two takes
What makes a song last?
It’s not the meaning.
It’s the sounds, the particular sounds of the particular words—sounds that singers, year after year, decade after decade, keep wanting to hear, to sing.
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart . . .
“Cold, Cold Heart” (H. Williams)
Hank Williams, TV show, 1952
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Norah Jones, BBC Radio show, 2007
passings
Kitty Wells (AKA Ellen Muriel Deason), singer, songwriter, guitarist, 8/30/1919-7/16/2012
“It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”
TV show, c. 1952
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“Making Believe”
TV show, 1955
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“Lonely Side of Town”
TV Show, 1950s
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lagniappe
“The history of country music can’t be written without calling attention to her great achievements,” John Rumble, senior historian at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, told The Times on Monday. “She really has left an indelible mark on American music history.”
Singer Marty Stuart on Monday called her “the undisputed queen of country music. There’s more to being a queen than just calling yourself a queen — it’s a title that goes with an entire lifetime of service and influence. You check the careers of anyone in [Nashville], and you won’t find anyone with a more spotless career than Kitty Wells.”
Wells laid a template for female singers in country music that started a shift in traditional male-female roles in rural America with “Honky Tonk Angels.” Her recording delivered a strikingly assertive response to Hank Thompson’s massive 1952 hit “The Wild Side of Life,” in which a man laid all blame on a woman he met in a honky tonk for breaking up his marriage and then leaving him to go “where the wine and liquor flows, where you wait to be anybody’s baby.”
Wells, singing a song written by J.D. Miller, shot back, “It wasn’t God who made honky tonk angels/As you said in the words of your song/Too many times married men think they’re still single/That has caused many a good girl to go wrong.”
That recording was No. 1 for six weeks in 1952 and began a string of hits that extended to 1979.
The stern resolution in her voice would be echoed in subsequent recordings by Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris on through Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks and still ripples today in assertive songs by Taylor Swift, Miranda Lambert and Carrie Underwood.
“Kitty Wells was my hero,” Lynn said Monday in a statement. “If I had never heard Kitty Wells sing, I don’t think I would have been a singer myself.”
—Randy Lewis, Los Angeles Times (obituary), 7/17/12
rock ’n’ roll
country
gospel
blues
jazz
A world without American music: what would it sound like?
The Blasters, “American Music,” Champaign, Ill., 1985
(Originally posted 7/5/10.)
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Merle Haggard, “Lonesome Fugitive,” Buck Owens Ranch Show, 1966
(Originally posted 4/6/12.)
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Slim and the Victory Aires, “Alright Now,” Paducah, Ky., 2008
(Originally posted 3/11/12)
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Johnny Shines (1915-1992), vocals, guitar; David “Honeyboy” Edwards (1915-2011), guitar; Big Walter Horton (1917-1981), harmonica; “For The Love of Mike,” 1978
(Originally posted 10/4/11.)
Von Freeman, tenor saxophone; Clifford Jordan, tenor saxophone (first solo); Willie Pickens, piano; Dan Shapera, bass; Robert Shy, drums; “Oleo” (S. Rollins), Chicago (Chicago Jazz Festival), 1988
(Originally posted 5/3/12.)
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lagniappe
radio
All Pops, all day:
Tune in on July 4th, Independence Day . . . as we celebrate the professed (although according to historians, not actual) birthday of Jazz great and American Hero, the trumpeter and vocalist Louis Armstrong, by playing 24 hours straight of his music, from midnight to midnight.
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encore*
Dave Alvin with the Blasters, “4th of July,” Berwyn, Ill. (Fitzgerald’s), 2010
*By popular demand (see Comments).
passings
Arthel Lane “Doc” Watson, singer, guitar player, songwriter
March 3, 1923-May 29, 2012
“Deep River Blues,” 1960s
Country musicians who love blues, blues musicians who love country (as I frequently encountered years ago working at Alligator Records): stories of race and music are often complex, resisting reduction to black and white.
Happy Birthday, Blind Willie and Tammy!
Blind Willie McTell (5/5/1898-8/19/59), “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues” (1940)
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Tammy Wynette (5/5/42-4/6/98), medley (“Apartment No. 9,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “Stand By Your Man”), TV show
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Imagine what this country would be like if everything were as fine as the music.
Nothing hits the spot, sometimes, like a homicidal love song.
The Handsome Family, “My Beautiful Bride”
Live, Australia (Sydney), 2010
More? Here.
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lagniappe
art beat: Monday at the Art Institute of Chicago
Utagawe Hiroshige, Autumn Moon over Tama River (from the series Eight Views of the Environs of Edo), 1837-38
two takes
“Feel Like Going Home” (C. Rich)
Charlie Rich (vocals & piano), demo, 1973
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Tom Jones with Mark Knopfler (guitar), TV performance, 1996
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I don’t think I ever recorded anyone who was better as a singer, writer, and player than Charlie Rich. It is all so effortless, the way he moves from rock to country to blues to jazz.
—Sam Phillips (Sun Records)
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radio
Happy Birthday, Charles!
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reading table
I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world;
but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere.
There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no.
I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.
—William Bronk,* “The World” (mp3 [Hudson Falls, NY, 1978], Selected Poems [1995])
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*Bronk, who died in 1999, was recently inducted, posthumously, into the ultra-exclusive MCOTD Hall of Fame, joining tenor saxophonist Von Freeman and poet Wislawa Szymborska.
two takes
“Honky Tonk Man” (J. Horton, et al.)
Dwight Yoakam
Live, mid-1980s
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Johnny Horton
Recording (Billboard Hot Country Singles, #9), 1956
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lagniappe
reading table
Hank Williams . . . was essentially the first rock star. He was a hillbilly singer, but he was a rock star. As Chet Atkins said, the year that Elvis hit, it ruined country music. Because they had rural America and southern America’s teenage audience. And then they couldn’t keep them. Elvis had changed everything.
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I was a Monkees kid. For a ten-year-old like myself, the Monkees were a cultural access point that the Beatles weren’t. I was an oldest kid, teaching myself, and the Beatles were a bit beyond my grasp. Television delivers the Monkees to me in a different way; A Hard Day’s Night was not on TV in 1965. . . . The Monkees . . . came inside my living room, and there was a familiarity that allowed me to really understand what this new thing was. I had the first two Monkees albums, and I couldn’t have gotten a better education, retrospectively, in songwriting, when you think about it, than listening to Neil Diamond, Carole King, Boyce and Hart compositions. The world in two-and-a half to three minutes.
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I had the jeans, the boots . . . There was a whole Hud element to that cowboy culture that I knew that could be introduced, the Route 66 Americana, not the Nashville Dixie country. Beyond James Dean, beyond Giant. This Route 66 Corvette cowboy. So let’s just call it that—it’s beyond Cadillac Cowboy. It’s Corvette cowboy.
—Dwight Yoakam (in Don McLeese, Dwight Yoakam: A Thousand Miles From Nowhere [2012])
The tree of country music has lots of eccentric branches.
The Handsome Family, “My Friend” (2009)
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lagniappe
reading table
The Everyday Enchantment of Music
by Mark Strand
(Almost Invisible [2012])
A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until it became the memory of a night in Venice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the empty home of a heart in trouble. Then suddenly there was sun and the music came back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing, would become music, and the memory of what happened after Venice would begin, and what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.
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Happy Birthday, Billie!
music clip of the day 