There are two towering figures in Mississippi Hill Country Blues. One is the irreplaceable R.L. Burnside...the other is the mighty Junior Kimbrough. Legends. As great as any of the players who left for Chicago or Detriot...greater in my estimation. Like all great players...Howlin' Wolf - Smokestack Lighting, Muddy Waters - Mannish Boy, etc...they both had a signature song...a song that was impossible, no matter how many times it was covered, to separate from its source. For Burnside it's Goin' Down South...for Kimbrough it's Meet Me In The City.
I wouldn't be surprised if one of you pops and says you've done a cover of it.
I love the North Mississippi Allstars. Some of their albums come off as too theoretical...to concerned with what they're trying to do but they've also been fantastic live. Luther and Cody are, of course, the sons of Jim Dickinson. They come by all this very honestly...this is their neighborhood.
Jon O'Spencer is gonna make "every-TING" so fine...best guitar take not played by Junior himself.
Gomez capture something different.
The Black Keys obviously have an affinity for the Hill Country...they got their start on Fat Possum so it's with some credibility and obvious tenderness that they take it on.
It's an untouchable song that deserves a place among the greatest expressions of the 20th century.
From local Memphis TV in 1979 we have Straight Talk With Marge Thrasher...and she is having none of this nonsense. In fact, she's in a right tizzy about it. The Regal couple just seems confused.
Tav handles himself like the consummate Southern Gentleman that he is.
More important for our purposes here...are the "invisible performers" he's talking about. He's almost certainly talking about people like Charlie Feathers and his mentor Junior Kimbrough, Othar Turner, Jim Dickinson, Jessie Mae Hemphill and even our very own Alex Chilton there...and I have no doubt that R.L. Burnside was on his mind.*
** Snake Drive written by R.L. Burnside
It should be pointed out that Panther Burns is covering R.L. Burnside more than a decade before Bad Luck City and almost 15 years before Fat Possum Records.
Behind the Magnolia Curtain was released in 1981...the same year, you will of course remember, that The Fall were touring the US behind Grotesque and Slates...while also running through songs that would appear on Hex. You will also know that one of the greatest moments in the history of sound occurs on this tour...Winter..."that's an alcohol free lager...well, anyway I digress."
It was recorded at a show in Memphis, Tennessee...where Mark E Smith met our man Tav. Both were on Rough Trade and The Fall Online is convinced that Mark E Smith was introduced to the song Bourgeois Blues through the Panther Burns cover on Behind the Magnolia Curtain. If he owned that record...he heard Snake Drive.
This proves, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Mark E Smith was indeed completely obsessed with Hill Country Blues.
Here's where I drop the mic...wipe my hands of this nonsense and leave the room a champion.
ALL I DO IS WIN WIN WIN NO MATTER WHAT...
*If you're a little confused by the geography...Memphis is in the extreme southwest corner of Tennessee bordered by Arkansas to the west and Mississippi to the south. The reason that everybody in Mississippi ends up in Memphis instead of Jackson is that The Delta and the Hill Country are within Memphis's sphere of influence. When they go to town...they don't go to Jackson they go to Memphis.
Special Thanks to Gronmark for the Hasil Adkins reference...which reminded me of Panther Burns...which led to me uncovering this fascinating rocknroll artifact.
** If Mississippi was a sound it would be this song...here's Jim Dickinsons boys, and Burnsides and Kimbroughs...burning Bonaroo down with it. Bonus Track.
Half sung lyrics that are forced along by an irresistibly rough hewn rhythm...punctuated by demented melodic barbs. Hill Country Blues or....
Little Milton, Albert, B.B....we love you but, the Bossman's here now. Scatter!
Break your ears on this.
"Then One Night/I Was Doin' My Homework/My Woman/She Calls Out Yo' Name."
Those early Fall records are rocknroll in another dimension...a better one. One where Hill Country Blues, not Delta Blues, set the rules. Where they don't have a word for Rockabilly because Rockabilly just is. Where they don't have a word for Hippie because they've never seen one...and, internets forgive me, they've never heard a Boy Band sing Twist and Shout. I love the Fall...but, those records from Grotesque to Perverted By Language are transcendent.
We haven't even bothered with the fact that you have Ezra Pound, Christopher Logue, Mary Flannery and Eliot...ranting over the whole thing.
That's how a Cracker came to be obsessed with the FALL.*
How this clown became such a hater we'll probably never know.
Get The F*** Down Y'all!
*For the record...I am a Cracker...not a Redneck. My people were among those Britons who settled South Georgia
A cynical person might think that there are elements among us who don't believe these particular people are capable of pondering Universal questions at a high level...all I'm sayin'...get the same shit with "Folk" art...and with Country music...only that's been a bald face con perpetrated by...anyway. We'll save it.
Beale St...Martha and the Boy a couple of years ago.
The Boy tries to convinces his Moma that he is indeed big enough to go into the bar.
Brace youselfs...this is the cut. When he hits the first fanfare you will think you're high. The Delta Force article named Junior Kimbrough as Fat Possums greatest discovery. No doubt, Junior Kimbrough was a balls out genius but, R.L. Burnside was capable, when he cared to, of making you feel like you've heard an echo of God's voice (and he knows it too...watch his face)...an affirmation of reality.
You don't have to listen closely to understand why Fred McDowell needed to keep Jesus on speed dial.
Fred McDowell did get a piece of the 60's blues revival. At the end of the decade, he shocked and horrified the "Blues Community" by hiring a white bass player and making one of the finest records since electricity....I Do Not Play No RocknRoll. Little ironic joke there...lost on no one except the "Blues Community."
I'm pretty sure those twats are guarding his wiki page . There's the obligatory reference to jungle...I mean African roots. It's so rhythmic...you know? Best of all is the idea that McDowell would "occasionally" pick up an electric guitar. If that doesn't give you a case of the vapors...you can put your Ray Ban's in your fedora and set them on fire.
R.L. Burnside, a protege of McDowell, also occasionally played the electric guitar. Here he is as George Mitchell presented him in the late 60's. These recordings are acoustic and they are fabulous.
But here's Burnside on his own time...thankfully, and merely, recorded in the late 70's by Alan Lomax. The bad-ass holding the snowcone is his wife.
There's nothing ideological about it...nobody can hear an acoustic guitar at a fish-fry or block party. The truth of the matter is that these folks occasionally picked up an acoustic guitar to take money from the "Blues Community" on college campuses and at folk festivals.
These were Mississippi Hill Country players. Unlike their ossified cousins in the Delta...they were uncodified, unfettered, unconquered. They were also mostly unknown to the world until the early 90's when Matthew Johnson started Fat Possum Records.
He was writing for Living Blues Magazine...and the label was an expression of his frustration with the "Blues Community." Johnson said "imagine waking up one morning to find that your life's love had been taken over by Dan Akroyd?" They wanted people to hear and know that the Blues was still very much alive...hear what it sounded like when the musicians returned from your coffee shops and tossed the acoustic guitar back in the closet....what he heard on the weekends as a student at Ole Miss. Here's this bit from The Guardian in 2003...a little bit of a leg puller but, not that much of one. *
Jessie Mae Hemphill...dig it.
Sell some onion rings and T-shirts behind that bitches!
Listen to this and tell me if it's the facts of the situation that matter...i'm poor, my woman left me, the bawsman's a dick, etc...or if these facts aren't pointing to a Truth about the poverty of existing in contrast to Existence. There's a reason that so many of them sing about Jesus too.
It's just hard music...that's all. Hard times, hard partyin', hard lovin and hard praying. Hard as freezer meat.
* People's imaginations tend to run wild when they're in The South...especially in Mississippi. It doesn't help that we like to tell stories. I don't know where Richard Grant got the idea that possession of beer in Water Valley is illegal (it may be a dry...but, there are no laws against possession any where) or the f****ing nerve to ask R.L. Burnside if Matthew Johnson was paying him right.
It was also in the Guardian that I read of the 30ft Storm Surge that hit New Orleans during Katrina. For those of y'all playing along....pull up of Louisiana and picture in your mind the &^%$ing wave that would still be 30ft tall when it hit New Orleans. It was the Mississippi Gulf Coast that was hit and erased by the 30ft storm surge.
EDIT: Even though I've given some qualification in the comment below...I've just read back over this and none of it makes much sense. It's like listening to a person having an argument over the phone...as they walk in and out of the room.
P.S. If any of you want to contact me by email...my old yahoo email is dead. I have not been able to log on to it since Saturday morning. No idea...it keeps asking me for a new password. I can be reached at the new email... thevetcameron at gee mail .
Somehow a sketch that had life and tension in it became this staid yawner. Booo Hissss Boo!
See how the hair in the drawing is a cohesive shape that could stand on it's on...a swoop with a contained explosion. In the painting it's just a textury mess. No movement...no life in her body at all. This painting makes me want to punch myself.
We'll be taking the scraper to it tonight.
The image comes from the brawl at the Ascot in 2011...which I've only just discovered. Not on a bet could I have come up with something better than people in top hats and tails trying to crush each other's skulls in with champagne bottles.
We have had a winner though....
(That's better...the other picture is so murky)
Of all the paintings that have come out of my garage in the last two months...this, is probably the only one I truly happy with. It still wants a few touches when it dries...so there's still time to ruin it. Fingers crossed.
Next up...why you will never want to hear 12 bar, Delta Blues again.
