So maybe this is what Blue Öyster Cult meant by the red and the black. Mississippi Mudsharks’Train Rolls On and Black Diamond Heavies' A Touch of Someone Else’s Class are both beat-your-face-in albums of the belligerent he-man blues-rock persuasion, and they also both sort of look alike! Red lettering on a black background -- especially on the album back covers, each of which is a top-to-bottom list of 11 songs. The Mudsharks’ front has a locomotive and the Heavies’ a drum set, but hey, let’s not quibble, folks.
Maybe it just means I’m turning into an old grump, but 2008 will go down in history as the first year in memory that I actually wound up liking two albums by bands of white people that hit Billboard’s blues chart. First there was Too Slim and the Tail Draggers, from Seattle. Then there was The Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band, from Indiana. Both are trios, both spend a lot of time on the road, both play guitar better than they sing, both record for small labels, both I never heard of before this year, and both like to eat.
Even in the grits-and-gravy world of chitlin circuit Southern soul, the Legendary Moody Scott may not genuinely qualify as a bona fide legend. And likewise, I don’t doubt that there are more glamorous singers out there somewhere thanthe Glamorous Bertha Payne. But that they bill themselves thus only makes their homemade records more endearing.
Southern rock, as properly defined in pre-3 Doors Down days, still exists on the country charts (Montgomery Gentry, Kid Rock) and occasionally even rock charts (Kid Rock again), and sometimes, people now even vastly overrate it (Drive-by Truckers, My Morning Jacket, Mudcrutch). But where it mostly survives is where it always has – local roadhouses, where working men drink too much, and perhaps throw a punch or whiskey bottle or two when the mood suits them. Listening to Lucas McCain’s New Horizonand Hank Davison Band’s Hard Way, one suspects the artists in question to be familiar with such habitats.
A couple months back, I noted a strange historical truce that’s taken place between rockabilly and the sort of supper-club blues-ballad approximations that, over the years, have come to be known as “lounge music.” One artist I mentioned in passing, Little Rachel, wrote to say that she thought her music wasn’t rockabilly at all, but rather R&B. An interesting thought, though what her album – and another I’d mentioned by Britt Savage, for that matter – bear out is that it depends how you define your terms.
Bo Diddley, who died Monday at 79, inherited a beat that's been traced back through the '30s fieldworker blues chant "Chevrolet" to the millenium-old West African rhythm Kpanlogo, and he helped invent rock 'n' roll, funk, hard rock, disco, heavy metal, '80s pop, new country and rap music with it. (Via talk-rhymed first-person braggadocio in the latter case -- and "Say Man" has to count as one of the original dis records.)
Bo Diddley’s pre-language rock 'n' roll rhythm, the
“Bo Diddley Beat,” was permanently embedded in the human consciousness
in 1955 when Ellas Otha Bates (a.k.a. Ellas McDaniel, a.k.a. Bo Diddley)
appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show playing it, instead of the Tennessee
Ernie Ford song he had agreed to perform. The rest is indeed history as
Diddley remains one of the three most important figures in the
creation of rock 'n' roll and its subsequent offshoots. Like Chuck
Berry's and Little Richard’s, Diddley’s influence was pervasive, and
instrumental in the formation of the rock vocabulary -- legend has it
that early Rolling Stones shows featured the band simply playing the "Bo
Diddley Beat" for the entire night to a roomful of ecstatic kids.
Ross Johnson, unbeknownst to me before this year, is a Memphis underground legend (he’s worked with everyone from Jon Spencer to Peter Buck, Alex Chilton to Tav Falco) and also a musical laugh riot – at least if you think shuffling up drunken standup routines with crazed '60s soul-garage-punk and rockabilly is a smart mix, which you damn well better. Make It Stop! The Most of Ross Johnsonis easily one of the best new albums I’ve heard in 2008.
Word is that Akon – already an unclassifiable man of many genres and vices and wives -- says he’s about to make a country move. He claims it will make him the first black person ever to score on the country charts. This is a gross misconception, as others have already pointed out, but it does give me an excellent excuse to recommend some notable country music by African Americans, starting with the late, great Big Al Downing.
