BuellKazee: 'we just sang by nature'
Hentoff, Nat
INDIGENOUS MUSIC BuellKazee: 'we just sang by nature' Nat Hentoff I first came to the music of Appala-chia through Library of Congress recordings of singers who sounded like ancient balladeers....
...If you were there, you can, if you want to, be there again...
...With sunny, relaxed authority, this appreciative daughter recalls those nights when every word in a song could be heard, when the rhythms danced rather than pounded or whimpered, and when the dynamics were so much more than just loud or soft...
...Among his standards are the title tune, "She's Funny That Way," and "Sleepy Time Gal...
...Whiting makes the music of then sound quite contemporary for, after all, she is...
...Ya Yo Me Cure (American Clave 1001) brings together a number of the most multiple-skilled (in jazz and Latin-American music) Nuyoriquenos, led by trumpeter Jerry Gonzales...
...We were entertainers...
...So inhospitable are current record labels to-what might be called traditional (melodic, non-electrified) popular singers that even Tony Bennett has not had a new album in several years...
...His high, calm, but intense voice (a paradox, but there it is) commands attention, and then still reverberates after the tale is done...
...As for the songs of the high-born brought low in castles that could not keep out fate, Buell Kazee, when he went to college in Kentucky, was rather amazed to find that the ballads being dissected in his English courses were ones that were still being sung where he came from...
...Choice cuts Before there was jazz, the beat had long since been laid down—pulsing call-and-response vocal lines and intricate polyrhythms on stringed instruments and just hands...
...He died in 1976, and while his preaching may have gotten him where he wanted to go, it is this album that will show generations to come down here what it was to sing and play by nature...
...A silvery master of mountain banjo, it was said, and a singer whose sound was clear as spring water and touched your soul besides, if you had one...
...And there are work songs and homegrown Southern love songs ("If I had wings like Noah's dove, I'd fly to my true love's door...
...in Kentucky have released on their June Appal label an album that makes utterly clear why Kazee has helped shape many of the newer traditionalists (Buell Kazee, June Appal JA 009, Box 743, Whitesburg, Kentucky 41858...
...It has not been generally available until now...
...And the words and expressions were also still being spoken back there...
...Harmonies that glowed in the dark' When he was a boy, playing on the banjo alongside a fiddler, "sometimes in the summertime on the dirt streets around the courthouse, we'd get the instruments out and sit there and play in the moonlight, and people would sing...
...We just sang by nature...
...Radiola, c/o Radio Yesteryear, Box C, Sandy Hook, Connecticut 06482...
...In the illuminating booklet of notes by Loyall Jones, Kazee, born in 1900 in Magoffin County in the mountains of eastern Kentucky, tells how the old ballads and banjo tunes were handed down through the generations like the very speech cadences of the families...
...And then there is Kazee's description of the exhilaration of natural music-making— much like similar memories I have heard from black country songsters and pickers: "Picking the banjo by the fireside at night, you know, it would lead up to a mood...
...He had recorded some in the late 1920s, but those sides were exceedingly hard to find, and I never did come across one...
...The high art of traditional ballad singing requires, of course, the rare ability to keep a long narrative line building—so pregnant with anticipation that even though you've heard the story scores and more of times, you're inexorably caught in the rhythms of inevitability...
...There have been nonpareil releases by Mabel Mercer, the late Dick Haymes, Hugh Shannon, and Margaret Whiting...
...There are Child ballads (among them, "Blackjack Davy," about a lady fair that forsook her house, land, wedded lord, and baby-o to lie on a cold river bank with Black Jack Davy...
...With their own originals and jazz standards (by Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, and Wayne Shorter), they interweave the thrust and colors of tim-bales, guataca, conch shells, with vocals and horns...
...We'd have a great time...
...The powerful momentum of cross-rhythms, punctuated by swift, incantatory voices, is also the musical foundation of those Spanish-speaking musicians who call themselves Nuyoriquenos...
...Kazee does this, seemingly effortlessly, throughout...
...Everybody sang and nobody thought there was anything unusual about it...
...Kazee decided, Loyall Jones writes, that "his mother was an Elizabethan type of woman...
...For information, JCOA/New Music Distribution Service, 500 Broadway, New York, New York 10012...
...Or, as Peter Rowan once wrote of listening to these celebrations of acoustic sounds: "It rang out—harmonies that glowed in the dark...
...Seeking out other singers in concerts—some folks from the hollows visited up North during the folk song awakening in the colleges during the 1950s—I occasionally heard references to Buell Kazee...
...And some of the voices of these descendants of early British settlers were still clear and supple—making it seem all the more as if, as in Miss Havisham's room in Great Expectations, "Everything had stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago...
...Kazee did not seem much at ease...
...Finally, the resourceful young members of the Appalshop media collective Nat Hentoff writes regularly about music for The Progressive...
...But weathered and cracked as their voices were, they made those dreamlike, often frighteningly sad tales as compelling as a black blues or the God-confronting chant of a Jewish hazzan...
...From the turn of the century, Kazee also nurtures the story of "The Orphan Girl," who dies on the steps of the home of a rich man after "his proud lips curled, he scornfully said, 'No home, no bread for the poor.' " And there are hymns, for Buell Kazee was a preacher...
...That is, they live in New York but they hear their own heritages as well...
...However, the small but dauntless Audiophile Records (3008 Wadsworth Mill Place, Atlanta, Georgia 30032) insists on following the tastes of its owner, George H. Buck Jr...
...The bands—swinging in or serenading the new year from New York, Evansville, San Diego, and other places—are: Harry James, Count Ba-sie, Freddie Martin, Woody Herman, Gene Krupa, Henry King, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Dorsey, Les Brown, Artie Shaw, Stan Kenton, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Louis Prima1, and Carmen Cavallero...
...Titled Too Marvelous for Words (Audiophile AP 152), the Whiting set is dedicated by her to Johnny Mercer and her father, Richard Whiting...
...It'd get so everything you'd touch would be good...
...They do not dilute the flavor of any of the ingredients, creating yet another new dimension of improvising from down home...
...Then there was a Folkways album in 1958, but while there were moments that made the legend real, it was kind of fragmentary...
...If you weren't, some of the jazz on these tracks transcends even nostalgia...
...For another way of looking backward, 1945-1946 New Year's Radio Dancing Party (Radiola MR-1031) is just that—a series of remotes originally shortwaved to American soldiers around the world...
Vol. 45 • March 1981 • No. 3
