Mose McCormack will put you under the jail tonight on The Santa Fe Opry!
McCormack, who has been picking and singing and occasionally releasing albums in New Mexico music since the 1970s, will be playing on my show, starting a little bit after 10 pm Friday (Mountain Time) on KSFR, 101. FM in Northern New Mexico and streaming live HERE.
Here's a profile of Mose I wrote for No Depression back in the '90s. And below is Mose performing one of his tunes:
A version of this was published in The Santa Fe New Mexican March 27, 2015
Mojo JuJu & The Snake Oil Merchants. Ms. JuJu is sitting with resonator guitar
Close your eyes and imagine you’re lost on a foggy night on some uncharted back street off the Reeperbahn in Hamburg or near the port of Amsterdam, where the sailors all meet. From some dangerous little dive you hear music: after-hours blues, off-kilter torch songs, Gypsy jazz, hot Weimar Republic cabaret, “punk noir,” strange tangos, and dark, soulful ballads. But before you can go in, you wake up.
Don’t worry. You can find that kind of alluring music on a new collection called Anthology by Mojo JuJu& The Snake Oil Merchants.
In case you’re not familiar with Mr. and Mrs. JuJu’s baby girl, she’s an Australian from Melbourne who has been a solo act for a few years. But Off Label Records, my favorite crazy German punk/alt-blues/garage/slop country/jug-band record company in recent years, compiled this collection of her work with her old band and released it last month to expose this music to a wider audience — and, I suppose, to show us what we’ve missed.
The music here falls somewhere between that of Cab Calloway and Gogol Bordello. I’m also reminded of the Eastern European-influenced Firewater. “Fisherman’s Daughter” starts off with a horn section that sounds like it might have come from a ’90s ska-punk group. And if anyone claims that Tom Waits isn’t a major influence, they’re either lying or deaf. Try to listen to Mojo’s banjo-led, horn-accented “Sacred Heart of Mary” without being tempted to sing along in your best phlegm-heavy Waits voice.
And elsewhere, like on “Transient Being,” you might be reminded of the late Amy Winehouse. That is, if Winehouse had been prone to using accordion and trombone in her songs. In one interview, Mojo said she gets her inspiration from “scary antique stores.”
Sounds reasonable.
Some of the best tunes here are the ones that sound like they could have been theatrical pieces. “Scat Song” would have fit in on the soundtrack of Boardwalk Empire (maybe in a scene set in Chalky White’s nightclub). “God and the Devil” is a little morality drama in which a woman hears a pitch from the Prince of Darkness and asks, “Well, I looked that devil right square in the eye and said, ‘Do I look stupid to you?’ ”
One of the darkest, most striking songs on Anthology is the near-seven-minute “But I Do.” It’s slow and menacing. Mojo sings of pain in her heart, the piano plays sinister little one-finger trills that sound like Morse code, and the drummer seems to be pounding to drive away demons.
The song that sounds most autobiographical here is “My Home,” an intense tango in which Mojo sings:
And the color of my skin and the color of my eyes has meant that even in my homeland I have been mistaken for a stranger in a foreign country But it’s my home. This is my home.
She sounds angry and proud. It’s powerful.
Mojo Juju, without her Snake Oil Merchants, is about to release her latest solo album, Seeing Red/Feeling Blue, next month. That should be worth checking out.
Also recommended:
* Worthy by Bettye LaVette. I normally don’t quote James Taylor much (if at all), but listening to this album made me flash on an old line by sweet baby James: “A churning urn of burning funk.”
To be sure, it’s slow-burning funk, and one of my few problems with the album is that there should have been a few more faster numbers. But like LaVette’s best work since the turn of the century, the soul runs deep. Every song on this album is a raw emotional statement — though that’s also true of just about all the songs on just about all of her albums.
Quick biographical note: LaVette has been in the music biz since the 1960s. But as a result of bad breaks, bad business decisions, and the fickle nature of the entertainment industry, she never quite made it beyond the status of cult favorite.
That changed around 10 years ago, when she met up with producer Joe Henry, who helped LaVette make I’ve Got My Own Hell to Raise, an album that not only was worthy (yes, I used that word) of her talents, but also had some commercial appeal, at least for hip adults.
She’s made some fine albums since then — one of my favorites is The Scene of the Crime, which Patterson Hood, of the Drive-By Truckers, produced in 2007 and which had a nice rock ’n’ roll edge.
When it comes down to it, Henry is a perfect fit for LaVette. And Worthy is a sweet reunion.
The album contains a song from each of the cosmic trinity of 1960s rock: “Unbelievable,” an obscurity from Bob Dylan (from the critically disdained 1990 album Under the Red Sky); a Beatles throwaway, “Wait” (from Rubber Soul); and the Rolling Stones’ “Complicated,” which was on their underrated album Between the Buttons.
But LaVette isn’t aiming for some empty-headed ’60s nostalgia here. Remarkably, she makes you all but forget the original versions by these exalted masters. I didn’t even recognize “Complicated” until about halfway through. “Unbelievable,” which kicks off the album, is the toughest and, yes, funkiest thing on the record. And LaVette brings out more emotional depth in “Wait” than the Fab Moptops ever did.
Other gems on Worthy are the slow, bluesy “Just Between You and Me and the Wall You’re a Fool” (written by James Brown, but not that James Brown); the stunning “Undamned,” which begins, “Sometimes the things we believe turn out to be nothing but a scam/I’m just trying to get my world undamned”; and “Stop,” a minor-key Joe Henry tune in which LaVette gets defiant. “Don’t tell me to stop,” she sings.
But I don’t know anyone who wants Bettye LaVette to stop.
Here is a classic American tune that perhaps you first heard in an old cartoon.
Like this one:
Or maybe you remember it from Ken Burn's Civil War series.
Or maybe ever so often it just bounces around in your subconscious, just part of your American musical DNA.
It's called "Kingdom Coming" or sometimes "Year of Jubilo." And it was written in 1862, during the Civil War, by a popular songwriter of the day named Henry C, Work (1832-1884).
Warning: The song was written for a minstrel show. And we all know about minstrel shows. Indeed, this song does contain a racist epithet: "darkies" and it's meant to be sung in minstrel show dialect.
But before we condemn Henry C. Work, consider his life. Born a Connecticut yankee, he was a devout abolitionist and supporter of the Union in the war, It ran in the family. His parents’ house was used as a stop in the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves fleeing to Canada.
Despite the minstrel show conventions found here, the lyrics mostly ridicule the "massa," who has been frightened away from his own plantation by Union gunships.
It's a song of liberation in which the slaves celebrate, locking the cruel overseer in the smokehouse and helping themselves to the massa's liquor cabinet.
“The whip is lost, the handcuffs broken, but the master will have his pay ..."
I couldn't find any Youtubes of the song from the 1860s, but here's an old version by National Barn Dance radio star Chubby Parker:
Will Rogers sang it the 1932 film Too Busy to Work in which Rogers, playing a drifter named "Jubilo," who is reunited with his long-lost daughter,
Singer Pokey LaFarge did a wonderful version of "Kingdom Coming" in the 2013 compilation Divided & United: The Songs of the Civil War. He cleaned it up a little, changing "darkies" to "brothers."
But my favorite version still is that of The Holy Modal Rounders, who recorded two versions of it through the years, both titled "Year of Jubilo." They joyously screw with the lyrics. In the Rounders' versions you don’t see Lincoln’s gunships, you see Lincoln himself with “a piece of paper in his hand,” presumably the Emancipation Proclamation. “Abe Lincoln come, ha ha/Jeff Davis go, ho ho,” they sing.)
They wanna hear some American music, American music They wanna hear that sound right from the U.S.A. ... The whole world digs that sound from the U.S.A.
The Blasters sang it.
I believe it.
That settles it.
And so I'm going to indulge in a little American exceptionalism, musically speaking, and present a little showcase how different styles of the American music we love deeply in out hearts have been reinterpreted by pickers and singers from all over the globe.
Some of the music below might make you laugh at first. That's OK. After all, it's Wacky Wednesday. But after a chuckle or two, listen to these songs. There are some fine musicians here and their art is a testament to the glory of American music (not to mention the kinship of musicians throughout the globe and the strands of human culture that unite creative people everywhere.).
Obviously, American music has been influenced by all sorts of sounds that originated in Europe, Africa, Mexico, pre-statehood Hawaii etc. But hard-working American musicians turned it all into something new. And around the world, those who heard the call soaked it in and added their own sounds and made it new again.
In fact, the artists I like best out of these are the ones who take our roots music and add elements of their own culture. One of the best examples of this is a Romanian blues band called Nightlosers. Years ago I reviewed their albumPlum Brandy Blues. And I still love it.
And how about a little late-'60s/early-'70s psychedelic garage soul from Ghana: I give you The Psychedelic Aliens!
And now, some hardcore, Casbah-rockin' punk sounds from war-torn Syria. This band from Damascus is called Mazhott. And they rock! Their sound is quite addictive.
We sing about stuff that matters to young people, in general, and social [issues]. [For example], the high school diploma, here, is unbelievably difficult, so, we wrote about that. We wrote about fathers forcing their young daughters to marry older men, about our generation that is frustrated and lost and don’t know wot to do with their lives, about less separating of boys and girls, and about how we need more attention and freedom.
Below, from the group's Bandcamp page is their 2013 EP M is for Mazhott. (And if you like these amazing songs, fork over a couple of bucks and buy it! I did.)
And of course, there is Japanese bluegrass. The Ozaki Brothers, Yasushi and Hisashi, are bluegrass pioneers in the Land of the Rising Son, who as pre-teens in World War II, had to secretly listen to the American folk music they love because the government had banned it, according to WAMU's Bluegrass Countrywebsite,
Here's a 2009 video of the brothers singing "Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb."
And let's close out with some Argentine rockabilly by a band called Coyotes!
God bless America!
(Hat tip to Tripp Jennings, who inadvertently inspired this with an unrelated Tweet last week,)
