On Music
COOK, BRUCE
On Music BEGINNING LIFE AT 33 BY BRUCE COOK IT is hard to know how to classify Larry Jon Wilson. If he had come along 15 years ago, they would have called him a folk singer. They would have been...
...That night on stage he did Joan Baez's "Diamonds and Rust," with a fine sense of drama and style...
...In fact, his compositions are literary in the best sense...
...The crowd wasn't large the night I saw him at the Childe Harold in Washington, D.C., but it was responsive...
...he went into product development at Fiberglas, then took up sales...
...In "Let Me Sing My Song to You," the title tune of the new album, he commented on his new life in music and told what his friends and neighbors think of it...
...nor was it selected simply because it is a fitting name for a first effort...
...Mail trucking operation...
...Wilson has a strong, deep voice which he uses with authority and complete control...
...In "Canoochee Revisited" he takes us to the little south Georgia country church he and his father used to attend each Sunday...
...His songs are his own and nobody else's ??about his life, his family, and the country he comes from...
...They seem in that respect specifically Southern, steeped in the history of family and place, analogues in song to the fiction of Faulkner and Welty...
...His reminiscences of life in rural Georgia and his celebrations of married life are performed with the same strong feeling he showed on the first record, but with greater style and polish...
...And my people been living down there, making love, and war, and babies, and liquor for about 285 or 90 years...
...As I said at the outset, though, it's difficult to classify Larry Jon Wilson...
...He phrases with a conversational ease and subtlety, so that, alone on the stage with his guitar, he gives what seems like an informal backporch concert on a warm spring night somewhere in the rural South...
...His face, pitted and lined, prominently features a rather bulbous nose...
...Wilson has turned into a first-rate performer as well...
...Wilson's second album Let Me Sing My Song to You (Monument KZ 34041), should consolidate and add to his reputation...
...He's mature, intelligent, well-read, and articulate...
...And in the meantime they've corrupted Ohoopee to become the Hoopee...
...They would have been wrong, for unlike folk music, the songs he writes and performs are very personal and often quite emotionally complex...
...Evocative and elegiac, many of them have an almost reverent attitude toward the past...
...Take the opening number of his first album, New Beginnings (Monument KZ 33382...
...Up on the little stage, a single spotlight shining down upon him, he looks like a laborer very hard at work...
...The melody and setting perfectly recall and reuse the old rollicking Baptist hymn style...
...The song that follows, "Hoopee River Bottomland," is an effort to come to terms with a hard piece of land...
...I Remember It Well" is not Larry Jon Wilson's own song but the work of a Nashville writer named Rob Galbraith...
...The Ballad of Handy Mackey,' a simple reminiscence of a black man he knew as a boy, was even improved by this more austere kind of rendition...
...That's not quite right either, for there is a good rumble of rocky funk in every note he sings...
...Within a year, he had an album out and was beginning to get bookings in major cities across the country...
...Because he is from Georgia, has a voice that is soft around the edges, and records for a Nashville label, he is generally regarded today as a country singer...
...In one of them, "Bertrand My Son,' Wilson tells frankly of his son s serious orthopedic problems without ever becoming sentimental or mawkish, and in so doing manages to extend the limits of his art...
...It is a good song, wryly ironic and written from fully-felt experience...
...And the way he sings them is equally unique...
...But he is very much his own man...
...Wilson isn't afraid to be the butt of a joke...
...So, at the age of 33 he made his new beginning in music...
...In the right setting??a medium-sized club or a small hall??he manages to achieve an intimacy and a directness in his communication with the audience that any singer would envy...
...As he gets deeper into his music he begins to sweat, droplets running down his brow and cheeks, disappearing into his blond beard and plopping onto his guitar...
...I Remember It Well," a tale of one man's disaster on a statutory rape charge, led him directly into the old chain gang song, "Another Man Done Gone," delivered in a rousing and soulful style...
...It worked...
...That may account for the impressive presence he generates when seen and heard in person...
...In a way, I suppose he is part of the "counter-country" group in Nashville that includes some of the best of the younger performers...
...The leaders of this counter-country group are Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Billy Swan, and Kris Kristofferson ??if "leaders" is quite the word for such a loose assembly of free spirits...
...The album also includes other songs of greater complexity and subtlety...
...In "The Truth Ain't in You" he delivers a funny anecdote about his "30-minute football scholarship" at the University of Georgia...
...When the man said "plastics" to him, that sounded like a pretty good idea...
...His attraction can't be his good looks...
...This tale of his unrequited love for the girlfriend of a Baltimore Colt is sung at his own expense...
...Larry Jon took it over, kept at it until his father died, and finally decided to do what he had always wanted to do...
...They gave him the kind of devoted attention that is usually offered only to classical performers...
...His tone itself communicates years of experience, hard times, and a certain physical weariness...
...No, "new beginnings" more or less sums up what has been happening with Larry Jon Wilson's life in the last two years...
...He's stocky-a football player gone heavy in the front??and looks more than every month of his 35 years...
...Somehow, performing a song that was distinctly not his own, he managed to become someone quite different...
...That came a little while later when his father gave up his U.S...
...There arc three or four songs by others on Let Me Sing My Song to You, chosen well enough to fit right in with the rest...
...He was quite successful in business, but it took a lot out of him: He had a heart attack at age 27...
...At first, it's difficult to see what he has that fascinates people so...
...Wilson goes back to his roots in this way again and again...
...They are much less concerned than their elders with preserving the purity of country, and elements of rock and old-fashioned backwoods blues have been incorporated into their version of the music...
...The title of that initial album, issued last summer, represents more than merely the tag on a nice song in the collection...
...his music fits in well with theirs...
...In South Georgia there's a river called the Ohoopee River," he tells us in the spoken introduction...
...Larry Jon Wilson is comfortable with them...
...Now 35, he graduated from college as a chemist...
...And if your idea of country music and musicians comes from the simplistic tunes and know-nothing performers in the movie Nashville, then Larry Jon Wilson won't satisfy your preconceptions at all...
...What is perhaps most impressive about Wilson is the extent to which he has been able to put his persona] imprint on his music...
...None of the production paraphernalia of his records??the full rhythm section and background vocals ??was missed when he sat down and started singing...
...XT His sound, however, is leisurely...
...In the hospital, Wilson decided to get out of Fiberglas at the earliest opportunity...
...Wilson is a natural actor, able not only to sing songs but to inhabit them, to occupy their space from the inside...
Vol. 59 • March 1976 • No. 7
