TERRELL'S TUNE-UP: The War That Never Ends

If the South woulda won we'd still have Junior

A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican 
July 10, 2015

It’s the war that never seems to end.

Last month’s killing of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston reopened a lot of old wounds; the young man who police say has confessed to the crime reportedly had the deluded hope of starting a race war. Dylann Roof didn’t accomplish that. 

But what he did spark was another intense national debate about the Confederate flag, the nature of the Confederacy itself, and the meaning of the American Civil War. 

And what do you know? The scars still are too tender to declare this debate done.

This week South Carolina's legislature voted to remove the Confederate flag from the Capital grounds and Gov. Nikki Haley signed the bill. Somehow, I don't think this war is over.

The battle over Confederate culture has been fought in the world of music as well — and I’m not just whistling “Dixie.” Here is a look at a handful of the musical shots fired in the past 50-some years.

* “The Burning of Atlanta” by Claude King. This 1962 single was the follow-up to Claude King’s biggest hit, the country classic “Wolverton Mountain.” In many ways, the song — which concerns Gen. William Sherman’s torching of the Georgia city in Nov. 1864 — fits in the “faux folk song” phenomenon of that era, songs like Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” “El Paso” by Marty Robbins, and Bobby Bare’s “Miller’s Cave.” But “Atlanta” has an edge to it, especially considering what was going on with the civil rights movement in the South in 1962. King singing, “We don’t care what the Yankees say, the South’s gonna rise again,” was more than a little charged in this context.

* “Down in Mississippi” by J.B.  Lenoir. For some reason, bluesman J.B. Lenoir’s swampy tune, recorded in Chicago in 1966, didn’t get a fraction of the airplay that “The Burning of Atlanta” received. Lenoir definitely wasn’t fantasizing about the South rising again. As far as he was concerned, things hadn’t really changed that much from the old days. Lenoir had been writing topical blues and protest songs since the ’50s. “Mississippi” is his finest. “They had a huntin’ season on a rabbit/If you shoot him you went to jail/The season was always open on me/Nobody needed no bail.”

* “An American Trilogy” by Mickey Newbury. Elvis Presley turned this haunting medley into a showstopper for his live performances in the mid-’70s. But it was renegade Nashville songwriter Mickey Newbury who put the three songs — “Dixie,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and “All My Trials” together. It is a sweet plea for reconciliation. Hat tip to the online publication Saving Country Music for recently re-publishing Chris Campion’s liner notes to Newbury’s An American Trilogy compilation album, which focuses on Newbury’s performance of “Trilogy” at a Hollywood nightclub in 1970. Campion describes “All My Trials” as “a Bahamian lullaby turned plantation spiritual.” He continues, “It fit so well, forming a breach and symbolizing a quiet revolution to the other two songs, charged as they were by their association with Civil War conflict.” Campion says that Newbury’s wife was concerned that the Confederate anthem “Dixie” would offend Odetta, the iconic African-American folksinger who was in the audience that night. But from the stage, Newbury himself “could see Odetta’s eyes glisten as they welled up, her face shine as the emotion stained her cheek.”

Remember this guy?

* “If the South Woulda Won” by Hank Williams Jr. Had the South won the Civil War, Hank Williams Jr. suggests in this 1988 ditty, it would be so cool. We’d celebrate Kentucky bourbon, Cajun cooking, Elvis, Patsy, and his dad. The Supreme Court would be in Texas where they’d execute criminals quicker to avoid all those boring appeals and embarrassing exonerations. The girls all would have sexy Southern accents. All this, plus slaves!

* “Ronnie & Neil” by Drive-By Truckers. The Truckers’ 2001 album Southern Rock Opera is a concept album about what frontman Patterson Hood calls “the duality of the South.” This song is the strongest. It starts off talking about the 1963 Birmingham church bombing. (“Four little black girls killed for no goddamn good reason,” Hood sings.) Then it gets into the rhetorical back and forth between Lynyrd Skynyrd singer Ronnie Van Zant and Neil Young, who had written a couple of disparaging songs about the South (“Southern Man” and “Alabama”). Van Zant in “Sweet Home Alabama,” responded, singing, “I hope Neil Young will remember Southern man don’t need him around anyhow.” But Hood points out that in real life Ronnie and Neil became pals, a symbol of reconciliation.

* “Wave That Flag” by The Bottle Rockets. This song, from the 1993 debut album of the influential alt-country band from Festus, Missouri, deals directly with the stars and bars. “Wave that flag, hoss, wave it high/Do you know what it means? Do you know why?/Maybe being a Rebel ain’t no big deal/But if somebody owned your ass, how would you feel?” 

* “Take it Down” by John Hiatt. This stark and mournful song from John Hiatt’s Crossing Muddy Waters album from 2000, starts out talking about lost love and ends up commenting on the issue of the Confederate flag flying over the South Carolina capitol. The message is that people should realize when they’ve been defeated — be it a romance or a civil war — and stop clinging to symbols of the past. 

* “The Lost Cause” by The Legendary Shack Shakers. Over the strains of what sounds like a player piano, in this 2010 tune, J.D. Wilkes describes a battalion of undead Confederate soldiers. It’s not really a ghost story; it’s a refutation of historical revisionism that glorifies the Confederacy: “A company of skeletons in rags/March home under tattered white flags/Dusty Bibles and deep empty pockets/Dark dreams and deeper eye sockets/We ain’t right in the head and our women lay dead/We’re the losers who chose the Lost Cause.” The final verse seems even more ominous after Charleston: “From the dirt where they plant us,/‘Sic semper tyrannis!’/ May we one day avenge our lost cause."

You can hear most of these songs on this playlist, plus a few bonus tracks:

THROWBACK THURSDAY: All My Trials Over "All My Trials"

Consider this Throwback Thursday post a prelude to this week's Terrell's Tune-up column. I can't say why right now, but a certain song I mention in the column has an obvious connection with "All My Trails," a tune I first learned at various United Methodist Youth Fellowship gatherings during my high school days in the late '60s and early '70s.

I've always had a special place in my heart for the song. And lots of great -- and some not-so-great -- singers have recorded and performed versions of it. Most the usual folkie suspects -- Seeger, Baez, Van Ronk, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary -- have done it. The Bible-soaked lyrics tie in nicely with the Civil Rights struggle of the early '60s. "If religion were a thing that money could buy / The rich would live and the poor would die ..." and "I had a little book was given to me / And every page spelled liberty .."  etc.

The lyrics get changed around from version to version. Some even cut out the first verse "Hush little baby don't you cry/ You know your mama was born to die ..."  which is pretty morbid for a goddamn lullaby!

Yes, a lullaby. Practically every source I looked at while researching the song said it came from or might have come from an old "Bahamian lullaby" or perhaps a Bahamian "spiritual." One dubious source even referred to it as a "Jamaican slave song."

But when I set out trying to find out where the darn thing came from, I kept running into a brick wall. I couldn't find anything definite. No accounts of Nassau sailors singing it to delighted British journalists. Not even any Youtubes with Bahamian singers. (And I seriously wanted to find a crazed, incomprehensible version by Joseph Spence to post here!) Seems like Alan Lomax or somebody should have stumble across some mama in the Bahamas trying to put her kid to sleep with something like this.

It turns out that another blogger (and fellow podcaster and fellow musician and fellow DJ) who wanted to explore "All My Trials" ran into the same problems. Jim Moran of Comparative Video 101 wrote:

It turned out that "All My Trials" is of extremely uncertain pedigree, and the chances seem very good that the "folk" song was in fact assembled from fragments of earlier spirituals to sound like a traditional song when it was set to a mysterious Bahamian lullaby that no one really seems ever to have heard or bothered to record. 

If Moran is right -- and I suspect he is --  then I've got an inaccuracy in tomorrow's Tune-up!

So where did it first appear? According to Moran, "The earliest commercial recording anyone can find seems to be Bob Gibson in 1957 -- on an album of what he thought were `strange' folk songs."

Here are some of my favorite versions, starting with Odetta (who also figures into tomorrow's column)



The first non-United Methodist Youth Fellowship version of "All My Trials" I ever heard was Harry Belafonte's. My mom had an album that contained it.



Over on the country side of the tracks, Anita Carter (June's sister, Maybelle's daughter, Hank Williams' singing partner) did this lovely take.



And, thanks to a blog by a Portland soul DJ called DJ Action Slacks, I just discovered this 1967 version by a classic girl group called The Cookies, bettter known for their early '60s hits "Chains" and "Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby." In the middle of the song they sing a verse of "Kumbaya" another song I learned from my Methodist youth group.



Early on in the history of "All My Trials," there was a spin-off version. The Kingston Trio used the same basic melody -- apparently that good old Bahamian lullaby -- but overhauled the lyrics to create "All My Sorrows," a song full of heartache but at least no dying mamas. This song was recorded by The Chordettes, The Shadows and, best of all, The Searchers,



And don't forget that Nashville songwriter Mickey Newbury merged "All My Trials" with "Dixie" and "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to create "American Trilogy," best known through Elvis Presley's version.

But we'll talk more of that tomorrow.

For more deep dives into songs, check out The Stephen W. Terrell Web Log Songbook

WACKY WEDNESDAY: A Musical Tribute to Phil Austin

Phil Austin of The Firesign Theatre died June 18. I'm still getting over that.

Hell, I'm still getting over Peter Bergman's death three years ago. Phil Proctor and David Ossman now are the only Firesigns left.

Back in my college days in the early '70s I practically worshiped The Firesign Theatre. They were far more than a comedy team. And it wasn't just hippie humor. In their records they created new worlds, surreal, satirical, multi-layered universes where the jokes had multiple meanings. They were full of references to pop culture of the day and Shakespeare  and Edgar Allan Poe and spoofs of  old radio shows and televangelists and politicians and cheesy TV shows and commercials

It's been 45 years since they released my favorite Firesign album, Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers  and I still find lines I never noticed before.

So if you've never heard The Firesign Theatre, by all means seek them out. (Most of their albums, including their early classics, are on Spotify and a bunch of their stuff is on Youtube. Or you might do something old timey and BUY some of their albums. (Start with Dwarf or How Can You Be In Two Places At Once When You’re Not Anywhere At All -- which includes the debut of Austin's most famous character, Nick Danger.)

Because this is a music blog, this Wacky Wednesday I'm paying tribute to Phil with some Firesign musical bits -- songs The Firesign Theatre taught us.

R.I.P. Nick Danger!

Here is a live version of "Oh Blinding Light" from the movie Martian Space Party. Phil Proctor's fiddle solo comes in at about 1:42



Here's one from I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus.



And finally, "Toad Away," a hymn and sermonette from Dear Friends. Someday we'll all be toad away.

TERRELL'S SOUND WORLD PLAYLIST

Sunday, July 5, 2015
KSFR, Santa Fe, N.M.
10 p.m. to midnight Sundays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell
Webcasting!
101.1 FM
email me during the show! terrell(at)ksfr.org

Here's the playlist
OPENING THEME: Let It Out (Let it All Hang Out) by The Hombres
Lupine Ossuary by Thee Oh Sees
Gimme Love by Sleater-Kinney
My Box Rocks by Figures of Light
Non-State Actor by Soundgarden
Glam Rock Girl by The Barbarellatones
The Lover's Curse by The A-Bones
Cretin Hop by The Ramones
Look at Little Sister by The Sonics
Duck for the Oyster by Malcom McLaren

Piñon Lurker by The Gluey Brothers
I'm a Hog For You Baby by Screaming Lord Sutch
Don't Shine Me On by Frankie & The Dell Stars
White Bread n' Beans by Left Lane Cruiser
Candy Man Blues by Copper Gamins
Mine All Mine by The Beat Rats
Funeral by Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
Catch a Ride to Sonic Bloom by Night Beats
They're Coming to Take Me Away by Napoleon XIV

Backup Man by Greenland Whalefishers
Red Rover by Motobunny
Fly Like A Rat by Quintron & MissPussycat
Lesson Of Crime by YVY
You Treat Me Bad by The Ju Jus
Count Me Out by Boss Hog
( I Got a) Good 'Un by John Lee Hooker
Set Your Mind Free by Wiley & The Checkmates

Lavar dySara by Cankisou
Love Letters by Dex Romweber Duo (with Cat Power)
On the Horizon by The Compressions
Voodoo Boogie by J.B. Lenoir
Down in Mississippi by Ry Cooder
Venus by Television
Ac-cen-tu-ate the Positive / Things Are Getting Better by NRBQ
CLOSING THEME: Over the Rainbow by Jerry Lee Lewis
Like the Terrell's Sound World Facebook page
Subscribe to The Big Enchilada Podcast! CLICK HERE

THE SANTA FE OPRY PLAYLIST

Friday, July 3, 2015
KSFR, Santa Fe, NM
Webcasting!
10 p.m. to midnight Fridays Mountain Time
Host: Steve Terrell 101.1 FM
Email me during the show! terrel(at)ksfr.org

Here's my playlist :

OPENING THEME: Buckaroo by Buck Owens

American Trash by Betty Dylan

Fourth of July by Dave Alvin

Still Sober After All these Beers by Banditos

Lower 48 by The Gourds

Go-Go Truck by The Defibulators

Ballad of the Bellhop by The Dustbowl Revival

The Clams and I by The Dirty Bourbon River Show

A Day at a Time by Dale Watson

 

(Tom Russell message)

Hair Trigger Heart by Tom Russell

The Outcast by Dave Van Ronk

The Day Bartender by Al Duvall

Chevy Headed West by Jim Stringer

Thirteen Minutes by Earl Brooks

The Girl on Death Row by T. Tex Edwards & Out on Parole

Come Out Come Out by Angry Johnny & The Killbillies

 

Lucky by The Beaumonts

Down on the Corner of Love by Buck Owens

Aim to Please by Palomino Shakedown

Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette) by Phil Harris

Fried Chicken and Gasoline by Southern Culture on the Skids

I'm Barely Hangin' On by Johnny Paycheck

Alice in Hulaland by Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard

I Can Talk to Crows by Chipper Thompson

Hungover Together by The Supersuckers with Kelly Deal

Indoor Fireworks by Elvis Costello

Desert Rose Chris Hillman & Herb Pedersen

Worried Mind by Eilen Jewell

Sweet Virginia by The Rolling Stones

Can You Blame the Colored Man by South Memphis String Band

My Rosemarie by Stan Ridgway

CLOSING THEME: Comin' Down by The Meat Puppets

Like the Santa Fe Opry Facebook page
Subscribe to The Big Enchilada Podcast! CLICK HERE
Steve Terrell is proud to report to the monthly Freeform American Roots Radio list

 

THROWBACK THURSDAY: Happy Birthday, Rev. Dorsey. Happy Birthday, Georgia Tom

Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey

Yesterday, July 1 was the birthday of two great American musicians born in 1899 in Villa Rica, Georgia.

One was a great blues pianist and occasional singer who played with greats like Ma Rainey and Tampa Red. He co-wrote and sang on Red's best-known song. "Tight Like That" -- and he recorded a few sides under his own name, Georgia Tom.

The other was the Father of Gospel Music, credited with, basically, inventing the genre of Black gospel, bringing the passion of the blues to sacred music ... and writing some of the greatest gospel songs ever known. He even coined the term "gospel music." His name was Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey.

Most of you probably realize Georgia Tom and Thomas Dorsey were the same guy,

He was the son of a Baptist preacher and a church organist. Some say he was a child prodigy. At first he adopted the stage name "Barrelhouse Tom" before settling on "Georgia Tom."

By the age of 19, he moved to Chicago, where he knocked around n some local jazz and blues bands before starting his own group, The Wildcat Jazz Band, which backed up Ma Rainey. Tampa Red was a guitarist in that band.

But in the 1920s, Dorsey's life took a turn toward darkness. According to a PBS documentary caled This Far by Faith:

Georgia Tom

At twenty-one, his hectic and unhealthy schedule led to a nervous breakdown. He convalesced back home in Atlanta. There, his mother admonished him to stop playing the blues and  serve the Lord. He ignored her and returned to Chicago, playing with Ma Rainey. He married his sweetheart, Nettie Harper. But in 1925, a second breakdown left Dorsey unable to play music.

It should be noted that different accounts have several conflicting dates for these "nervous break downs."  According to some sources after the second one he sought the spiritual guidance of a faith healer named Bishop H.H. Haley who, Dorsey told biographer, Michael Harris, extracted a `live serpent' out of Dorsey’s throat.

According to the story, Haley told Dorsey, "There is no reason for you to be looking so poorly and feeling so badly, The Lord has too much work for you to let you die." And he helped convince the young musician to turn away from those Devil blues and dedicated his talents to music for the Lord.

But Dorsey hadn't hit bottom yet. According to This Far by Faith:

After his recovery ... Dorsey committed himself to composing sacred music. However, mainstream churches rejected his songs. Then, in August 1932, Dorsey's life was thrown into crisis when his wife and son died during childbirth. In his grief, he turned to the piano for comfort. The tune he wrote, "Take My Hand, Precious Lord," came, he says, direct from God. 

Dorsey started the Dorsey House of Music, an independent music publishing company for Black gospel composers, in 1932. He established the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, serving as its president for more than 40 years. He would begin an association with Mahalia Jackson, one of the greatest gospel singers of all time

And he sang nothing but gospel music until his death in 1993

So happy birthday, Reverend! Here are a bunch of his songs.

Let's start off with Georgia Tom:



Here is is with a lady called Kansas City Kitty



Here is his most famous song, recorded with his pal Tampa Red



Now on to Dorsey's gospel career. This isn't one of his better known songs, but it's a good one.



Here is Mahalia Jackson singing "(There Will Be) Peace in the Valley," which Dorsey wrote for her in 1937. The song went on to be hits for Red Foley and, later, Elvis Presley. Johnny Cash also did a great version (the first one I ever heard back in the '60s.)



Here is Rev. Dorsey's best known song, performed late in his life

WACKY WEDNESDAY: The Secret History of White Rap

I'm not talking Vanilla Ice here ...

Decades before before The Sugar Hill Gang -- years before The Last Poets or Gil Scott Heron even -- courageous, (or at least shameless) Caucasians created their own forms of rap music that swept the nation.

Or at least made for some pretty weird novelty records.

The late, lamented Spy Magazine released a hilarious compilation called White Men Can't Wrap, which showcased many of the classics of the genre, some of which are included below.

The collection included liner notes by none other than Irwin Chusid, perhaps the nation's greatest expert on "outsider" music, and a major fan of all sorts of strange and wonderful songs.
Chusid sayeth:

White rap is a centuries-old tradition; the original white rappers were square-dance callers improvising rhymes for Saturday-night barn parties in America's rural backwaters. Like today's rappers, they were seen as debauchers, imperiling the morals of the young. The fiddle was "the instrument of the devil"; church leaders banned it. The callers' freestyle rhymes teased with erotic innuendos ("Duck for the oyster/Dig for the clam/Knock a hole in the old tin can").

The stuff they taught you in the grade-school gymnasium, that cornball mountain music with the do-si-dos - it was all about sex and forbidden behavior! It was the roots of today's white rap culture. Herewith, a tribute." (Thanks to the ever-excellent Music for Maniacs blog for transcribing that for their post about White Men Can't Wrap a few years ago.)

Besides its roots in square-dance calling as Chusid notes, another major manifestation of white rap was "talking blues," Folksingers like woody Guthrie and the young Bob Dylan loved the style and included several talking blues tunes in their repertoires.

But the style goes back at least to the mid-20s. South Carolina entertainer Chris Bouchillon recorded a song called "Talking Blues' in 1926. His song "Born in Hard Luck" is even better.


Hank Williams played his own style of talking blues also, in is guise as Luke the Drifter.



But hillbilly singers were not the only purveyors of white rap. In the late '50s comedian Lenny Bruce made this beatnik-jazz contribution.



By the 1960s, white rap was in full blossom. There were big radio hits like "Big Bad John" by Jimmy Dean, "Old Rivers by Walter Brennan," "Ringo by Lorne Green and "Gallant Men," a patriotic march by Everett McKinley Dirksen, whose day job at the time was minority leader of the U.S. Senate. (I posted a YouTube of that on a previous Wacky Wednesday.)

But the greatest white rapper of them all in the 1960s was not an actor or senator. He was Napoleon XIV (real name: Jerry Samuels)  who recorded this sensitive take on behavioral-health issues called "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" This track actually was a crude form of hip hop, just a guy reciting lyrics over a beat and an ominous siren. Why has Napoleon XIV not been sampled more?



Finally, I know that technically he doesn't qualify for this category, but for his 1967 song "Don't Blame the Children," I believe that Sammy Davis, Jr. should be considered at least an honorary  white rapper.