The blues, honesty and truth

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“The blues is the truth,” said Willie Dixon, famously. “The blues are the true facts of life expressed in words and song, inspiration, feeling, and understanding.”

One the one hand, the blues have always been entertainment, music to dance to, but it’s essentially music that is rooted in hard times, trouble and suffering. Which Dixon understood well. Born in Vicksburg in 1915 in a household of 14 children, his family lived in what he described as a “raggedy” house. Even worse was where he ended up aged eleven after running away from home – “man, you’re talking about a shack… the house [I stayed] in had great big holes in the floor.” Trying to steal some fixtures from an old derelict house got him sent to a jail-farm when he was twelve where he said, “That’s when I really learned about the blues. I had heard ’em with the music and took ’em to be an enjoyable thing but after I heard these guys down there moaning and groaning these really down-to-earth blues…I really began to find out what the blues meant to black people.”

On another occasion, for a petty charge, Dixon served thirty days at the Harvey Allen County Farm, near the infamous Parchman Farm prison, where the treatment of prisoners was inhumane – “this was the first time I saw a man beat to death,” he said. Dixon himself was brutalized, receiving a blow to his head that made him deaf for about four years. Dixon, in short, knew all about the truth of the blues.

Early blues songs covered the whole gamut of real-life problems and hardships faced by black communities – ill-health, poverty, homelessness, discrimination, police brutality, as well as the vagaries of romantic love. Here’s Victoria Spivey with TB Blues, tuberculosis being a disease particularly associated with poverty:

There’s no hiding from the realities of life with the blues. As slide guitarist Bryn Haworth told me recently, “Blues music to me is honest music. It’s people expressing their sorrow, their pain, their loneliness, their disconnectedness, their questions or anger about things we all feel…It’s honest…honest to God music, really.”

The blues face life head on, honestly, and somehow, often seem to enable a way through, because of that honesty. Honesty, however, seems to be a quality in short supply these days.

Tell the Truth, written by Bobby Whitlock and Eric Clapton, was recorded by Derek and the Dominos in August 1970, and appeared on 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.” Would he have been surprised at where we have reached in today’s world, where the bare-faced lie has become perfectly acceptable and truth in the public sphere scarcely seems to matter?

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. Donald Trump is in the White House, telling more lies each day than you wash your hands (according to CNN, June 2019) – as of June 7 2019, his 869th day in office, the president had made 10,796 false or misleading claims, according to Washington Post’s the Fact Checker’s database. And UK Tories have just installed Boris Johnson as the country’s Prime Minister, a man with a long and well-documented history of playing fast and loose with the truth (as reported by the Independent) – from his days as a journalist with the Times and the Daily Telegraph to backing the infamous claim on the side of the bus that the UK was sending £350m a week to the EU, followed by “let’s fund our NHS instead” during the Brexit referendum campaign.

As Roger Cohen put it recently, “The triumph of indecency is rampant. Choose your facts. The only blow Trump knows is the low one. As the gutter is to the stars, so is this president to dignity. Johnson does a grotesque Churchill number. Nobody cares. The wolves have it; the sheep, transfixed, shrug.”

Of all the disturbing aspects of the rise of petty nationalism and populism which has given rise to racism, xenophobia and increasing polarisation, it is the assault on truth which is perhaps the most undermining of life as we know it. I watched a clip on an US TV programme recently where a woman was asked about Trump’s recorded statement that he could stand in the middle of 5^th Avenue and shoot someone without losing any voters, and she dismissed it out of hand as “fake news” from the dishonest media. Up is down; black is white; I only believe what fits my viewpoint.

But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Harvard professor and four-term United States senator, famously observed, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That has become almost quaint, so far down the road have we come. Johnson and Trump do not exist in a vacuum; the dishonesty which pervades public life at the highest levels seeps out through elements of the media into the public square and into the lives of individuals. 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).

We’re grateful for courageous reporters, broadcasters, church leaders and others who speak truth to power, expose lying and call out dishonest leadership. And with a continuous stream of properly fake news, we need to take care what we are prepared to believe. As psychologist Jordan Peterson says, “The small sins of the individual culminate into the great sins of the state.”

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.”

Lies and deceit eat away at the fabric of our being. They are truly destructive, each lie causing a little more damage to our characters, until we can scarcely tell truth from untruth.

On the other hand, when you tell the truth, “Everything begins to come together…when you’re around someone who tells the truth everything comes together and that’s the potential destiny of the world…you can bring forth something again to paradise by speaking the truth and you can start in your own life, and in the lives of your own family…It’s the proper way of wending your way through the terrible world without making it worse than it already is and with the possibility perhaps of making it better.”

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.

More importantly, two thousand years ago, someone said, “You shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” As we discover in the authenticity of the blues, there is something about truth telling that does indeed set us free. Something about facing the realities of the world and our troubles face-on that is the first step to freedom. There’s a deeper freedom than that, though – 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)

It’s so hard to find one rich man in ten with a satisfied mind.

A Satisfied Mind was written by Joe “Red” Hayes and Jack Rhodes and first recorded by Porter Wagoner in 1955, scoring him a #1 Country hit. Hayes explained the origin of the song in an interview: “The song came from my mother. Everything in the song are things I heard her say over the years. I put a lot of thought into the song before I came up with the title. One day my father-in-law asked me who I thought the richest man in the world was, and I mentioned some names. He said, ‘You’re wrong; it is the man with a satisfied mind.’”

The song has been recorded by a great many artists over the years, notable by Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. Cash’s first version was released in 2004 on the Kill Bill: Volume 2 soundtrack, but it later appeared on his posthumous 2010 album American VI: Ain’t No Grave. It was a song Cash had been singing since the 1950s from the time when he didn’t have enough of his own songs and needed covers, but he liked it very much. Like the rest of the songs on American VI, the song is poignant, and sounds like the wisdom of a man who is near to the end and has an urgent message to convey.

Money can’t buy back
Your youth when you’re old
Or a friend when you’re lonely
Or a love that’s grown cold

The wealthiest person
Is a pauper at times
Compared to the man
With a satisfied mind.

Cash doubtless knew his time had “run out,” but the song lyrics seem to very aptly fit the faith that sustained him:

But one thing’s for certain
When it comes my time
I’ll leave this old world
With a satisfied mind.

Bob Dylan recorded A Satisfied Mind twice, first in 1967 on a version that wasn’t released until 2014 on The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete, and again for his 1980 Saved. Dylan’s version on this much pilloried album is masterful, all bluesy and gospel at the same time. He begins virtually unaccompanied, with his wonderful gospel singers harmonizing and some sparse piano. The stripped back, emotion-laden approach highlights beautifully the potency of the song’s message in a way that most other versions I’ve heard fail to do. Throughout the song Dylan moans in the manner of an old gospel blues artist, giving us ample time to ponder the question of what really satisfies in life.

On Saved, A Satisfied Mind bleeds into the excitement of the title track, a rocker which provides Dylan’s answer to the opening song’s question. “I was blinded by the devil, born already ruined,” Dylan sings, urgently pointing to his discovery of the reality of a mind unsatisfied by fortune or fame. But now, “by his grace I have been touched, by his word I’ve been healed,” that unsatisfied life saved by his new-found faith.

I got to thinking about this song after reading Charles Duhigg’s article in the New York Times Magazine, Wealthy, Successful and Miserable. Duhigg says that “The upper echelon is hoarding money and privilege to a degree not seen in decades. But that doesn’t make them happy at work.” He recounts attending his 15^th anniversary reunion with his Harvard MBA class and being shocked at how many were just plain miserable. These were people all earning huge salaries and working in prestigious companies, and yet who felt like they were wasting their lives. One person was earning $1.2m a year, hated his work, and yet felt he could not afford to take a pay cut to a mere $600,000 in order to take up an opportunity he really fancied.

As Hayes and Rhodes’s song says,

But little they know
That it’s so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind.

Upon further research, Duhigg discovered that around 50% of American workers are professionally miserable – and this in a boom economy. There is an underlying sense that what they are doing day by day just isn’t worth the huge effort many of them have to put into it.

Our economics-driven market drives ever greater production and consumption. It’s hard not to buy into it, so pervasive is the advertising industry assailing us at every turn, online or off. You need this, you have to have it, you’re not complete without this. So it goes, relentlessly, every day. We work ceaselessly, we consume, we sleep, we get up and do it again. But, as the old saying goes, who says on their death bed – “I wish I’d spent more time in the office.”

Money can’t buy back
Your youth when you’re old
Or a friend when you’re lonely
Or a love that’s grown cold.

Or as the ancient Psalmist of Israel said, “Do not be overawed when someone gets rich, and lives in ever greater splendour; for they will take nothing with them when they die, their splendour will not descend with them. (Psalm 49:16-17)

Joe Hayes said of his song, “It has been done a lot in churches. I came out of the Opry one night and a church service was going on nearby. The first thing I hear was the congregation singing ‘Satisfied Mind.’ I got down on my knees.”

Good place to start, maybe, to get some perspective and maybe, a satisfied mind.

 

[Some other fine versions of the song include:

Ben Harper and the Blind Boys of Alabama on There Will Be A Light

Jeff Buckley on Sketches

Eric Bibb on Spirit & the Blues

Lucinda Williams on Ramblin’

A Blues Odyssey: Part 1, New York

A trip to Memphis and on into the Delta has been on the cards for a long time. I’d originally planned to do this trip when I was researching my book (The Gospel According to the Blues), but ill health had prevented me. Having now visited the Mississippi Delta, and experienced the land, the people, the pace of life, for sure it would have been helpful to have done this trip before now. No matter, I was in better health and a trip to New York City with my wife gave me the opportunity to slip down to Memphis and meet up with a couple of pals from Texas and see what Tennessee and Mississippi had to offer.

The journey began clearing US customs in Dublin airport, where previous experiences of surly US customs officials was repeated. Our guy was an unsmiling, unfriendly fellow – young, but looking like he had the cares of the world on his shoulders. My wife was quite unnerved, getting her right hand and left hand mixed up for the fingerprint taking and got no sympathy from our guy. After he finished dealing with me, I thanked him and told him he was doing a great job – quite sincerely, actually. I’m sure it’s no fun doing what he does all day long. He cracked the glimmer of a smile, so I hope he was a bit more pleasant with subsequent passengers.

We shared US customs war stories with the passenger beside us on the plane – who’d had a truly awful experience. As the conversation wore on, he told us his life story, which was quite heart-warming. John’s a retired Englishman. A northerner, affable, good talker, big guy. He’d been married as a young man for three short years and then divorced; he then lived his life for 40 years working in Scandinavia, having remarried happily. A few years ago his wife became very ill and before she died he heard from his first wife for the first time since they’d divorced. She needed some documentation relating to the divorce. She’d lived all her life happily married for a second time in the US. As it happened, her husband was also dying at the time. John and she supported each other from separate continents until both of their spouses had passed away. In due course, they got together again, now in their senior years, living half of each year together n a rural Southern State and half the time in Ireland.

Somebody ought to make a movie of this story.

The great thing about clearing US customs in Ireland is you can just walk off the plane as if you are an American. Our New York adventure began.

We were blessed with blue skies and sunshine, along with near freezing temperatures. No matter – the warmth of New Yorkers everywhere we went more than made up for that. You hear reports of New Yorkers being rude and short. But everyone we met – hotel and restaurant staff, people manning the subway, people in stores, police, people we stopped to ask directions – were all unfailingly courteous and pleased to help. Topped off by the woman who approached me in Harlem when I was struggling to get the bus ticket machine to work so I could get to LaGuardia. She topped up her MetroCard in the machine, gave it to me, and despite my protestations, would not take any money from me.

But hey – music’s the reason you’re reading this, right? The Saturday night we were there was the night before the Grammys. And I’d booked us into the City Winery on Pier 26 to see Guy Davis and Fabrizio Poggi play, along with Eric Bibb. Three of my favourite artists and all three nominated for a Grammy in the Traditional Blues Album category. I’ve interviewed all three of them recently, so was especially looking forward to the gig.

When we arrived the small restaurant was packed with tables and diners, with a small stage for the performers. We got seated – right beside Shemekia Copeland, whom I’d also interviewed a while back and whom I was delighted to chat to; and across the table from Dom Flemons, ex-Carolina Chocolate Drops and Grammy winner. Guy and Fabrizio sang some songs from their outstanding tribute to Sonny and Brownie, Sonny and Brownie’s Last Train. Eric Bibb was up next and performed an utterly spine tingling unaccompanied version of “Refugee Moan” from his album Migration Blues. Eric live is always a wonderful experience, but this song, sung in this way, at this time in New York City, was very special.

Elvin Bishop Trio

That would have been good enough for me – but next on the bill was the 75-year-old John Hammond, Blues Hall of Fame inductee and multiple Grammy nominee, who has lost none of his resonator and harmonica prowess. Then we had Elvin Bishop – also nominated in this year’s Traditional Blues Album Grammy category for Elvin Bishop’s Big Fun Trio – with a couple of pals. Elvin settled himself on the stage and evidently was hoping someone would loan him a guitar. A few moments later, someone duly obliged and we had a short set from Elvin.

The biggest surprise of the evening was that Keb’ Mo’ also turned up and took the stage. Keb’ Mo’ deservedly took the Grammy along with Taj Mahal the next day for Best Contemporary Blues album. I’ve seen Keb’ Mo’  play a few times – and he never disappoints. He’s an outstanding guitarist, singer and song-writer. Congratulations on the Grammy, Keb’.

Disappointing, however, the next day was the result of the Best Traditional Blues Album. Nominated along with R L Boyce, Guy Davis & Fabrizio Poggi, Eric Bibb and the Elvin Bishop Trio was the Rolling Stones. Guess who won? Now the Stones’ album I quite enjoyed and we ranked it in our Best of list for 2016. But a traditional blues album? Come on. Especially when pitted against the other contenders here. It seemed to me that the result of this category was more about the alliance of two big brands – the Grammys and the Rolling Stones – rather than the merit of the artists and albums.

John Hammond

But the City Winery event, which also featured Dom Flemons, R L Boyce and Barbara Blue, was something special. It had the feel of a private party and we felt privileged to be a part of it. And thanks to Fabrizio for the warm welcome! We’ll see you again, my friend, on down the road – and many congratulations for the Grammy nomination.

So from the blues in New York to the home of the blues – on to Memphis and the Delta.

(to be continued)

Check out our Best of List for 2017 which features Guy & Fabrizio, Keb’ Mo’ and Taj Mahal.

And interviews with Guy Davis here; and Fabrizio Poggi here.

 

Grammy Nominated God Don’t Never Change – Producer Jeffrey Gaskill in Conversation

God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson has earned plaudits from all quarters and Grammy Award nominations for Best Roots Gospel Album and Best American Roots Performance for the Blind Boys of Alabama recording of Mother’s Children Have a Hard Time. The album was produced by Jeffrey Gaskill of Burning Rose Productions. The album features a star studded cast which includes Tom Waits, Lucinda William, Derek and Susan Trucks, Luther Dickinson and the Cowboy Junkies. Down at the Crossroads chatted with Jeffrey Gaskill to find out more about how the album came about:

DATC: First of all Jeffrey – congratulations on God Don’t Never Change. It’s a wonderful record; it’s been very widely acclaimed; it’s had two Grammy nominations. That’s no doubt been very pleasing for you – but have you been surprised at just how well it’s gone down?

Jeffrey Gaskill with Lucinda Williams

Jeffrey: I guess I’m not so surprised. I’m grateful for the Grammy nominations – I was hopeful they would come. But I like the fact that it’s gotten great reviews. These are uncertain times – everything’s uncertain, the music business is uncertain, you can’t take anything for granted. But, yes, I’m pleased with the nominations.

DATC: One writer said that your guidance resulted in “Eleven stirring renditions which replicate the soul of the songs, not just the sounds.” Presumably that was what you were striving for?

Jeffrey: Yeah, that was exactly it. Exactly. You know, just going for the heart of the song, and what Willie Johnson was saying at that time. Just bringing it up to contemporary times. And bringing artists together who can convey the song, convey the thought. Really, you know, it’s the thought in the song behind the music that matters the most.

DATC: So why did you want to do an album of Willie Johnson songs?

Jeffrey: Well I wanted to do it way back in 2003, after my Dylan project, Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan came out. But you know, I had to give some things a rest after that and it was hard to find a label that was willing to go to bat for the project on paper before it was recorded. This was at the time the record industry was collapsing.

DATC: So what is it about Willie Johnson’s music that really appealed to you, that made you want to do this album?

Jeffrey: I think it’s the sense of permanence – and I think it’s the same thing with Dylan’s music – these are themes that everyone needs to think about in their lifetime, no matter  when in the spectrum of time they’re living their life – it’s really timeless, enduring music. It’s not something to be sung today and forgotten about tomorrow.

DATC: And that’s the thing about his music – it really has endured over the years. It’s been covered by so many artists, in so many ways over the years. There’s something about it that seems to appeal to people in different eras, perhaps coming from different genres of music.

Jeffrey: Yeah, his music can be interpreted in any number of styles, so seminal is it. He himself, we might say, is hidden in plain sight, to the extent that most everybody is familiar with at least one or two of his songs, if not all of them. Although maybe not familiar with him as an artist.

DATC: The interesting thing, Jeffrey, is that Johnson’s music is quite unashamedly Christian; it springs right out of his vibrant faith. How come people still have an appetite for it, and how come artists who may have no particular interest in faith want to cover his songs and find his songs compelling?

Jeffrey: Well, of course some people only see Blind Willie Johnson as a blues artist, with those universal themes. It takes perhaps a little bit more understanding  and appreciation of the lyrics and what he’s getting at to really fully realize him as a gospel artist, which he truly is. But he can be taken either way I guess.

DATC: Can you tell us a bit about the process of making this album, Jeffrey? From what you’ve said I gather it was a long time in the making?

Jeffrey: Labels loved the concept of the album and the artists who were interested in recording, but the budget and the financial end just wasn’t feasible while the industry was collapsing. So inevitably I wound up raising the funds through a kick starter campaign. I was grateful for kick starter, but it’s not really in my nature to want to go out and do things like that. But, you know, when your back’s against the wall, and you want to get something done like that, you’ll do what needs to be done. And then the thought came to me about his dilapidated home in Marlin in Texas that I had visited, and what could be done about the wood from it, and through some extraordinary generosity, a woman down there whom I had befriended was able to secure some wood from the house before it was demolished. And that became the Blind Pilgrim Collection – the cigar box guitars.

[Wood that had fallen free from the dilapidated house where Johnson lived with his wife and singing partner Willie B. Harris in Marlin was delivered to the capable hands of George Brin at String Tinkers in Putnam, CT.  He carefully cleaned up this old Southern Yellow Pine and painstakingly hand-made ten magnificent finger-jointed boxes book-matched front and back to create these cigar box guitars.]

DATC: And there were some guitar picks as well weren’t there? I’m kinda kicking myself – I wish I’d tried to get one of those picks!

Jeffery: Well, they were made from the same wood that the guitars were made from. I said, “do you have any scraps left?” and in fact there were three very small pieces of wood left, and so I sent them out to a fabulous pick maker out in California, and he was able to get a hundred picks out of that wood. [Chris Brossard Picks (www.brossardpicks.com)]

DATC: Wonderful. So how did you go about recruiting the artists – I mean it’s a fantastic cast on the album, and all the performances are very, very strong. So how did you go about recruiting them, Jeffrey?

Jeffrey: Well, just sending letters to management, saying, hey, I’m Jeff and I made a record called Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, and I’m working on this Blind Willie Johnson project, and here’s a song, and I wonder if you’d consider singing it?

One artist we tried, an Irish one other than Sinead O’Connor, was Van Morrison, but we never heard back from him. That would’ve been nice.

DATC: So you suggested songs for particular artists, rather than artists choosing?

Jeffrey: In most cases yes. With some exceptions – like for Sinead O’Connor, I think I gave her different suggestions up front and then she came back and said she wanted to do a different couple of songs. But then I gave her Trouble Will Soon be Over. So that took a little bit of back and forth. But I think we landed on the right one.

Down at the Crossroads’ review of God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson is here

DATC: You sure did! It’s probably the surprise of the album, but it’s really fabulous. I wouldn’t have thought of Sinead O’Connor doing a song on an album like this. But she really nails that one, doesn’t she?

Jeffrey: Yeah, she totally nails it. And when I heard that, it really surpassed any expectations I had for the record. That and the Cowboy Junkies. I’m proud of all the tracks – they’re all great – but I really feel like, Sinead O’Connor and the Cowboy Junkies take it to another level, to a real contemporary sound, and show the relevancy of the words and of Blind Willie Johnson’s music. And these are the sort of songs that can be played on the radio, you know, anywhere, anytime.

DATC: What do you think the songs of Willie Johnson have to say to the modern world? We’re going back a long time to a particular social context, to an individual in very difficult circumstances, singing songs about faith – what can these songs say to the modern world?

Jeffrey: Well I like to think that the world is an improved place since his time. But I would think Willie Johnson would think that the lessons from his songs are still relevant. I would hope there is less desperation now than there was back then, and that there would be more empathy and understanding.

DATC: Have you another project in mind, Jeffrey, or do you just want the let the dust settle a bit on this on at the moment?

Jeffrey: Yeah, maybe let the dust settle for now. I do have another project in mind, it’s more of a audio museum exhibit of shaker music. I’m from New England and this music comes from the area in which I live. It’s got real historic importance.

DATC: Sounds like a great project. Thank you Jeffrey. Again – congratulations on the album our best wishes for the Grammys.

 

Best Americana Albums 2016

2016 was a bumper year for Americana and Roots music. With such variety and quality, it’s hard to grade them in any meaningful way.  So here’s the ten we’ve enjoyed most in alphabetical order by artist, followed by our next 10, and a final 5.

Birds of Chicago – Real Midnight

Luther Dickinson – Blues & Ballads  

Check out our recent interview with Luther here.

Dori Freeman – Dori Freeman

Luke Winslow King – I’m Glad Trouble Don’t Last Always

 Here’s our take on this album.

Sean McConnell – Sean McConnell

Parker Millsap – The Very Last Day

Kenny Meeks – New Jerusalem

Van Morrison – Keep Me Singing

Various – God Don’t Never Change

Here’s what we think of this superb album.

Lucinda Williams – Ghosts of Highway

Check out our take on this album here.

And our 11 – 20 list (again in alphabetical order by artist)

Avett Brothers – True Sadness

Brandy Clark – Big Day in a Small Town

Bob Dylan – Falling Angels

John Moreland – Tulsa Heat

Margo Price – The Farmer’s Daughter

John Prine – For Better, or Worse

Mavis Staples – Livin’ On a High Note

Here’s our take on this album.

Sister Hazel – Lighter In The Dark

Various – Southern Family

Brooks Williams – Brooks’ Blues

Check out our recent interview with Brooks here.

 

And our final five:

Brent Cobb – Shine on Rainy Day

Eric Clapton – I Still Do

Here’s our comment on this album.

Eric Bibb – Happiest Man in the World

Keith Richards – Cross Eyed Heart

Check out what we have to say about this album.

Sara Watkins – Young in All the Wrong Ways

 

And check out our Best Blues Albums of 2016 here.

 

Asking the Big Questions – God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson

Blind Willie Johnson’s music gets to you, it works its way inside you and asks you big questions about yourself and the way the world is.

God Don’t Never Change: The Songs of Blind Willie Johnson is quite simply this year’s best album – and there have been some very fine ones, including those from Luther Dickinson, Mavis Staples and Lucinda Williams.

Produced by Jeffrey Gaskill, ten years in the making and as a result of a successful crowd funding campaign, it features a stellar cast including Tom Waits, Derek Trucks & Susan Tedeschi, Lucinda Williams, Maria McKee, Luther Dickinson, the Cowboy Junkies, Sinead O’Connor and Rikki Lee Jones. Each song, with the possible exception of Jones’s version of Dark Was the Night, is outstanding, the artists’ interpretations doing full justice to the grit, passion and commitment of Blind Willie Johnson.

Johnson was a gospel bluesman who recorded 29 songs in five sessions for Columbia Records from 1927 to 1930 and who was renowned for his slide guitar – Eric Clapton called him the finest slide guitarist he knew – which he played with a brass ring or a knife. He alternated his tenor voice with a low growl or sometimes just a moan. His haunting gospel blues have endured over the years, covered by a host of artists from Led Zeppelin to Tom Jones to Ry Cooder to the Grateful Dead.

Johnson had a difficult life, as we might expect for a disabled black man living in the Southern States in the early decades of the 20^th century. Details of his life are sketchy – we don’t even know exactly where he is buried (for a fascinating examination of this see Shane Ford’s Shine a Light), but he lived in poverty and hardship, mostly busking and preaching on the streets of Texas. He died pitifully, living in the ashes of his burnt down house in 1945, having contracted malaria.

And yet, his legacy of songs live on. Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, possibly his most famous song, is one of the music tracks on the Voyager Golden Record, on the unmanned Voyager Project spaceship sent into space in 1977. It takes its place alongside music by Beethoven, Bach and Mozart. Quite what any extra terrestrials might make of Willie Johnson’s eerie slide guitar and moans on Dark Was the Night is anybody’s guess!

Johnson’s songs unashamedly confess and celebrate his Christian faith. (For more on Johnson’s life and faith see The Gospel According to the Blues ). For Johnson, God was a reality with whom we all have to deal – he pulls no punches on God Don’t Never Change and Can’t Nobody Hide from God. He reminds each of us of our responsibility for our own shortcomings in It’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine and he highlights the hardship of life in Lord I Just Can’t Keep from Crying. He gives us the answer to the problem of human frailty in I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole, and he looks forward to a better world in Jesus is Coming Soon and Bye and Bye I’m Going to See the King. The songs can sound threatening, ominous, gritty – but they can also be joyous and inspirational, when Johnson celebrates his faith in songs like Sweeter As the Years Go By or Let Your Light Shine on Me. This is earthy, blood and guts, committed religion.

And it needed to be for Johnson with the life he led. He had to know there was something more than the trials and difficulties he had to go through; he had to trust that God was, somehow, on his side, and that there would be a better day ahead. That’s why he sang, “keep your lamps trimmed and burning, see what the Lord has done,” and “let your light shine on me.”

For those of us cosseted in comfortable 21^st century Western lifestyles, Johnson’s music is a stark reminder of the harshness of life for many people in today’s world – motherless children, the poor, the disabled, those caught up in war, the sick – and shows how all this can be faced with fortitude, courage, even joy. In You’ll Need Somebody on Your Bond, Johnson reflects on both the sorrows of life and the way to deal with them:

“I came to Jesus as I was, weary and wounded and sad.
found in Him a resting place and he has made me glad.”
For Johnson, these words could never be trite, given the reality of his own life.

So to this new album, God Don’t Never Change. Tom Waits gets us right into the spirit of the songs with his raw vocals and some spirited guitar picking with Soul of a Man. Lucinda Williams contributes a couple of songs, notably a sparse Nobody’s Fault But Mine with some tasty slide guitar and a little Johnson-esque moaning. The slide guitar playing gets take up a notch as you might expect by Derek Trucks on the joyful Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning. (Check out our post on this song here).

Then suddenly we have Willie Johnson himself rasping his way into our consciousness as the Cowboy Junkies start up Jesus Is Coming Soon. They cleverly sample Johnson’s voice for the chorus on the song and it works fantastically well. After the pleasure of the Blind Boys of Alabama, with Jason Isbell on slide on Motherless Children, we have the surprise of the package – Sinead O’Connor, right in the middle of these top notch Americana artists, treats us to a spine-tingling Trouble Soon Be Over. With some exquisite backing vocals and a little guitar and percussion, O’Connor beautifully captures the dichotomy in the song of wrestling with the struggles of life and the hope of redemption.

More slide guitar, courtesy of Luther Dickinson, who is no stranger to inspirational gospel material on Bye and Bye I’m Going to See the King. Then, after Waits’ and Williams’ second contributions we have the delightful Let Your Light Shine On Me with Maria McKee. With a little guitar, some church organ and some nice backing vocals, McKee’s interpretation is glorious, particularly as the song grows and adds some rocking piano and McKee belts out “I know I got religion and I know I ain’t ashamed.” Ricki Lee Jones rounds off the 11 songs with Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, giving us the benefit of the lyrics about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, where Johnson had just played slide guitar and moaned.

These are not trivial songs. They’re about life, trial, hardship, faith, death and eternity. Big subjects. Johnson’s music gets to you, it works its way inside you and asks you big questions about yourself and the way the world is. His music matters. That’s why this album is so important. And it’s why each of these artists has participated in the project and has produced such outstanding work.

And it’s why you should go get yourself a copy of the album without delay. Better still, start listening to Blind Willie Johnson yourself.

Lucinda Williams – Just a little more faith & grace

Lucinda Williams has been in a rich vein of form of late. Each of her last two albums, Blessed and Down Where The Spirit Meets The Bone I was convinced was her best work to date. Now we have The Ghosts of Highway 20, which Paste Magazine said, “hits the gut, the soul and the grey matter.”

At 63, her song writing is penetrating, visceral. It acknowledges pain and suffering, love lost, bereavement, hard times and memory stolen, but rails at it and fights and crawls its way through it to a place, not just of survival, but of redemption. As she sings in Place In My Heart,  “I’m pretty strong when I admit it. You might be surprised at what I can manage, so don’t you ever forget.”

In The Ghosts of Highway 20 we have Williams’s second double album in two years, fourteen songs of mature, life-tarnished reflection, delivered flawlessly by her band along with the atmospheric guitar work of Bill Frizell and Val McCallum, and Greg Leisz on pedal steel. And, of course, Williams’ own characteristically world-weary, aching voice, as ever beautifully phrased, raging, urgent or cracking, as the song requires.

The final two songs of the album are Americana hymns, which bring it to an appropriate cathartic close, after the previous searching twelve songs. If There’s A Heaven has strong echoes of Hank Williams and touchingly laments the recent passing of Williams’ father, Miller Williams. Apparently Miller used to talk of the time that he met Hank Williams just before his daughter was born, and then as it happens, Miller died on January 1, the same day of the year as Hank had. So, as Lucinda Williams’ husband Tom Overby said, “it’s very fitting that this song would arrive – as if it was a gift from Hank himself.”

The song is unashamedly about death – something that has become a taboo subject in our culture. “When you’re done, and your run is finally through…when you cross over to the other side…[when] you are cold and cannot stand…when you leave me here to grieve in pain and despair” – are stark lyrics for sure. Anyone of us who has lost people we love know the starkness and the pain of this parting, of being “bereft,” literally deprived of the other person.

“I’ve seen the face of hell,” says Williams, speaking of past heartache and troubles, and wants to know “if there’s a heaven out there.”

The final song of the album, Faith and Grace, brings something of an answer to the question.

“Just a little more faith and grace, To help me run this race, That’s all, that’s all, all I need.”

The song broadens life’s pain beyond bereavement to include burdens that are “hard to bear,” and times when “every door is locked,” and “no one will help me.” How do we cope at such times? How do we bear it? Williams answers, “I know I can make the call, I know God will hear.”

But we can’t see the heaven that’s out there beyond death, we can’t see the other side of our troubles at times, and for sure we can’t see God. That’s why we need “a little more faith and grace,” to find the assurance that “He will always hear you knock,” and to know that “You will always be standing right, When you’re standing on the rock.”

Williams here echoes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. “Ask,” says Jesus, “and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” If we can find the faith to believe that, then we become like the people at the end of the Sermon, of whom Jesus said “Everyone who listens to these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise person who built their house on rock.”

 

But, Williams has it right – when the time of trouble comes, we need a little more faith and grace, so we can stand on a rock, rather than be blown away by it all. And Williams’ final refrain as the song plays out is telling: “Get right with God,” she intones over and over, echoing a song from her album Essence. Right there is the point where faith begins and where we begin to find the grace we need.