In 1991 the BBC put out a series of TV programmes, ‘Bringing It All Back Home’, about the influence of Irish music on American folk and country music and the cross fertilisation of American music back to Ireland. Naturally, given the history, a lot of the songs were about emigration, and the experience of loss and longing, on the part both of the emigrants and the ones they are leaving behind. Here is a heartbreaking example, from the same series.
This song ‘Sonny’ is about the other side of this - of the one who didn’t leave. It tells of the fear of the mother that her son will, like those of so many other mothers, leave her alone. And when at last it is he who is left alone, it’s as if his life had had its meaning taken from him. It is sung here in a famous recording from 1991 by Emmy Lou Harris, Mary Black and Dolores Keane. The wailing uillean pipes, Ireland’s equivalent of country music’s steel guitar, seem to speak achingly of Sonny yearning for something he could never have and which he has no words for.
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Posted in Country Music on Sep 7th, 2009 No Comments »
This is from 1986 - from country singer Lyle Lovett. He was famous later for being one of fim star Julia Roberts’ temporary husbands. It’s a man’s song, for which no apologies. I must admit I don’t get all the words and some of the verses of this song don’t seem to bear much relation to the chorus - perhaps it’s just the culture difference which makes them opaque to me. But others do, and carry a lot of meaning, about self delusion, romantic dreams and the conflict of hopes and dreams with down to earth reality. And speaking your mind - which, being English and steeped in reticence, I find very hard.
‘If I were the man you wanted, I would not be man that I am.’
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Posted in Country Music on Jul 20th, 2009 No Comments »
Ever since I bought Hank Locklin’s ‘Please Help Me I’m Falling’ almost fifty years ago I’ve been a fan of Country music. You outgrow the pop music you adored when you were a teenager, when your puppy love phase is over. Country music grows up with you - it deals with your adult joys and despairs - with grown up love, loss, betrayal, disenchantment, where love is hard, where passion, sex and disappointment are inextricably intermingled.
This song is from 1984, by Janie Fricke. New love has claimed him. It may be sweeter but cannot be truer. She can’t let the memory go.
‘Her lips will be my lips when she’s kissing you. You’ll be looking at her but it’s my face you’ll see.’
Surreal - and haunting, as if sung by a ghost that can’t quit the earth which it has forsaken.
The arrangement is way over the top - but Fricke’s vocal is intimate and sincere. There is no reproach; there is no bitterness - just intense regret, disbelief and defiance.
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Posted in Country Music on Jun 19th, 2009 No Comments »
This is a song written by David Mallett, and recorded severally. There are popular versions by Dolores Keane, Eleanor Shanley and Kathey Mattea.
It’s a memory first of childhood, an almost too perfect memory of summer, of a field of clover, clouds, wind blowing, trees dancing. Then a shift to adulthood as he comes back, as from a world from which he is now retreating, back to the where he was a child, loved and where, improbably perhaps, she, his own true love still waits for him.
There’s a lovely line ‘By the deep pool where the fish wait for the old fool with the wrong bait’.
I always think it’s describing me!
This is the best version, by Kathy Mattea.
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Posted in Country Music, Rock on Feb 26th, 2009 No Comments »
I mentioned Jackson Browne in passing in my previous post on Francis Cabrel. I then realised I hadn’t posted any of his songs here. To rectify this omission here is my favourite Jackson Browne song, from his album ‘Late for the Sky’. It’s a song about the fleeting and the fragile - youth, joy, life - captured as he watches her dance. Here’s the final verse, on all we have left to do before we die.
‘Into a dancer you have grown, from a seed somebody else has thrown. Go on ahead and throw some seeds of your own. And somewhere between the time you arrive and the time you go may lie a reason you were alive. But you’ll never know.’
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Posted in Country Music on Jan 29th, 2009 1 Comment »
Here, by special request from an avid listener in the North of England, is John Hiatt singing his own song ‘Icy Blue Heart’ from his album ‘Slow Turning’. In Hiatt’s world love doesn’t come easy. Beauty and selfishness seem to go together, freezing out altogether the possibility of love, leaving them both desolate.
It’s a tough, hypnotic, masculine song, delivered hard and straight.
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From Beth Nielsen Chapman, written after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, this is a song of hope - and fear. She places hope in God and his angels to care for her before she goes to sleep. Like Hansel and Gretel, lost in the wood, praying for angels to guard them, two at their head, two at their feet. There is fear here too, its undercurrent deep in the music, but in the last verse, when the piano shifts sideways into a new major chord, hope is there too.
‘Now I lay me down to sleep, the troubles of this world released. The promise of tomorrow keeps angels by my side.’
It’s simple, artless - and very moving.
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This song was written by the Irish singer, Sinead Lohan, and recorded by her on her album ‘No Mermaid’. She sings it there with her characteristic dreamy innocence and charm. Unfortunately the album is infected with the virus of an overactive producer who seems to have insisted on adding extraneous effects to the musical background and filtering the sound through a coke-lined sieve. For a few hearings this is exhilarating but thereafter starts to tire the ear. Here is the song sung straight, and very good it is. It is performed by the American country group, Nickel Creek.
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Here’s another version of a Lennon and McCartney song that I offer in confirmation of my thesis that their best versions are not by the Beatles. This is Emmy Lou Harris.
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Posted in Country Music on Aug 11th, 2008 No Comments »
Jo-el Sonnier is a Cajun accordeon player and country singer who made several albums in the eighties. This is his best song. It was written by Tony Romeo. It’s a summer night and, six pack high, he’s waiting for her to come. But Come on Joe, buck up, she’s not worth it.
Joe Brown (and his Bruvvers) did a good version of this song when I saw him in concert at Bournemouth, there on holiday fifteen years ago
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