Trollheart

Hey, real glad you're readin' the words I'm-a writin' here, little lady! Or something.

I'm nothing like you: there was no country music played in my house - all old 30s/40s Perry Como/Bing Crosby/Matt Munroe kind of stuff. Literally 78 records, and only brought down from the attic at Christmas in a vain attempt by my waste of skin father to try to make up for the abuse of the rest of the year. We had the radio, but at the time it was the national one only, and so you had Irish artists, trad, showbands (shiver) and various pop artists, nothing you could really identify with. Once I got my own radio (which I won for having a piece published in a comic) Radio Luxembourg was my saviour.

But I was totally ignorant of country music, and laughed at it well up to, well, almost my mid-forties I guess. It's only recently that I've been giving it more of a chance. I think my gateway into it was Nanci Griffith, who I grew to love, then for harder fare, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam, but I really have a lot to learn about country, which is why I started writing this.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

ribbons

I'm a-readin', pardner. I may not have much to say, but I'm always a-readin'. And hey, I liked that Nanci Griffith track on first listen - I've never heard her before, but really like her rhythmic style. Will have to seek out more from her.

As if that could ever be made up for. I wish I could somehow reverse time and take that pain away from you.

There, that's better! No surprise you won the radio for something you wrote.

Trollheart

If I was to recommend Nanci albums I would go in this order:

Lone Star State of Mind (that's the album that track is from)
Little Love Affairs
Last of the True Believers
Once in a Very Blue Moon
Storms
Flyer
Late night Grande Hotel

Her earlier material is good too, but it can be a bit patchy. I'm not a huge fan of Poet in My Window, and her debut, There's a Light Beyond These Woods, didn't leave much of an impression beyond the title track. Anything after 1998 or so I'm not at all familiar with: I've heard tracks here, tracks there, some good, some not so good. But the seven above would give you a good grounding in her music.

P.S. Other Voices, Other Rooms is also good but it is an album of covers of traditional songs, so be aware of that.

Oh god damn it to hell! Just read that she died last year! Only 68! Damn! Damn! Damn!

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

STOP THEM PRESSES, Y'HEAR?
Yes, it's technically old news, but I only found out a few days ago that one of my favourite icons of country music had passed away, and so, as I did mention at the beginning I would be exploring various artists, and as I now wish to write a lengthy tribute to the woman who first provided an open gate into country music through which I could walk and look around and explore, I will be stepping away from the history timeline in the coming weeks, to concentrate on her story.

Nanci Griffith (1953 - 2021)

I'll be reviewing her entire discography, finding out all I can about her and giving the best and most complete picture of a woman who, while perhaps not perceived as being at the same level as legends such as Dolly Parton and Crystal Gayle, nevertheless was a huge star in the scene, lived her life for music and helped, perhaps, in some small way, to nudge it back towards its folk-based roots.

This will not be something I'll be rushing, as to do so would, I believe, do a disservice to this quiet star of the country firmament, but once I have enough written I will begin posting it. When I do, they will be consecutive posts, as I don't want to break this up, so for a while the history will be placed on the back burner, but we will of course get back to it. I just feel that I need to do this right, I need to do it now, and I need to do it in a way which for me allows me to pay my proper respects to a woman who gave over thirty years to country music, and left it, I feel, better before she departed.


For now, we return you to your regular programme, already in progress.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Ida Cox (1888 or 1896 - 1967)

Apart from having a name which sounds like a dirty joke, she is known for being the “uncrowned queen of the blues”, and like many, perhaps all black people interested in music at the time, found an outlet for her talent in the choirs of the local church, and at age fourteen left home to work with the travellng vaudeville shows, one of which, the Rabbits Foot Minstrels, we have already come across with Brownie McGhee. This particular show would be responsible for introducing not just Cox but also two future giants of the blues in Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

It was her third husband, Jesse “Tiny” Crump, who would help her write her songs and also accompany her on the piano, as well as managing her career. She met him in 1927 and began recording songs for the genre then known as “race music”, which was basically, in a nutshell, music by black people for black people - blues, jazz, African beats, some comedy, all performed by black artists. Later we’ll see how sharply black and white were divided by radio and by record companies, leading to the former playing blues and jazz while the latter stuck to country music.

Cox’s commanding stage presence and powerful delivery made her a star, and she recorded albums and radio shows, and in 1929 through to 1935 she and her husband toured their revue show, Raisin’ Cain, across the south (playing in only black theatres, of course). The Great Depression though made it hard to continue, and in 1939 she played Carnegie Hall and then concentrated on making records, until her first retirement in 1945, occasioned by a stroke. She was coaxed out of retirement in 1961 and made one more album, but suffered a second stroke four years later and passed away in 1967, another victim of cancer.

She was a proud and independent woman, whose music sang of the injustices of her time and the plight of women, and of blacks in general. She broke many barriers, being one of the first black women to own and manage her own company, and also write her own songs. The lyric to one of her most famous songs is probably her best epitaph:
I've got a disposition and a way of my own,
When my man starts to kicking I let him find a new home,
I get full of good liquor, walk the street all night
Go home and put my man out if he don't act right
Wild women don't worry,
Wild women don't have the blues.




Lucille Bogan (1897- 1948)

One of the first of what were termed the “dirty blues” singers, certainly one of the first female examples, Bogan was known to use explicit images in her lyrics, and referenced drinking too, which would not have endeared her to the more polite side of society. She had very humorous sexual innuendos in her songs, and they have been recorded by many giants of the blues since, including the great B.B. King. She also recorded as Bessie Jackson, from about 1933. She was considered one of the “big three of blues”.


Bessie Smith (1894 - 1937)

Brought up, like so many African-Americans of the period, in dreadful poverty, Smith’s parents died when she was only nine and she was brought up by her sister. When her brother joined a travelling troupe she wanted to go with him but was too young, but when the troupe came back to her hometown her brother arranged for her to join. Here she met Ma Rainey, who taught her how to work a stage. After playing in theatres she moved on to recording music in 1923, and was soon one of the most popular female blues artists of the day, earning her the title “Empress of the Blues.” She was the best-paid black performer of the time, and probably the first black person to have their own private railroad car to travel in.

Her death was the stuff of rock legends. Her boyfriend, while trying to overtake a slow truck, hit it and the roof of their car came off, taking off Bessie’s arm. In shock, she was being tended to by a doctor at the roadside when another car sped up and, ignoring all warnings to stop, ploughed into the already-wrecked car. Taken to hospital (a “coloured” one of course) Bessie had her arm amputated but did not regain consciousness and died that morning, September 26 1937.

Her no-good husband made off with the proceeds of fundraising intended to have a headstone placed on Bessie’s grave, and it wasn’t till 1970, 33 years after her death, that one was finally erected thanks to Janis Joplin. Decades after her death she was awarded three posthumous Grammys, inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and appeared on a US postage stamp.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Whitewash: The true “race music” begins

Despite the influence the musicians above, and others, would and did have on the emergent country music scene - and even on Appalachian music itself - they would be allowed, read forced, to fade into the background when it came time to record this music and introduce it to the world outside. The very first true “country music” record would, you will be not at all surprised to hear, be recorded by a white man, but, you might be shocked (or not) to learn, would turn out to be an old tune romanticising slavery.


Fiddlin’ John Carson (1868 - 1949)

There’s a lot not to like about Carson, despite his place in country music history, or perhaps because of it. A native of Georgia, he learned to play the fiddle when young and worked as foreman on a cotton mill in Atlanta. When the workers were on strike for better pay he took to playing his fiddle on street corners in order to make ends meet. He wrote songs and published and sold them for a nickel or a dime. One song he wrote strongly criticised the governor of Atlanta for commuting the death sentence of a Jewish man, Leo Frank, wrongly accused of murdering a little girl, Mary Phagan. You can’t say in fairness that his song was entirely responsible for what happened, but given that it had the kind of baseless accusations of bribery and collusion that would have made a Trump supporter proud, it surely contributed to the later illegal capture of the man from jail and his subsequent lynching by a mob. Carson is also said to have written, though not released, a song praising the tree from which Frank was hanged.

As his fame began to grow - he was crowned “Champion Fiddler of Georgia” no less than seven times between 1914 and 1922 - he began to cozy up to local politicians, playing at their campaign rallies and endorsing them, and writing songs for them. He appeared on radio for the first time in 1922, on Georgia’s WSB (which I’ve learned from Ken Burns’ documentary stands for Welcome South Brother. Probably would be more accurate had they called the station WSBALAYNB, or if the welcome was changed to white) where he was a huge hit and it was not long before a recording career followed. However before we go there, a short diversion is required to explain the lay of the land at that time.

Two major innovations - perhaps the two biggest in all of its history - took place in music as the nineteenth century spilled over into the twentieth. In 1877 the inventor of everything it seemed from the light bulb to electricity itself, Thomas Edison, unveiled the world’s first machine capable of reproducing sound, which he called the phonograph. However, as astute as he may have been, he missed the boat bigtime with this one, and did nothing much really with it, other than patenting the device, until Alexander Graham-Bell, his first cousin Chichester and Charles Sumner Tainter improved on it in 1886, replacing Edison’s tinfoil-covered cylinders with wax-coated ones, and changing the name of their machine to the graphophone. Almost, guys, almost! But it was Emile Berliner who perfected the name we know today a year later, patenting his gramophone.

Indeed, it was he who made the, in retrospect, ground-breaking change from rotating cylinders to flat discs, the ancient precursors of what we used to know as records, and which survive today as CDs and DVDs. By the early half of the first decade of the twentieth century these were selling well, as people bought “records” or recordings of opera singers like Enrico Caruso, classical composers and marching tunes, orchestral jazz and the showtune music of “blackface” performers such as Al Jolson. The advent of the gramophone of course created a whole new industry, the music recording industry, and profits rolled in.

But there was a storm coming on the horizon, and it was called radio, or wireless transmission.

The first commercial radio station in the USA went live in 1916 and by 1920 radio stations were popping up all over the country, as well as all over the world. As portable transistor radios began to appear for sale in shops, easily affordable, they began to take a large bite out of the revenues of record companies. After all, why pay for something you could get for free, once you’d made the initial outlay on the radio? But radio stations, like the record companies, broadcast the same basic fare - orchestral concerts, operas, marching bands, and so on. The record companies needed to look to niche markets which the radio did not service, and they found them in rural America.

With what we would today find as a shocking lack of taste (but to be fair, complete honesty, even if that honesty was accidental and brutal) one of these markets, catering to black listeners, gained the descriptor of “race records” and was, in essence, the forerunner of soul, Motown and jazz. The other side of the coin was the rural white audience, who were not about to listen to a bunch of “savages” chanting their African nonsense, singing about things no God-fearing Christian should be singing! Oh no. These folks wanted clean, wholesome, family music - gospel tunes, old time music, nostalgia, music that took them back to a - mostly imagined - better time, a simpler time. This would be performed almost exclusively by people of their own colour, and would of course come to be known as …

… hillbilly music?

Oh yeah. It was some time before the words country and music were put together, and a long time after that before they’d acquire the suffix western. This was music from the mountains, from the hills. A sort of wild, untamed (but safe, as it was white) exuberant form of music which sang of the normal things normal folks did, such as ranching, ploughing, dancing, and of course drinking and loving. Simple songs for simple people. Hillbillies. And so the music was called, for some time, hillbilly music.

This didn’t go down well with either its practitioners or those who lived in the mountains, who felt (rightly) that they were being denigrated, looked down upon, laughed at jeered at and pitied. Variety magazine even described them thus: “95% can neither read nor write English. Theirs is a community all unto themselves. Illiterate and ignorant, with the intelligence of morons.” Nice. The people who bought the records, as they became available, didn’t mind listening to the music, but would have been horrified to have been associated with these “poor mountain cousins” of theirs, even though their characterisation of them was completely off base. But who needs the truth when you want to be entertained, huh?

In some ways, mountain folk or hill folk or hillbillies, or whatever you want to call them (or they wanted to be called) didn’t quite help this skewed perception of themselves by the outside world as they participated in travelling medicine shows, where a quack would attempt to sell worthless waters and concoctions as elixirs for everything from a bad back to the secret of eternal youth, maybe. Fiddle and banjo players would work up the crowd by playing against this backdrop of the peddling of snake oil, this idea carried through to its natural conclusion with the arrival of radio, where on Kansas’s KFKB Dr. John R. Brinkley had the crazy idea of - wait for this - implanting goat testicles into humans to restore sexual potency. In order to promote his product he would feature music by local fiddlers. Pretty apt maybe, as he was undoubtedly on the fiddle himself. In neighbouring Shenandoah, two competing radio stations staged fiddle contests, which drew large crowds who wanted to watch the live broadcast, and the town grew in response to the demand. Well, it wouldn’t have happened in New York.

The first radio station to be set up in what would become in time country music’s mecca, Nashville, Tennessee, was, you might be surprised to learn, a marketing ploy to sell insurance. It was in fact set up by an insurance company, the National Life and Accident Insurance Company, broadcasting live music in order to sell their product. Not quite the kind of genesis you’d have liked for Nashville, eh? The big lie, as it were, or hypocrisy if you prefer, is that the station’s boss required any acts that played on his radio show to have a hillbilly-inspired name, even if they were nothing to do with the mountains. If they came from Chicago or Boston, or New York or Washington, it didn’t matter. They had to sound authentic. Hillbilly music was what was in vogue, was what the listeners wanted to hear, and this station would deliver what the people wanted, all in the name of selling insurance. How’s that for good old boys, eh?

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

But back to Carson we go, if only for a moment. Before he began to get famous he would play wherever he could turn a buck - square dances, political gatherings, even KKK meetings - but after his performances on WSB he was suddenly in great demand, and travelled the south playing theatres and dances and anywhere they wanted him. He remarked once that his “wife thinks she’s a widow most of the time, because I stay away so much! Radio made me!”

Sure, that may have been true, as far as it went, but if radio made him, it would take another medium to break him commercially and open up doors to him that radio just could not. And one man controlled that medium in the south.


Ralph Peer (1892 - 1960)

It’s perhaps appropriate that the man who could quite easily be called, if not the father of country music then certainly the father of country music records, should be born in a town called Independence, Missouri. After working for Columbia Records in Kansas City for several years he moved to Okeh Records, who were responsible for the “race records” just mentioned. He almost immediately found, signed and recorded Mamie Smith singing “Crazy Blues”, the first blues record aimed at a black audience. He then pioneered field recording, taking recording equipment into the south, into Georgia in 1923, searching for more black music and musicians to feature on the race records series, capturing performances from artists in places as diverse as hotel rooms and bars to their own homes.

Somewhat disappointed at the number of black artists he could find in Atlanta, he was prevailed upon to visit WSB, where he was advised to record Fiddlin’ John Carson. Dubious, he wondered if there even existed a market for “old time music”; he remembered the Victor Talking Machine Company, the biggest record label in the USA, having recorded Eck Robertson a few years earlier, and how poorly those records had sold. Perhaps the appetite just was not there. Or perhaps the right artist had yet to be discovered. When Fiddlin’ John’s record, the aforementioned “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane”, sold out, he realised he had been right to take the chance, and immediately began advertising for and searching for other artists who could play what he called “old time music” or “hill country music”. He now saw that there was a market for, let’s be honest here, white racist music: southern whites who wanted to remember what for them were the “good old days”, back to a simpler time, gentler folks yadda yadda you know how it goes.

This was, on the face of it, and compared to the other more high-brow music of opera and jazz and classical, simple music for simple folks. The melodies were basic, the words spoke to them of their own experiences, they identified with it. It was the music of the ordinary man, the music of the working man, and they understood it readily. It was the sort of music they sung in barn dances and pubs and in their houses, but now it was being recorded and they could buy it. Many of the old ballads brought over from the British Isles had to be rewritten for an American audience, but mostly that was just a case of changing the lyrics, and the music would remain the same. So it was familiar, but slightly altered so they could identify with it, sing along with it and enjoy it all the more.

And it was theirs.

Ignoring or setting to one side for the moment the obvious horribly racist mindset of the white Appalachians, this was music they had grown up with and to be fair, they had little. This was part of their identity, songs that had been passed down from father to son for generations, usually only by the oral tradition, because, despite the nasty supercilious tone of that newspaper article, it was correct in that most of the mountain folk could not read or write. So it was important to get this music before it was lost, and Peer set out to make field recordings of it, and money from it, of course. Add to this hymns and gospel music sung in Church on Sundays and you had a recipe for whites-only, family-friendly, good, honest, moral, American music.

Of course, in reality it was far from theirs. As described earlier, the very tunes that came out of the Appalachians were inspired by and improved on by African American musicians with their banjos, guitars and other instruments, their tribal chants and their stories, their rhythms… I mean, leave it to the white mountain folk and you’d have had nothing but fiddle accompaniment to old Irish, English and Scottish ballads, and that was hardly going to start a whole new movement. But the contribution of the black community to the burgeoning behemoth that would become country music has been mostly ignored and even denied by racist white performers, who can’t bear the thought that they are making money off the backs of former slaves and non-whites. Their denial does not make it any less true though, and in recent years several authoritative sources have tried to redress this terrible wrong.

But I digress.

Peer realised that he had an untapped goldmine here, and in 1927 he “discovered” Jimmie Rodgers and then The Carter Family, recording both. Many experts have pointed to this as the real moment of the birth of country music, but whether or not that is true, it’s certainly the case that this was the beginning of an explosion of talent coming out from almost literally the woodwork, artists found in cabins and farms and hotels and at dances, all to be recorded by Peer and his label, his payment to be a share of one cent per side of a record for each of his artists in royalties, which he would divide between himself and the artist. This had never been done before, and shows the business acumen of the young executive, who now set the pace for how artists would be paid.

G.B Grayson (1887 - 1930)

Another fiddler, and another blind man at that, Grayson would go on to be instrumental (sorry) in the creation of bluegrass and country music in general. Born in South Carolina, he moved with his family to Tennessee when he was two years old and remained there all his life. Unable to gain any sort of employment thanks to his disability, Grayson took to playing his fiddle to anyone who would listen and throw him a few coins, and travelled with banjo player Clarence Ashley to play at the West Virginian coal mines. In 1927 he met guitarist Henry Whitter and the two recorded albums which sold so well that Grayson was able to buy himself a house. Sadly, he did not have long to enjoy it as he was killed the following year in a traffic accident.

Henry Whitter (1892 - 1941)

A native of Virginia, it will at this point come as no surprise to hear he learned music at an early age, and took to the guitar as his first love, though later he moved on to fiddle, banjo, piano and harmonica. He was one of the new artists picked up by Ralph Peer in 1923 to record his music, and his “Wreck of the Old Southern ‘97” became a hit, though technically in the hands of another man, Vernon Dalhart, under whom it became the first million-selling country music record. He is said not to have been a virtuoso like Carson and others, but got steady work recording and laid down some country standards. As noted above, he met fiddler G.B Grayson in 1927 and began recording with him, but after Grayson’s untimely death in 1930 Whitter never recorded again. He died in 1941 of diabetes.


Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882 - 1973)

I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone who began their life as a musician, went into law and then back into music, but this guy did. Born in North Carolina he played fiddle and banjo when young, then studied for a law degree in an attempt, partially at least it seems, to dispel and disprove the popular myth that all “hill folk” were illiterate and stupid. He succeeded, as he became famous as “The Minstrel of the Appalachians”, sticking very much to his family values ideals, avoiding coarse or objectionable songs and playing mostly spiritual and gospel music and ballads. Like Fiddlin’ John Carson, he used what were called at the time “negro spirituals” - music created by African Americans using their own native rhythms and their experiences of slavery (which you would have to think would certainly be frowned upon today as a form of cultural appropriation, but not then) not, it would seem, with any intention of calling to account the evils of slavery, but merely to sing about it and make no judgement.

He organised and played in the very first Mountain Dance Folk Festival, and continued to play in it every year up until his death, as well as setting up the Bascom Lamar Lunsford Minstrel of Appalachia Festival, which is still going. Like Carson, a celebrity of his day, he got involved with politics and was even invited to the White House by FDR in 1939 and performed for the then English king, George VI. He died in 1973, having suffered a stroke eight years previous.


The Carter Family

Without question one of the “founding parents” of country music, The Carter Family were a trio, an actual family and were another of the great - perhaps one of the greatest - acts brought to the notice of the public through the recording sessions held by Ralph Peer in Bristol, Tennessee. 1927 seems to have been Year One for country music; it was the year most of the artists those who know and play country are familiar with came to the fore, and the birthing pangs of the genre began to kick in. An interesting aside about the Carter Family is that their bandleader, A.P. Carter, lived in one of the most desperately poor regions of Virginia, appropriately called Poor Valley, and he found his wife, Sara, in the much more affluent Rich Valley. She transitioned with him, having married him, from Rich to Poor, literally, and life was hard on their farm.

When Ralph Peer advertised in Bristol for acts to record for him, A.P. cadged a loan of his brother’s car to make the trip, promising to weed his corn field in return. After a long trip the Carters arrived in Bristol, complete with sister-in-law Maybelle, heavily pregnant. They immediately impressed Peer, and recorded four songs for him, heading back home the next day after recording another two songs. The family forgot all about the sessions, returning to their farming life. Within three years they had sold over 300,000 records, and were able to leave their poor life behind. A.P. began travelling through the region, collecting old songs he could record, and as noted above in the section concerning him, he hooked up with Lesley Riddle in this venture.

Popular all through the south during the 1930s and 1940s, the Carter Family performed on radio stations in Texas and North Carolina, and as more children were added to the family they would take part in the performances, though never on record. However the touring schedule began to wear on Sara, to say nothing of the fact that her husband was a selfish prick who would leave her alone for weeks on end looking after the farm and the children, while he sold trees, and in 1936 she divorced him and married his cousin. They moved out to California, and in 1944 the band broke up.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018

Trollheart

Okay then, take your partner by the hand (unless they have a restraining order against you, in which case don't push it) and let's do this thing!

I: Nickel Dreams: From Austin to Nashville - The Light Beyond the Woods

Though born in Seguin, it was in the much larger city of Austin, to which her parents moved when she was young, that first gave a young Nanci Griffith her first real experience of country and folk music. Her father, known for singing in a barbershop quartet, took her to see the legendary Townes Van Zandt, and folk singer Carolyn Hester, who recognised talent in the young girl and encouraged her to consider music as a career. Her parents split when she was only seven, but Nanci was already performing in coffee houses with material she had written herself at twelve years of age. However at this time, the early sixties, there weren’t many women making it in country music, and those who were had been long established, so after graduating from Austin University of Texas with a degree in education, Nanci became a kindergarten teacher, and though she would never have children of her own, her love of them would come through strongly in many of her songs.

Teaching was her job and brought in the money, a steadier - and some might say, more respectable for a woman - job than being a singer, but she did not give up her dream of one day being a musician, playing bars and coffee houses after school in the evenings. Through these sessions she met other rising stars such as Lyle Lovett and Lucinda Williams, as well as Eric Taylor, whom she married in 1976. Two years later all her hard work paid off when she won the Kerrville Folk Festival’s New Folk Competition, which allowed her to give up her teaching job and pursue music as a fulltime career. It also brought her to the attention of Philo Records, for whom she would record her first two albums.



There’s a Light Beyond These Woods (1978)

It’s fair to say Nanci didn’t exactly blow the worlds of country or folk away with this initial offering. In fact, it wouldn’t be till her third album that she would make her proper commercial breakthrough, and it would take another two before she would have a bona fide hit, ironically not a song written by her. This debut album shows more of the folk than the country about her, but then Nanci had apparently always referred to her music as “folkabilly”, which, while it sounds a rather rude reference to bestiality, is a way I guess of fusing her love of folk and "hillbilly", or country music, the former mostly giving way to the latter as her career progressed and developed.

It’s a soft acoustic opener as “I Remember Joe” introduces us to her first self-penned song with the strong, powerful yet gentle vocal we would come to recognise and love. Sounds like Jew’s harp, though none is credited. Good fiddle from, well, it doesn’t say, but the mandolin from Rick West is really nice. Plenty of backing vocals, and it’s a decent start before she tones things down with “Alabama Soft Spoken Blues”, which reminds me of her later “Ghost in the Music”, to an extent. The piano from Richard Cooper adds a lovely sort of sighing little backdrop to the melody here. The contrast, or if you like, versatility in her songwriting is shown here, as she moves from a basic toe-tapper to a reflective ballad with ease. This is the only track on the album where she shares songwriting credit, here with Maggie Graham (is this the Mary-Margaret mentioned in the title track? Not sure but in that song she does call her Maggie, so maybe).

Upping the tempo slightly then for “Michael’s Song”, nice soft breezy feel to it with a cool little bit of dobro I think, but you’d have to be honest and say that this far nothing has really stood out, and “Song for Remembered Heroes”, with its picked guitar intro rising into the vocal is another reflective composition which really showcases her young voice, clear and confident even at only age twenty-five, but I think it’s possible that a failing of these songs is that they’re all sort of low-key and it’s hard to really grab a hold of anything in any of them. There’s nothing that really stands out, not to me. The cello here is really nice too, and they’re not by any means bad songs, but even so, it’s not hard to see why this album failed to catch anyone’s interest. It’s having problems keeping mine, and I’m a big fan of hers.

“West Texas Sun” is another that sort of sighs or shimmers into the tune, Nanci’s voice not rising too much above it, and it certainly suits the acoustic nature of most of the music here, but I would like to hear her kick it up a little, as I know from experience she can do. It might be unfair and unkind to say so, but the overall impression this album is giving me so far is of a record to fall gently asleep to, and that’s not how I see her music, but I guess she was learning her trade, maybe testing the waters. Not every debut can set the world on fire, and she is relatively young here. The title is the only one that really gives me any hope, with its autobiographical style, looking back through her life (even though she’s, as I say, only really beginning it here), talking about her old boyfriend who died when she was at high school and then tracing her own life after that tragedy. If any song on the album points the way to her future fame, I think this is it. It’s of course like every other song here a bittersweet ballad style, though with a bit more punch about it, and definitely the standout, but there’s just something a little different about it for me; it sounds a little more mature, and rising into the country genre more than the folk.

Speaking of country, “Dollar Matinee” is another which begins to head more in that direction, with a honky-tonk piano but annoyingly it’s sung by her husband, Eric Taylor, also written by him, so I couldn’t count it as one of her songs. I don’t even hear her contributing backing vocals here, she doesn’t duet with him, so you have to ask what the hell is it doing here? Let Taylor put it on one of his own albums. Meh. It’s also, to be fair, a pretty poor country song and for me a black mark against this album, which really couldn’t afford too many more. Not very encouraging either that the next one, the penultimate track, is a cover too, this of Bruce Carlson’s “Montana Backroads”, and even at that it’s so different to the previous track that it only brings into sharp relief the disparity between it and the rest of the album. I wonder if Taylor had demanded he have a song on her debut? If so, pretty selfish, and a bad idea if it was hers.

There’s not a lot to recover from, but Taylor has really pissed me off and I can’t see this ending any better than I had expected it to, and that wasn’t much. The banjo is nice and lively, but the song itself is not much to get excited about, and we end on “John Philip Griffith”, which seems to reference her late boyfriend again, and it seems he would crop up a lot in future songs, though I have to admit I don’t remember this being the case.

TRACK LISTING

I Remember Joe
Alabama Soft Spoken Blues
Michael’s Song
Song for Remembered Heroes
West Texas Sun
There’s a Light Beyond These Woods (Mary Margaret)
Dollar Matinee
Montana Backroads
John Philip Griffith

I suppose you can’t be too hard on her when this is her first outing, but I have to admit this is quite poor. I’m disappointed, and even though I’m pretty sure I must have heard this before (I certainly know the title track) I don’t remember any of it. I wonder did I hear it? Surely I would not have been so surprised/annoyed by Eric Taylor’s song if I had? Perhaps that title track appears on another album later in her career… ah! There we go. It’s the closing track on Lone Star State of Mind. No wonder I remember it, but not this album. Well, sadly I have to say I don’t seem to have missed much. Nevertheless, for Nanci I’m sure it was a big deal: her first proper album, and a few years and two albums later she would be on her way. Can’t see anyone spinning this though, or even owning it, unless they’re a real completist. Not a good place to start your exploration of her music.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018