John Martyn’s Glorious Fool: Truth stumbles in the street

John Martyn was a British singer-songwriter and guitarist, who performed for more than forty years and released 23 studio albums, often to critical acclaim. The Times described him as “an electrifying guitarist and singer whose music blurred the boundaries between folk, jazz, rock and blues.”

Recent events in the UK brought to mind his Glorious Fool song, the title track on his 1981 studio album. The song was covered very well by Sam Butler and Clarence Fountain of the Blind Boys of Alabama on a 2011 tribute album to John Martyn.

Glorious Fool is directed towards the American president of the time, Ronald Reagan, for whom Martyn, it seems, had little time. Leaving aside Martyn’s feelings about Reagan, the song has even more relevance to public life currently;

He lied to his mother
And lied to the rest
He lied to his brother
Who loved him the best
He lied to himself.

Another song that captures the death of truth that we’ve seen in the public sphere is Tell the Truth, written by Bobby Whitlock and Eric Clapton and recorded by Derek and the Dominos in August 1970 for Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs. Whitlock has described it as a kind of coming-of-age song, a reminiscence about getting older, but as you listen to the lyrics today, it sounds like a social commentary on the descent of today’s world into double-speak and deceit:

Tell the truth. 
Tell me who’s been fooling you?
Tell the truth. 
Who’s been fooling who?

It doesn’t matter just who you are,
Or where you’re going or been…
The whole world is shaking now. Can’t you feel it?

Back in 1949, George Orwell’s 1984 was published under the shadow of Hitler and Stalin, and portrays a nightmare vision of a future in which truth has been eclipsed. Orwell said he was worried that the “very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world.” He might have been surprised at where we have now reached, where the bare-faced lie has become perfectly acceptable and truth in the public sphere scarcely seems to matter.

We’re rightly appalled at the lies promulgated in Russia by Putin’s government about his bloody war in Ukraine, where women are being raped, civilians murdered and people tortured. But it’s merely a military operation, Putin says, to neutralize Nazism, and his soldiers are helping oppressed people.

The effectiveness of these lies within Russia was brought home to me a few weeks ago when I had a short engagement with a Russian photographer in a photography site I’m a member of. I objected to his posting a photograph of “Victory Park” in Moscow and he told me firmly that I was being duped by my government and the press and that eventually that would be revealed. This from a clearly well-educated person.

But it’s not just in Russia that truth has died. In the UK, political leaders seem to have taken a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book, with the Prime Minister facing a parliamentary investigation into claims he misled the House of Commons about the partygate scandal.

If you haven’t been following the story, during the lockdown and public health restrictions of 2020 and 2021 there were parties and gatherings in 10 Downing Street (the Prime Minister’s residence), its garden and other government buildings. The police have now fined Boris Johnson, other politicians and government officials for breaches of the regulations – which of course they themselves had set and urged everyone to follow.

As an example, The Daily Mirror reported that around “40 or 50” people were said to have been crammed “cheek by jowl” into a medium-sized room in Number 10 for each of two parties during December 2020. “It was a Covid nightmare,” one source claimed.

But worse than the flagrant breaking of the rules during a period when families could not attend funerals of their loved ones, was the denial of any wrong-doing by Johnson, including a statement to Parliament, for which he is now being investigated.

This does not surprise anyone in the UK – The Independent newspaper has said that Johnson his ministers have made at least 27 false statements to parliament since the 2019 general election – and have failed to correct them.

The idea that you can just lie and get away with it has a long history, of course, with politicians. In American life, Presidents Eisenhower, Johnson, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, and Obama have all been caught in untruths. But it has all come to a nasty looking, pus-filled head of late – during his term as President of the United States, Donald Trump is reported to have made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims – what some have characterized as a “firehose of falsehood” propaganda. Fact-checkers have described it as “unprecedented” in American politics.

What philosopher Hannah Arendt once called “the conflict between truth and politics” has been taken to an entirely new level. Robert Musil, the author of the classic The Man Without Qualities in the mid-1930s, wrote, “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” And yet here we are.

Truth has become devalued and our societies imperilled because of it. As the ancient prophets of Israel said, “Truth has stumbled in the street” (Isaiah 59.14) and “lies and not truth prevail in the land” (Jeremiah 9.3).

Someone famously said, “Let us begin by committing ourselves to the truth – to see it as it is, and tell it like it is – to find the truth, to speak the truth, and to live the truth.” Words to live by – despite the salutary fact that this came from Richard Nixon on the occasion of his acceptance of the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1968. The danger of ignoring the advice writ large.

The lack of honesty and integrity is corrosive. A previous UK Prime Minister, John Major says all this “is a dangerous trend. If lies become commonplace, truth ceases to exist. What and whom, then, can we believe? The risk is … nothing and no one. And where are we then?”

It’s up to all of us to demand the truth of our politicians, no matter if they represent our political viewpoint or not.

And to demand the truth of ourselves as well. Because dishonesty is a temptation for us all. Fyodor Dostoevsky warns us in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, that not to tell the truth risks us losing our sense of reality. To lose the truth is to lose your soul. “Above all,” says Dostoevsky’s Father Zossima, “don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.”

Two thousand years ago, someone said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” This truth is a deep one – as a provincial governor found out a long time ago when he faced his prisoner and asked, “What is truth?” There was no answer because the living embodiment of that was standing in front of him.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth. (Gospel of St. John)

Son House, live and restored

LONDON: Blues guitarist Son House (Eddie James ‘Son’ House, Jr) performs on stage at the Hammersmith Odeon in 1967 in London. Image is part of David Redfern Premium Collection. (Photo by David Redfern/Redferns)

Son House, who died in March 1988, was one of the original Delta bluesmen, who began singing and playing guitar in 1927, and within a short time became a blues legend. Friends with Charlie Patton, he recorded nine classic songs for Paramount Records in the 1930s and was a major influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. After recording for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress in 1942, he quit playing and moved to Rochester, New York. His music career was revived, however, after his re-discovery in the mid-sixties, recording and touring America and Europe.

His life and later career were marred by his alcoholism – Howlin’ Wolf told him, “You had a chance with your life, but you ain’t done nothin’ with it…See, you in love with one thing, and that’s some whiskey.” Nevertheless, House managed some remarkable live performances and recordings at this time and the songs on Forever on My Mind are from 1964, from a taped performance at Wabash College in Indiana obtained by House’s manager and blues curator Dick Waterman. [check out our review of Waterman’s biography here]

Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound label is restoring and releasing Waterman’s archived tape collection of Delta blues artists, and Forever on My Mind is the first instalment. The sound quality on the album is great and it contains eight classic House songs, including Preachin’ Blues, Death Letter, Pony Blues and Levee Camp Moan.

House was first gripped by hearing the sound of glass on steel – the bottleneck slide – when, as a young pastor, he strolled past a house where a party or “frolic” was taking place. He stopped to listen. “Wonder what’s that he’s playing? I knew that guitars hadn’t usually been sounding like that. So I eases up close enough to look,” House said. “Sheez, I like that! I believe I want to play one of them things.”

Whereupon he got himself a guitar, albeit with only 5 strings and a hole in the back and learned to play it, after Willie Wilson (who was the bluesman at the frolic whom he had heard) fixed it up for him. With his guitar tuned in Open G, he soon was “zinging it” as he called it, with the bottleneck slide. Within a matter of weeks, he was out earning money at gigs. And as he said himself, “I kept on playing and got better and better.”

And on Forever On My Mind, there’s plenty of “zinging,” House working his resonator skilfully in accompaniment to his characteristically expressive vocals. The songs sound, perhaps, more reflective and calmer than other recordings, though they still drip with emotion.

Many people will know Death Letter from his videoed 1965 performance (with 3.5m views on YouTube), which is frantic and anguished. House made the song a centrepiece of his live shows during the 1960s, often playing it more than once during a concert. About a man who learns by letter of the death of the woman he loves and who later views her body at the morgue, Paul Du Noyer said the song is “one of the most anguished and emotionally stunning laments in the Delta blues œuvre.”

The version of Death Letter included here is a much calmer version, the slide playing more nuanced. Given the nature of the song, though, it is by no means mellow, and House expresses the tragedy masterfully.

Preachin’ Blues has a nice combination of slide work on both strummed chords and single notes and, no matter how often you hear it, the song is always arresting. This song was something of a signature song for House and it vividly describes the tussle between the church and the blue devils for his soul – a tussle the church kept losing. He sang:

Oh, and I had religion Lord this very day
But the womens and whiskey, well they would not let me pray.

By all accounts House had been an accomplished preacher. Yet, for most of his preaching career, he was living a double life, drinking and womanizing. In Preachin’ the Blues, a deacon jumps up in church and accuses the minister:

Another deacon jumped up and said, “Why don’t ya hush?”
“You know you drink corn liquor and your life’s a horrible stink.”

Which might well be an accusation that House either had thrown at himself or felt should have been thrown at him. And his disillusionment with religion, or at least his disillusionment with himself as a worthy church leader, comes out in these lines from the song:

Yes, I’m gonna get me religion, I’m gonna join the Baptist Church.
You know I wanna be a Baptist preacher, just so I won’t have to work.

The title track is real, old time Delta blues, bleak but articulated beautifully by House and accompanied mostly by sparse single note guitar work. Never officially recorded and released before, it’s a fine introduction to forty-five minutes of blues history, the recordings superbly re-mastered by Easy Eye Sound.

The final song is another Son House classic, Levee Camp Moan. Levee camps were temporary settlements along the Mississippi River for about 60 years until 1940 for workers on the earthen levees that run along both sides of the river’s banks. The workforce was almost entirely black men who were fearfully exploited – forced to work long work hours, paid badly and harshly disciplined. House’s song laments a man’s separation from his woman and the problem in their relationship “when I done not get the check.”

The album gives us Son House at the peak of his abilities, sober, and singing and playing with passion and clarity. Dick Waterman said of the concert: “The show was held in kind of an assembly hall. There were a few dozen, there may have been up to fifty people, something like that. They were quiet and polite during the performance…There were no barriers, there were no filters between him and the audience. He was just giving them the plain, unvarnished Delta material, as he knew it and as he sang it.”

Plain and unvarnished it may be, but it sounds fresh and clear. Waterman and Easy Eye have given us a great gift in these wonderful recordings of quintessential Delta blues by one of the masters.