“Hope & Sorrow” by Wilder Adkins [a review]
March 19, 2016
So here we find ourselves at nature’s crossroads—that transitional purgatory between winter and spring, where the dead things of wintertime fade among the buds of a new season. Birds are reappearing against gray skies. Winds are blowing from new directions. It’s an appropriate climate for Wilder Adkins new record, Hope & Sorrow. Through 12 dreamy songs, Adkins sings in that middle ground where heartache meets love, questions meet faith, and joy blends with pain. The songs are quiet, led by Adkins’ gentle guitar and dulcimer work, but there are extra flourishes this time around as well. There are bursts of string-work and ethereal harmonies. Though each song feels small and intensely personal, there is a grandness to the record. It is Adkins grappling all night as Jacob did, fighting for blessing. It is the artist trying to make sense of those gray, middle grounds. In this world of Hope & Sorrow, time is fading, flowers are blooming and life is flooding in.
You can listen to and purchase the album at https://wilderadkins.bandcamp.com/
“Slow Trauma” by Bill Mallonee [a review]
March 14, 2016
To look at Bill Mallonee these days—the gaunt cowboy with gray hair falling down to his shoulders, his white and gray beard in tangles, his weary eyes staring at something off camera, something distant—you are quite aware that he’s seen a thing or two in his day. In the 90s, he and his band the Vigilantes of Love were regularly on the verge of some kind of mainstream success, with Mallonee poised to take his place among the great songwriters of the ages. But somehow, as those mainstream mechanisms seem to roll, it never quite happened. Eventually he retreated from the road, to the highlands of New Mexico and a simpler life.
The desert suits Mallonee. His retreat (or whatever you want to call it) has given him a creative outlet to pour all that mileage into bittersweet albums about faith, hope, love and the darkness that hovers like a cloud around each. His latest record, Slow Trauma, is another of his late period masterworks. Across 10 songs, Mallonee extracts wisdom from the lives of American waywards, his own life included, as they look across the expanse for some kind of redemption. Mallonee wrote the songs, and he and his wife play all the instruments—a full band of guitars, harmonica, piano and percussion. They call themselves the Big Sky Ramblers, and out there at the edge of the highway, where the mainstream machines cease to roll, they’re coming to grips with hard roads travelled, and heavenly roads ahead.
You can listen to and purchase the album at http://billmalloneemusic.bandcamp.com/
I Was There When it Happened: Fern Jones’ The Glory Road
January 26, 2016
After a season of heavy rain, my dad and I were investigating a long shaft of running water that was trailing its way through my grandparents’ back yard, continually moving downward until disrupting the banks of a creek that ran through the front. This stream of running water, that gathered somewhere among the trees behind their house, seemed so unassuming, yet it was causing substantial shifts in the ground. Years from now, my dad noted, the entire landscape would be different. More earth would be carved out. The banks of the creek would continue to collapse and the creek would widen.
Following that trail of water, examining the damage it was causing, and speculating on the future of my grandparents’ farmland, I started thinking about the fickle passage of time. I’m pretty attached to that homestead. I spent a childhood roaming the hills and trees around their house. But time has a tendency to disrupt our nostalgia. The people and places that we invest in here and now will look different a little further out. Sometimes it’s for the worst, and sometimes it’s for the better.
At the same time that all of these thoughts were coming to me, I had also been listening to the music of Fern Jones and reflecting on her brief stint in the gospel music business of the 1950s. Though she wrote a hit gospel song that would be covered by many in the years that followed, Fern would never reach a substantial audience in her lifetime—at least beyond the Pentecostal tent revival circuit. She may have developed a new way of singing and playing gospel music—something closer to rockabilly and early rock and roll—but unfortunately, it would happen just before shifts in the industry would allow for more diversity in the gospel sound.
Fern was probably a bit too innovative and a bit too early. She recorded an album’s worth of rockability-infused gospel songs with some of Nashville’s finest session players, but after a splintering of her record company, the album would be shelved for decades, somehow surviving a house cleaning that saw many of her contemporaries’ records destroyed. Watching her record fade into obscurity, having no power to do anything about it, she would retreat from the spotlight and quietly fight to win back her masters in the years that followed. It would be decades before she would win that fight, and it wouldn’t be until after her death that her songs would re-emerge as the Glory Road on the Numero Label.
Born in 1923, Fern absorbed all the sounds she was hearing over late night radio waves—pop and country and especially blues songs. She learned the tunes and strummed each chord on a catalog-bought guitar. Her voice sounded as if she had lived out every heartbroken word. She sang in juke joints and country bars, until a local chef in El Dorado, Arkansans swept her off her feet. Fern was only 16 when she married Raymond D. Jones. Before long, Raymond would covert to Christianity, and Fern with him. Raymond became the fiery Reverend Raymond D. Jones in the strict Assemblies of God Church, and Fern’s musical ambitions would henceforth be veered toward the ministerial. But she found a way to make it work, harnessing the energy of those juke joint numbers into guitar heavy gospel songs. The two evangelists hit the tent revival circuit, carrying their message throughout the south on a rockabilly beat.
Like a lot of gospel musicians in those days, Fern and Raymond printed their own records, and sold them out of the back of their car. It was when Fern hitched her wagon to the great gospel machine that she experienced, firsthand, the somewhat seedy side of salvation songs. She had the opportunity to get “I Was There When It Happened” published, but only by putting someone else’s name beside her’s in the credits of the song. And then there were those recordings—a batch of gospel songs that bounced along to an electric guitar; that swayed to a boozy saloon piano; that professed a love for God with all the conviction of Patsy Cline walking after midnight. She saw her songs forgotten and nearly destroyed. And then she was gone.
* * *
So what does all of this have to do with a crumbling backyard and a rising creek? I suppose that the music Fern was playing all over those Southern roads seemed to have little impact on the culture of the 1950s. Her music would come and go in just a few years, and she would fade away like most of her contemporaries. Fern perhaps, was that tiny stream of water, carving her way through a sea of dirt. But the sounds that she was making, the styles she was integrating into spiritual music, would have major impacts that the artist herself probably won’t get credit for. Fern’s daughter, Anita Garner, reflects upon her mother’s legacy this way: “She was an original. One magazine referred to her as ‘A Southern Master’. I still marvel at the way she used her gifts and her skills to get her music into the world, when every bit of logic would say it was impossible. She wrote songs, she found tape recorders to record demos, she found people to listen to them…”
Fern may not have seen it or felt it, but the ground had been shifted in her wake. The earth had been moved.
Information for this essay was gathered from an interview I conducted with Anita Garner, and through the liner notes of Numero Group’s The Glory Road release.
For more information on Fern and her story, visit Anita’s website at http://thegloryroad.com/thegloryroad/index.htm
“Sing to Your Mountain” by Rachel [a review]
September 3, 2015
When I look at what is happening at Great Comfort Records, I am reminded of the gospel record labels of yesteryear—those many companies that sprang up in the early days of vinyl, in the inner city side streets of Cleveland and Chicago and elsewhere, where families and congregations were making vibrant spiritual music with what appeared to be little regard for the mass market process. They didn’t always have the most polished sound, but what they did have in abundance was plain, unfiltered joy. Great Comfort’s newest release, Sing to Your Mountain by Rachel, continues that same tradition of exuberant melody makers wrecking joyful havoc upon unsuspecting listeners. Rachel and friends are making music for the sheer joy of worship. A member of brother Daniel’s Danielson Familie, and daughter of hymnist Lenny Smith, Rachel has found a middle ground between the former’s unusual arrangements and the latter’s love of Biblical poetry. Her songs are full of peace and longing and aggression. Her whispering voice carries each tune, drawing wayward melodies back to earth, lest they escape into the stratosphere. It’s worship music, sure, but not in a genre-type sense. It’s worship music because she sings with conviction and fire and of course, plain, unfiltered joy.
You can find out more about the artist and purchase her newest release at greatcomfortrecords.com
Dying from Home: The Louvin Brothers’ “Satan is Real”
June 29, 2015
There’s no getting around the theology of the Louvin Brothers. It’s right there in the title of their most famous— or infamous— record, Satan is Real. Red and orange flames lick the darkness. And the accuser himself stares us down through empty yellow eyes, a crude statue standing atop a hill of burning tires.
Satan is real, working in spirit…
You can see him and hear him in this world everyday
The brothers’ voices, so matter-of-fact, are barely distinguishable from each other. There’s no fire in their tone. There’s no brimstone in their inflections. Salvation and damnation are as natural as eating and sleeping. And perhaps that is what makes their delivery all the more terrifying.
It’s true that the music on this record has been somewhat overshadowed by that very peculiar picture— the two brothers standing beneath a homemade devil statue, clad in white and breathing in those tire fumes. Their arms are outstretched and pleading us to follow a better road. But put aside your visual concerns (and possibly even your theological ones), and what emerges is a striking, pull-no-punches country masterpiece. The playing is tight, a skilled Nashville band hitting all the right notes on all the right instruments, moving from sad county waltzes to tent revival celebrations.
The brothers had started off in gospel music, prompted by producer Ken Nelson, but had to fight to move beyond the genre. Charlie, always the straight talker, looked back on those years in his memoir. He writes, “Even though we were singing more and more secular songs, and making good money at it, we never did stop doing the gospel stuff. We wrote a lot of songs that got used for altar calls, and I still get fan mail from people who swear up and down that the Louvin Brothers music saved their life. I doubt if God’ll give us any credit for that though. I fear that we have to do more than write words for the big reward, but it was nice to know that our songs helped a person or two”. It was a few years into their “secular” career that Satan is Real was recorded.
* * *
The Louvin Brothers’ life was as harsh as the religion they sang about: hot days in the Alabama cotton fields; cruel beatings at the hand of an abusive father. Ira, the oldest, took the brunt of the violence, and perhaps grew angrier because of it. By some accounts he was a nonbeliever, who early in life was destined to be a preacher. When he chose music over the Good Book, his life took a hard spiral into alcoholism and bitterness that he never recovered from. Perhaps he did believe. Perhaps he drank to escape a chasing God, and lashed out not at his wives or his brother or his band mates, but at the One he was running from.
Whatever the case, a Cain and Abel-like mythology surrounds the two brothers. Charlie was the good, temperate family man. Ira was the resentful, angry womanizer; known to smash his mandolin in fits of rage. As the Louvins career rose in the 50s and early 60s, and fame took them from Louisiana to Nashville to the stage of the Opry, Ira slowly burned every bridge that led them there, until their partnership dissolved in 1963.
It was only 5 years earlier that the brothers had stood together among those burning tires and that peculiar stature, fighting the darkness with their extraordinary harmonies.
* * *
In 1965, Ira would leave with his fourth wife to play a solo show in Kansas City. Sometime before he left, he told his mother he was going to use the money from the show to buy a tent and finally start preaching.
Ira was only 41, but he had lived a few lifetimes by then. As a child, his father had beaten him with a fence post until he had lost consciousness. During his second marriage, he had been shot six times by a wife after he tried to strangle her with a telephone cord. And through it all, he had slowly sunk to the burning depths of alcoholism, fighting and cussing and smashing mandolins all the way down. Maybe, one hopes, he was about to crawl out again, and find a little redemption amid the cruel world he was able to characterize so well in his songs. And perhaps, before the shattering of glass and the collision of metal that robbed him of any future, he had found that redemption, or saw that light, or heard those angels rejoicing.
The irony wasn’t lost on anyone. Driving home from that Kansas City show, his car was hit head-on by a drunk driver, killing him and his wife instantly. It was a story as tragic as any the Louvins sang about. Bill Monroe gave a mournful rendition of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at the funeral. The voices of Charlie and Ira would never merge and beguile again.
Charlie would go onto a prolific solo career, eventually fighting the same fight that many of the country legends do— finding relevance amidst the harsh light of younger Nashville stars. But just like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and many others, Charlie re-emerged in his old age as a seasoned county icon, recording a string of albums at the end of his life for independent label, Tompkins Square Records. His voice isn’t as recognizable without the ghostly harmonies of brother Ira, but Charlie stuck to each word like it was Biblical truth, and the music— love songs and murder ballads, and of course, gospel hymns— continued to pull no punches. It was as matter-of-fact as it was in the 1956, reflecting a faith that had been callused by death and disease and every kind of hardship, but alive and real nonetheless. He writes, “…if you think you can do anything you want and still go to heaven, you’re full of shit. God’s always right there when you think you’re getting away with something. There’s nothing that escapes him and nothing he doesn’t know”.
Charlie, singing and playing till the end, died in 2011 after a long fight with pancreatic cancer.
Information was gathered from Charlie Louvin’s autobiography, Satan is Real, and Charles Wolfe’s In Close Harmony: the Story of the Louvin Brothers.
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