jeannie has made an acoustic record ("Jeannie Kendall" (Rounder)) that includes guest shots by a number of people who are wise enough to be her fans, including Emmylou, Alison Krauss and Union Station, Ricky Skaggs, Allison Moorer, and Alan Jackson (who's covered several Kendalls songs over the years).

Jeannie sounds as lovely as ever, and the songs are great, including a couple of classic "cycle of life" country songs, like the paradigmatic final moment, "I'm Still Here."

Perhaps you won't excuse me for saying so, but it's been a long, long time since Willie Nelson made a good record. Since sometime in the mid-seventies, he's sounded kind of numb to me, impassive, inexpressive, going through the motions. His last big radio attack was in the early eighties with his recordings of old-time pop standards, and though they had pretty moments, they had pronounced somnambulistic tendencies.

But "Crazy: the Demo Sessions" (Sugar Hill) reminds us that Willie is really one of the greatest songwriters and performers that America has produced. A collection of demo tapes from the early sixties - re-mastered into a condition of astonishing transparency - it is comparable in its way to last year's "Hank Williams Alone With His Guitar." That album simply showed exactly who Hank was, removing all the distractions and leaving only pure genius.

Willie's rowdy outlawism was always a bit ironic given the delicacy and sophistication of the voice, the delicacy and sophistication of the guitar, and the delicacy and sophistication of the songs, which as this album displays intensely, were always suspended perfectly between country and pre-rock pop and jazz. Anyway, this record is unimaginably beautiful, and includes the classic songs you've heard - "Crazy," "Three Days" - and classic songs nobody's ever heard.

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Yes. Oh yes. It's true that Nick Curran looks like a bit of a dork on the cover of "Doctor Velvet" (Blind Pig), possibly because he's wearing sunglassses, the lenses of which are shaped like Texas and a red naugahyde jacket with leopard-skin trim, sitting in an old Cadillac with two girls. Is he serious, or just playing at being a latebreaking member of the Fab Thunderbirds? Doesn't really matter, does it, because if Screaming Jay Hawkins was appearing tonight with the Lowell Fulson band, they'd sound like this, though maybe not quite as good. This is incredibly juicy jump blues: not like a Stevie Ray Vaughn virtuoso outpouring of technical facility (though Curran in fact has incredible chops on the guitar), but like a perfect blues-heavy r&b that sounds Texas by way of socal (though Curran's from (?) maine), T-Boneish I guess.

Confucius said that the ideal of human life would be to perform the traditions of one's culture perfectly, but spontaneously. It's like shaking hands: when it's done right, the movements are easy and coordinated, but they also enact the prescribed ceremonial greeting. It's extremely encouraging that a young guy could understand the blues tradition this thoroughly, this bone-deep. He finds a perfectly natural contemporary expression in this music, so that he plays it note-perfect but with spontaneity. I've been playing "Don't be Angry" over and over, but it's only one of several great songs studding an album that is all really really fucking good. This is certainly the best new blues album, and the best new blues artist, I've heard in years.

The idea of "the first Yardbirds album since 1968" is just a mite absurd, especially since the lead singer, Keith Relf died decades ago. Obviously, the birds, who at different times featured Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page, were seminal blues rockers and proto-heavy-metal pseudo-gods. So i had "Birdland" (Favored Nations) - which consists of half new songs half old - with a couple of original members, a new singer, and rotating lineup including Steve Vai, Slash, Beck (Jeff, I mean) etc etc - pegged as a really sad attempt to cash in.

Tell you what though. Not only is this a straight-up great rock album. it's true to the spirit of the original stuff but also contempo. I don't know, even the re-recording of, say "For your Love," is very worthwhile: faithful but not rigid, and of course with contemporary production standards rather. We certainly have reached the point where sixties blues rock is refreshing (witness the revival of the style just after this by the Strokes, Hives, and whomever) and none moreso than this.

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Wackies Sampler Volume 1, (Wackie's) comes as something of a revelation. And it teaches us something about our access to Jamaican music, and the music of anywhere, pretty much, that is not here. This thing from the reincarnated Wackie's records gives us 18 cuts from artists who would be thought of in the US (outside of a small group of very serious reggae freaks) as obscure or second-tier: the Love Joys, Stranger Cole, Leroy Sibbles, Wayne Jarrett. But there is nothing second-tier about this music, which is amazingly consistent in its combination of simplicity, seriousness, and beauty. There is not a weak cut here, and it's liable to send you (or me, for that matter) rummaging into obscure back catalogues, finding out about these great musicians.

The lesson is that, when you get down to it, what makes it out of Jamaica and into our consciousness is relatively arbitrary, because our attention is limited. so back in the seventies, when we were hearing really pretty bad records by Peter Tosh, or Dennis Brown, or Gregory Isaacs, we should have been exploring.

Dub Syndicate's "Murder Tone" (On-u/Caroline), evidently a collection of recordings made over a decade or so, is absolutely definitive digital dub made by a collective that revolves around Adrian Sherwood and Style Scott. Lee Perry is listed as a producer (!) and credits include Flabba Holt, Bingy Bunny, and Bim Sherman. obviously, it can't get any better than that, and as a matter of fact it doesn't. this disc is by turns meditative and haunting, atmospheric and pointed, hypnotic and melodic; there is no circumstance, essentially, in which this is not the best album to put on. "your head is a bulbous punching-bag of sound," they proclaim, before launching into a profound rethinking of the theme from Gilligan's Island.

While I'm on the subject of Adrian Sherwood, I'm going to pause to rave about "The Master Recordings, Volumes 1 &2 (on-u). Sherwood is an English genius who started his own record label when he was 17, like around '79 or '80. since then, he's made the sweet-nastiest dub available with a stable of artists, including singers and players, prince far i, dub syndicate, etc etc. this is a pair of greatest-riddims collections that are cheap. they are the work of a single artist, however. the rhythm tracks are the hottest and hardest: like burning so slow, but so hot: all the tracks are built on a bed of coals, baby. unimaginably excellent.

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Sometimes individuals get promoted to the status of genres. That has happened in the world of Americana with Lucinda Williams. Artists such as Julie Miller, Kathleen Edwards ("Failer," (Rounder)) , and Kim Richey ("Rise" (Lost Highway)), sound a lot, lot like Lucinda. Only not as good.

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One of the most disturbing moments I ever experienced at a concert was at a Laurie Anderson show in the early eighties. Before launching into some arch and empty electronic deconstruction of Dolly Parton's beautiful "Tennessee Mountain Home," Ms. Anderson said something like this: "You know that bitch left Tennessee as fast as she could go and never wanted to go back." Now I suppose that Ms. Anderson and her dude Lou have values that reflect their milieu up there in the NYC art world: fuck everybody, do all the drugs, exist with complete decadence and stupefying artificiality, sneer at the very idea or possibility of decency, regard yourself as a sophisticated artiste, make music of stupefying mediocrity and monotony. Sadly for the art world, everyone gets to be nostalgic for where they come from, especially if it's the East Tennessee Hills. Where Laurie and Lou live, the trees have to be caged for their own protection.

Larry Sparks is a veteran bluegrass guitar player with a classic tenor, a quietly impressive repetoire, and no pretensions other than a celebration of decency and home. "The Coldest Part of Winter" (Rebel) is beautiful suite of songs about the old home place, about the longing for the rural and the true. Maybe Laurie's values have taken a turn toward the existent in recent years, but if not I am planning to kidnap her and lock her in a room for an indefinite duration with this cd playing. She will emerge a better person and a better artist

Finally, allow me to recommend to Laurie and to you a trio of women from Vancouver: The Be Good Tanyas. I like the way they look - like friendly, normal people, and I love the way they sound: harmonies that are simple, fragile, and lovely over understated but perfect acoustic accompaniment. "Chinatown" (Nettwerk), is sweet, direct, rooted, alive, true.