INDIGENOUS MUSIC
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC, Nat Hentoff CAN THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN? One of Merle Haggard's musical epiphanies has a guy saying: "Someone told my story in a song. He told it all and never missed a line. He...
...In disgust...
...Merle Haggard says of those diluted country singers who have abandoned their roots for riches: "They got no heart...
...Box 10230, Des Moines, Iowa 50336) consists of eight volumes, boxed, containing 143 numbers (more than eighty not currently available anywhere else) and a marvelously lucid and knowledgeable booklet of historical (and anecdotal) notes by Bill Malone, who selected the recordings...
...black blues...
...At one point, Lee Hays, recalling the fallout of his appearances before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, says: "If it wasn't for the honor, I'd just as soon not have been blacklisted...
...In his narrative for the Smithsonian collection , Malone writes of growing up in east Texas in the mid-1930s: "The vivid memories of a mother pouring out her soul in a mournful ballad or gospel song, the lonesome sound of an early-morning radio fiddle filling a still darkened bedroom, or the pleasure of anticipating Roy Acuff s rendition of 'Wabash Cannon Ball' every Saturday night on the Grand Ole Opry...
...Clearly, this understanding was not an academic exercise for Malone, and the result is a pervasively impressive—and grandly entertaining—celebration of this indigenous rainbow music with its deep interplay of venerable though transformed British ballads...
...Can the circle be unbroken...
...He even knew that I almost lost my mind...
...More than a little irony has been added, however...
...He is also an alto saxophonist who spans much of the jazz history of that horn, from down-home shouts to that Great Speckled Bird, Charlie Parker...
...And some musicians are so at ease in both blues and jazz that they bestride the pigeonholes made by critics...
...10107 ($8.95 plus $1.00 shipping...
...Similarly, tenor saxophonist Al Cohn, first renowned for his work with Woody Herman in the 1940s, is what singer Joe Williams calls "a true survivor...
...And it further demonstrates that jazz is by no means just a young man's obsession...
...From the first commercial recording in 1922 of a country fiddler (the startling A.C...
...al fresco dances that first came from the old countries of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and many other vivid strands...
...black and white gospel...
...That's why country music has endured so long...
...And, finally, for listeners who really want to explore the roots of the tradition that keeps nourishing Haggard and other true country story-tellers, there is the first comprehensive recorded history of country music...
...Corny and backward, just like the people who liked country music...
...Western swing...
...Avon paperback...
...That it took so long for a country counterpart is further proof of how unseriously this music has been taken, except by the people to whom it has always been as serious as their lives...
...Yet, in his new set on Concord, Al Cohn Nonpareil, all the old elan is present, and indeed, Cohn is even more satisfying in his autumn years because his tone has become crisper and his beat more incisive...
...Why, sure, says Loretta Lynn: "I think country will keep growing as long as country stays different from pop...
...Haggard surely still has...
...For instance, there is Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson, originally from Texas and for decades a blues singer of extraordinary power and wit...
...as do Willie Nelson...
...Roots of another kind were memorably manifest in a November 1980 recording of the Carnegie Hall concert reuniting The Weavers to mark their first appearance in that hall since 1955...
...They got no soul...
...The impact of The Weavers and Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson begins with their earned authority...
...Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman, blacklisted though they were, always have shown remarkable resiliency, and they do again as they fervently, wittily, angrily, dauntlessly regenerate "Wasn't That a Time," the International Brigade's "Venga Jaleo," "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine," and, of course, "Goodnight Irene...
...Two huge-toned tenors of Texas origin...
...Loretta Lynn, George Jones, and a good many more...
...But for a long time, again quoting Loretta Lynn, "Lots of people who listened to country music were ashamed to admit it...
...For a long time, however, he has spent more time as a composer-arranger than as a player...
...Malone is a professor of history at Tulane University whose previous books include the indispensable The Stars of Country Music, which he co-edited (University of Illinois Press...
...Robertson) to Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain" (1975), Malone traces and documents the whole only-in-America story: from the farms to the honky tonks, from the mountain parlors and churches to the hit charts...
...Buddy Tate and Arnette Cobb, join him along with a rhythm section so cohesively swinging that it might almost move David Stockman—drummer Alan Dawson, bassist George Duvivier, and pianist Ray Bryant, who also affirms his mighty skills as an accompanist for blues singing...
...To keep it true, you have to leave it hanging on the fence...
...That's all changed as country music has gone national so that country performers, and those who started that way, now appear regularly on the top charts...
...The rest of the country dismissed these sounds of the South and Southwest as corny—certainly as compared to Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart...
...I had expected a kind of historical relic in the music of this reunion, but the collective and individual verve of these eclectic descendants of Tom Paine hasn't diminished—at least not on that night...
...In Eddie "Cleanhead" Vinson and the Muse All-Stars Live at Sandy's (Muse), the two voices of "Cleanhead" (singing and playing) soar in a most compatible setting...
...For some, there are also shared pleasures, of course—true love that astonishingly stays true...
...M Choice Cuts The blues, of course, also keeps hanging it on the fence, and that's why the blues remains the common language of jazz—while it also maintains its own legions of players and singers...
...For an advanced—but wholly lucid—seminar in melodic improvising and magisterial swinging, this is an album to keep...
...Can the Merle Haggards keep this true country tradition alive...
...memories of rural dances where the fiddler sounded as if he were outplaying the devil...
...The Weavers Together Again (Loom) is available from Loom Productions, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 2017, New York, N.Y...
...Reverberatingly present are Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family, Hank Williams, and scores more...
...The Smithsonian Collection of Classical Country Music ($54.95 plus $2.49 postage to Smithsonian Recordings, P.O...
...Lord knows there have been similarly ambitious classical, jazz, and theater anthologies...
...It tells a lot of people's "true life stories...
...Actually, it's hard to tell the difference between some of them and pop singers born and reared in New Jersey...
...as Loretta Lynn puts it...
...and especially, memories of growing up in a home so warm you had no idea being poor was something to be ashamed of...
...It's like a party line on which you hear how other folks are also coping with dead-end work, divorce, booze that long ago lost its kick, and the quicksands of cheating on a wife or husband to whom you've had nothing to say for years but to whom you still "belong...
Vol. 45 • October 1981 • No. 10
