Uniform Hieroglyphic

Billy Budd's Strange Dubieties

Written last, read only posthumously (except by his wife), almost certainly unfinished, more than any other work of Herman Melville's brilliant, troubled, and mysterious career, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) has served as a screen onto which successive generations of commentators have projected their personal obsessions.

The short work--at once deceptively simple (particularly stylistically in contrast to the dizzy soaring prose of Melville's younger years) and surprisingly dense for a piece of such un-Melvillian directness and proportions (only 130 pages in the definitive text prepared by Hayford and Sealts)--has alternatively been described as "Melville's testament of acceptance", as a Christian allegory, as a veiled portrait of the ambivalent way in which Herman's father in law, Massachusetts chief justice Lemuel Shaw, an abolitionist, mercilessly enforced the fugitive slave laws, and as a not so veiled story of self-loathing homosexuality.

There might be some truth to all of these things. Certainly it's an old man's book in which strangely inert characters submit with little protestation to the roles that the Fates, or at least the author, has proscribed for them in a manner that is unquestionably Greek in it's relentless inevitability ("Fated boy" Vere says to Billy when Billy kills Claggart, giving Vere's later moral hand wringing an air of powerless sophistry) and darn fatalistic. There's no doubt of the parallels to Biblical themes of the fall of man and the sacrifice of Jesus in Billy's more than preternatural innocence and the explicitly heavenly description of the beatified skies at the moment of Billy's death, as well as in Billy's final blessing of the man who condemns him to die. I can buy the notion that Shaw served as something of a model for Vere's almost self righteous rush to impose martial law as if no other choice were before him given not only what we know of Shaw's career but also what we can't help but read into what must have been Melville's resentment towards yet another towering family father in whose shadow he lived and on whose financial support he relied. And there's no question that Claggart's attraction/repulsion to "the Handsome Sailor" is pregnant with sexual envy and conflict.

But most of all I think Billy Budd, which I've just read again for the first time in some years, is about the same things that all of Melville's greatest work is about--the malleability of truth, the sad ways in which the social conventions of the civilized world alienate people from their true natures, and the doomed hopelessness of all human striving to understand anything about the world, the universe and the meaning of life.

At the heart of the book is a kind of switcheroo, a moral Freaky Friday trading places act. Claggart, an almost supernaturally depraved bad actor who falsely accuses Billy of planning a mutiny, whose only motive--whatever psychological motives we modern readers ascribe to him--is described as arising from his being "depraved according to nature" becomes the hapless victim while Billy--so naive he doesn't even understand that such depravity exists--becomes not only the necessary example of guilt to the rest of the crewmen (for whom his hanging is intended as lesson by Vere) but a simple of depravity, vindictiveness and alienation.'

Melville tells his readers outright what has gone on at the moment that Billy mutely strikes Claggart dead:

In the jugglery of circumstances preceding and attending the event onboard the Bellipotent, and in the light of that martial code whereby it was formally to be judged, innocence and guilt personified in Claggart and Budd in effect changed places.

But Melville goes a step farther, in a book uncharacteristically (for Melville) devoid, or mostly devoid, of pre-modernist multitextuality, Melville offers only a few touches of such stuff near the end of his tale, one in the form of a news report from an "authorized" weekly naval chronicle, written in good faith, Melville assures us, but nonetheless gathered from rumor and innuendo resulting in an official account, an outside narrative, of events that our author has just laid before us, so completely at odds with Melville's inside narrative as to represent an utter reversal. In the official account, Budd's no beloved innocent lashing out in mute passion against a man who has wronged him. No, he's an armed assassin and mutineer so vindictive and sneaky he must not even have been an Englishman who has committed a crime of "extreme depravity" against the "respectable," "discrete," and "patriotic" Claggart.

Beyond all the narrator's declarations of the unknowability of Claggart's character, the conspicuous absence of any backstory for either Claggart or Budd, and the invitations to readers to decide for themselves whether Vere has done the right thing or the wrong thing in ensuring that Billy hangs and quickly, or even whether or not Vere has become unhinged, this news report undermines the sense that we as readers know whether or not anything is true.

It's a subtler handling of the inadequacy of human knowledge then Meville gives us in Moby Dick with Ahab's obsessive, fatal, failing compulsion to "pierce the veil" but in it's modernity it's perhaps more disorienting.

Melville then pushes farther yet again into myth making, including at the narrative the short poem from which the whole piece sprang (Melville first wrote the poem Billy In the Darbies, a kind of folk ballad of a mutineer in a brig at night awaiting his execution in the morning--an old tar, not a symbol of innocence like the Billy of the inside narrative. The the novel grew up around the poem, springing from a headnote Melville began writing then continued to expand). Read at the end of the inside narrative, and following the unreliable news report, the ballad offers another version of the tale--a myth told as a sea chanty, its authorship now ascribed to a shipmate of Billy's who would have known the truth but instead writes the song of an old tar, an actually mutineer, with a girl back home in Bristol.

Melville knew well sailor's stories from his years at sea. And he studied Anglo American ballads in preparation for his great Civil War poetry. He knew how myths were made from the stuff of reality. But in many ways Billy In The Darbies feels more "true" or at least more real than the "inside narrative" itself--which is full of impossibly pure and impossibly malignant characters with no backgrounds, just sailor's stories about their rumored backgrounds, archetypes more than flesh and blood characters. And by including--Rashomon-like--these alternatives to the narrator's own "inside narrative," both an utterly opposite news report, and a very real feeling sea chanty Melville leaves us wondering what his texts always leave us wondering about: is anything true? Is anything really knowable at all?

Rats Scramble Off Ryan's Ship

Newt Gingrich's political triangulation notwithstanding, I thought most Republicans would wait for the outcome of tomorrow's special election in upstate New York before deciding to scramble off the sinking ship that is Paul Ryan's draconian budget cutting proposal.

If you haven't been following the race in New York’s 26th congressional district--to fill the seat vacated by Craigslist Congressman Chris Lee--in a solidly Republican district GOP State Assemblywoman Jane Corwin now trails Democractic challenger Kathy Hochul in some polls. And the issue that has scuttled Corwin's cakewalk has been Ryan's plan to slash Medicare.

Well, Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown--a Republican who will face re-election in a very blue state--didn't wait for the election, scrambling off the Ryan boat in a guest colum in Politico this morning.

Writes Brown:

While I applaud Ryan for getting the conversation started, I cannot support his specific plan — and therefore will vote “no” on his budget.

Why can’t I go along with the Ryan Medicare plan?

First, I fear that as health inflation rises, the cost of private plans will outgrow the government premium support— and the elderly will be forced to pay ever higher deductibles and co-pays. Protecting those who have been counting on the current system their entire adult lives should be the key principle of reform.

Second, Medicare has already taken significant cuts to help pay for Obama’s health care plan. The president and Congress cut a half trillion dollars to the private side of Medicare — meaning seniors are at risk of losing their Medicare Advantage coverage.

Another key principle is that seniors should not have to bear a disproportionate burden.

Brown's arguments are all reasonable. But they're also a rhetorical screen behind which lurks one simple political reality--seniors vote, and seniors don't want Medicare cut--and two complex political realities--first, that after years of conservative demagoging about the evils of government spending the electorate is profoundly confused about just what the government does; and second, that for all the political potency that demonizing government spending seems to posses, people don't actually like to see government spending cut if it's spending that benefits them.

For evidence of the confusion and ambiguity one needs to look no farther than the GOP sponsored town hall meetings in recent years at which angry voters continually and routinely tell GOP lawmakers to keep government out of their Medicare!

Even after the Ryan budget proposal goes down in flames, as it inevitably will, Republican candidates like Brown--who was for the Ryan plan before he was against it--will be on the defensive, and they will certainly be continually tested on the issue of entitlement cuts by every Democratic challenger. But for Dems, the brouhaha over Medicare ought to be something they use not just as a means of tarring their opponents but also as an opportunity to explain their principles: that government isn't inherently bad; that we form governments to do for one another collectively what we can't do so easily for ourselves as individuals; and that in fact there are many things on which government spends tax dollars--Medicare included--which, like that biggest of budget lines, the GOP spending sacred cow of defense, make us better and stronger as a people and as a nation

 

Tomorrow's Technology, Yesterday's Business Model

Ashlee Vance has an excellent feature today on Businessweek.com. Although the piece is burdened by the snappy, ambiguous title, The Tech Bubble Is Different, it's not the typical cyberutopian sermon you'd expect.

The gist of Vance's piece is this: the business model that underpins the social media bubble is advertising. This model has turned Silicon Valley into a magnet for the pure mathematicians who once went to Wall Street to develop trading decision algorithms; now they go to Palo Alto and design consumer behavior predicting algorithms and the Valley, instead of attracting the kind of hardcore computer scientists who once drove innovation, now just attracts quants. The quants, so Vance says, don't possess the kind of world-altering idealism of earlier generations of tech innovators. They're not looking to change the world, just to get you to click on an ad. As a result, Vance's reasoning goes, the social media bubble, when it bursts as all bubbles do, will leave behind no game changing technology infrastructure. The PC bubble put PCs into American households. The Internet bubble left behind the network infrastructure. The social media bubble will leave behind no such hard assets.

At least that's Vance's argument.

There's a lot of truth in what Vance has to say. The Internet--by connecting people and turning the computer, at least for consumer users, into, first and foremost, a communications device--has transformed the technology industry forever turning it into something that looks a lot more like the media business than the tech industry of old.

The horror and disdain this reality evokes from old-timers in the Valley is palpable in Vance's piece. Says one such person Vance quotes: "My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood--an entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn't fundamentally increase American competitiveness."

The quote captures the self-important, even sometimes delusional conflation of private business interests, public concern, and faith in science that has long characterized Silicon Valley, and which turned a simple observation about the pace of change in transistor manufacturing into "Moore's Law"--something with the whiff of basic physics as if inevitably planetary forces were involved. The quote also reveals the Goldwater conservatism that has always informed the basic presumptions in the Valley--increasing American competitiveness, there's a goal worth striving for, everything else is namby pamby hippie stuff.

But there's nothing wrong, of course, with entertainment and communications businesses. And they do actually produce innovative technology that changes not only the way we work (as if that were the only thing that matters) but how we play and, perhaps even more importantly, how we relate to one another. And one could easily argue that the role that Facebook, Twitter, and Internet telecom more generally played in, say, the populist revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt recently suggest that the social media bubble has already played a more important role in changing the world--and left behind a more important legacy--than, say, PowerPoint. Vance fails to measure or take any note of the kind of social change Internet communications and social media have enabled and, while not a legacy of hard assets, may in fact be no less important than PC penetration and the explosive group of Internet points of presence.

But in the end there IS something disappointing about how the advertising model has swallowed the world of computer technology. Back in the 1990s, when the Internet first began unwinding the world of traditional media, the dream for media technologist was not only about new ways of producing and distributing media, not only about community and user generated content, but also about a new business model that would support new media in a way that would allow for the continuing creation of not only pure entertainment media (like Farmville) but also new kinds of news products, and popular arts. Instead what has happened is that peer to peer file sharing and DIY media has driven the consumer price tolerance for media arts to $0; the movement of classified advertising from newspapers to the likes of Craigslist and Monster.com has hastened the demise of the urban newspaper, leaving us with the least well informed American population in a century; and, as Vance points out, Groupon--a cyber-coupon circular--is the fastest growing "tech" start up of the new bubble. Far from inventing a new business model for media, the Internet revolution has pushed the media business model into the world of technology, and the end result may well have been worse for the media sector than the tech sector.

 

 

Sunday Go To Meeting: Willie Eason, Just A Closer Walk With Thee (Arhoolie, 1997)

Steel guitar is one of American music's signature sounds. The weeping swells of the pedal steel,  the swooping hokum of bluegrass dobro, the grinding rock riffage of, say, Ben Harper pushing his Dumble amp with his pickup-equipped Wiessenborn --the round timbres, wobbly tremolos, and octave wide portmanteaus--these sounds say "American music", the way the sound of the hammered cimbalom says "Hungarian music" or the sound of the charango says "South American music".

Of course, like many of the things we think of as characteristically American, the steel guitar is an import. In fact it is a Hawaiian approach to a Spanish instrument that took the continental US by storm after its appearance at the Hawaiian pavilion at the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco touched off a craze for Hawaiian music, steel guitar, and steel guitar instruction, a craze of a sort not seen again until the electric guitar boom touched off in the wake of the Beatles. (For more about how a Hawaiian instrument became a mainstay of country music see Episode 4 of my podcast, Down in the Flood).

Lesser known, until recently at least, has been the tradition of sanctified gospel steel guitar. Mostly an East Coast phenomenon associated with the House of God church   so-called "sacred steel" guitar  emerged along an Atlantic Coast sanctified circuit from New York to Florida,  bursting into the public eye when Arhoolie Records licensed a collection of sacred steel performances from the Florida Folklife Program.

Soon one player in particular--Robert Randolph out of New Jersey--emerged as the genre's biggest star, a pop music darling, the go-to player when some rock star wants to add a "sacred steel" flavor to his or her records (he's recorded with Elton John, Dave Matthews, Ringo Star, Santana, and Los Lobos among others).

Mostly these days Randolph records secular music and to be sure he's a smoking player, witness this rip through one his signature show stopper "The March":

 

But in large measure the sacred steel style is descended from the work of one man, gospel steel pioneer Willie Eason, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, rocking an Epiphone lap steel, brought the sound of steel to the church.

No doubt the few records Eason made in the 1940s and 1950s were thought of by the labels that released them as novelties. Eason was never much of a singer or leader, witness his 1951 recording for Regent records "I Want to Live So God Can Use Me."

Various Artists_12_I Want To Live (So God Can Use Me)

Perhaps Eason's best known recording is his 1947 pairing with The Soul Stirrers on the jubilee style political song, "Why I Like Roosevelt."  That recording, is, unfortunately completely unavailable in any digital format although Eason continued to perform it until his death in 2005, including this warm performance Eason delivered for filmmaker Alan Govenar in 2004 .

 

If Eason's few records were mostly novelties, the performances he continued to make up and down the East Coast until his death in 2005, were more influential, inspiring among other Eamon's brother in law Henry Nelson, and Nelson's son Aubrey Ghent to take up the sacred steel style.

Ghent continues to perform in church in the style Eason taught him:

 

Eason was never the virtuoso that Randolph is or that Chuck and Darick Campbell of The Campbell Brothers are. 

 

But his few recordings remain an inspiration, especially the later-in-life Eason performances collected by folklorist Bob Stone for the influential sacred steel anthology including this Eason performance of "Just A Closer Walk With Thee."

 

Various Artists - Arhoolie Records_07_Just a Closer Walk With Thee

 

Sunday Go To Meeting: Blind Willie Johnson - Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed (Columbia, 1927)

The 30-sides recorded by Texan street singer Blind Willie Johnson between 1927 and 1930 comprise one of the great bodies of work in the history of American music.

The songs Johnson recorded in those sessions, many of them older even than Johnson himself (born in 1897), have become familiar--either through their adoption by COGIC performers or, after the folk revival of the 1960s, rock and rollers. I'm talking about "Motherless Children Have A Hard Time," "Jesus Make My Dying Bed" (also known as "In My Time of Dying"), "Nobody's Fault But Mine," "If I Had My Way I'd Tear the Building Down," and "You'll Need Somebody on Your Bond," all recorded not just by many a gospel performer but also by Eric Clapton, Led Zeppelin, The Grateful Dead, and Captain Beefheart.

Johnson's version of "Dark Was the Night and Cold Was the Ground On Which Our Lord was Laid"--which turned the hymn into the deepest of wordless blues moans--is so deep and perfect an example of African American song that it was included, alongside the music of Bach, Stravinsky, and Louis Armstrong on the recording that NASA scientists sent to space in the Voyager 1 space probe in 1977.

 

Not so much straddling as making a mockery of any line that might exist between blues and gospel, Johnson accompanied his own gravely, froggy, cement mixer of a voice with bottleneck guitar propelled by a heavy thumb-picked bottom. His style was, formally, no different from the blues music of peers like Blind Lemon Jefferson. But every song Johnson sang was spiritual.

This mixture of sanctified religion and blues music style and energy was, in the early years of the twentieth century, something of a Texas specialty. Up around Dallas, Jefferson--who would become the first breakout star of the country blues--didn't so much mix the forms as freely alternate between them: straight blues, ragtime novelty numbers and spiritual music (Jefferson's first recordings were spiritual numbers like "I Want to Be Like Jesus in My Heart"). That kind of repertoire was fairly typical for a blind street singer like Jefferson--musical performance of this sort was a rare career path for the blind in pre-war rural America--who played what people wanted to hear.

  

But two other blind singers in Texas more directly blended the music. Working, like Jefferson, around Dallas (and later Oklahoma City), but in the COGIC churches not on street corners, pianist Juanita Arizona Dranes mixed barrelhouse piano with sanctified revival music in a style that influenced everyone from Rosetta Tharpe to Jerry Lee Lewis.

 

 

And then, down in Beaumont, near the gulf, there was Johnson.

Unlike Jefferson, who became a pop music star of a sort, and Dranes, who didn't record after 1929 but who performed in larger sanctified churches for years where she was heard widely and passed along a significant influence, Johnson more or less disappeared from the public eye after making his last recordings in 1930, only to be rediscovered via his records during the folk revival thanks to the efforts of folk music researchers like Sam Charters, who took the first pass at unearthing Johnson's biography; and, later Texas journalist Michael Corcoran who located a living descendant and a death certificate.

After making his last recording sessions in 1930, Johnson apparently lived and preached around Beaumont, Texas, operation a store front church in that city until his death in 1944.

All of Johnson's recordings are essential listening for fans of gospel, blues, and American music generally. And "Dark is the Night" is, at this point, probably the best known, but Johnson's recording of "Jesus May Up My Dying Bed," from his first recording session at a makeshift studio in Dallas in 1927, is something of a miracle too, not so much for its elliptical, swallowed vocal--which bites off the lyric and allows the uitar to finish the key phrases--or for its deep, mournful feeling, but for it's outrageous slide guitar playing.

   

Sunday Go To Meeting: The Famous Blue Jay Singers, I'm Bound for Canaan Land (Gotham, 1947)

Gospel quartet singing--that male a capella style in which background singers provide a rhythmic accompaniment in harmony for the flights of the lead singers--emerged simultaneously all over the south. The Soul Stirrers came originally from Houston, the Fairfield Four from Nashville, the Golden Gate Quartet from Virginia.  And of course, after World War II, with the great migration of black Americans from the rural South to the urban north, quartet singing took root on the street corners and barber shops of northern cities where it mutated into all sorts of secular forms.

But if there was a regional center at all for the early emergence of the quartet style is was Jefferson County, Alabama and the towns of Birmingham and Bessemer. Among others the region produced the Bessemer Sunset Four, The Heavenly Gospel Singers, the Kings of Harmony and the Birmingham Jubilee Singers founded by influential local quartet instructor Charles Bridges, who created a school for quartet singers in Bessemer.

But most importantly the Birmingham scene gave us Silas Steele and his Famous Blue Jay Singer, responsible as much as any group was for the popularization of a new style of quartet singing full of blues gestures and sanctified energy.

The early Birmingham style was characterized by tight, elaborate harmonies, and a cleanly enunciated lead approach that owed more to the turn of the century stage than it did to the new COGIC congregational singing. It was an approach quite deliberately built upon the sound and style of the late 19th century singing groups, both quartets and larger ensembles, founded at the early black colleges--the Fisk Jubilees and closer to home the Tuskegee Quartet and Tuskegee Institute Singers first organized by Booker T. Washington in 1884. The university groups had repertoires that consisted of pre-gospel spirituals. Their arrangements tended to mix passages of rubato performance alternating with passages of uptempo music with clearly stated rhythms. The harmonies at times can sound nearly Anglican. And the lead vocals are cleave fairly closely to the melodies--with little of the melissmas and bent notes that are hallmarks of the blues and sanctified singing.

You can hear the influence comparing this 1914 recording of the Tuskegee Institute Singers in 1914 performing the spiritual "Live a-Humble":

 

with Bridges' Birmingham Jubilees a decade and a half later, in 1930, singing "I Want God's Bosom To Be Mine"

 

Then along came Silas Steele and his Famous Blue Jay Singers. Steele founded the Blue Jays around the same time Bridges founded the Birmingham Jubilees, circa 1925, and the two groups were local rivals. Both featured the elaborate, well-arranged harmonies of the Birmingham style, but the Blue Jays had a secret weapon in Steele--not just his rich, potent baritone but also his adoption of the sanctified singing/preaching approach to lead.

Here's a number from the Blue Jays second record date, "I Declare My Mother Ought to Live Right" recorded in 1932. The contrast is clear: the background harmonies are tight and dense but the entire accompaniment is rhythmic and propulsive; the singing is full of bent notes, melissmas, and even falsetto--sanctified techniques absent from the early Birmingham style records; replacing the rubato sung sections are "breakdowns" for preaching style verses. Gospel music, as distinct from the earlier jubilee style, is in full flower, albeit with a Birmingham flavor to the harmony.



Various Artists - Document Records_14_I Declare My Mother Ought To Live Right

Steele's Blue Jays were the first Birmingham area group to take to the gospel highway and hit it big, at least big for the world of gospel in the 1930s--relocating first to Dallas and later to Chicago, and even recruiting former rival lead man Charles Bridges as a second lead/swing singer in the late 1940s, and becoming known in gospel circles  as the "fathers of the quartet," although they hadn't so much pioneers the form as they had popularized the new, bluesy approach to it.

It was in this configuration, with two great Alabama lead singers--Steele and Bridges--that the Blue Jays cut their greatest records like this 1947 recording of "I'm Bound For Canaan Land"

 

While the Blue Jays would continue on into the 1960s in various configurations, it would be without Steele, who, sometime in 1948 or 1949 left the group he founded to join the Spirit of Memphis quartet, leaving the group he founded to the leadership of his one time rival on the Birmingham/Bessemer scene.
 

Polls and the People Who Love Them

It's a popular rhetorical move among conservative pols to twist polling on issues they are concerned with into broad assertions that they, and not their political opponents, are the voice of the American people.

The list of things "the American people don't want"--determined by polls which inevitably proceed from one side of a debate or another and are packed with polemically slanted questions--according to Republicans in last election were the Obama healthcare reform package (continually mis-characterized as a government takeover of health care--if anything it's a government subsidy for private industry), gay marriage, economic stimulus, deficit spending, and liberalism itself.

Well, here's another thing that, by the same criteria "the American people don't want": public workers unions stripped of their collective bargaining rights.

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll: "Americans oppose weakening the bargaining rights of public employee unions by a margin of nearly two to one: 60 percent to 33 percent."

A Pew poll more specifically focused on the situation in Wisconsin found a a 41-32% split in favor of public workers (with a full 21 percent either not preferring one side or another don't know).

And among Wisconsin voters, a Public Policy Polling survey found that if November's election between Governor Scott Walker and Democratic opponent Tom Barrett were held today, Barrett would win big, 52 to 45%, mostly as a result of a shift among blue collar GOP voters.

It's actually Republicans, more so than Democrats or independents, whose shifting away from Walker would allow Barrett to win a rematch if there was one today. Only 3% of the Republicans we surveyed said they voted for Barrett last fall but now 10% say they would if they could do it over again. That's an instance of Republican union voters who might have voted for the GOP based on social issues or something else last fall trending back toward Democrats because they're putting pocketbook concerns back at the forefront and see their party as at odds with them on those because of what's happened in the last month.

Precisely the same kind of polemical polling--with the same sorts of leading questions, issues about the nature of those polled and the underlying agendas of the pollsters--produced the polls GOP candidates cited in November to claim they were the standard bearers for the will of the people.

But this morning, with exactly the same sorts of polls clearly showing the public favoring preserving the power of public unions, conservatives are up in arms about polling methods, cohorts, and the like--complaints the same folks never raise when equally colored polls return the results that they favor.

American politics and journalism have each become far too reliant on polls. Not only are polls themselves packed with inherent flaws--the inevitable biases, the small sampling sizes, the unreliability of respondents, the unwillingness of people to participate, the increasing difficulty reaching respondents through traditional means--but they see to serve, for journalists and politicians alike, as a new kind of ersatz class of facts, illuminating little.

Sure, polls can work fairly well in the context of simple yes or no questions, or even in elections between two candidates, where there are binary choices with none of the ambiguity, complexity, or subtlety presented when you try to reduce to a pollable question issues and attitudes that humans reflexively approach with nuance polls can't capture. If a respondent tries to answer a poll question with the real nuance and ambiguity most humans feel about more complex questions than Coke or Pepsi, all that happens is the response is invalidated.

But polls and surveys have come to govern our public lives. Politicans make all their decisions based on poll results. And increasingly new organizations use them as substitutes for substantive coverage. The New York Times off lead story today is the poll it conducted with CBS News, a glorified "man in the street" piece, a work of journalistic alchemy that has the impact of reducing complex social attitudes to simple opinions and then presenting those opinions as facts.

Look, I'm as fascinated with poll results as anyone. I write about them and use them to inform me about a range of topics. But I'm always aware of the limitation inherent in their methodology and would never be so bold as to proclaim that on the basis of the poll "the American people" can be said to want one thing or another. 

As a side note, last night I happened to catch Jamila Wignot's documentary about the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire on WGBH's American Experience series. The film is terrific, replete with period photography from the tragedy that I had never seen before. The famous fire--in which 146 mostly teenage girls perished in a sweatshop a year after a strike led to concession like a 52 hour work week and 4 paid holidays but left the workers unable to unionize--was a galvanizing moment in the history of American labor. That 100 year old event is instructive in the history of the current disputes in Wisconsin and elsewhere. Sure, public employees today don't work in dangerous sweatshops. But America is at an historic crossroads and needs to decide how it is going to support it's aging population as it leaves or is pushed out of the workforce and left to live on precisely those meagre income streams that are continually under GOP attack--social security and negotiated pension benefits. Let's hope we don't need the spectacle of starving homeless retirees freezing to death in tent cities in the upper midwest to realize the workers have a point.

BTW, you can watch the documentary here. Highly recommended.

Sunday Go to Meeting: Aretha Franklin, Precious Lord (Checker, 1956)

It's probably gospel music's most famous, most widely-recorded song, Thomas A. Dorsey's 1932 composition "Take My Hand, Precious Lord."  The tune is one of those rare non-traditional numbers that has found its place in both the black and white gospel traditions, recorded by  everyone from Mahalia Jackson and the Soul Stirrers to Roy Acuff, Elvis Presley, and Merle Haggard.

The tale of Dorsey's transformation from Georgia Tom into the Reverend Thomas A. Dorsey is oft-told: how a piano playing songwriter and arranger who backed Ma Rainey on the black vaudeville circuit and composed salacious party tunes for his duo with guitarist Tampa Red became gospel music's greatest songwriter and founder of both the first black-owned gospel publishing company and of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses.

Here's Dorsey, as Georgia Tom, with Tampa Red playing Dorsey's most famous blues "Tight Like That" in a 1928 recording:

 

Dorsey's was a creeping conversion, at least in terms of his career as a songwriter. Born again in 1921 Dorsey continued to write blues but he also began writing religious songs that mixed his blues sensibility with the black baptist hymnal style of mid Atlantic preacher C.A. Tindley, who, in the early 20th century had composed many proto-gospel classics including "We'll Overcome Someday," "By and By" and "Stand By Me."

It wasn't until Dorsey had managed to sell a few copies of the sheet music of his first gospel tune, "If You See My Savior, Tell Him That You Saw Me," at the 1930 National Baptist Convention, that Dorsey abandoned secular music all together.

 

"Precious Lord," as it has come to be commonly known, grew from personal tragedy, famously composed by Dorsey in a depression following the deaths in childbirth of his first wife and their child in 1932, borrowing a melody from an 1844 hymn called "Maitland." The earliest know recordings of Dorsey's number date from 1937 waxed first by The Heavenly Gospel Singers in a pop tinged vocal quartet arrangement, and by Elder Charles Beck in a piano-backed bluesy version that one imagines is closest to the way Dorsey must have originally played it.

Heavenly Gospel Singers_05_Precious Lord, Take My Hand

 

Elder Curry & Elder Beck_10_Precious Lord

 

In the years since the song has received every kind of treatment one can imagine, from the hard driving sanctified quartet version by RH Harris and the Soul Stirrers that is my all-time favorite:

 

 To Mahalia Jackson's slow devotional version:

 

 To Tennesse Ernie Ford's fascinating 1950s version that mixes gospel and pop arrangement:

 

 To this beautiful trombone sonata performance by Wycliffe Gordon:

 

But it doesn't get much better than the 14-year old Aretha Franklin in 1956 singing in her father's church in Detroit. The recording picks up with the performance already under way but just about to take off. All I can say is, amen!

 

Drive-By Truckers, Go-Go Boots: True Tales of Broken Times

Drive-By Truckers are 12 albums and 15 years into a career as America's best, steady rolling, critically acclaimed yet all-but-unknown band.

In that decade and a half no institution in American life has better cataloged the cracked lives of middle and working class Americans, particularly those in the cities, suburbs and rural towns DBT's native south, struggling with the effects of stagnant wages, labor dislocation, shifting cultural sands, and the emotional dissonance of life within American families and communities, places in which people, thrown together by accidents of geography or genealogy, find themselves trapped, abandoned in a crowd, struggling to free themselves, struggling to live within their limits or to just plain cope with forces beyond their control.

Not that DBT's chief songwriters Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley write polemically. DBT ain't The Clash or Gang of Four. Hood and Cooley are storytellers. They build their songs around characters we all recognize, people we know, people we are, people who find themselves in situations we understand even if, in their wracked state, the characters themselves can't--the Vietnam vet afraid he's cracking in "Ray's Automatic Weapon," the divorced and disgraced former police officer in "Used To Be A Cop" wallowing in the anger and self-pity of all his loss.

And of course, like all good storytellers, Hood and Cooley pack their songs with telling, cinematic detail. A detail from one of the new songs--a pair of go go boots--provides the title for DBT's latest album. The titular boots belong to the mistress of a small town preacher-- "Missy wore them go-go boots; it did something for him/Made him think his wife back home was homely and boring"-- who pays to have his wife murdered.

"Go-Go Boots", and a second song about the murder-minded preacher--murder ballads of a sort in the grand American tradition--form the core of DBT's new album, possibly the group's most unstintingly dark record, with its minor key explorations of a psychological and physical landscape of American life that's almost unremittingly bleak. Even family and community offers not support and emotional nourishment but another prison in a song like "The Thanksgiving Filter," a nightmarish slice of claustrophobic extended family life.

Recorded mostly at the same sessions that produced last year's The Big To-Do, Go-Go Boots ratchets down the energy and raucous twin guitar riffage that are the band's familiar sonic signatures and which dominated the previous album in favor of a more laid back grove that mixes elements of early 70s southern R&B with explicitly country gestures--dobros, acoustic guitars. It's a mixture the group comes by honestly: Hood's father, David, was the bass player in the famous Muscle Shoals Sound Studios house band, The Swampers. DBT has toured with Muscle Shoals keyboard man Spooner Oldham (co-composer of "I Cry Like A Baby" and "I'm Your Puppet"); and in recent years DBT has cut albums as the backup band for R&B greats like Bettye LaVette and Booker T. Jones. The new sound serves the material well, creating space for the stories to develop.

In places the record recalls The Band's 1968 cover of Lefty Frizzell's 1959 murder ballad "Long Black Veil," particularly in the sound of bass player Shonna Tucker's beautiful "Dancin' Ricky," one of Go-Go Boots' rare moments of sunlight (another is the cover of Eddie Hinton's "Everybody Needs Love", which, in the context of this album sounds like a desperate plea for deliverance).

With its central and recurring tale of a murderous preacher, Go-Go Boots calls to mind Willie Nelson's mid-70s classic concept album, The Red Headed Stranger, but without that album's unifying narrative structure or ultimate tale of redemption. The ruined lives of the characters here are just plain ruined. And the strongest force that connects their tales is an overwhelming sense of momentum broken, of dreams and ambitions not deferred but choked off with crushing suddenness and finality, of lives cut short. In that regard Go-Go Boots better reflects the sense of life in America during these years of the great deleveraging than any other pop culture product--music, movie, television show--I've come across in recent years. Go-Go Boots may not be DBT's greatest album--it lacks the hooks, conceptual unity, and diversity of sound of the band's best work. But it damn sure feels like one hell of a keeping-it-real capsule of our broken times.

 

Sunday Go to Meeting: The Mighty Clouds of Joy, Mighty High (ABC, 1975)

It was 1975--the year Silver Convention hit with "Fly Robin Fly," Donna Summer hit with "Love to Love You Baby," and KC and the Sunshine Band hit with "Get Down Tonight." The scourge of disco was loose in the land and threatened to wash away all the R&B, funk, and soul music that had come before it. Over the following few years most of the great soul and R&B singers of the previous generation would try--often half heartedly--to surf the wave, cutting disco records of their own that displayed varying degrees of indifference.

The emergence of disco also marked the nadir for gospel music. Having grown, together with the COGIC church, out of the Asuza Street Rivivalin Los Angeles in the early part of the century; having reached an apex in Chicago during the years of the great black migration from the south as secular songwriters like Thomas Dorsey turned to the task of merging church music with the blues; having built stabilizing organizations like The National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses; and finally having heard its sounds, forms and language co-opted by secular performers forging rock and roll in the 1950s and 1960s, gospel music had all but fallen by the wayside by the middle 1970s. Even as stalwart and stolid a church group as The Staple Singers--who had already spent most of the 1970s cutting feel-good secular records whose messages of social uplift at least could be argued had some spiritual content--capitulated fully, cutting salacious r&b (The Staples hit with the Curtis Mayfield produced number "Let's Do It Again" in 1975).

It was at this moment that Los Angeles gospel group The Mighty Clouds of Joy turned to LA-based flautist, songwriter, arranger and producer Dave Crawford and, for better and worse, changed gospel forever.

Founded in 1959, The Mighty Clouds were something of an anachronism even then, a classic male gospel group relying on old school material like "Steal Away" the group's first big record, as ancient a part of the gospel repertoire as any song, written by Wallace Willis in the 1860s and part of the pre-gospel tradition of the "negro spiritual."  Behind Joe Ligon's gruff, preaching, urgent lead, The Clouds gave "Steal Away" a rollicking, sanctified treatment. The group adorned its performances with synchronized, if clumsily executed, dance steps, as you can see from this early 1960s TV performance.

 

The Clouds were modern for the hidebound world of gospel. Besides the dance steps they added a full band of guitar, bass and drums behind the standard acapella gospel quartet. But by the time The Clouds arrived, the broader market had moved on. After more than a decade on the gospel highway, recording for Peacock, and getting little or no attention outside of the shrinking gospel market, The Clouds made a semi-secular move recording Kickin' with Crawford for the ABC label.

Like the Staples work for Stax, Kickin' mixed secular R&B (a medley of "I Got the Music In Me" with "Superstition:; a cover of "You Are So Beautiful") with a kind of secular gospel hybrid built on dance rhythms and full contemporary r&b arrangements with lyrics that were religious but with a greater or lesser degree of ambiguity in their praise, allowing secular listeners a way in.

Whammo, it worked, The Clouds hit with a record that changed the sound of gospel forever, the Crawford-penned "Mighty High":

 

Musically, "Mighty High" was straight r&b with an unapologetic disco beat and arrangement--on down to the congas and the extended beat breakdown in the middle. Lyrically it was religious--there's actually a brief bit of pro forma testimony in the song's middle lyrics (I was just a man/A lonely man indeed/God took all my troubles/Yes he did, he set me free)--but mostly the religious content is kept intentionally ambiguous. In the middle 1970s, riding the mighty high could have many meanings indeed.

But proof that merging gospel music with contemporary funk and dance music could lead to crossover success was the last nail in the coffin of gospel's golden age as a specific genre of music with it's own formal rules and unique sound. Within a generation gospel as a sound and form--like blues before it--would become the stuff of repertory groups and oldies acts while religious music both black and white would eschew its own homegrown forms in favor of pop music forms from rock to hip hop.

There's a direct line between Mighty High and, say, Kirk Franklin's gospel hip-hop funk records like 1997's "Stomp":

 

But whatever the charms of modern gospel funk, its no longer the creative influencer sanctified gospel once was,  but instead is a derivative form in American vernacular music.