Our curation of music and opera reviews
Mercifully, the election ain’t the only show in town. There’s actual, real good news elsewhere. For instamce, 57 years after his death Hank Williams has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his contributions to American culture. Better late than never. So here, to celebrate, is audio of perhaps his most famous and thus perhaps the most famous song in the history of coutnry music, Your Cheatin’ Heart:
Another rare old tune from a marvellous concert we’ve featured here before. This time they’re performing an old Carter Family tune The Storms are On the Ocean. Terrific stuff.
I dunno how this passed me by, just missed the news I suppose. But apparently Alex Chilton died a week or two back – which is no great surprise, in one way, but sort of shocking in another. He was one of two or three heroes of mine in that limited but enlivening medium, rock music; always defiantly beyond the mainstream, difficult but hugely talented. As a kid, I wanted to be Alex Chilton, even more than I wanted to be someone I valued more as a songwriter, Neil Young. These rock musicians, the talented ones, of which there are few; it’s as John Updike wrote, not long before he
Their 1970s album was called More a Legend than a Band and that was about right since it and they disappeared for 20 years. Happily the Flatlanders returned and continue to amaze with their groovy, mildly mystical brand of Texas country. Here they are with a song from their album Hills and Valleys called Homeland Refugee:
At his best Willie’s pretty much a marvel and when he’s singing Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain you get a whole lot of Willie at his best.
It’s a pretty thin and overrated medium, rock music, and too much energy is expended lauding its practitioners. But Mark Linkous, who is dead having shot himself, was one of a small handful with genuine talent which sometimes, just sometimes, teetered into real brilliance. Few people have used the medium better, or understood better how to defy its obvious limitations. Under the name Sparklehorse, Linkous made one of the two great albums of the 1990s, Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot (the other, I reckon, is Beck’s Mellow Gold). This was a peculiar mélange of southern country, Neil Young, Alex Chilton and Tom Waits, a bit of weirdness and noise, the sound of a child’s
When you’ve got a song called If Drinking Don’t Kill Me (Her Memory Will) then you know you’re travelling through the country of country. But that’s fine, because the Possum is keeping you company. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr George Jones…
Kitty Wells was born in 1919 and she’s the oldest living member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. So it’s well past time she featured here and, this being so, it’s sensible to play her first big hit It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels. If Hank Williams was the inspiration for everyone who followed him then, after the Carter Family, you can argue that Kitty Wells played a similar role on the distaff side of country.
Another gem featuring three great pickers and Alison Krauss. The Banks of the Ohio is a great song too and, like so many other murder ballads, a reminder of how closely connected old-style country is to the music of these islands.
So old school it makes old school seem dangerously hipsterish. But, you know, great.
Bryan Curtis has an excellent piece at the Daily Beast on the current state of country music. Well, the state of commercially successful, Grammy-nominated country music anyway. As you might expect, it’s depressing stuff. Basically, you have a choice between Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift and perhaps the best that may be said of this is that it might be marginally less gruesome than the era of Shania Twain and Garth Brooks. Marginally. As Bryan explains: To reduce Taylor vs. Carrie to style points would be a mistake. Their music has deep thematic differences, too. If you favor Swift, you are embracing a Weltanschauung that says that all of life
Earl Scruggs and his boys pay a visit to Doc Watson’s home in North Carolina for some good times and some even better music. It’s old school and it’s great.
Been a whole lotta time since Waylon was seen around here. Time to rectify that so here’s the great man singing A Good Hearted Woman which is what every outlaw needs though since all mommas also know they really shouldn’t let their babies grow up to be cowboys you’d think that means they’d be doubly hesitant to let their daughters hitch themselves to the outlaw bandwagon…
Well, Sunday afternoon high-class, great-pickin’ gospel really. Alison Krauss has always cited Tony Rice as one of the biggest influences upon her career and here he is, accompanied by the great Ricky Skaggs, performing what is, in my view, a beautiful version of the classic The Soul of Man Never Dies:
I think I owe my colleague Hugo Rifkind an apology for my comments about his piece on climate change a week or so ago. I think I said that he was a gibbering idiot, a lice-ridden whore and the source of all evil in the western world, I can’t remember exactly – something typically measured. Maybe not all that. Anyway, it was a silly and disproportionate thing to say to a bloke who is a lovely writer, even though I disagreed with the gist of his piece. In brief, Hugo seemed to be suggesting that we should stay away from the science of climate change because we are incapable of
Apologies for the light blogging these past couple of days. Still, it’s Saturday and so it’s time for some more country. Since I’m seeing him perform in Perth on Monday night it’s appropriate that Steve Earle makes another appearance in this series. And since his latest album is a set of Townes van Zandt covers it’s also fitting that we highlight his lovely, moving tribute to TVZ, Fort Worth Blues:
Sadly Youtube doesn’t seem amply stocked with footage of Gram Parsons. But here’s one of the next best things: Emmylou Harris performing her great tribute to Gram, Boulder to Birmingham:
Yay! Another young, still-to-reach-their-prime performer! I like Laura Cantrell heaps. She has something. Here she is performing When the Roses Bloom Again. A nice, properly mournful song that is, in its title anyway, a spin-off of an old Carter Family tune that itself is reminiscent of some of the old Border ballads and, thus, a reminder of how much good country music is still linked to songs from these parts…
I recently read of a music writer who believes the perfect pop song lasts precisely two minutes and 42 seconds. Crazy though it sounds, he may be on to something. Try ordering your iTunes collection by duration and you may find as I did that songs of that length seem slightly better on average than any others. For the record, mine include ‘Michelle’, Elvis’s ‘Funny How Time Slips Away’ and ‘Love me Tender’, Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, Josephine Baker’s ‘Si J’étais Blanche’, ‘California Dreamin’’ by The Mamas and the Papas, ‘The Wanderer’ by Dion and the Belmonts and ‘This Charming Man’ by The Smiths. So, just as you could
Because, frankly, from Afghanistan to Texas to the corridors of Whitehall and the Bank of England, it’s been a pretty bleak week it’s appropriate to bring Saturday Morning Country forward by a few hours. This Lyle Lovett song – If I Had a Boat – always cheers me up. Added bonus: with its dreams of boats and ponies and ifs and ans and all the rest of it you may also read it as an arch critique of the promises politicians feel compelled to make and that we, because we want to believe, choose to take at more than face value. Not merely boats for all, but ponies on each