The Oxford American annual Southern Music Issue has just come out and is highly recommended. The 2020 edition is a "greatest hits" version that relies heavily from past music issues, which, according to your perspective, is either a little bit of a cheat — a clip job, a compilation episode — or a valuable curation effort.
The archived pieces are worth the cover price ($14.95). Peter Guralnick on Skip James, Sam Stephenson on Thelonious Monk and Tiana Clark on Nina Simone, first published in 1997, 2007 and 2018, are anthology-worthy classics.
Kiese Laymon's piece on Outkast (2015) got me to return to a band I'd enjoyed for a while but pretty much abandoned after "Idlewild." There's not a weak essay in the bunch, and, of the new stuff, it's great to read anything by writers like David Ramsay, Patterson Hood and Rosanne Cash. It's great to read anything about Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
There is an intelligence to the programming, and the selection of the irrepressible Brittany Howard (Alabama Shakes vocalist and guitarist as well as a solo artist and burgeoning songwriter) as guest editor is a nice touch. The sensibility of the magazine holds — as always it looks great.
I will spend a lot more time with this issue, and I will discover more to mention, but the problem with my business is that there are deadlines — and sometimes windows of opportunity pass. Quarterly magazines typically hit the streets three months before their cover date; this issue is dated Winter 2020. Winter begins Monday.
Another thing about the Southern Music issue: What makes a thing Southern? Howard briefly touches on this in her charming introductory essay, in which she observes that "the South has a thang. That thang is hard to describe."
She rightly begins to delve into the particulars of her situation, understanding, intellectually or innately, that specificity is the key to universal resonance. Her story is typically atypical, a lot like the music she makes with the Shakes and on her own. You hear it and you recognize it and maybe you can even say it sounds like this or like that, but you are unlikely to mistake her for any other child of God.
But we are not born this or that; we are not born a thing.
All culture is a form of appropriation or affectation. You pull it on like clothes. Or maybe it appropriates you, knocks you down, drags you off in its undertow. Spits you back on the beach changed. Maybe being Southern is an act of volition or the result of coercion, but it's nothing innate.
Just seems like it is, the way most of us were brought up.
And if you were brought up Southern, maybe you heard Jim Reeves singing on the radio in, say, your grandmother's kitchen, in say, 1960. The song is "He'll Have to Go" and the first line is:
"Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone."
This command is an invitation to intimacy, to an adult conversation between lovers. What follows is two minutes and 20 seconds of something we might identify as "countrypolitan," a relic of the Nashville Sound that Chet Atkins invented with Owen Bradley in the late 1950s, to rescue country music for abject hillbilliness. (Looking back, we can criticize that impulse, but Atkins and Bradley were more interested in selling records than preserving any sort of authenticity.)
The chief attribute of the record, what you are most likely to notice as it bleeds from Grandma's transistor radio in that long-ago kitchen, is the caress of the singer's light but rich baritone, a naturally resonant register for Reeves that makes the song song both casual and urbane. (Imagine it sung by any Hank Williams or Hank Ballard -- any Hank for that matter. It might work, but not in the way it has and will continue to work.)
Atkins produced this particular track, kept it low key by not splurging on a string section. Nashville A list players; Floyd Cramer on piano, Bob Moore's bass, Buddy Harman's drums, Hank Garland's guitar and the Anita Kerr Singers' choral backing. The secret weapon is Marvin Hughes' vibraphone, which now and them peals sweetly through the spare arrangement.
Reeves' recording is very close to the original recording by a forgotten singer named Billy Brown, who also used a vibraphone on his version as well as the waltz-time tempo of the hit record. Listening to Brown's version — it's on YouTube at youtube.com/watch?v=EABuBISZjis — you might wonder, as Jim Reeves did, why it never became a hit.
According to a brief biography on the All Music site (this Billy Brown doesn't even rate a Wikipedia page), Reeves' recording "incensed the quick-tempered Brown, leading to a split from his label [Columbia]; the singer spent years in the wilderness where he found and lost religion in the blink of an eye. His work remained largely forgotten until Bear Family released the compilation 'Did We Have a Party' in 2012."
By then, naturally, Brown was dead from emphysema. To quote Tom T. Hall, "they say he got religion at the end and I'm glad that he did."
"He'll Have to Go" is a cornerstone of Southern music, but not because it was made in Nashville by professional musicians with crossover dreams, but because I first heard it in my grandmother's kitchen in south Georgia, on the Top Gun Country radio shoulder to shoulder with records by Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline and Porter Wagoner.
In the same way, Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Green River" and the Beatles' "Get Back" are deeply Southern, not because they were made by faux Southerners (northern California Southerns, British Southerns) but because of the context in which I received them. They have that Southern "thang" that Brittany Howard talks about because I first heard them while riding in the back of a pickup down a dirt road 30 miles west of Savannah, not because of anything inherent to or authentic in their making.
Now consider Fred Schneider, an almost-out gay man in a New Wave dance band called the B-52s in 1978, calling back to the lyric of a Ray Charles' single from 25 years before. "Everybody's doing the mess around," Schneider effuses, employing an operatic technique the Germans call Sprechgesang — a kind of shout-singing that allows both for both camp and Southern accents to come through.
Now consider that "The Mess Around" was a song written by Ahmet Ertegun, a Turkish-born businessman who couldn't play an instrument and could barely carry a tune.
Ertegun had begun "writing songs" — composing lyrics metered to some patted or stamped out rhythm — simply because the record label he co-owned, Atlantic Records, was so small that music publishers wouldn't give them what they considered their best material. Ertegun was an inspired amateur whose only credentials were a love of rhythm and blues and the nerve to sit down on a piano bench next to a young Ray Charles — who at the time wasn't the Genius Ray Charles, but just a young artist who had done so well on the Chitin' Circuit that Ertegun had signed to his label because he could sound like Nat "King" Cole and Louis Jordan.
In his flat wobbly voice, Ertegun sang a few lines — extrapolations of the lyrics from Pinetop Smith's 1928 hit "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" (which, if you were the kind of person who argued these sorts of things, might be a reasonable candidate for the Ur rock 'n' roll track) — and Charles took it from there: "See the girl with the diamond ring, she knows how to shake that thang."
And that's how the story goes, a man from Istanbul imitates a Black man from Troy, Ala., and a Black man from Albany, Ga., blocks out some chords and aspirates the vocal and a white gay man from New Jersey who'd gone to school at the University of Georgia and started a dance band with his friends in Athens, Ga., after sharing a tropical flaming volcano drink with them at a Chinese restaurant calls it all back: Everybody is doing the mess around.
Even Van Cliburn and Florence Price.
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The Oxford American is vital not because it catalogs tradition but because it serves as a channel for expression. Its Southerness is a lightly worn thing — or thang — that signifies a deeper commitment, a belief in the mattering, the meaningfulness of the lives of regular folk. To be Southern is to live in a country that has been defeated and occupied and is sometimes deeply and incontrovertibly wrong.
Southerners have to accommodate themselves to this wrongness, which was this nation's original sin and the crime which conceived many enduring fortunes. It is this wrongness, and the ways in which we face and refuse to face it, that marks us as Southern and permeates the culture that we together create. The thang that Brittany Howard writes of is real and it haunts us in a real and present way.
But it is also a chosen thang, it walks zombie slow. It can be escaped, for a time. You can run away and cut your hair; you can change the way you talk. But it is persistent. The Southern thang keeps coming.
Email: pmartin@adgnewsroom.com | blooddirtangels.com