[discoveries]
As the choir and band cooked up a chills-inducing spiritual, Diddley’s casket was wheeled in, followed by more than forty family members chanting “Hey, Bo Diddley” and led by his oldest daughter, Evelyn, or “Tan,” who danced maniacally behind the slow-moving casket....
...And Diddley was truly sent out in style. As his longtime backing band...softly played his signature song, “Bo Diddley,” his casket was wheeled out into the steamy Florida sun.
From "Goodbye, Bo Diddley" by Matt Hendrickson, Garden & Gun,
September/October 2008
Remembering Blaze Foley
Living in the Woods in a Tree: Remembering Blaze Foley, by Sybil Rosen (Number 2 in the University of North Texas Press’ Lives of Musicians series) arrived in my mailbox this gray, rainy Saturday morning, courtesy of Amazon. The rain fell and steam rose from my coffee and the book drew me in. Sybil lived with Blaze in the seventies, during a time of transformation in both of their lives. He wrote his best-known song, the beautiful “If I Could Only Fly,” for her. Her relationship with Blaze may have been, as she describes it, a “fleeting idyll” in the grand scheme of things, but as she looks back from the distance of years through the uncertain filter of memory, through the light of Blaze’s subsequent notoriety and stature, she finds deep, resonant meaning. And this journey into her personal past also illuminates overall the vibrant times of these southern hippies, artists and musicians living the underground life in the seventies and eighties, and takes us down some of the little-known backwaters of the Texas music scene of the period, providing a depth and color missing from many accounts of this rich, creative milieu. And, on top of everything else, Sybil Rosen is a skilled writer of beautiful, moving prose. This book is not only a welcome addition to UNT Press’ fine Lives of Musicians series, but also to the literature of Texas music and to the literature of the counter-culture. It is a fine memoir of a sensitive soul.
The Hackensaw Boys
These six wild boys from Charlottesville, Virginia, all lined up straight singing wild, loose harmonies, playing acoustic guitar, standup bass, fiddle, mandolin, banjo, and a washboard-and-tin-can percussion contraption, these boys grab you from the first note and don’t let go. It’s white-lightning-fast hippie bluegrass, mountain music on speed, a crazed backwoods revel, but these boys are all real nice fellas, not clean-cut, so much, in fact, highly creative in the facial-hair department in some cases, but earnest and exuberant, fine musicians, and exuding a truly inspired communal vibe and a roots rhythm that had everybody on their feet and dancing throughout the extremely engaging and energetic live show in which I participated (in Bristol, Tennessee), everybody from the locals in spit-shined shoes and overalls and new hairdos and Sunday dresses doing real dance steps, to the Deadheads (do you still call them Deadheads? What are they called now?) in flowing tie-dyed regalia with hula hoops (hula hoops!) doing what they do, still, apparently. Go see the Hackensaw Boys, and like the song says, “Look Out Dog! Slow Down Train!”
The San Antonio sound is alive and evolving with the Krayolas, who have taken up where Doug Sahm and the Sir Douglas Quintet left off, stirring a mixing bowl full of British Invasion-era rock’n’roll, Texas blues, horn-driven R&B and soul, and border music, and adding the razor-sharp writing of rhythm guitarist/vocalist/ frontman Hector Saldaña. La Conquistadora (Box Records, 2008) is a joy, from the packaging--the cover painting by David Zamora Casas, the brilliantly evocative sixties-style hallucinatory-declamatory liner notes by John Phillip Santos, and the great interior action-shot of the memorable Jovita’s gig where I first discovered the Krayolas in March, with Augie on the Vox--through each song in the varied playlist. The three scattered Augie Meyers songs--including the infectious “Little Fox”--lay a firm foundation in joyous organ/accordion-based rock’n’roll. Saldaña’s songs go deeper, exploring relationships, personalities, and situations in simple, succinct, straightforward, yet magically evocative language: “Alex” evokes both longing and barely restrained bitterness; “Deceiver” brings together lust and, if not guilt, then conscience; “Nolan Street Bridge” is a time and a place and a character brilliantly drawn; the love songs--I particularly like “Your Doorway Darling” and “I’ve Wished You Well” – are both tender and imbued with a mature, if not jaded, wistfulness. All this in a set of three-minute rock’n’roll songs as well crafted as they are imaginative and varied.
I spoke briefly with Augie Meyers at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival on the Mall in Washington, D.C., earlier this summer, and he told me he’d just recorded some more tracks with the Krayolas (“They’re great,” Augie said, “aren’t they?”). I’ve been listening to those tracks this week (thanks, Hector!), and they are killer, taking the group’s sound into bluesier territory, with a harder edge. The writing is top-notch, and “Long Leaf Pine” immediately takes its place among the band’s strongest performances. “I Want to Fall in Love Again” is another lost gem from Augie, brought exuberantly alive. Whereas only one track on La Conquistadora features horns, both these tracks make superb use of the kick-ass West Side Horns: the baritone sax on “Fall in Love Again” will grab you and not let go.
Stay tuned here for lots more about the Krayolas.
Launched last year, Garden & Gun is “sort of a cross between Oxford American, Southern Living and Field & Stream,” according to Marshall Chapman, who is a contributing editor. In the current issue, the article on Bo Diddley’s funeral by Matt Hendrickson is tight and evocative; Jimmy Buffett’s piece “Who Do You Love,” which opens “Bo Diddley saved my life one night in Africa,” is simply a good little story well told. I see Bronwen Dickey, who I know from Oxford American, is here too, and her writing is always superb. The layout and attitude are crisp. I can’t remember whether I heard about this magazine through Marshall Chapman or vice versa, but there you go.
She’s from South Carolina, she’s quite tall, I believe, and she’s written a couple hundred songs, many of which have been recorded by fine artists such as Emmylou Harris, John Hiatt, Joe Cocker, Irma Thomas, Jimmy Buffett, Jessi Colter, Crystal Gayle, and Conway Twitty, among others. She put out a string of albums from the late seventies through the nineties--including It's About Time, which was recorded live at the Tennessee State Prison for Women in 1995. What fascinates me, though, is her literary work. Her first book, Goodbye, Little Rock and Roller, came out in 2003 and was one of three finalists for the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She’s currently working on a book about the Nashville scene, of which she has intimate knowledge, and I’m looking forward to meeting her at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville in October.
I read a striking piece on Minton Sparks by Marshall Chapman in Garden & Gun, and that piece, along with the Dorothea Lange-like photograph of Sparks standing barefoot in an old screen doorway, spurred me to find out more. Like Marshall Chapman, Sparks writes prose and records CDs as well, but her CDs (and a new DVD) feature her reading her prose with instrumental accompaniment (including guitar work by John Jackson, who played with Dylan and with Lucinda). She has a deep, expressive, crooked-smile voice and a long Southern drawl reminiscent of Lucinda. Worth checking out.