Author Archives: Easy Ed

Damn the Hype, Praise the Boxer

jack_johnsonIf I was a baseball player you might say I’m in a slump. I feel as though, when I’m up to bat, I swing at air. If a ball speeds toward me, I reach up to catch but it just sails through my glove. I could grow a beard, shave it off, lower my right shoulder, raise my left, shuffle my feet, or tug at my ears. No change. And that’s probably the best analogy I can come up with, as to my current relationship with new music.

This affliction is hardly new, and I’ve been struck by it several times in the past few years. One cure that seems to work has been for me to take a break from the new stuff and get back to the tried and true — simply immerse myself in old favorites. I might spend a month listening to only the Carter Family Border Radio set, or something completely off the wall. Last year, it was 60 days of the complete Elvis Costello discography.

I realize that it can wear a little thin when those of us who have the good fortune of being able to share our discoveries and opinions with readers on a regular basis are constantly dragging out endless stories about the good ol’ days. I have attempted — but perhaps not always succeeded — to strike a balance. After all, No Depression‘s new tagline is “The Journal of Roots Music,” but I think it’s fair to say that the majority of the subject matter and content that dominates this website and others like it is primarily focused on new releases: artists currently on tour, upcoming festival lineups, reviews of recent concerts.

About four months ago, I started to aggregate and post a minimum of three news stories per week on my various social media platforms that related to roots music. Relying on two dozen websites that emphasize folk, blues, jazz, alt-country, bluegrass, old-time, and the ilk, I soon discovered that everybody is (more or less) reporting on the same news, the same artists, and the same albums. While I still budget my “ear share” to listening to a dozen or so new albums each week, I find that very little of it is sticking.

Now, this isn’t a situation where the old curmudgeon doesn’t think there’s great music out there, waiting to be heard. At least I hope it isn’t coming off like that. To the contrary, I think there’s almost too much of the good stuff and too little time to find it. I find myself feeling as though I’m being manipulated by high octane hype that’s beginning to stifle my overall interest. Throw in the weekly Top 40 chart from the Americana Music Association along with dozens of stories about the artist-album-flavor of the week from Sturgill, Hayes, Parker, Margo, or the Jayhawks, and it just makes me want to … what … listen to Bruce Springsteen do “Purple Rain” again?

For now, I’m alternating my listening time between Norman Blake’s Flying Fish output and hundreds of various jazz titles that have been ripped from old 78s, digitized, and sent to me from a friend in Europe.

Meanwhile, Ernie in Kansas City piqued my interest when he sent me a note asking if I knew about the famous boxer Jack Johnson, who went by the nickname of “The Galveston Giant.” He was the first African-American world heavyweight champion, from 1908 through 1915. In the 1920s, after serving time in prison, he recorded a side or two for Ajax Records. He has an amazing life story and Ken Burns produced a film about him you might want to check out.

Recently I found this clip and it’s reminds me of why I love music. Both old and new.

https://youtu.be/lswBX3cBKAQ

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column on the No Depression website.

Photo by Otto Sarony/1908 CC 2.0

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #6

SDD10

Photo by Sandy Dyas

Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

Hidden Agenda Deluxe.

When I first heard the Pan Alley Fever, the debut album from Hidden Agenda Deluxe, I imagined that they must come out of Georgia or Alabama with their Allman Brothers meets The Band vibe. It appears that I missed the geographic location by about ten thousand miles because when I visited their website this is what I saw:

Wat krijg je als je een aantal Nederlandse drukbezette topmuzikanten bij elkaar zet die allemaal al van echte Americana hielden voordat iemand nog wist wat die term ging inhouden? Juist: Americana Deluxe. Met binnen de gelederen de internationaal gelauwerde singer-songwriters BJ Baartmans en Eric Devries, wekt een samenwerking hoge verwachtingen.

So yeah…Mississippi, right?

This is a collaboration of accomplished and established Dutch musicians that includes the aforementioned Baartmans and Devries, along with bassist Gerald van Beuningen and drummer-vocalist Sjoerd van Bommel. Though not listed as an official band member, Rob Geboers’ Hammond organ is sprinkled throughout.

While you can stream it here in the US on Spotify or download it from Amazon, so far there is little press about these guys and I see only a few one-off gigs booked. Looks like their own solo careers keeps them pretty busy but this album could change that.

Every Picture Tells a Story.

Sandy 2The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.

 

Had I Blinked I Might Have Missed Sammy Walker For The Second Time.

Were it not for Jim Allen’s story this past week in North Carolina’s Indy Week, there is an excellent chance I would have continued on with my life without ever hearing the music of Sammy Walker. Atfter reading the article and listening to his Folkways and Warner releases from the seventies, my first thought was the whole thing might be a hoax. How could I possibly have missed Walker and what was I doing in 1975….oh yeah…wait…never mind. But seriously, I doubt we’ll ever hear anyone who sounds so close to both Woody Guthrie or the early Bob Dylan than this.

The occasion for Allen’s piece and other media nods is the recent release of Brown Eyed Georgia Darlin from Ramseur Records. A collection of demos that Walker did for Warners, it’s now putting the spotlight back on a man whose backstory is worthy of a screenplay with his connection to a cast of characters that includes Phil Ochs, Moe Asch, Bob Fass, Lee Hayes, Mo Ostin and Harold Leventhal. 

Here are the first three paragraphs to Allen’s Once a Leading Candidate to Be the “New Dylan,” Sammy Walker Deserves a Second Listen but I strongly urge you to just click here for the full story. Its a great one.

There should be a long German word for the phenomenon by which we endlessly seek new iterations of an irreplaceable cultural force. You’ll find few better examples than the music world’s desperate quest to anoint a “New Dylan,” starting in the sixties, continuing apace through the late seventies, and, to some extent, still happening now.

Singer-songwriter history is littered with artists who were simultaneously honored with and damned by the designation—Loudon Wainwright III, John Prine, Elliott Murphy, Steve Forbert, a young Bruce Springsteen, and so on.

Arguably, aside from Springsteen, none of these fine songsmiths achieved the same cultural impact as the inscrutable man from Minnesota. But they often ended up earning some cult-hero status—except, ironically, the singer most legitimately daubed with the New Dylan brush, Sammy Walker.

My Broadside Column At No Depression Is A Triple Play of Woody.

BroadwayDannyRose4-9580

This past week I had Woody on the brain. From a new Woody Guthrie project by Del McCoury, a concert with master blues guitarist Woody Mann and another look back at Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. It’s on this site now: Press. Ctrl + F (Windows) or ⌘ Command + F (Mac) and then search for Woody.

I Wish I Could Watch The Everly Brothers: Harmonies in Heaven.

For those of us in the US who are not able to tune in BBC Four, we’ll be missing out on a new music documentary that focuses on the career of The Everly Brothers called Harmonies From Heaven. A production from Eagle Vision, it features Don Everly telling their story of how he and his brother Phil rose to fame after appearing as kids on their dad’s radio show in Shenandoah Iowa.

Set to a backdrop of 1950’s Eisenhower-led America, the film examines this troubled and transformative era, the trials and triumphs of this remarkable brotherly pairing, and the innovations and lasting impact of a musically revolutionary duo.

The film also features interviews with Don Everly, Art Garfunkel, Graham Nash, Bonnie Prince Billy, Dave Edmunds, Tim Rice, Jake Bugg, legendary guitarists Albert Lee and Waddy Wachtel, plus archive performances and home movie footage of the Everly Brothers in the recording studio.

A Woody Triple Play: Guthrie, Mann, and Allen

Portrait of folk singer Woody Guthrie smoking cigarette. (Photo by Eric Schaal//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Portrait of folk singer Woody Guthrie smoking cigarette. (Photo by Eric Schaal//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Today I’ve got several threads running through my brain, and I’m going to throw them into a Yahtzee cup and see what spills out. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. And if the Woodys I’m here to talk to you about today aren’t of interest to you, you can click this link and watch Ted Danson talk about the time he took mushrooms with Woody Harrelson. I aim to please.

But, to one of my points: Woody Guthrie has been a prominent figure in the last hundred pages of a dense and detailed book I’ve been reading for what seems like months now, that was published back in 1998 by Peter D. Goldsmith. Making People’s Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records reads more like a history book than a biography. Should you be interested in learning about how roots music from Texas to Ethiopia was recorded and distributed in the 20th century, this one is for you. It’s available from the Smithsonian people but can also be found used on Amazon, starting at the steep price of 53 cents.

At times you can’t tell if its a narrative or an oral history, as Goldsmith brilliantly weaves the words of others around the theme of how a European immigrant came to New York, got interested in radio and recording, and went from releasing Yiddish records to building a catalog of essential folk, jazz, spoken word, gospel, and world music. Guthrie, Leadbelly, Josh White, Pete Seeger, the Harry Smith Anthology, Jazz at the Philharmonic — it’s an amazing American legacy.

You’ve likely been hearing a lot about the new the Del McCoury Band album of Guthrie tunes that came out last week, and it’s a fine project. I love how Nora Guthrie manages her father’s extensive archive and keeps the music alive with unique collaborations such as this one. Here’s a track to give you a taste of how McCoury does what he does.

My friends Mark and Beth, who front the smokin’ New York-based blues-infused roots band Spuyten Duyvil, have been running a concert series for the past seven years called Urban H2O. Last week they closed it out with an intimate performance from master guitarist Woody Mann. A student of the late Reverend Gary Davis and co-producer of the documentary Harlem Street Singer, this Woody has eight solo albums, tours around the world, and is currently a visiting artist at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he teaches Davis’ artistry to a new generation of young musicians. If you haven’t seen the film, track it down.

Woody Allen will be releasing a new film in August titled Cafe Society, and next year there will likely be a lot of press coverage on him and his wife Soon-Yi Previn, as they celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. It’s quite a story how they came together, and I know a lot of people still have a hard time separating the man’s work from his actions and choices. Putting that aside for now, though, I happened to see Broadway Danny Rose again recently and it reminded me of Nick Apollo Forte.

A lounge singer from Connecticut who worked at Holiday Inns and Howard Johnson motels, Forte had zero acting experience when he was chosen to play Lou Canova in the 1984 comedy classic that starred Mia Farrow along with Allen. It is my all-time favorite film and there was never an official soundtrack released. I wish I could track down a clip of him singing his signature tune “Agita” in that film, but this is the best I was able to come up with:

And with that…I’m out of here.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed Broadside column on the No Depression website.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #5

sandydyas_katy RPM5

Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising: A Family Album of Close Harmony and Tasty Covers.

BarberBorn in Mississauga, Ontario, Matthew Barber is three years older than his sister Jill. Over the years they’ve enjoyed separate music careers that have taken them down different roads. Each have released multiple acclaimed solo albums, but they are stylistically different with Matthew the more hyphenated folk-pop-roots-singer-songwriter, while Jill zigs and zags across the genre-landscape of jazz, pop, chansons, old school soul and torch ballad country.

The Family Album is their first album as a duo, and features three originals from Jill, two from Matthew and cover versions of songs written or recorded by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Bobby Charles, Ian Tyson and Gene MacLellan. In addition to an eclectc song selection, the sibling close harmony with arrangements and instrumentation in the roots-folk tradition make this an absolute standout.

The entire recording process took only a week at a Toronto studio, and for many in America this may be your first introduction to the Barbers. And while songs like ‘Comes A Time’, ‘If I Needed You’ and ‘The Patrician’ might seem to some as being endlessly reworked in the past, these arrangements come off sounding to my ears more as well done redefinitions and less the usual note for note reworking.

There are about a dozen tour dates scheduled in Canada over the next month or two, and June gigs in NYC and Boston. Hoping that The Family Album creates a big buzz so that these two will wander across the border a little more often, and fly over the ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiIhpL_LDn4

Every Picture Tells a Story.

Sandy 2The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one. 

Jason and the Scorchers…Another in a Series of ‘Great Rock Bands From The Eighties’.

I happened to come across an article in The Guardian this past week from Michael Hann about Jason and The Scorchers, a band that for a brief moment in time back in the mid-eighties stood on the edge of immense possibility. Fronted by Jason Ringenberg who moved to Nashville in 1981 with the dream of starting up a high energy roots band, he found three musicians who were more interested in playing power-punk than twang. The blend was almost indescribable.

Hann’s memory is far better than mine, but like him I also got the chance to see them play during that summer of 1985 at Nashville’s Exit/In. I equate it to that moment when you tug on the seat belt as the roller coaster starts to climb and it’s too damn late to get off. It was a confluence of sound and energy that I’ve never seen before nor since.

Here’s just a few excerpts from Hann’s article. It’s really a great story, and so I encourage you to read it all here.

There are only ever a handful of names that get mentioned when the idea of “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world” is raised. Actually, there have been dozens of greatest rock’n’roll bands in the world, but most of them never get recognised – because they were only ever the greatest band for a week, or a month, a summer.

Jason and the Scorchers made music that sounded like no one else, a berserk, overdriven racket, in which country covers and Ringenberg’s originals were played with Never Mind the Bollocks power by the other three.

As you’ll already have guessed, the moment of greatness was brief. The Scorchers became less Ringenberg’s band than Hodges’, as EMI ushered them towards big hair and big makeup, to go with the big guitars. If the Pistols at the Opry worked, Poison at the Opry most certainly didn’t. Their next album, 1986’s Still Standing, might have been better retitled Going Backwards. One more record, Thunder and Fire, and the Scorchers were no more.

Back in 2004 there was a documentary released called The Appalachians which tells the story of the people and the land of Appalachia. The film uses interviews with ordinary people, scholars, and musicians like Loretta Lynn, Marty Stuart, Rosanne and Johnny Cash, and others. Dualtone Records put out a soundtrack, and Jason, by then a solo artist, contributed ‘The Price of Progress’ which has always been my favorite from him. 

Steve Earle On Getting Beat Up and The Importance of Merle Haggard To Him.

This was published on April 12, 2016 by The New York Times as an Op Ed, and I’ll cut and paste the first few paragraphs along with the link to the entire essay that was written by Steve. Not only does he have a way with lyrics and music, but Earle is a fine wordsmith.

In late 1969 and early 1970, when “Okie From Muskogee” was blaring from every jukebox in every beer joint, truck stop and restaurant in my hometown, San Antonio, I wanted, sometimes very much, to hate Merle Haggard.

I say blaring because that’s the kind of record “Okie” was. The kind that, when it dropped into place on an automated turntable or crackled from the speakers of an AM radio, you wanted to turn it up.

Well, not me. I was pretty much a rock-and-folk guy, but this was Texas at the height of the Vietnam War, and San Antonio was a military town boasting five Air Force bases and an Army post, so I’m pretty certain I was in the minority. There were kids in my high school who took pride in listening to nothing but country music. Whether Hag intended it or not, his blue-collar anthem became a battle cry for Vietnam-bound working-class youths with a snowball’s chance in Saigon of a student deferment. Music to kick some hippie butt by. Click here for the full story.

Heartworn Highways Deluxe

Light In The Attic Records put together a 40th Anniversary Edition Box Set of Heartworn Highways a few years ago with restored image and sound, and a whole bunch of extras. The documentary was shot in late 1975 through early 1976, and  covers singer-songwriters whose songs are more traditional to early folk and country music instead of following in the tradition of the previous generation. Some of film’s featured performers are Guy and Townes as well as other ‘outlaws’ such as Steve Earle, David Allen Coe, Rodney Crowell, Gamble Rogers, Steve Young and The Charlie Daniels Band.

I think the best of the bonus items in this set is an 80 page book with exhaustive 20,000 word essay by Sam Sweet interviewing artists, documentary creators and crew, including ephemera and over 100 unseen photos taken during the making of the film. Oxford American posted an excerpt this week on their website titles  From Houston to Long Beach to Old Hickory Lake and it’s one great story. Here’s just the opening, and I’ll link it below.

Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt met during what Clark later called “the great folk scare.” Houston in the early 1960s had a folk community that paralleled those in Cambridge, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles—only smaller and with better bluesmen. The musicologist John Lomax ran the Texas Folklore Society and would arrange for veterans like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb to play concerts at the Jester Lounge on Westheimer, where they would turn Kingston Trio fans onto something tougher. As Lomax’s son, John Lomax III, put it, “Lightnin’ was as electric as you could get with an acoustic.” Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt were among the room’s transfixed teenagers. Click here to read the rest.

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #4

Chevy in Air

Easy Ed’s Broadside weekly column is found at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising: Brennen Leigh Sings Lefty Frizzell

And when I say ‘new’ I mean new to me. There’s also good chance it might be new to you too. Seems like on any given week there are hundreds of websites all talking about the same three or four titles. I could follow that path, but it seems pointless. Sometimes I’d rather just offer up music that might have slipped through the cracks or is far from the beaten path.

This week I want to talk about an album that was released last November. Brennen Leigh Sings Lefty Frizzell is a project from an Austin-based musician and songwriter whom I admittedly had never had heard of until recently. Check this out.

A founding member of the band High Plains Jamboree, she tours throughout Texas and across America often with her frequent writing and touring partner, guitarist Noel McKay. In her travels and tours in Europe, Scandinavia and South America, she has slid into that cult status zone. Her songs have been recorded by Sunny Sweeney, The Carper Family, Norway’s Liv Marit Wedvik, and Lee Ann Womack. She has also collaborated with Jim Lauderdale, John Scott Sherrill and David Olney.

My friend, writer Terry Roland, did a story on her for No Depression last year, so I’ll let him do the heavy lifting:

Brennen Leigh is not a household name. Her 2009 solo album, The Box, stands as a classic of the form, with original songs that are as close to the bone of traditional country music as you’re likely to find east or west of the Mason-Dixon Line. It is among the best Americana albums of the decade, an overlooked gem.

In 2013, she released the critically successful Before the World Was Made with singer-songwriter Noel McKay. This album was compared by the Chicago Tribune with the duets of John Prine and Iris Dement and George Jones and Melba Montgomery.

Leigh’s new album demonstrates an unbroken line of the influence of Lefty Frizzell on this young, innovative artist. Here’s how she came to his music:

“Before this, I wasn’t that familiar with the bigger part of his work. I got a copy of his box set and I also stumbled onto a compilation on vinyl from the ’60s. I’ve imitated him vocally in a superficial way for years. There is just something in his delivery. He was able to express what was going on in his brain. He must have worked at it for years. It’s not only his voice, but in his approach. He changed the way I sing.”

I’ve dropped in a couple of audio samples here from the album, and below is from a concert she did with Noel. You can find this album to stream or buy from all the major digital platforms, but I’d bet Brennen would appreciate it if you head over to her Bandcamp page and do it there.

Every Picture Tells A Story

SandyThe image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….including this one originally published back in January 2014 at No Depression dot com.

A Ray Charles Primer: 25 Great Tracks and Photo Gallery

Ray Charles

Martin Chilton, who is the Culture Editor for The Telegraph website, put together a list of his favorite tracks accompanied with really striking images from the collection of Joe Adams, Charles’ long time friend and manager. Taken from the book/DVD collection Ray Charles Yes Indeed! that came out in 2009, it features a forward by Bill Wyman and thoughts from Ray’s closest friends – including Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones and Willie Nelson.

Here’s the link to Chilton’s list. And here’s Ray with Johnny Cash doing a Harlan Howard song y’all know.

A Few Words About Merle Haggard 

As I was getting ready to hit the button and publish this week’s update, I heard the news that Merle had passed on. I recall seeing him at The Spectrum in Philadelphia around 1972, and we long-hairs got hassled first by the police and then jostled a little in the crowd when he broke into ‘Okie from Muskogee’. The Grateful Dead had released a version of ‘Mama Tried’ and that was my on-ramp to his music. Had a chance to meet him in Las Vegas about fifteen years ago give or take, but he was in a foul mood that night. He was struggling with his voice, and I think he just wanted to be anywhere but in the desert.

About a month or two ago, he was interviewed by Rolling Stone Country about politics and Donald Trump. Thought it might be of interest to share his thoughts:

He’s not a politician. I don’t think he understands the way things work in Washington, that’s what worries me about him. I don’t think he realizes he can’t just tell somebody to do something and have it done, you know. I think he’s dealing from a strange deck.

What a great line. I think he’s dealing from a strange deck. 

I wanted to include an appropriate song or video of his, and came across this track from an album he did with his band The Strangers, Bonnie Owens and The Carter Family. The Land of Many Churches was released in 1971 as a double lalbum and collects four live performances: two are in churches proper, one at San Quentin’s Garden Chapel inside the prison, and one at Nashville’s Union Rescue Mission. The music offers a mix of country gospel and traditional hymns with preachers introducing some of the songs.

This is a favorite of mine and it sure fits this day.

Dori Freeman Melts My Heart With A Hank Williams’ Song

Last month when the Teddy Thompson-produced debut album from Dori Freeman was released, it was one of those titles that seemed to get picked up and reviewed by every media outlet who covers this type of music. Here’s just a few examples of:

The purity of Dori Freeman’s voice and the directness of her songwriting reflect not only her Appalachian hometown — Galax, Va. — but also a determined classicism, a rejection of the ways modern country punches itself up for radio and arenas. (Jon Pareles, New York Times)

It’s startling to hear such a fully formed singing and songwriting voice come out of nowhere. (NPR‘s ‘Songs We Love’)

A strong contender for Americana debut of the year. (Rolling Stone Country)

This week John over at Free Dirt Records invited me to see Dori at the City Winery NYC, where she opened up for her producer and Kelly Jones…whose new duets’ album I featured in RPM1. As Dori stood on that stage all alone with her guitar, I must admit I wasn’t expecting to hear a voice with such incredible strength and clarity that would soar above the din of the diners and drinkers. The crowd surely responded to her, and it seemed to me that this is a woman exceeds the accolades she’s been receiving and just exudes poise and potential. 

Kelly McCartney did an interesting and short ‘Q and A’ with Dori for Folk Alley that ran last week, and you can click here to read it. And here she is doing Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart” wayyyyy back from 2012 at the Henderson Festival in Mt. Royal, Virginia. You should hear how she does it now…it’ll melt your heart too.

Guitar Town (Or You Never Know When You’ll Bump Into Steve Earle)

Just as Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones stepped out onto the stage for their set, I looked up from my phone to find Steve Earle standing next to me checking out the gear on stage. I’m pretty sure Jones was using a Martin D-15M but I couldn’t recognize Thompson’s guitar, but I suspect it could have been a Lowden which his dad seems to favor. I was about to ask Steve but the lights went down and later in the evening I had to run out to catch a train before the encore was over. 

A few days before I was on Bleeker Street and stopped at Matt Umanov’s guitar shop to buy some strings. Several years ago I stood there with Steve and Matt as I considered buying the Martin M-21 that they had designed together. It was one of the last ones for sale, but after counting my pennies I went for the much lower priced 000-15M. I still like playing it a lot, but I sure do regret my decision. 

While Steve was touring Australia in March, he did an interview on The Music Shop with Andrew Ford and you can read it here or download the podcast. 

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

Does It Matter That Loretta Lynn Supports Donald Trump?

loretta-lynn-donald-trump-getty-640x480I can’t recall a single time that a celebrity endorsement, whether for a politician or commercial product, influenced my decision to vote or buy. I come to my opinions and choices based on my own experiences, research, and conversations with other folks, and while there’s always more to learn that could make me change course, adding a celebrity’s opinion into the mix is probably the lowest factor on my totem pole.

During the current election season in America, political endorsements range from the obvious to humorous. For example, Neil Young and Lucinda Williams have spoken out in support of Bernie Sanders. George Clooney is a Hillary supporter, and he joins a star-studded list that includes Britney Spears, Kendall Jenner (her parent, Caitlyn, likes Ted Cruz), and Snoop Dogg. I can’t find any celebrity speaking out on behalf of John Kasich, but Donald Trump has quite a long list of supporters including Ted Nugent, Sarah Palin, Kirstie Alley, Tom Brady … and Loretta Lynn.

Last January, Lynn gave an interview to Reuters where she said, “Trump has sold me – what more can I say?” Here’s the rest, in case you missed it:

Lynn, 83, who penned and recorded country hits like “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” “The Pill” and “Rated X,” still performs between eight and 10 shows a month. She said she has been stumping for Trump at the end of each show, and declared her support for him at an awards dinner in New York in early December.

She said her audiences generally respond warmly to her cheers for Trump, and that’s unusual.

“When you get up there and try to say you want to see Hillary Clinton win, that wouldn’t go over so big,” she said.

Other Republicans can’t live up to the real estate mogul, Lynn said, but Texas Senator Ted Cruz would be her second choice. However, she said: “When you’re advertising for the best, forget the rest!”

Lynn added that she wants to campaign for him.“I just think he’s the only one who’s going to turn this country around,” she said, but added she had no plans to try to contact Trump herself. “I’m going to let him call me.”

For the past month, I’ve been thinking a lot about Loretta Lynn. Her first new album in a dozen years is high on the charts, generating a lot of interest. Media on every possible front — from Pitchfork to AARP’s monthly magazine — are paying attention. There’s her staggering duet and video with Willie Nelson that has made the rounds on social media, and the PBS American Masters documentary Loretta Lynn: Still a Mountain Girl. It’s almost impossible to escape the majesty of her talent and achievements. This seems to be her moment.

Since 2007 Lynn has been working in the studio with John Carter Cash and her daughter Patsy Lynn Russell. They’ve already recorded 93 songs and she hopes to keep going. As she told The New York Times last month, she is thinking about her legacy.

“I wanted the kids to have ’em,” Ms. Lynn said. “I thought, everybody, they don’t think about what they’re leaving. So I went in and I thought, I’m going to cut every song I’ve ever had out. I started with my first hits and I cut the Top 5s and then the Top 10s. And then I just started cutting some that I wrote and some that I’ve always wanted to sing.”

Mr. Cash said Ms. Lynn has finished full albums’ worth of gospel, Appalachian and Christmas songs, along with favorites from her own repertoire and cover songs. “It was like filling in an encyclopedia,” Mr. Cash said in an interview at the Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tenn.

A few weeks after that was printed, she seemed to offer a different viewpoint for this Garden and Gun article:

Legacy don’t mean a thing to me. I’m just glad people like me. I don’t need to go out and charge a lot of money to do a show. I am proud that people feel that way toward me and I love them for it. I get a bang out of being out there. I don’t think that ever changes, the feeling you get when you’re out there onstage. Some people think they’re better than what they are. Ain’t none of them that good.

Merriam-Webster defines legacy as “a gift by will, especially of money or other personal property, or something transmitted or received from an ancestor or from the past.”  I tend to think that Lynn is interested in what people will remember her for, which the dictionary explains as “recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms.” And music is one helluva mechanism.

Politics? That could be another.

I don’t like Donald Trump. I think he has a black heart full of rage, anger, and intolerance. The thought that he could become the leader of my country strikes intense fear in me, and I honestly can’t understand why other people can’t see or feel what I do. When Loretta Lynn, a person I have enormous respect and admiration for, comes out and says she supports him … I’m just damn conflicted.

But during these times of such sharp divide between people, I find solace in these words from Pete Seeger, who reminded us, “It’s a very important thing to learn to talk to people you disagree with.”

While I doubt that Loretta and I will get a chance to meet at Starbucks for a cup of coffee and conversation, I’d like to imagine that if we did there might be a possibility we’d each come away with a better understanding of why we’re standing at opposite points on the political spectrum today. Perhaps we could find a path to move closer. (There is some hope — she’s said that she likes Barack and Michelle Obama, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton.)

It might seem easy to simply condemn Lynn for her support of Trump, but it’s a soft target. If you believe in free will and free speech, then you have to recognize that she has every right to stand on the stage and say whatever she wants. While I won’t pay to hear her say it, I also won’t stop listening to her music and thinking respectfully of the trails she’s blazed for women, and the progressive issues she’s spoken out about, through her music.

But celebrity endorsements? I couldn’t care less.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed Broadside column on the No Depression website.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #3

SDD5

Easy Ed’s Broadside weekly column has been a fixture at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music for over ten years. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising

By using the term ‘roots music’ as a description of what I listen to and wax about, you might come to think that I spend all my days listening to stuff like the Fruit Jar Guzzlers, Jelly Jaw Short, Wade Maniner…with a little Bull Moose Jackson and H-Bomb Ferguson thrown in for good measure. And while those musicians were indeed on this morning’s playlist, my taste runs deep, wide and inclusive…a tent so far and wide that I can barely see end to end.

Five years ago this week I published an interview…it was actually the first one I had ever done…on No Depression‘s post-print online website, my home away from home where I contribute a column called Easy Ed’s Broadside. I’d first seen and heard Massachusetts-based musician and artist Marissa Nadler on a few videos that she had uploaded to the Couch By Couch West online anti-festival that ran concurrent to that thing in Austin. Her music captivated and mesmerized me. It was right before her thirtieth birthday, and she’d already released five albums along with several side projects, amassing a highly-engaged international fan base that kept her on the road.

In my article and our conversation, which I do hope you can find the time to read or at the very least watch some of her videos that I’ve included, The Demystification of Marissa Nadler starts out with the words of others who’ve tried too hard to come up with a genre-box to explain who she is and what she does.

“The indie-folk pinup girl and mistress of the murder ballad.”

“She’s hacked away the art school whimsy, tossed out the crystals and burned the floaty headscarfs.”

“Simple, melancholic fingerpicked folk ballads that take advantage of her sonorous, spine-tingling vocals, narrating tales of damsels in distress or lovers absent or dead.”

“Compelling medieval twang.”

My take? I think Marissa makes incredible folk music. Maybe not your parents folk music, but it comes from a place where an eighteen-year-old Marissa would sometimes leaf through those early No Depression magazines and as she describes… ‘spend my awkward adolescence copying master paintings in my basement and listening to music on the boombox. A lot of this music was prog rock and classic rock. A lot of it was folk and Americana. I loved Gillian Welch and Lucinda Williams and they really spoke to me. Also, Emmylou Harris and Gram Parsons and the Fallen Angels. Elizabeth Cotton.’

StrangersOn May 20th Marissa will release her seventh full-length album titled Strangers, and she’ll be doing April dates on the USA West Coast, followed in May and June with dates in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and Denmark. Here’s the link to her site. 

This week she released the new video which she shot, directed and animated herself. I’ll let her own words set it up for you.

 

“With ‘All the Colors of the Dark’ I wanted to marry my love for the moving image with the song in a compelling visual that pulsated with the same rhythm. I’ve been inspired by the beautiful phantasmagoric worlds created by Svankmejer and Francesca Woodman, The Brothers Quay, among others. In the video, everyday objects move on their own, representing a lingering presence in my life.

Every Picture Tells a Story

SandyThe image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….including this one I originally published back in January 2014 at No Depression dot com.

From The Pages of Kithfolk: The Howard Rains Pictorial

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There’s a marketing and publicity company that works out of the Shoreline Washington home of the Leger family called Hearth Music. They are musicians, wordsmiths and designers, with a passion for traditional music and art that goes beyond simply running a business.

KITHFOLK is their digital roots music magazine of long-form interviews, engaging articles, video and audio streaming premieres, album reviews, and columns from guest writers. Most of the time they don’t write about the artists that they are currently working with, but the people and places and sounds that catch their attention.

Wandering around the site the other night, I happened to come across a gallery of paintings from a gentleman by the name of Howard Rains that really jumped out at me. Here’s a small sampling of Howard’s work along with his thoughts…the full story will take you to the gallery.

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I have painted since I was a kid, but for many years I have been painting old time fiddlers, drawing only from life and documenting living traditional musicians as they played. These portraits go through the filter of my style and I have often been told they look nothing like the individual I am painting; other times I have been told they look exactly like them. I have done this because I love to do it. Because I am obsessed with traditional music and the incredible people I meet through the music. Click here for the full story.

From The New Yorker: The Awkward, Enduring Influence of Hank William’s Jr.

AMHWJrThere seems to be an avalanche of press focus on the music and life of Hank Williams Sr. with the release of the biopic I Saw The Light, but David Cantrell has written an expansive and absolutely fascinating piece on his son.

Here’s just a little taste, but you should most definitely click here for the full story.

Hank Williams, Jr., was raised to be an echo, not an influence. His mother, Audrey Williams, pushed him to perform as Hank Williams, Jr., (his given name is Randall) and to play songs pulled almost exclusively from the catalogue of his father, who died when Hank, Jr., was three. He made his stage début, warbling his father’s first hit, “Lovesick Blues,” when he was only eight years old; he débuted on the Grand Ole Opry at eleven. He released his first album, “Hank Williams Jr. Sings the Songs of Hank Williams,” for his father’s old record label, M.G.M., just after turning fourteen, in 1964.

His father remains the genre’s key repository of myth and tradition (though he’s lately moved it on over a bit to make room for Johnny Cash). But listen closely to country radio’s defining sounds and points of view at almost any moment over the last four decades and Hank Williams, Jr., is right there—often, he was there first. When it comes to anticipating the direction of country music, Jr. has mattered more than Sr. for a long, long time.

In that picture above, which is from an old copy of Billboard Magazine, Junior is standing next to my cousin, the late Arnold Maxin. He was a true music man…playing horn in the big bands when he was fifteen, selling records for a Philadelphia distributor after the war, working A&R at Okeh Records, producing a number of hits including Screaming Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put A Spell On You’ and pretty much every Connie Francis album, and ending up as head of MGM Records in the sixties.

Lucinda Williams Takes Me Far Beyond The Blue

On a Tuesday morning, Lucinda Williams’ husband Tom sent me a message asking how far I was from Tarrytown. I punched out “ten minutes” although it’s probably closer to twenty, and hit the send button. She was playing at the old theater there on Saturday night, and up until the day before, I held out hope that I could arise and attend, but it wouldn’t happen. I sent my apologies on Friday afternoon and said “Another time, for sure.”

My column this past week at No Depression is mostly about me and some trouble I’ve had, but also about how Lucinda and her music moved my needle last June on a stormy night. Click here to check it out. 

On the day you fly away, far beyond the blue
When you’re done, and your run is finally through
I’m forced to let go, there’ll be no greater sorrow
On that day you fly away, far beyond the blue

OH NO…A FACEBOOK FRIEND SUPPORTS DONALD TRUMP…WHAT WOULD PETE SEEGER DO?

I’ll make this quick. I used to be a serial-social-media -politicalized-poster. You know…that guy. The friend on Facebook who links every left (or right) leaning story on the internet because they think YOU NEED TO HEAR THIS!!! It’s ok….I’m in recovery. Here’s my story about what I now ask myself before I hit the button. What Would Pete Seeger Do?

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.