What I Really Wrote: 600 Words on Woody Guthrie's AMERICAN RADICAL PATRIOT (Rounder)

WORLD magazine recently published a bowdlerized version of this article.  And I think I understand my editor's reasons.  But I also think that my original piece deserves a slot in the blogosphere.  So here it is....

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Paula Deen, come home.  All is forgiven.

At the risk of trivializing a fascinating and culturally important project, it behooves those troubled by the witch hunt currently targeting anyone who’s ever uttered a certain racial epithet (hint: it starts with n) to investigate American Radical Patriot (Rounder), a six-CD, one-DVD, one-78-RPM record, and one-256-page-biography box set that sheds essential light on America’s most important folk singer, Woody Guthrie.

Discs One through Four present interviews and illustrative song performances that Guthrie granted the folklorists Alan and Elizabeth Lomax for the Library of Congress in 1940, mainly on the subject of Dust Bowl refugees.  Guthrie, a riveting storyteller at 27, sounds 50 at least. 

Disc Five presents songs Guthrie recorded in 1941 in support of the Bonneville Power Administration and U.S. involvement in World War II.  (He joined the Merchant Marine in 1943 and served in the Army shortly before the war ended.)  

Disc Six’s highlight is a Guthrie-narrated radio drama called “The Lonesome Traveler” that, along with 10 demos referred to as “V.D. songs,” warns of the evils of syphilis.  (The 78-RPM vinyl presents the 20-year-old Bob Dylan singing a Guthrie V.D. song as well.)  Compared to attitudes prevalent in 2013, Guthrie’s frankly cautionary tone sounds almost moralistic, even naive.   

Naivety, in fact, is what emerges as Guthrie’s defining characteristic.  While never a Communist, Guthrie was Communist friendly enough to provide the enemy succor.  While the Common Man he championed was often indistinguishable from a Rugged Individualist, he also believed Big Government capable of more good than harm, and he provided that enemy succor too.     

Yet it’s not “naive” but another “N-word” that would be American Radical Patriot’s big revelation were Guthrie not a leftist icon.

“Until he was called on it,” writes Bill Nowlin in the box set’s book, “he used the word ‘nigger’ when referring to a well-known fiddle tune of the day--but once a radio listener wrote in and explained how hurtful that word was, from that time in 1937 on, he never used it again....” 

Fair enough.  Except that it’s unfair, and not only to Paula Deen but to Elvis Presley too.

In the early 1990s, rumors circulated that a tape would soon surface in which the King of Rock and Roll would be heard committing the Unforgivable Sin.  Rock critics panicked.  Elvis would have to be dethroned.  But the tape never surfaced, and Elvis survived. 

Guthrie may too--he utters nothing verboten on American Radical Patriot.  But he does say “negro,” and for some that will be blacklist worthy enough.  The worst Elvis has ever been proved to have said is “colored guys.”   

An equally captivating folk-box-with-book is Live at Caffè Lena: Music From America's Legendary Coffeehouse,1967-2013 (Tompkins Square).  The titular dates are misleading: Folkies began performing at the Saratoga Springs, NY, haunt in 1960.  But so far anthologists have not unearthed tapes dating back that far, hence the three-disc set’s 1967 starting point.

Fellow-traveler politics surely played--and play--a role in the Caffè Lena story, but they’re given short shrift in the box set’s three CDs and the 31-page libretto.  The all-acoustic music gets the spotlight.  And, uneven though the 47 performances are (in terms of both audio and aesthetic quality), sparks do fly.

Recommended: Ramblin’ Jack Elliott doing Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd” and Aztec Two Step doing “The Persecution and Restoration of Dean Moriarty,” which are every bit as compelling as they are historically revisionist and-or wrong headed.

Hair Apparent: The Rest of the Sean Michel 'Electric Delta' Story

On September 3, 2013, I had the pleasure of interviewing the 34-year-old gospel-blues warrior musician Sean Michel (pronounced Michelle) at length for WORLD Magazine.  The occasion was the recent release of his fire-breathing gospel-blues album Electric Delta.  Much of what he had to say landed on the cutting-room floor.  The partially edited portions of the transcript below pick up some of the pieces.

Electric Delta, according to your website, “was recorded completely analog to two-inch tape.”  What are the advantages of using such a process to record loud, electric, gospel-blues?  

There’s a lot of different advantages.  What we were trying to accomplish as a three-piece band--one, we wanted it to be live.  You can do that digitally.  But there’s something about the fact that all music recording, especially blues or gospel or early rock-and-roll, was all done live to two-inch tape.  We wanted our project to sound real, like it did back in the day.  For the album we did before Electric Delta--Back to the Delta--we stripped everything down in an old church in a Mississippi town called Rolling Fork, where Muddy Waters was born, and we did everything live to tape.  There was no post-production work or anything.  We wanted it to feel like a ’30s or ’40s blues record, and [Electric Delta] was the natural progression of that into electric, early rock-and-roll.

What inspired you to try this approach?

We were trying to get back to our roots, to what had been inspiring us musically for so long because we’d kind of lost our way, and we were getting real scatterbrained as far as what direction, musically, we were going.  This brought us back to the foundation.  We just wanted to give back to the people what we had been learning.

Is it your intention to record your next album in the same way?

Well, I hope it’s just a further progression of “Hey, this is what we’re doing musically.  This is what we’re learning.”  But sometimes that can be dangerous.

Why?

Because an artist is constantly evolving.  You hope your listeners can join you in that and be cool with it.  But sometimes, if you find your niche and your wheelhouse--you know, artists tend to want to stay there so that people will buy records.  We still want to do that.  There’s part of that too.  It’s just sometimes it’s difficult because it’s difficult to find that wheelhouse.  I think we found a good chunk of the wheelhouse with Electric Delta.    

What is your next project?

The next project we’re working on is going to be a short EP, maybe six or seven songs.  And we’re planning on doing that in a studio of our friend’s, and he does all-digital stuff.  So, you know, it’s not going to be to tape, but we’re still wanting to do it live and have the bulk of the instrumentation done with the three of us at the same time.

Any plans to keep the word delta in the title? 

(Laughs) It’s going to be called Raise the Dead, after a song that we did for a friend of ours who wrote a book for Thomas Nelson.  He basically had a soundtrack for the book, and he chose us to do one of the songs.  We wanted to write songs in that vein as far as rock-and-roll’s concerned--a little bit more aggressive--and toy with that.  It’s kind of just for fun.  So we’re hoping some good songs come out of that too and that it doesn’t confuse people too much as far as what our sound really is (laughs).

You mentioned having lost your musical way.  How did it happen, and how did you know that you had?

In 2003, my manager at the time helped me form a band, and we toured for about four years.  It was a completely different style of music, which I didn’t feel was completely me but which was all I really knew.  Then, after a dramatic turn of events, my whole band, after four years, quit on me.  That was pretty heartbreaking in itself.  And that’s kind of how the whole blues thing started, with me anyway, or gospel-blues at least.  I was starting brand new with this different style and learning how to play it.  I was always influenced by that kind of music anyway, so singing it wasn’t that hard of a transition, but the playing was.  Anyway, in the midst of that, I never had a full band again.  I think that was a big reason for being so all over the map, because I never had these set guys that I always worked with.  It was, like, several people from different backgrounds, different influences, and we were doing covers and doing this and doing that.  I was so scattered because I didn’t really know where or who I was yet with the music.  My manager could see that too, and I guess he had the vision to see that the best thing for me was to get back to those original artists I was listening to after my band quit and I went into, like, a huge depression.  I was listening to all this gospel blues from the ’30s and the ’40s, and it’s real stripped down.

Was one of those gospel-blues artists Blind Willie Johnson?

Yeah, he’s a huge player in that--and Mississippi Fred McDowell.  Massive.  He didn’t do a whole lot of gospel stuff, but he has this one album called Amazing Grace that he did with a choir of people from Como, Mississippi, and that album is basically almost the full foundation of Back to the Delta.  I listened to that record a hundred million times.  It’s just Fred McDowell’s slide guitar and four vocalists and him.  And that’s what we did.  I had four vocalists and me.  I had a guitar.  We added harmonica, and we also had foot stomping and stuff like that.  But [Amazing Grace] was pretty much the album that guided me through Back to the Delta.

Who is most responsible for the prominence of the glam-rocking drums in Electric Delta’s final mix?  I’m thinking mainly of “While I Run This Race” and “Unbelievable.”

As far as “Unbelievable,” that was our idea.  A lot of people said, “You sound like the Black Keys on that song.”  I was like, “Well, yeah.”  But the Black Keys are basically just ripping off Gary Glitter, you know, with the Jock Jams kind of tune.  And that’s the same feel we wanted to have.  “Unbelievable,” at first, like a lot of songs, was just a jam.  We were messing around one day in the practice room, and that was the beat that we were fooling around with.  And then we built on that.  So, as far as that song in particular, the foundation of it had always been that (orally mimics Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part 2” drum beat).  But it’s funny that you mention “While I Run This Race.”  We had several different options.  We could track drums live in the main tracking room, or we could track them upstairs in this reverb hallway, which we did on a couple of songs.  And “While I Run This Race” is the only song for which we tracked the drums in this enclosed, super-dead room to give you the kind of dead drums that they had in the ’60s and ’70s.  But in the mix it ended up being a little more prominent than maybe I would’ve liked.  But it still sounds cool.  

It sounds good to me.

That’s cool.  And the thing with us with the drums--and I told our engineer this, Chris Mara--he had done some early-on mixes, and this was two weeks after we had tracked everything.  He gave us a CD of mixes straight from the board.  They were basically just premixes.  So I’d been listening to that for two weeks.  And they had a lot of energy.  It was basically what you hear on the album.  And the reason we chose to mix with him and not just record with him was that he told us, “I’m going to mix straight from the two-inch tape through this analog board, no whistles, no bells.”  And we were like, “O.K., cool.  That’s what we want.”  And the the rough mixes from the board were awesome.  Then he sent us these preliminary mixes that he’d worked on one day, and they sounded horrible.  They sounded like radio-station--“Let me take a wet blanket and throw it over these big huge drums we’d just recorded and loud guitars and crazy vocals.”  And I was really heartbroken and kind of losing my mind.  It sounded like demos I had made in previous years, and I wanted to break away from that and make a legitimate record to where when I handed it to people I could say, “This is as close as we could get to what you experience live right now.”  That was a big problem with our recordings before.  They could never stand up to what people were experiencing live.  

So what happened?

We went back into the studio, and he was like, “What’d you think of those preliminary mixes?”  And I didn’t say anything.  I just stayed silent.  And he was like, “Crap!”  He was really distraught.  And I was like, “Look, man, I just want to get back to those rough mixes you had on the board.”  So then he tells me, “Well, I dumped the songs down into Pro-Tools.”  And I was like, “Why did you do that?  The whole reason we’re staying with you is that you said you were going to mix straight from the board and were not going to do anything digitally, just analog.”  And he was like, “All right.  Well, I can do that.”  And I was like, “I know you can.  That’s why we frickin’ chose you and we’re staying with you.”  So he said, “Let’s do it.  Let’s give ourselves only 45 minutes to an hour for each song to mix,” which is kind of unheard of.  A lot of studios--they’ll spend a few days or hours upon hours on mixing.  Anyway, we kept ourselves to that limit.  We never spent longer than an hour mixing a song.  And we kept it essentially to the rough mixes.  I feel like we captured so many great tones on the front end that we didn’t need any compression or anything on the back end.  We just basically needed to set the levels right and roll with it.

Good job of standing up to Pro Tools.

Yeah.  But I’m not saying this to say I’m on this personal journey of trying to destroy Pro Tools.  I think there’s a lot of good that can come from that.  And, like I said--hopefully in January or February--we’re going to be making an EP on Pro Tools.  There’s a lot of convenience to it.  It’s just not what Electric Delta needed or wanted.  If we knew in our hearts that we put out a record that was a follow-up to Back to the Delta, which was all mixed live to tape, and then we recorded Electric Delta live to tape but then we mixed it in a digital format, that would’ve been compromising the original intent of that project.  And I feel like it would’ve been cheapening that when we gave it to people.  We had to stay true to what the format was, which was all analog.

You released Back to the Delta on vinyl and cassette only as a protest of sorts against our increasingly impatient music-listening habits.  Did you at any point consider releasing Electric Delta the same way?

Uh, well, we were kind of over tape (laughs).  I mean, cassette tapes are cool and everything, but they’re not a great seller (laughs).  I mean, all the tapes came with digital-download cards, and that’s the only reason we sell those.  But we did release [Electric Delta] on vinyl.  Honestly, we had to pay a lot more than we were wanting to because we had it mastered twice.  We mastered all the songs so that it would be better formatted to CD, and then a guy named Tommy Riggins mastered it another time for vinyl.  So if you sit down with the vinyl and you sit down with the CD, they sound a little bit different.  It’s not drastic or anything like that.  But you can definitely tell.  It’s almost like the difference between two really good coffees and just the way that they’re brewed.  They’re both really good.  It’s just that they’re different.

What does the term Delta mean to you?  

Man, it conjures up a lot of things.  The first thing, I think, is just life and death.  There’s so much that happened in the Delta that produced life, I mean as far as soil, the crops, which offered life to so many people, growing essential things that the country needed back in the day, whether it was cotton or food that was shipped wherever in the country, feeding families that worked there.  But it also brought a lot of death and destruction.  I mean, you think about the Mississippi River and the power behind it-- the power to offer life, the power to offer death.  And there was so much flooding that went on in that region, things that human beings could never control and still can’t today.  We just had a flood recently, a couple of years ago, to where most of the traffic along the Mississippi River on the interstates had to be completely re-routed.  And even living in a technologically advanced society, you can’t control those things.  So, in a lot of ways, the river is great symbolism for who God is.  He brings life and--not to say that God’s bringing death.  I don’t believe that.  But there are factors that come in to where humans can’t control God.  So when I think about the Delta, I think about those things.  I think about the kind of people--it’s usually the poor, especially the sharecroppers, where a lot of the music came from originally.  It was coming from these slaves that were shipped over and from generations of slaves that were chained down to poverty and--just hard work, man.  I mean, every single day at work that I will never probably ever experience, the intensity of being out in the fields thirteen hours a day--crippled hands, crippled backs from having to bend over picking cotton, and bruised hands from trying to pick cotton bolls and getting stabbed, no air conditioning, no electricity.  Yet that suffering produced art that, as far as these songs that they sang out there.  All the songs they sang were basically to help bring some relief to the suffering that they were having to endure with the work and the bondage.  And from that suffering and from that art sprang, I think, the greatest music ever, which has influenced so many styles of American music, which has influenced the world, whether it’s blues or country or rock-and-roll.  It all came from those Delta boys.   

Talk about “Hosea Blues.”

I don’t really venture into the Old Testament a lot, but I sat down one day and started reading Hosea.  And I started blushing. I mean, that is a dirty book, man.  It was a scandalous book.  It was meant to be a scandalous book when the prophets wrote it.  It was meant to be scandalous to wake the people of Israel up to the horrible things they were doing--to other people, to their own people, in their disobedience to the Lord.  So I started writing it originally as if it was God talking to Israel, specifically mentioning Israel.  But it sounded kind of dumb like that.  So my manager, Jay--he helps me with songwriting as far as lyrically and the content and the concepts--he was like, “Man, you just need to change it to a woman, like you’re a man talking to a woman.”  So we rearranged the wording, and it worked.  It was what the song needed.  I just chose Hosea because that happened to be the book that I got it from.  I wanted to let people know “This is where we got this imagery from” because if you look at the lyrics, they’re pretty scandalous as far as gospel music.  But, honestly, I was just taking some of those lines almost straight out of Hosea.  So I wanted people not to blame me.  I wanted them to see, like, “Oh, the Bible really did this, not Sean Michel.”  I didn’t want to get in trouble (laughs).   

How does the song go over live?

Sometimes churches don’t want us to play it.  And it’s kind of ridiculous to me that the people who get it the most are the people in the bars--which is not really that surprising, I guess, because it was the same way with Christ a lot of times when he preached.  It always seems like the “sinners” got his message a lot more than the priests did.  But sometimes churches don’t want us to play that song because it’s offensive to them.  And I’m like, “It’s straight from the book of Hosea!  Go read it!”  But, when we play that song, a lot of times I have a little story that I tell at the beginning to set the song up, and it’s basically just the imagery of Hosea itself, uh, marryin’ a ho and, you know, the ho never leaving except leaving the house to skip out on her man and all this stuff.  And then when she’s being auctioned off, the only one who’ll buy her back is Hosea, the man she’d been skipping out on the whole time.  It resonates with people from the get-go because we tell that story and then we start playing it.  I think it helps people get it better.  It’s a special song to me, man.

So you play both sacred and secular venues.

Yeah, we do both.  We play a lot of bars.  We play a lot of churches.  We play clubs, theaters--you know, we go around the world.  We just got back from Senegal in West Africa in December-January.  We did mission work through the music.  We’ve been to Chile.  We’ve been to India, Nepal--anywhere the Lord opens up a door for us to play some gospel rock-and-roll, we’re going to try to step through that door for sure.

Do these opportunities result from your being contacted one gig at a time, or do you work through some sort of organization?

The stuff overseas has been missionaries that contact us and have this vision to use a rock-and-roll concert to bring people in the community together and to start to share the gospel with them.  We just fly over there to facilitate that.  

Talk about your religious background--churches attended and the like.  How did you become this gospel-shouting, preaching guy?

My religious background is a bit schizophrenic.  My father was an atheist for the longest time.  He didn’t come to Christ ’til I was a senior in high school.  So my mother was my hugest influence spiritually.  She came to Christ when I was about five, through Jimmy Swaggart’s ministry down in Baton Rouge a long time ago.  So I grew up with, like, this heavy Pentecostalism influence--you know, watching a demon exorcism when I was six years old at a Bible study.  That’s  never a good thing for a kid to experience (chuckles).  But I also grew up with grandparents in New Orleans who were strict, old-school Roman Catholic.  So I attended Mass a lot.  I had a blend of high church and, you know, sometimes-crazy church.  Then my mother ended up going to this non-denominational church.  The pastor lived next door to us.  It was still very Charismatic, but they were really sound doctrinally, and that was a big influence on my life.  That’s when I first really started getting serious about who Jesus was.  

How old were you?

I was probably thirteen, fourteen.  I “said this prayer,” and I guess that’s what started my journey with the Lord.  Then, when my family moved up to Arkansas to Little Rock, when I was, like, fourteen, the Lord led me to a Southern Baptist church mainly through one of the only guys at the school who would befriend me at the time.  I got involved in their youth group, and they had an amazing student ministry.  That’s when the Lord really started rockin’ my world.  I got involved with Bible studies with guys my age and a little bit older as these dudes were mentoring me through the Scriptures.  That’s when things started really getting serious between me and the Lord.  

Are you still Southern Baptist?

I’m still Southern Baptist.  So, yeah, I guess something stuck.

At what point did you stop shaving?

Uh, I think I was 10 (laughs).  No, I stopped shaving in college.  In my junior year in college through a movie that I’d seen at that time--

Which movie?

Girl Interrupted, with Wynona Rider and Angelina Jolie.  Anyway, Jared Leto was in that movie.  And I was like, “Man, that dude looks good with a beard.  I’m going to try that.”  So I started growing one.  I grew it for two or three weeks, and come to find out I could grow a pretty sweet beard.  But it really freaked me out, so I shaved it all off.  Then I was like, “Why did I do that?”  So then I grew it out again, and it freaked me out again, so I shaved it all off again.  Then, after that, I was like, “Forget this.  I’m just going to grow it out.”  So I grew it out for about a year-and-a-half, and it was pretty nice looking.  Then I had to shave it for graduation because my mom was embarrassed of me and didn’t want me to get my diploma “looking like a homeless bum.”  So I shaved it.  I had a two-tone face (laughs).  I looked like a freak of nature getting my diploma instead of a homeless bum--or as if I’d had a mishap at the tanning bed.

What was your degree?

Biblical Studies.  Studio Art was my minor--painting and drawing and stuff like that.  So I guess my beard fit my degree perfectly.  I’m not sure why my mom made me shave it off (laughs).  But that’s how things are in the South and Western culture.  Everything’s about outer appearance.  Anyway, that was in, like, 2001.  I’d shaved my face for graduation, but I still had long hair.  Then I went to a prayer meeting shortly after that and just felt like the Lord completely wanted me to shave my head bald.  So then I looked like a skinhead.  The sad thing was is that that was in January, and it was really cold.  And I was like, “Why did I do this?”  But it was almost like getting rid of everything before new growth was going to come out.  So in February 2002 I started growing everything back again, and I haven’t had a clean-shaven face since.  

Well, you look like the guy that I hear when I listen to Electric Delta.

(Laughs) Yeah, my drummer, he always jokes--well, I don’t think he’s joking honestly--but he’s like, “Man, if you ever cut your beard, I’m quittin’ the band.”  

In retrospect, what do you make of your American Idol experience in 2006?

It was real awkward.  I’d never watched the show, and I didn’t like it at all.  I only went to the tryout because I had some friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time who were going to try out.  I’d just found out about the tryout the night before.  So we really just drove to Memphis, which is a couple of hours from where I live, to hang out with some friends and eat really good barbecue.  I got cut just before the live show, and I’d forgotten all about it because the show didn’t air for another three months.  Then they ended up showing my clip, and then things got really crazy publicity wise.  

In what way?

I was basically on the phone for two weeks, non-stop almost, doing interviews.  And I got super depressed and super tired.  I couldn’t leave my house because I was getting bombarded by people.  A lot of people that do music do it for the fame, and I struggled with a lot of that when I was younger.  The Lord used certain books and certain influences to get me away from that, from the fame aspect.  But when a little taste of fame did come, it was really hard for me to deal with.  I went into a bit of depression.  But the Lord used all that to teach me a lot about myself and how he interacted with the crowds when he was preaching.  He was kind of a big deal, you know.  He was a rock star, basically, before people changed their minds and wanted to murder him, which is what a lot of what “Unbelievable”--the song, the lyrical content--is about.  Anyway, the Lord taught me a lot through that experience, about how to love people and take the time to talk with them and get to know them even though they were strictly like, “Oh!  You’re on a TV show!  I want to be your best friend!”

(Photos by Tyler Andrews, courtesy of Sean Michel's website.) 

   

Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait 1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10

My review as published in the September 21, 2013, edition of WORLD magazine: One more look: New installment of Dylan series vindicates Self Portrait.

Wendell Kimbrough: The Complete Q&A

"The rest of the world, from the Beatles on, have just been trying to sound like poor folks from Mississippi."


In March 2012, I had the pleasure of interviewing, via e-mail, the Washington, D.C.-area singer-songwriter Wendell Kimbrough for WORLD magazine: http://www.worldmag.com/articles/19375.  The occasion was the release of his excellent second album, Things That Can't Be Taught.  Alas, he had a lot more to say than I could include in the article.  I told him that I thought his comments deserved to be available on the 'net and asked his permission to publish them here.  He acquiesced.  Hence the following barely edited transcript of my questions and his replies....

When were you born?  I.e., how old are you? 

I was born in 1983 in Ozark, AL.  My family moved to Mt. Olive, Mississippi when I was six, so I consider that "where I grew up," but we lived in southern Alabama when I was born.  I'm twenty-eight years old.  Birthday in August. 

Your PR info mentions that as a toddler you were once “performed” “Jesus Loves Me” by humming it before the entire congregation of the Presbyterian Church of Clio, Alabama.  What other musical precociousness did you demonstrate?

My first grade classroom at Mt. Olive Attendance Center (strange name for a school) was located across the breezeway from the marching-band practice room.  We could hear the drums all day, and I (along with several classmates) took to drumming along on our desks.  I loved it!  And it became an obsession for me, where I would beat on things and hear beats in my head all the time.  I don't know how my mom put up with me, because I would literally walk through the house keeping a beat on the hallway walls and doors as I passed through.  Strangely, I still hear beats in my head as an adult.  I even have dental-jaw problems because since I was a kid, I "grind" my teeth to the rhythms in my head.  But the beats-rhythms are so deeply ingrained in my subconscious that stopping is not really an option because I don't even realize I'm doing it.  So if I get TMJ [Temporomandibular joint disorder], so be it.  

       Around fourth grade, we got our first PC, and my dad purchased a program called "The Miracle" that taught piano lessons with a midi keyboard.  I took to it really quickly, and my parents realized they needed to find me a real "live" piano teacher.  I was lucky to get a great teacher, Mrs. Rosemary Mooney, who realized I had a good ear (I could pick up songs without the sheet music) and helped me develop it more fully.  She let me play a song I composed at one of my first recitals as well as a song from a movie that I had learned by ear.  

       I taught myself guitar when I was thirteen and started a Christian acoustic rock band a couple of years later.  

By the way, where along the Protestant conservative-liberal continuum did (does?) the Presbyterian Church of Clio, Alabama, fall?  

It's a PCA [Presbyterian Church in America] church, so pretty conservative.  I grew up in PCA churches with my dad as the pastor.  

To what extent did growing up under that church’s influence leave its mark on you?

It was pretty central in my childhood and is still a huge part of who I am on many levels.  I'll give two examples.  One: Hymns, specifically the Trinity Hymnal, is probably the single biggest influence on my sensibilities about music.  I now lead music at an Anglican church here in DC, and my entire philosophy and practice of leading congregational music is shaped by the wisdom of Protestant hymnody.  I blog about church music over at http://churchmusicblog.wordpress.com and do occasional instructional videos on how to adapt traditional "piano" hymns to the guitar.  Two: I'm still pretty reformed, and I love the church.  I moved to DC to do the music for an Anglican church plant.  

So, obviously, you’re still a believer.

Yes, I'm a believer.  I'm not in the PCA anymore, but I'm part of an Anglican church that is under Rwanda.  And as I mentioned, I lead the music at the church.  It's called Church of the Advent.  And Christianity is still central to my life.  I wouldn't be working in music professionally if I had not come to believe that God cares about goodness, truth, and beauty.     

Is your music-leading gig your main source of income?   

Last year I made about half of my income from working at the church.  The other half came from my singer/songwriter music "business"-- playing shows/gigs and selling CDs.  This year, I'm forgoing CD income because I'm giving away for free my new album.  I'm doing that in the hopes that it allows me to greatly expand my fan-base.  So I'm a full-time musician, working half-time at church and half-time self-employed.  Tax time is so much fun. 
   

What made you move from the PCA to the Rwandan brand of Anglicanism?  

I wasn't specifically drawn to Anglicanism, but I do love it now.  I just happened into it in God's providence.  After college, I spent a year at the  Trinity Forum Academy--which is another, big part of my story, but I won't go into it here.  After my year at the TFA, I began searching for an urban church where I could participate in music leadership.  I thought I would end up in the PCA, but a friend put me in touch with an Anglican church plant in DC, and they offered me a job.  

       So I never had a "breaking" with the PCA.  I'm really grateful for that tradition.  I just found another gospel-centered church in another tradition that was a good, healthy place for me to be, to serve, and to use and develop my gifts.  

       Of course, now, after being here for almost five years, I definitely consider myself Anglican and love the church calendar, the Book of Common Prayer, and many of the traditions of Anglicanism.

Did your parents ever restrict your access to music or films in any significant way?  Or did they, recognizing your natural gifts, allow you to explore the highways and byways of your interests as long as you were home by dinner? 

My parents limited the amount of television we could watch as young kids, for which I'm deeply grateful.  They also shielded us from things that were inappropriate for kids.  At the same time, my parents modeled "loving the good" by keeping high-quality music (both Christian and non-Christian), film, and television as part of our life.  As a result, my tastes were shaped by the tastes of my parents.  By the time I was a teenager, they let me make my own decisions about what music, film, and TV to take in, and I had a pretty good idea by that time of what was worthwhile and what wasn't.  But they largely let me make my own decisions, with some trial and error. 

Talk about your approach to songwriting.  

I spend a lot of time on songwriting, but it comes in seasons.  I'm set up at home in such a way that I can capture an idea when it first comes to me (record a quick demo and jot down lyrics), but then I have to make time to return to the idea and mold it into a full song.  For example, right now, I haven't dedicated time to songwriting in almost a year.  So I have this huge backlog of ideas--short mp3 recordings, lyrics scribbled--filling up a notebook and on my computer.  Some of them I think are really exciting, but it remans for me to sit down and give them enough shape to be presentable songs.  I hope to do some of that this spring before touring again.  Of the things I do as an independent musician, songwriting is my favorite.  So I wish I could do more of it and less marketing-booking-promoting.  But I'm figuring it out as I go.  

       In terms of process, some people always start with music or always start with lyrics.  I can go either way, but music usually comes first.  I have more musical ideas than lyrical ideas, and the lyrics take a lot more work to get right.  I'm a perfectionist with lyrics: I don't want to ever stand up in public and have to sing a line that I know was just a "throw-away" or space filler.  So I work hard to make each line hold its own.  

       A couple of examples.  One: The song "Home" from my last album began as an instrumental piano piece that I wrote sometime around high school graduation.  I loved it and played it whenever I had access to a piano, but it didn't get lyrics and thus "meaning" until I was twenty-seven, almost ten years later when I began dating my now wife.  Then it became a kind of anthem to the people who have loved and cared for me as I've wandered around with a head full of "knowledge" but not able to figure my own life out.  Two: "The Death of Death" began as a piano jam with a friend playing a hip-hop beat pad.  A few weeks later I had a disturbing experience with some of the homeless guys I knew through volunteering at church, and I found myself playing the piano piece as a sort of "soundtrack" to my emotional world at the time.  Lyrics soon followed.  

How can you tell that a song is "done"?
I know a song is done when I feel overwhelmingly excited about it.  Or at least, that's when it's time to put it out in public.  Sometimes I'll revise a bit after performing it a few times, but typically I don't put it out in public until I'm pretty confident that it's mostly done.   

Your PR also says that “[a]long the way, [you] absorbed the sounds that make Things That Can't Be Taught come alive—from early twentieth century jazz, channeled through greats like Louis Armstrong and contemporary composer Randy Newman, to folk heroes of the 1970s, James Taylor and John Prine.  T-Bone Burnett once wrote that “[w]e are all branches on a tree.”  What do you think you add to the musical tradition mentioned above? 

This is a tough question.  Certainly one worth asking, but a tough one for me to answer.  I think that's because I haven't analyzed my own music very much, at least not on a meta level.  I guess I tend to think "with my head down," focusing on what I'm doing right now or what comes next.  Said differently, I'm pressing on as diligently as I can, trying to improve my craft, write the best songs I can, and get my music out there, hoping that if I work hard enough at it, one day I'll be considered a noteworthy leaf or branch on the same tree as the guys I love.  And then hopefully other people can tell me what I've added or contributed.  

       For what it's worth, though, I asked my wife, and she agrees with your suggestion.  She says she sees me as having "a very inclusive art" that "looks outward" while I "mine (my) own heart for stories."  And again, having not thought much about it myself, I can say that I push away from the side of the singer-songwriter tradition that strikes me as self-referential to the point of being self-indulgent.  When I hear carelessly or intentionally esoteric lyrics from other artists, they piss me off.  I heard a Christian philosopher/thinker (I believe it was Greg Wolfe) say once something to the effect that the "particular" and the "universal" are two sides of the same coin.  If the "particular" voice is telling the truth, then others will see themselves in it.  Since then, in my songs, I try to tell the truth about my own life in such a way that something universally true about the human experience emerges.  

       I don't know if that makes me unique or if it means I'm adding anything to the tradition.  But that's at least what I see myself doing.  Hopefully, someday someone will think I've contributed something good to the tradition.  

More from your PR: “From the first chords of “When I Work Alone”—like the gentle swell of an orchestra tuning up—to the choir shouting “hallelujah!” and shaking the walls of some great cathedral in “The Death of Death,” you can tell that Kimbrough is doing what he loves.”  What might you be doing if you weren’t doing what you love?

Mold remediation?  Ha!  I had a nasty experience with mold in the basement of a house I rented, and the presence of so many scoundrels and manipulators in the mold remediation industry made me angry.  It took months, and I was sick, depressed, and at the end of my rope when I finally met someone who was honest and trustworthy.  I realized that God builds his Kingdom through the goodness and truth telling of hard working people.  I asked the guy if I could work for him part time if I couldn't make enough money in the music.  I kind of hope that I won't have to do that.  But I grew up in a blue-collar town, and I have such respect for hard-working people (and some experience with it), enough to know that I could do it and live a good life.  Heck, I might be a better musician, too.  

       Being a pastor has always been on my radar, too.  And I still might end up in seminary when I'm thirty-six and begin pastoring in my forties.  But I wanted to pursue music first, because it was where I felt God's pleasure the most.  (Chariots of Fire was a big influence on me in general, my dad's favorite movie).

You’ve said that “Things That Canʼt Be Taught leads the listener through a soundscape reminiscent of an early Tom Waits record, rooted in the pre-rock-era jazz, folk, and soul music of the American South.”  Why do you think that the “music of the American South” is important?  What do we risk losing by neglecting the “pre-rock era”?

Well, let me say a few obvious things first.  The South is where all the good American music came from.  That's a bit of an exaggeration, but only a bit of one.  Blues, jazz, Gospel, and rock--basically all of the important musical forms in American culture--have their roots in the South or Southern musicians.  The rest of the world, from the Beatles on, have just been trying to sound like poor folks from Mississippi.  

       I think this is because beauty in music and art almost always come as the fruit of suffering.  It's a flower growing out of a grave or honey from a lion's rotting carcass.  It's damned frustrating, and I wish it wasn't this way so I could live an easy life.  But the best of beauty only comes when we suffer.  (There's a parallel between the aesthetic and ethical world here, too: the kindest, wisest, most glorious humans I've known were people who suffered a lot).

       The South has suffered, particularly the African American community, brought over as slaves, still racked by generationally entrenched poverty.  (I've often thought there was a kindred spirit between Mississippi and Russia--both places of immense suffering, and both producing some of the best writers and musicians the world has known.)  And out of that hot, humid, awful, ugly place where human sin has done so much damage, some of the best music in the world has emerged.  It's like God's gift to the suffering--beautiful, powerful music.  

       I think the danger in neglecting the pre-rock era, (or maybe it'd be better to call it the "pre-mass-media" era) is forgetting that there's no end-around suffering that produces the same kind of heart-wrenching, gut-grabbing beautiful music.  I mean, listen to top-forty radio today: It's riddled with the anthems of people who don't know what suffering is; made by kids who were raised in privilege and the worst thing that ever happened to them was a girl dumped them.  It rings empty.  It's not even fair to malign their music, because they're doing the best they can.  And to some degree, I'd put myself in that camp, as well.  My whole generation spends way too much energy avoiding pain.  Our privilege is the greatest enemy of our music.  

       I could go on this topic for a long time.  But I might already be sounding a little crazy.  To try to wrap it all up in a summary statement, maybe I'd say: The best music comes through suffering; the South has suffered.  We need its songs to help us learn how to do something beautiful with our pain.  

Why did it take you two years to follow your debut, Find Your Way Home, with Things That Canʼt Be Taught?

Well, speaking of suffering; it's funny how all this connects.  I wouldn't say I've lived a very difficult life, but I did encounter some hardships along the road to making this album.  The reason it took two years was that I had to raise the money, spend it down, get lost and discouraged, and then get back up and try again.  I almost gave up on the album half-way through because I was low on money and working alone too much, beginning to hate my music.  

       The short version of the story goes like this: I hired a close friend to be my producer, but mid-way into the project, his life fell apart, and he walked away.  So I lost money, lost a friend-ally, and a producer.  This left me working alone for long hours, losing perspective, and nearing the point where giving up was appealing.  This coincided with me getting sick, losing my voice, and realizing that I had lost my voice a lot in the last year and had actually been sick for most of the year.  I thought, "How foolish of me to think I could have a career in music when I can't even keep my voice healthy."  
       About that time, I discovered the aforementioned mold in my basement (which made me more sick), and I had to move out and live in a friend's basement.  

       I remember sending out a distress e-mail to some friends, speaking out for the first time about how discouraged I was.  That e-mail was kind of a turning point--I asked for prayers.  People started praying, and not long after, a friend suggested I cut gluten from my diet.  I did and started improving quickly.  Some other friends reminded me about Kickstarter and encouraged me to do a campaign.  I did, asking for five thousand dollars, and my friends and fans fully funded me in forty-eight hours.  (You can view the campaign here: http://tinyurl.com/3l9xlvp).  

       That was a dramatic turnaround.  The love and enthusiasm I received from people supporting my project put new wind in my sails.  With the new funding, I was able to go work in a studio nearby with a local engineer.  That got me out of my house, out of my own head, and in about three months the project was complete.  It felt like I'd been clawing my way out of a grave and finally broke through to daylight.  

As well, and my voice got healthy again.  I was able to go on tour in the fall of 2011 and play twenty-four shows; didn't lose my voice the whole time!  

How did you decide to title your latest album Things That Can’t Be Taught?  Do you harbor any opinions about teaching, leaning, or education?

I've always been someone who did really well in the classroom.  I loved college, liked to learn and know things and give good, nuanced answers to questions.  But in my first few years of adulthood, I realized that I didn't have as many answers as I thought I did.  I found myself relearning, through experience and often through mistakes, many things that I thought I already knew.  It's been a humbling few years.  So the album title reflects that: lots of lessons learned the hard way, things that I could not learn in a book or from someone else's experience; I had to learn them myself.  Getting truth into the heart is harder than getting it into the head.  

In “Two Ways to Be Worthless,” you sing, “Tell me I’m an asshole....”  Some of your more conservative fans might object.  Any advice to help them over the hump?  

 I think most listeners who understand the song will understand the strong language, so let me just give an explanation of the song.  

       "Two Ways to Be Worthless" is essentially a letter (or epistle) to my friends, exhorting them to meet me with "tough love" in the event that I should need it.  Although the song is humorous and light-hearted in feel, the content is actually among the most serious of any of my songs.  It imagines a scenario in which I have ignored my marital vows and abandoned my wife and family.  (I don't have kids yet, but the song assumes that is a possible future.)  In other words, the song presents a sort of worst-case-scenario for my life.  

       If that scenario were to come true and I was in a self-destructive downward spiral, doing great harm to the people around me, I would not want my friends to come to me and say gently, "Hey Wendell, we think you might want to reconsider a few things."  I would want them to get in my face and get my attention.  If ever there is a time to use strong language, that would be the time--for the sake of snapping me out of my self-pity, waking me to the damage I am doing, and calling me to repentance. Vulgar language is rarely appropriate.  But when someone is in egregious sin, I think strong language is justified.  

       It's a little bit like Jesus calling the Pharisees "you brood of vipers!" when they claimed he was from the devil in Matthew 12.  Strong language was merited because the offense was great.  So while it may seem out of place to have strong language in a bouncy folk/jazz song, I just ask listeners to consider the story the song is telling.  In the scenario the song describes, I believe the language to be appropriate.  

Charlie Daniels: The Long-Haired Country Boy Comes Home (1997)

(As published in WORLD ... )

The time when shaggy-dog stories could translate into hit records has probably passed for good, but many people who remember the good ol' days agree that two of the best shaggy-dog hits ever--"Uneasy Rider" and "The Devil Went Down to Georgia"--belong to a genuine good ol' boy: Charlie Daniels.

And since many Christians are good ol' boys (and girls) themselves, they were more than happy to extend an open-arms welcome to Daniels when, in 1994, he released The Door (Sparrow), an album so full of gospel witness that the Gospel Music Association gave it a Dove Award for "Country Album of the Year."

He followed it in 1996 with Steel Witness (Sparrow), an album that recently received a Grammy nomination and that spawned the Christian-radio chart-topper "Somebody Was Prayin' for Me." Until recently, in fact, "Somebody Was Prayin' for Me" occupied a high-profile position in the Charlie Daniels Band's typical concert set, right between "The Orange Blossom Special" and "Long-Haired Country Boy."

Such a juxtaposition, however, has caused some of Daniels' fans to wonder whether, instead of a gospel message, he may not actually be sending a mixed one. "Long-Haired Country Boy," after all, although a signature Charlie Daniels tune from way back, falls considerably short of endorsing family values: "People say I'm no good and crazy as a loon / 'cause I get stoned in the mornin', get drunk in the afternoon."

"Well, I'm not proud of songs like that," the former long-haired country boy told WORLD, "and some of those songs I don't do any more. But with some I've simply changed the lyrics.

“We recorded 'Long-Haired Country Boy' back when I was a much younger man, and although it had some alcohol and marijuana mentions in it, it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek thing to me at the time. It was not taken all that seriously. But nowadays everything is taken very seriously, and I did quit doing the song. But I kept getting requests for it, so I modified the lyric to 'I get up in the morning, I get down in the afternoon,' and I'm fixin' to record it again."

In response to questions about what caused him to begin making gospel music after more than twenty albums and twenty years as a high-profile country-rocker, Daniels tells a low-profile story. "I've been a believer all my life. I was raised in a believing family. There was a time when I didn't know anybody who didn't believe in God. But for many years I did get away from walking the walk."

He describes his return as "a gradual coming back." "It was not a Damascus Road experience by any means. It was more like, 'Charlie, you know you're not doing the right thing here. Start cleaning up your act a little bit'--or a whole lot, actually."

He laughs. "You know, it's not as if one day I just all of a sudden got blinded by the light or something. I knew about the light all the time."

In a refreshing change from the "celebrity-Christian" norm, Daniels takes such "civilian-Christian" duties as considering the effect his music has on others--especially youth--seriously. "I think a lot of young people say that they give their life to Jesus but don't really understand what they're doing. I know I had the misconception that I had to be good enough, that if I committed a sin, my salvation was off ," he laughs. "Sometimes I feel that--especially with very young people, children--we need to explain that we all sin and that forgiveness is there for us, that we serve a forgiving, loving God, not one who's hiding behind a tree with a baseball bat ready to pop us."

He also takes such "civilian-Christian" duties as church attendance seriously (his "home church" is in Nashville) and finds the idea that the commotion caused by fame exempts the famous from fellowship to be "just a lame excuse." "A lot of times, on the road, the real reason that you don't want to go to church is that you stayed up till two and just don't feel like getting up," he chuckles. "There are all kinds of excuses you can come up with, but being too famous is not one of them.

“I'm not Michael Jackson. If I go somewhere and they recognize me, that's fine."

Martha Bayles: Hole in Our Soul (1994)

(As published in WORLD ... )

HOLE IN OUR SOUL: THE LOSS OF BEAUTY AND MEANING IN AMERICAN POPULAR MUSIC, by Martha Bayles, The Free Press, 453 pages, $25.

“The central argument of Hole in Our Soul," writes Martha Bayles in her book's first chapter, "is that the anarchistic, nihilistic impulses of perverse modernism have been grafted onto popular music, where they have not only undermined the Afro-American tradition, but also encouraged today's cult of obscenity, brutality, and sonic abuse."

While popular books by Rush Limbaugh and the late Allan Bloom have made similar arguments, Bayles' book is the one that will most likely have a serious impact on those whose opinions influence the way serious music lovers think: professors in liberal arts programs and professional music critics.

For one thing, unlike Limbaugh and Bloom, Bayles is hard to caricature. As a graduate of, and teacher at, Harvard, and as someone who's published articles in the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's, she's both a product of and a participant in liberalism's intellectual mainstream. She's also a woman who matured in or at least near the '60s, all of which makes her a difficult target for those whose arsenals consist mainly of the labels "right-wing," "patriarchal," and "reactionary."

In addition, she writes like a conservative. For although she takes pains to distinguish herself from social conservatives (who suffer from "genteel old-fashioned American philistinism"), neoconservatives (whose allies "suspect, without knowing much about it, that art is bad for 'family values'"), and libertarian conservatives (whose "opposition to censorship is matched by support for the legalization, without regulation, of pornography"), she directs her most lengthy and articulate arguments against liberals--multiculturalists and postmodernists especially.

"Multiculturalists wouldn't dream of asking non-Western peoples to give up their own standards of excellence," she writes. "That demand is reserved for the West, where it's no longer enough to admit that racial and sexual bias has historically led to mistaken negative judgments. Now the West's positive judgments must be damned as well, and its noblest works reduced to a residue of prejudice."

Similarly, according to Bayles, postmodernists--or "perverse modernists," the term she prefers--seek to sever the present from the best of the past. "Too often artistic modernism has sought ... a repeal of morality--in the name of the radical freedom needed to create a radical new culture ... without any of the old culture's imperfections." Elsewhere Bayles is clear to number Christianity among those pillars of Western civilization that perverse modernists are foolish to try to topple.

But Hole in Our Soul's greatest strengths are the author's genuine love for American popular music and her understanding of the history of esthetics, a history she summarizes better than any commentator in recent memory. In the chapter titled "Three Strains of Modernism," she traces the philosophy of art from Plato and Aristotle--both of whom saw art as subordinate to truth--to "the rationalists of the Enlightenment," who severed truth from both religion and art and "put art on the defensive." From there she follows art through Romanticism and the early Victorian period (when, as common enemies of science, religion and poetry became confused with each other) to Symbolism and Naturalism, which retreated from and denounced the world, respectively.

"[B]ecause both impulses," she writes, "are fundamentally antagonistic toward life as it is actually lived, their interaction ... precipitated a plunge into artistic perversity."

In this Bayles lays the groundwork for her detailed discussions of the developments of jazz, gospel, R&B, and soul, Afro-American music forms whose histories she convincingly reconstructs based on her understanding of what she calls the "blood knot," i.e., the complicated relationship between whites and blacks in the United States, particularly the South. According to Bayles, no theory of American popular music that oversimplifies this relationship makes sense. She argues, for instance, contrary to the popular myth, that instead of white culture exploiting black culture for the benefit of a few, both cultures have consistently exploited each other for the benefit of everyone. Hence her use of the term "Afro-American" in the first place.

Bayles also finds in Afro-American music a complex and essentially stoic worldview that incorporates humility, irony, and humor, a worldview that today's "gansta" rappers and many white dilettantes have reduced to nothing more than a passion for animalistic sex and violence. Her skill at articulating the true virtues of Afro-American music makes Hole in Our Soul as valuable in terms of positive, optimistic criticism as it is in terms of the negative.

The book's weakness is Bayles' inability to see anything at all of the Afro-American qualities she extols in the music of those she distrusts. With the exceptions of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and U2, this includes almost every well-known pop musician from 1965 to the present. By grounding her criticism of the Rolling Stones and Madonna, for instance, in an examination of their publicity stunts instead of their songs, she leaves herself open to the charge that she doesn't always listen closely to the music she dislikes. Even National Review had a few sober good words for the rappers Ice-T and Sister Souljah in the heat of their 1992 controversies.

That aside, Hole in Our Soul represents the clearest and most coherent explanation to date for why so many serious people experience ambivalence or confusion when confronted with American popular music, and why we can and should go beyond the muddle "to trace the roots of our present predicament to their true sources in the larger culture." When we do, according to Bayles, we'll discover why we dislike the music we dislike. We'll also discover that the music most worth listening to is the music that "does not pursue the goal of innovation to enervating, self-destructive, or nihilistic extremes."

"Above all," she concludes, "it does not forget that its original purpose was to affirm the humanity of a people whose humanity was being denied."