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Post by Jim Boylston on Nov 17, 2007 22:36:28 GMT -5
So Tom, what's the verdict on "Where Dead Voices Gather"? I just finished Dylan's "Chronicles Vol. 1". Have you read it yet? Jim
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Post by TRK on Nov 18, 2007 9:38:35 GMT -5
So Tom, what's the verdict on "Where Dead Voices Gather"? It's one weird book (for example, Greek terms are occasionally used, but it comes across as much as a sideswipe at academia as an effort to be erudite), and, much like its subject, Emmett Miller, the last great minstrel man, it really rambles and meanders, sometimes threatening to veer off the tracks before somehow getting back on course. It is not a smooth or easy read: you have want to meet it more than halfway, but it has its rewards. While it's basically about American minstrelsy and Emmett Miller, the author, Nick Tosches, goes off on some seemingly wild tangents which, by the time you get to the end of the book, turn out to make sense. Tosches covers some diverse themes, such as the "masks" and personae that performers assume; racial exploitation, roles, and stereotypes in the popular entertainment business from the Civil War to the present; the development and intermingling of musical styles (minstrelsy, vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, blues, country, Western swing, and rock & roll); and common lyrical themes. At the heart of the book is an examination of Emmett Miller, his personality, style, influences & those he influenced, and his meteoric career as the last great minstrel performer. The elusive and mysterious Miller has long been a touchstone for Tosches, and he was able to solve (with some acknowledged help from researchers) a lot of longstanding mysteries about the life of the minstrel man. The "Dead Voices" of the title is the collective "voice" of long-gone poets, troubadors, minstrels, gospel shouters...you name it; the collective subconscious, if you will. Some of the more interesting parts of the book are where Tosches takes a line or couplet from a modern song and traces it back through the centuries. In a way, it's a bit like what Greil Marcus did in his book on Dylan's Basement Tapes, but with attitude, and better ammunition to back up his arguments. Tosches has some interesting insights into early Blues performers, particularly Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, and how they fit in. He also devotes considerable space to cross-influences between Miller and Jimmie Rodgers. And, there's a definite sense that the one performer of the last half-century that Tosches considers a real force and luminary is Bob Dylan... which brings us to: I read it when it first came out what, two years ago? I thought it was an autobiography worthy of the man, with many flashes of real brilliance. It's not fresh enough in my memory to comment on in depth without reviewing it. How did you like it, Jim?
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Post by Jim Boylston on Nov 18, 2007 13:21:44 GMT -5
I gave "Chronicles" a shot when it was first released, but found it disjointed and meandering. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood, or maybe it's all the episodes of "Theme Time" I've listened to in the interim, but this time around I thoroughly enjoyed it. I missed much of the humor on the first go-round, and the chronological jumps didn't bother me this time...I just went along for the ride. There are a lot of rabbit trails, to be sure, but there's also a lot of introspection and revelation.
I've read a few of Tosches' books; "Hellfire", "Country", and "Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll", and I like his style. He's kind of like what I imagine James Ellroy would be if Ellroy were a music writer. I remember that Tosches views Emmett Miller as something of a Rosetta Stone in the history of American music, as the place where a lot of different styles intersect. I'll have to give the book a look, it sounds interesting. I recently ordered Greil Marcus' "Old Weird America" (formerly "Invisible Republic") which places Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" in much the same context as Tosces does Miller (or so I gather). I haven't received it yet, but should get it this week. This theme of "old voices" is also examined in the Terry Zwigoff film "Ghost World", where characters that are out of synch with contemporary culture find meaning in older music. Skip James' recording of "Devil Got My Woman" is central to the story. It's an interesting, quirky film. Jim
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Post by Allen Wiener on Nov 18, 2007 15:59:55 GMT -5
Jim,
Let us know what you think of Marcus's book. I know a lot of music fans and scholars hold him in very high regard, but I've had a devil of a time following him. I like Toches much better. The first one of his that I read was "Country Roots of Rock & Roll" and I really loved "Hellfire." I also just plain like his style.
This idea of key artists creating the links between different styles and genres has always fascinated me. I began contemplating this when I first began work on some Elvis projects years ago and have never lost interest in the concept. I think there have been several key artists who had major impacts on many others, which, in total, created the various genres or styles. It's hard to pin down all of them, but a lot of the blues guys you've mentioned belong on the list, like Johnson; several country artists too, including Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams -- maybe Gene Autry (but I may be overly influenced by the new bio of him that I'm reading right now). I'm not entirely sure how Elvis fits in since he was both influenced by a miriad of other artists and styles, which he synthesized into his own style and which, in turn, impacted all of rock music from that point on.
It's a fun game I never tire of playing.
AW
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Post by Jim Boylston on Nov 18, 2007 17:31:00 GMT -5
Same here. As for the blues, I think Charlie Patton's influence can't be overstated. Hank Williams owes a huge debt to Jimmie Rodgers, but I also hear a lot of blues in Rodgers' recordings. Another artist I love is Bob Wills, who managed to synthesize blues, country and jazz into some really swinging records. Jim
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Post by TRK on Nov 19, 2007 8:13:10 GMT -5
Tosches gets in some potshots at Elvis, whom, one senses, Tosches considers about one step above Pat Boone. He takes Elvis to task for, among other sins, expurgating semi-racy or suggestive passages from the blues and R&B songs he covered. And he throws in a snide epitaph that Elvis "died of lack of gumption."
Speaking of influences and cross-pollination, one theme that comes up time and again in Tosches' book is the idea of artistic "theft" and how it has helped keep those "dead voices" alive: "Men such as Emmett Miller and the even more forgotten men they stole from, and those in turn who stole from him--holy thieves all--ensured with their long-ago howls--howls you can hear among those in 'Sympathy for the Devil'--that, under whatever name, or namelessly, it [rock 'n' roll] would endure." (p. 295)
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Post by Allen Wiener on Nov 19, 2007 9:41:44 GMT -5
Yeah - he does have that attitude all right. I think he was particularly harsh on Johnny Cash as well. Seems to see the cross-pollination as some sort of rip-off of seminal artists, who did not get the credit (and certainly none of the money) they should have. I'm not sure what Toches does admire. I liked his book on Jerry Lee Lewis and his writing style. I haven't read any of his other stuff, like a book he did on Sonny Liston not long ago, which did not get very good reviews. Some of the reviews I read suggested that Toches is not well liked or admired by his peers.
AW
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Post by Jim Boylston on Nov 19, 2007 10:07:23 GMT -5
The idea of "theft" as regards melody or lyric might be a rather new idea. The folk and blues traditions certainly never considered using existing tunes or couplets as theft. On the Muddy Waters Plantation Tapes recorded by Lomax there's a short interview with Muddy after he sings the song "Country Blues". Lomax asks Muddy about the song, and Muddy tells him that Robert Johnson released the song on record and called it "Walking Blues". Lomax asks if he'd heard the song in other forms before Johnson's recording was released, and Muddy tells him "Oh, yes". Muddy's song "Feel Like Going Home" is substantially the same as well. Dylan mined blues lyrics for many of his songs, and admittedly used many folk melodies as the basis for his tunes. I can think of a lot of couplets that appear in numerous early country and blues songs, that seem to have been floating around in the ether for anyone who felt like using them. I suspect that the advent of the professional songwriter (maybe during the tin pan alley era) put the kibosh on the idea that music was in the public "public domain". It'd be interesting to research,. Jim
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Post by TRK on Nov 19, 2007 10:36:30 GMT -5
Allen, Tosches, at least in Dead Voices, seems to be saying that "theft" in the sense of traditional music, is a good thing, if done right--it keeps the music alive. In this book, he doesn't get much into rock artists who profited by ripping off blues artists; rather, he's more likely to take to task those who ripped off their forebears in a watered down manner. There's one passage where Tosches mocks Elvis ("the great mediocrator of rock and roll") for leaving out some irreligous lines from his version of Wynonie Harris' "Good Rockin' Tonight," and he criticizes Bill Monroe for taking "I can can pop my initials on a mule's behind" and taming it down to "I can pop my initials on a mule any old time" in his version of Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel No. 8" ("Muleskinner Blues").
Quoting Jim: "The idea of 'theft' as regards melody or lyric might be a rather new idea."
Maybe sort of recent. Actually, early in the book, Tosches cites the 1993 book by Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (coincidentally, the basis, it seems, for the title of Bob Dylan's 2001 album "Love and Theft"). While Tosches scorns Lott's book as one of a number of books on minstrelsy full of "specious theory and academic gibberish," he keeps returning to the idea of "theft" of musical and lyrical themes in American music. Again, the way Tosches uses the term, "theft" isn't necessarily a bad thing but, more often than not, the very thing that keeps the old voices and old music alive.
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Post by Allen Wiener on Nov 19, 2007 23:37:22 GMT -5
I'm thinking of the different versions of "One Night" that Elvis cut, the unexpugated (and originally unreleased) version called "One Night of Sin." That recording, of course, is out now and I truly love it, as well as several other blues numbers Elvis did. I understand what you are saying about Toches -- maybe it would be more palatable if every artist who ever ripped off a riff gave credit (and maybe a half-cent royalty) to the original artist. But that really becomes impractical when you reduce it all the way back to the kind of thing Muddy was talking about. After a while, you begin to wonder who ripped off whom. As I recall (it's been a long time), one of Toches's points in "Country Roots of Rock & Roll" was that, in some cases, it was the country artists who influenced the blues artists, not at all the other way around. I forget all the examples he used, but I think he found Jimmy Rodgers pretty seminal. How much Jimmy got from contemporary blues artists, or visa-versa, I'll never know. I think Toches suggested that some black artists got some of their material from Hank Williams too.
I think there's no end to this and, at some point, you start chasing your tail. Williams was a terrific songwriter and performer whose songs pack an emotional (or sometimes humorous) wallop to this day. There's no question that much of that originated with Williams. But, like everyone else, he was influenced by others and those influences were bound to creep into his stuff. I love the way Elvis describes Jackie Wilson's performance of "Don't Be Cruel" in Vegas on the "Million Dollar Quartet," and then does the song ala Wilson on "The Ed Sullivan Show"!
Gene Autry clearly and admitedly was copying Jimmy Rodgers on virtually all of his early recordings. Jimmy had made the style popular and Gene recorded for a number of low-budget labels, who could sell his cover versions a lot cheaper than the higher priced labels. As I read that new bio of Gene, those early el-cheapo discs gradually gave him a following of his own, built his reputation and popularity (apart from Rodgers), and got him better record deals. Autry became defensive about those early discs in his later years, but the recordings speak for themselves.
I've always thought that Hank Snow was more influenetial on early rock artists than he's been given credit for. His uptempo stuff is much like early rockabilly and I know Elvis not only was familiar with Snow's work, but mentioned him somewhere on "The Millon Dollar Quartet." You can even hear the Beatles doing a bit of the obscure "Caribbean" on some of the "Let It Be" outtakes (boy, what a pile of crap most of that is!).
Needless to say, much of this has to do with the commercial world that the early 1950s rock & roll artists ran into. As it was, there was a widespread movement to get rid of them and ban them from radio. Just think of what the reaction would have been to that original version of "One Night of Sin"!! In the case of Elvis, the Colonel not only had no knowledge of, or taste in music, but he wasn't gong to let anything stand in the way of the money -- if those dopey movies Elvis ended up making, and the even dopier songs he sang in them, would keep the cash register ringing, what else mattered?
AW
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Post by Jim Boylston on Nov 20, 2007 10:29:47 GMT -5
There are a couple of books out now that attempt to track the origins of particular songs. I haven't read either of them, but they might warrant a look, especially in light of this discussion. "Stagger Lee Shot Billy" is an examination of "Stackolee", but critics have called the book poorly researched and full of errors. "Chasing the Rising Sun: the Journey of an American Song", by Ted Anthony, is an attempt to trace the roots of "House of the Rising Sun". There are just so many examples of these "cross pollinated" songs. Another that comes to mind is "St. James Infirmary", variations of which were also recorded as "Gambler's Blues", and how about "Deep River Blues", also recorded as "Big River Blues"? Jim
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Post by TRK on Nov 20, 2007 11:01:37 GMT -5
Tosches spent two pages on the genesis of "St. James Infirmary" in Where Dead Voices Gather. He traces it back to the American ballad "The Dying Cowboy," which, he says, "was really the old Irish ballad 'The Unfortunate Rake.'"
Returning to the idea of musical "theft," let me reiterate that in Where Dead Voices Gather, Tosches doesn't really castigate anybody for ripping off somebody else and not paying royalties; for him, the crime seems to be more in the execution: i.e., the way some musicians take something old and traditional and redo it in a tamed-down, censored, or expurgated fashion. It's been a long time since I read his books Country and Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll, and Tosches may have addressed musical rip-offs and failure to pay royalties in those books, but he doesn't really touch on it much, if at all, in Dead Voices.
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Post by Allen Wiener on Nov 20, 2007 11:11:40 GMT -5
No, I don't recall Toches discussing this as a royalty issue -- I only threw that in myself. I think he's trying to recover or save the origins of music or specific songs in the face of the changes they undergo in the hands of later artists. I think the commercial market dictated a lot of that from the 1940s onward and the most familiar examples are the recordings of black artists that were covered by white artists so that they could be made "safe" for mainstream radio and recording sales (Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame" vs. Pat Boone's recording). Country music suffered the same kinds of reworking, like the pop/mainstream reworkings of Hank Williams' songs. In these adaptations, much of the song's original feel, intent or social origins is completely lost. I agree with Toches on this. I don't recall his take on the net worth of this process, but he may see it as serving some positive purpose in that the songs survive in some forms and are passed to later generations. Once that happens, there's always the chance those later generations will dig back to find the song's origins.
AW
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Post by Jim Boylston on Nov 20, 2007 12:15:49 GMT -5
I read a Hank Williams bio some years ago (Chet Flippo's maybe?) that questioned whether or not Williams really wrote a lot of the songs attributed to him. He partnered with a professional writer/publisher (Rose, I think), and IIRC Flippo made a claim that in many cases Williams brought little to the table on some of his hits, but received credit nonetheless. This wouldn't have been that unusual, frankly. Elvis received songwriting credit on a lot of tunes he didn't cowrite, but then Elvis isn't known as a writer. I view Hank in the same light as I do Woody Guthrie and Jimmie Rodgers. I think they all borrowed copiously from earlier songs and traditions, but no one could put the songs across as well as them. On another note, didn't Louis Armstrong play on some early Jimmie Rodgers records? Talk about crossing boundaries... Jim
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Post by Jim Boylston on Nov 20, 2007 12:18:52 GMT -5
Just a thought... Since the "Jook Joint" thread has gotten fairly long, would you guys like me to create a "Juke Joint" sub-board in the off topic section? That would enable us to create seperate threads under the "Juke Joint" heading. Would this be inappropriate on an "Alamo Studies" forum? Jim
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