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Live at Other Music: Taken By Trees (Episode #10) -Josh Madell
This Week's Featured Downloads
Before Revenant, Dust-to-Digital and Sublime Frequencies there was Arhoolie, one of the greatest American independent labels devoted to unearthing under-heard sounds that has or ever will exist. A Prussian-born immigrant whose family fled to the United States during the Russian Pogroms at the end of World War II, Chris Strachwitz founded the label in 1960, his original focus to put out albums of then obscure Texas blues singers. His first release was a Mance Lipscomb LP in an edition of 250. In the years since, the breadth of his catalog has become expansive, with more than 350 releases covering the likes of old timey blues and country, bluegrass, free jazz, Tex-Mex border music, Ukranian fiddle music, calypso, and gospel. He's probably done more than anyone to introduce Cajun and zydeco to listeners worldwide, as well as expose hidden corners of American cultural life, like the Balkan string bands who ended up in the U.S. during waves of immigration in the early twentieth century. What follows below is an idiosyncratic and personal selection of some Arhoolie titles I can't imagine living without. Dig through the catalog yourself and I'm sure you could easily end up with a totally different list. -Michael Klausman
It's been about fifteen years since I first heard this on the radio in the middle of the night while driving across the country. I can't remember what state I was in, but I'll never forget hearing the absolutely unique Bahaman guitarist Joseph Spence singing "Out on the Rolling Sea" and just being totally bemused, confused, and mesmerized by his unorthodox vocals and guitar playing. It sounded like a pirate singing along to Derek Bailey, and after the DJ announced his name I repeated it like a mantra, over and over, so as to never forget.
Overstreet was a singing street preacher who Strachwitz recorded in Phoenix, Arizona in 1962, and this album has long been a holy grail for raw gospel aficionados. It doesn't really get any better than this, as Overstreet and his kids cruise like they're the Neu! of gospel, so forcefully powerful that they pick up steam like they're on some never ending highway to heaven.
You can find tons of excellent Cajun music on Arhoolie, but a super place to start would be this collection of old 78s recorded by the great accordionist Nathan Abshire. Soulful and raw, you may not understand a word of what he's saying but it all totally comes across. I once saw a photo of Abshire sitting with his accordion case, with the phrase "The good times are killing me" written in block letters across it. Indeed.
Born in Houston, Texas, Mendoza was a Tejano singer who began recording with her family in the 1920s. She had a solo career making records for Bluebird in the 1930s, eventually cutting more than 200 songs for them. She made beautiful, beautiful music, with a voice like a songbird and an incredible melodic sense on the guitar. She was a major American artist and yet most Americans are probably more familiar with Edith Piaf than they are with Mendoza, which is a major shame. She passed away just last year.
Angola prison is, of course, the infamous state penitentiary in Louisiana. Folklorist Harry Oster visited in the mid-fifties and recorded a number of inmates, whom the most famous and important would end up being Robert Pete Williams. A singular and completely idiosyncratic guitar player, he can be heard here singing about how he got life for murder. Williams was actually pardoned a few years later and went on to worldwide fame. This set also includes recordings by three female convicts singing gospel-tinged blues, apparently the only instance of this ever occurring.
Freddy Fender, who went on to become the most successful Hispanic country artist in history, actually did a couple of years in Angola prison as well, when he was busted for marijuana possession a full fifteen years before the onset of his fame. He cut these Spanish language versions of rock n' roll songs in the late fifties before his prison sentence when he was still going by his given name of Baldemar Huerta. They were regional hits in and around Texas, California, and Mexico and there is tons to love here. His version of the classic tune "Corrina, Corrina" is wonderful.
Tons more fun here as well, Pachuco Boogie documents the Hispanic hipster underground of 1940s Los Angeles. This was a thriving culture of Zoot-suited dudes whose music was a weird melange of Latin rhythms, R&B, and boogie woogie. It's all so familiar, yet different.
Easily the weirdest album in the Arhoolie catalog, and possibly one of the weirdest albums of the 1960s, which is saying something. "Bongo Joe" was a street performer from Florida who played a couple of gigantic oil drums with mallets in very, very strange and near avant-garde patterns, while rapping about things like the fact that he wished he knew how to sing. The penultimate track is "Transistor Radio," in which Bongo Joe narrates the hold up of a prostitute, bank, and police station, ultimately only asking for their respective transistor radios. Genius.
We were on a big huayno jag here at Other Music awhile back, these songs just make you feel so good. Huayno is sort of like the country/folk/pop music of rural and working class Peruvians, with roots that go back at least five hundred years to Incan times. This collection was curated by the famous folklorist, musician, and filmmaker John Cohen, and is comprised mostly of 45rpm singles that were issued between 1949 and 1989. It's totally exhilarating and infectious music, with a trancey rhythm that gets embellished in any number of inventive ways, with chiming harps, guitars, flutes, farty brass, and scratchy violins.
Dr. Ross cut some of the most obscure and desirable sides for Sun Records back in the fifties, before he split after getting pissed that the money he was making for the label was all going to promote Elvis Presley. He was a one-man-band that played a guitar upside down and left-handed while stomping a kick drum and blowing a harmonica, with a raw, stripped-down boogie sound that's easily as great as that of the more famous Lightnin' Hopkins and John Lee Hooker. He was called Doctor because he kept his harmonicas in a black leather medical bag, but his tune "Boogie Disease" kills.
Neely was a truck driver and chef that Strachwitz discovered in Austin, Texas in the early seventies. He was an excellent white country blues singer and guitarist who made music as if Jimmy Rodgers and Cliff Carlisle still had hits on the radio, with a warm earthy tone and the kind of stern moralizing you only find on old Louvin Brothers LPs. Standout tunes include the title cut, as well as the amazing "Satan's Burning Hell." I could listen to this all day.
Elder Roma Wilson was a singing and harmonica-playing preacher who, unbeknownst to the man himself, had a hit record in the 1940s. Apparently he'd been recorded secretly, but it took the blues and gospel collecting mafia to track him down and inform him of this nearly forty years after the fact. He was still performing in the 1980s when this was recorded, and he sings his songs of faith as if forty years of popular music had never happened. Wilson delivers brilliant songs and sermons against racial hatred and the steadfastness of faith in front of skepticism, while ingeniously accompanying himself on the harmonica. |
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