The Andrew Sisters - Apple Blossom Time

July, 2012: In Echuca for the Winter Blues Festival, the challenge was: how to avoid paying the tourist premium?*  In a restaurant, I ordered fettucine with veal meatballs, the second cheapest main-meal (which reminds me, the most popular coffin is the second cheapest in the catalogue) and the waiter pressed me strongly to order the veal shanks instead, $10 dearer.  Finally I said, "Why?  Is there something wrong with the meatballs?"  

But Andy scored a bargain at the Moama markets: eight pieces of sheet-music, 50c each.  The Stephen Foster songbook promises nights of entertainment, but it was Begin The Beguine (a song that even Cole Porter, who wrote it, couldn't play without the music in front of him) that led us back to the Andrew Sisters.  I hadn't heard the Andrew Sisters since childhood - Errol had a best-of I'd listened to almost as much as the Supremes.  APPLE BLOSSOM TIME was my favourite back then.  Andy looked it up in 1001 Pop Songs, and hearing it again, I understood why I'd loved it.  The first line: "I'll be with you in apple blossom time" - in my mind's-eye, I see masses of soft, white petals, bees buzzing, grown-up me in a white dress, veil floating on a sunny breeze...It is a happily-ever-after fantasy with all the stops pulled out.  But children like a hint of darkness in their art, because they know it's there, out in the wide world, and in their own bedrooms as soon as the light goes out.  The minor chords of APPLE BLOSSOM TIME, the unexpected twists and turns in the melody, the weird intervals (which, as we discovered, make for difficult harmonising), give it a piquancy I would have responded to as a child.  Now, of course, I hear it as a war-time song, and the piquancy is even sharper: the longing for peace and tranquility, fruitful life and love, while in a world of turmoil.

*It is worth paying the tourist premium just to see, and perhaps step foot on, the Echuca paddle-steamers.  Was anything made by man more lovable than an old paddle-steamer?  Seeing the steam of the approaching PS Emmylou rising above the red-gums, hearing the 'plash-plash' of her paddle, then the sound of Andy's fiddle (a three-hour engagement on a Murray River cruise), was very exciting.  I uncharacteristically took more than one photo.


Vera Lynn's version of APPLE BLOSSOM TIME is the most beautiful:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuN2TKje7y8


Amazingly enough, here is a clip of the Supremes and the Andrew Sisters singing each other's songs on a TV show:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgTsBsSngrc&feature=related

Dusty Rankin

May, 2012: One of my most oft-played purchases from Athol Colemane has turned out to be a Columbia compilation, The History Of Australian Country Music, Vol I.  The cover was missing (Athol, being meticulous, kept it in a white sleeve with his neat writing on it) so I got it half-price for $1.  On this comp, I first heard Shirley Thoms, though of course I'd heard of her - Shirley's mysterious, sweet, ageless voice, as clear-ringing as a bell-bird, struck me immediately.  But the song that sent me to the record-player - who is this? who wrote this? and what the hell is that word he keeps singing? - was CURRABUBULA, sung by Dusty Rankin, written by someone whose surname is Hawthorne.  I tried to "check it out on the Google" (best wishes, Jimmy Little, wherever you are), but didn't get far.  

It's a song about the good old days, when this "sleepy little hollow" just south of Tamworth was a thriving centre.  This theme can be grossly sentimental, and worse - it can be a wallowing in the trait that afflicts a lot of us as we get older, namely, the refusal to accept change and find good in it; it also often smacks of the 'good old days' when non-whites and women knew their place.  At the same time, it's interesting and poignant that many of these decrepit, shrunken towns we drive through (or in the case of this song, catch a train through) were once lively and full of potential, and it would be a shame to avoid this theme out of fear of stepping into one of its booby traps. Several things save CURRABUBULA from being repugnant, nostalgic Australiana.  For a start, there's its craftsmanship and literariness - Hawthorne clearly put a lot of effort into this song, while many country songwriters go to great pains to create songs out of plain words, plain, old clichés, and to eschew anything that can remotely be considered poetic or intellectual.  Hawthorne even goes so far as to refer (without contempt) to a more literary era: "In the days of books and letters" (so unexpected was this line, I first heard it as "boots and leathers").  He uses metaphor, imagery: "But you couldn't say that this lonely place/ Was all peace and quiet, made of silk and lace."  Another of this song's charms is its rhyming scheme, which has just about every word you could think of to rhyme with Currabubula - railway car, Shangri-la, church bazaar, near and far, blood and scar.  Even the repetition of 'Currabubula', an outrageous word to put in a song, let alone about a dozen times, makes the listener smile.  And there are the two extra-long lines that the otherwise steady rhythm has to accommodate with a little skip (thereby showing the priority that the words, the meaning, has over the form).  These might sound like insignificant touches, but when you listen to a lot of country music, poetry like this stands out.  

Dusty Rankin sings it in his warm, low, dusty voice, adding (only once, more's the pity) that rare thing: a soothing yodel.


Here it is:


http://grooveshark.com/#!/search/song?q=Dusty+Rankin+Currabubula

Elvis Presley

March, 2012: I revisited a wallet of CDs I used to carry around with me during a certain rootless, homeless period of my life.  Most of them were burns from Nic's vast collection, and comps of favourites put together by him or Galea.  I'd listened to them heavily, drawing comfort from them.  Revisiting them was a bit scary - would these CDs suck me back into that sad time?  Music is magic, and I wouldn't dare underestimate it.  

Among the CDs I revisited was one of Elvis's, Rhythm And Country.  It's a burn, so I don't have the liner notes, but it's a late-90s release of a session he did in Memphis in 1973, including heads and tails where Elvis is warming up and mucking up.  Not that I had any doubt, but it proves his consummate skill as a singer.  The song I fell profoundly and permanently in love with, back in 2003, was Danny O'Keefe's 'Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues'; this time, it was 'YOUR LOVE'S BEEN A LONG TIME COMING'.  There's nothing to this song, so it seems; it's built in a loose and slap-dash way around that one line: "Baby, your love's been a long time coming."  Next comes: "Baby, your love's got a hold on me/ Baby, your love's sure got me humming/ Baby, your love's been a long time coming."  I can picture a few songwriters (some internetting has yielded up three authors: Carmol Taylor, Norris D. Wilson and R. Bourke) whipping it up in five minutes - "Hey, what rhymes with 'coming'?"  "Bumming, gumming?  Humming?"  And I can see Elvis singing the lyric straight off the page, accidentally skipping over a verse, adding a second chorus to make up for it, (it goes: verse, another verse, chorus, bridge, chorus, chorus), the session players adeptly following him.  To me, it sounds like the work of experts, the sort of perfection people can throw off only after years of slaving over their craft.  "I felt a feeling, such a wonderful feeling, that I never felt before" - I would never be game to write such a line!  Then to repeat similar waffle in the bridge, "Deep in my heart there's a feeling I never knew."  But somehow it all binds together, melody, lyric, performance, capturing a specific emotion.  If you are ever at a point in your life when, after untold number of romantic disappointments, you finally find someone who really loves you (and vice versa), this is the song you'll be singing.


This is a bit more produced (the backing vocals are a bit excessive) than the version I was listening to, but it's still good:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpA-HsTIaxc&feature=related

Shirley Thoms

January, 2012: Athol Colemane has given me a glimpse into a network of country music collectors.  Because I tend to be a bit fuzzy (or fictional) when it comes to facts, these collectors have become mythical figures: such as the one who keeps 80,000 78s in several air-conditioned shipping containers.  And there's the one - I won't say in which country town -  who sells bootleg CDs of early Australian country 78s.  Athol's collection didn't include any Shirley Thoms, 'Australia's Yodelling Sweetheart', but he put me in touch with the bootlegger, whose did.  I put $25 in an envelope and promptly received a beautifully-recorded CD of early Shirley.  

Shirley Thoms has been on my list of music-I-should-hear since Archer of Daylesford, the protogée (posthumously) of Tex Morton, recommended her to me.  "Can you yodel?" asked Archer.  I will never be able to yodel like Shirley, but I can learn a thing or two by trying my best to imitate her.  She has a perfect voice.  It's almost inhuman in its sweetness and purity.  It has a smile in it, like Billie Holiday's.  I learnt HAPPY COWGIRL (not to be confused with Joan Ridgway's 'Yodelling Cowgirl' or June Holm's 'Happy Yodelling Cowgirl') partly because Andy had given me a difficult brief for song lyrics: "nothing sad please".  So I felt the need to research happy songs.  There aren't many of them.  HAPPY COWGIRL is a hard song, not because of the yodel, but because the words are plain, generic and repetitive, and it's easy to get them mixed around - "The air is full of light and the world is all right" in verse one, becomes "The world is all right 'cause your arms hold me tight" in verse four.  And the rising sun shines o'er the prairie, then it shines at noon o'er the prairie, then it sinks at last, then the stars sparkle bright o'er the prairie.  But it's fun to sing.  When I busked in Tamworth this year, I played for 25 minutes on Brisbane Street without earning a cent; then, on Peel Street, I found a bit of quiet that lasted long enough to sing HAPPY COWGIRL and half of 'Century Too Late'.  The lull ended when a yodeller equipped with a PA let rip on the opposite side of the road, and I had to close up shop.  I was counting my earnings when Sophie came out of the Post Office - in the time it had taken Sophie to buy a stamp, Shirley had earned me $9.


Listen to her here:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJJS4_nu_kk

John Hartford

December, 2011: I played with Oh Willie Dear at the Town & Country in St Peters, a pub "immortalised by Slim Dusty" in one of his inane beer songs.  I sang Henry Lawson instead of Slim Dusty.  Naturally I stayed on to hear Oh WIllie Dear, who are Daniele and Daniel from the Maladies (a duo slowly accruing more players: Jenny Shimmin on banjo, a double-basser, and now a fiddler, too) playing bluegrass classics.  When I first saw the Maladies, although sometimes too rock-'n'-rolly for me, I was arrested by Daniele's voice and his way of singing.  He lets a song completely possess him - his whole body goes into producing the note.  Lots of singers aim for this, but can't get there; maybe they're trying too hard.  I was impressed when I heard that the two Dans had started a bluegrass duo; it seemed like a creative, robust response to the woeful bands-in-pubs-in-Sydney situation; also, it was an exciting prospect: Daniele's voice, Daniel's picking, applied to bluegrass!

I don't love bluegrass as much as I used to.  Sometimes a whole set of bluegrass start to feel like someone tapping a spoon rapidly on my head.  And maybe I've seen too much bad bluegrass; what springs to mind is a session I strayed through at the Illawarra Folk Festival in January, where about twenty-five people clutching auto-harps, mainly the same brand-new model, were sitting in a circle of plastic chairs playing 'Will The Circle Be Unbroken'.  I watched the song out, completely divided over whether it was good for my soul, or bad for it.  It was similar to the feeling I get when I'm in Target, on a mission for undies, super-glue and a plug, and I end up at the back in the garden section - it's good for my soul to see something leafy, alive (ish), and from the natural world, and yet it's ghastly and wrong to find it at the back of Target in plastic pots.

Seeing Oh Willie Dear, it was the unbluegrass songs I liked best.  Patsy Cline's 'If You've Got Leaving On Your Mind' was just beautiful: unfurling note-by-note in Daniele's voice, conveying emotion, not aspiring to perfection.  At the end of the set, I asked about 'Almost Persuaded', which somehow I'd never heard before, and "the one about the business man going to work in tall buildings".  I went home and looked up John Hartford's 'TALL BUILDINGS'.  I've never been a fan of his other hit, 'Gentle On My Mind' (I'm offended by that ideal of the undemanding woman who waits patiently at home while her man has untold adventures in the wide world) but I fell in love with 'TALL BUILDINGS'.  

It's a remarkably simple song - a descending chord pattern is repeated without variation over two short verses and a chorus, with a lyric consisting of language a six-year-old might use: "Goodbye to the sunshine, goodbye to the dew/ Goodbye to flowers and goodbye to you," and, "Someday, my baby, when I am a man/ And other have taught me the best they can."  Yet it manages to span a man's whole life, and to be heart-breaking without saying anything particularly sad.  It's a great example of understatement.  All the complexity occurs in what is left unsaid: for example, in the first verse, he's anticipating going off to work in the city, and by the second verse, he is already about to retire, and vaguely wondering what happened "betwixt and between".  There's sadness in the man's life being over and done with in just two verses, the bulk of his life spent off-screen in that consuming, distracting, ultimately meaningless fug of work.  In the last chorus, I suppose he's an old man farewelling the sunshine and dew for the last time.  But to sing (rather than pore over) it's sweet and pretty, a bit wistful - then it makes me want to go outside and look at the clouds.  Maybe I should revisit 'Gentle On My Mind'.


The film clip is pretty sweet.  I miss the hippie days.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFCJOdc5Tak

Loretta Lynn via Jean Stafford

September, 2011:  I was browsing the classifieds in the Cowra Guardian when I saw a small ad in the 'FOR SALE' column: "1000s LPs EPs singles $5-$1 Country R&B and more".  I thought, "I bet Mr. Colemane of Colemane's Country Music Museum has decided to sell off his records!"

My hunch was right.  I walked down the road that goes by the river and the overgrown, grassy railway until I got to Colemane's Country Corner, with the wishing well in the garden, and the hand-painted sign, "Don't be shy!  Come inside!  Surprise yourself!"  Athol Colemane sat me down with his ledger, in which his entire collection (circa twenty-thousand) of country records is catalogued in his elegant hand-writing.  I wrote a sub-list of records I'd like to look at - Kitty Wells, Tex Morton, Steve Earle (of course), Steve Young, Johnny Darrell, Jean Stafford, I mean, Jean Shepard, oh, what the hell, how about both of them?  A large proportion of Athol's collection is Australian country music - singers I've never heard of, let alone heard.  It's a bit daunting, and some of my stabs in the dark have been unrewarding - I don't think I'll listen twice to Mary Schneider's yodelling record (I love yodelling, but this was yodelling to be played as background music in a shopping mall; oh, maybe I am being unkind, maybe I should give it a second go), nor Arthur Blanch, with his tight jeans and generic American-style songs.

I ended up liking Jean Stafford, who is innocent and Australian (the record I bought is named Flowers For Mama), distinct from Jean Shepard, who is American and more worldly.  I was happily listening to Stafford when a line caught my ear: "What kind of a girl do you think I am?"  Then: "What kind of a girl would do those things you're asking me to without wedding rings?"  I couldn't tell if the tone of the song was suggestively smutty or virtuously outraged; it really could have been either.  I went into the living-room and moved the needle back so I could listen again.  "Is that what you have to do to prove you're a man?"  and "What kind of a girl do you want for a wife?  Do you want a girl who knows that much about life?"  Jean Stafford was definitely singing it virtuously; but I couldn't help but suspect that the songwriter had managed to slip in some smut right under the noses of her puritanical audience.  I went to the record-player again to check the songwriter credit.  It all became clear.  It was Lynn/Wilburn.  That is, it was written by Loretta Lynn, with a chunk of its royalties unjustly snatched away from her by Teddy Wilburn.  The equivocal tone was now accounted for - there's no one who can tangle up smut and humour and virtue the way Loretta Lynn does (Dolly Parton comes close - such as her song 'If I Lose My Mind' where the young wife runs back to Mama, crying that her swinger husband "...made me watch him love another woman, and he tried to make me love another man").  I even looked the song up on You Tube (I don't, very often), and saw Loretta sitting on a haybale (oh, I might have made up that detail - aren't they all sitting on haybales in those black-and-white tv clips?) singing 'WHAT KIND OF A GIRL DO YOU THINK I AM' with a fierce and virtuously-outraged frown.  But she wasn't fooling me!  


On looking up the clip a few months later, I see she is not sitting on a haybale, but in front of a fake tree in a fake garden:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hm2I3cFEIr0

Gillian Welch

July, 2011: Towards the end of July, I was feeling on'ry.  I used to think that word meant 'horny', but now I think it means "grr".  I don't know whether to blame my on'ritude on a certain long-cherished man-dream that fell flat on its face about that time (Mumma, if you ever read this, that's a reference to the ostriches, or was it the alpacas?), or, a more likely cause, my novel - after eight years of writing and rewriting it, I was feeling like a prisoner doing a sentence of an indefinite number of years, and for a crime I knew not what.  During the week, as I wrote, I fantasised about having a weekend of unfettered freedom, unfettered solitude.  On Friday night, I cooked four sausages and an extra lot of tofu-and-vegies, and gathered together some bottles of water, a sleeping bag and my tucker-bag, threw in some matches, and a bit of toilet paper for a taste of luxury.  Helen dropped me and my bike (Debbie's bike) at my grandparents' old place.  "I should move out there, where the sky is open wide, and my grandmother's buried on a lonely hillside."  I didn't bring my guitar, as I didn't trust myself to concurrently ride bicycle and carry guitar.  This was the only night in about eight years when I haven't had a guitar at hand.  

I had prepared myself for this deprivation by cram-learning the new Gillian Welch song that had just begun to obsess me - HARD TIMES, from her new album 'The Harrow And The Harvest'.  Being on'ry, or perhaps the true description of my state of mind would be "fragile, with depression threatening", I clung to this song as if it were a torch (the torch that I had decided not to bring).  I sang it over and over, as I rootled through my grandparents' house in search of the least rat-pooey-pissy bedding and cooking utensils, and I sang it as I loaded myself up and walked over the hill, across the paddock, across the first creek.  I made a little camp for myself, choosing a spot least likely to be a thoroughfare for the wild horses or the kangaroos, as I didn't want to be trampled on while in my sleeping bag.  I went for a walk in the bush.  I sat in the limb of a tree, near where my grandmother had been buried (but no longer), watching the little birds and the last of the sunlight, and singing: "When the day got long, as it does about now, I'd hear him singing to his mule as he ploughed."  I think the actual lyric is "singing to his mule-cow", but as that animal is unknown to me, I had to alter it.  I sang, "Singing, 'Hard times ain't gonna rule my mind no more!'"  

It was a strangely scary, exhilarating experience, sleeping by myself in that bush I've known all my life.  I felt myself "fall through layers of fear" - that's how it felt.  It was an experience that was either going to kill or cure me.  The light faded.  I thought, "Night's coming!"  I wanted it to hurry up and come, to get it over with, but of course it came in its own sweet time.  Somehow, it was like life ending.  I still (a month later) don't understand.  I lit a fire, and spent the evening moving away from the smoke, putting on another branch, staring, listening, uneasy, restless, excited, despairing, but starting to feel calmer.  I heard the screaming woman bird (AKA the barking owl), which I was rather dreading.  But, for a woman with her throat cut, she was moving very fast.  And in the distance, another woman with her throat cut returned her ghastly call.  I also heard a couple of those great subterranean "booms"; the next day, my uncle told me these are known as 'desert noises', and were heard long before industrialisation.  I lay in my sleeping-bag within a sleeping-bag - it is cold in mid-winter in the central-west - and watched the stars slowly slide over the world.  I'd never quite realised how friendly stars are.

I sang HARD TIMES as I cycled along the dirt roads the next day, my thirty-seventh birthday.  I'm connected to that country by little threads of blood and of passed-down recollections.  "But that Camptown man, he doesn't plough no more.  I see him walking down to the cigarette store.  Guess he lost that knack, he forgot that song, woke up one morning and that mule was gone."  I don't want to forget that song! - that simple happiness, that simple way of easing a heavy heart.  And I want to develop that knack - of fending for myself - while there are still people alive who can teach it to me.  "See, it's a mean old world, heavy and mean.  That big machine is just picking up steam [she sings "speed"].  We're supping on tears, supping on wine [well, not teetotaller me], I'll get to heaven in my own sweet time."  It took Gillian Welch eight years to make a new album, due to, according to her, "Quality control."  It makes me love her all the more that she didn't play along with the 'two-to-three years between albums' schedule.  Quality-of-life control, perhaps.


Here's a live track of Gillian and David Rawlings singing HARD TIMES:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sL6OWZSNuI

Kasey Chambers

June, 2011: I bought Kasey Chambers' new album Little Bird while I was in Cowra and needed something to listen to. For the first few listens, I thought it was a bit noisy. I knew I'd end up loving it, but I was happy to take it slowly - there are so few pleasures that you can safely anticipate! Most end up being far less pleasurable than you'd hoped. So I left Little Bird in Cowra, came back to Sydney, went back to Cowra again. Then the love hit. I kneaded some bread dough for the entire album, singing along at top volume. This resulted in an excellent loaf.

As I listen to the album now, I can't decide which song is my song-of-the-moment. 'Beautiful Mess' is great, 'Little Bird' masterful (it's the same character from 'Am I Not Pretty Enough', wavering between insecure and self-respectful). Every song is melodious and interesting. There's a certain directness to Kasey's songwriting; on first listen, every song is recognisable, the mood and emotion loud and clear. I suppose this is what makes her a country singer; this is what it means to work within a genre, and within sub-genres. But as I get to know the songs, their innate Kasey-ness is revealed. Although she makes use of multiple characters and fictional scenarios, there is a driving sincerity through every song. Maybe NULLABOR (THE BIGGEST BACKYARD) is the Kasey-est of all the songs. I've seen her perform it live, with a long intro about her unusual childhood on the Nullabor (her father, Bill Chambers, took up fox-hunting for a living). It's only her voice and the banjo - with imagery like this, no ornamentation is needed. I like the rhyming structure - the first line of every verse is "When I was a little girl, I had the biggest backyard in the world", and then there are three rhyming lines, then, at the end of the verse, a non-rhyme hanging off the end all by itself. Here's the last verse: "When I was a little girl, I had the biggest backyard in the world - sitting round the campfire that started from a spark, rolling down the Gunbarrel Highway in the dark, making sure I had all the room here in my heart, for...the Nullabor".


A slightly wobbly live version:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMNdLzYluY0

Catherine Britt and Joey + Rory

May, 2011: Sophie and I had gone out to Rooty Hill RSL to see Kasey Chambers and Shane Nicholson, but Shane had been sick, so we went along to Notes in Newtown a few weeks later to see him solo. Catherine Britt supported him. I always look forward to seeing supports at country gigs - there's always the slim chance that I'll discover a new singer to love, but failing that, at least I know that the support act won't be too loud, will introduce his or her songs, and won't play for long. That's the formula, and it works for me. Catherine Britt had a great voice, but her lyrics were dull and predictable, and the songs hardly seemed to have any point, or just a shred of a point, carelessly conveyed. Why Shane Nicholson said in his set that she was one of his favourite Australian singer-songwriters, is beyond me. If he was just being polite, he compromised his integrity.

Then suddenly, halfway through her set, Catherine Britt was singing a real song. My attention was caught by the first line, and as each line unfurled, I was impressed with its simple ingenuity (a quality I hold in highest esteem, when it comes to songwriting). "Sweet Emmylou, I blew the dust off you, you're the only one who knows what I'm going through..." Just one listen was all I needed to remember several chunks of the song - this is a sign that a song makes sense. I said to Sophie, "She can't have written that song - it's worlds apart from the rest of her songs." Thanks to Sophie's phone, we discovered that it was a co-write with an American named Rory Feek. A few days later, I downloaded Joey + Rory's album 'The Life Of A Song' with the last of my Telstra Road To Tamworth voucher.

Joey + Rory and I have very different values. I concede that there is some finely-crafted songwriting going on there, but I just can't warm to this sort of hardcore Americanism. Such as the song called 'Cheater Cheater': "Now I'm not one to judge someone that I ain't never met, but to lay your hands on a married man is about as low as a gal can get, and I wish her well as she rots in Hell" etc...so is having sex with a married man worse than murdering someone? Is it worse than punching someone in the face? Or is it just the worst thing a gal can do, because gals' actions are so pathetically circumscribed - limited to looking nice (but not slutty) as they wait patiently for their man to return from the rodeo, or the paddock, or wait for him to give up boozing and start coming to church (yes, one of Joey + Rory's women patiently, or perhaps doggedly, "loved the Hell out of" her man)? So they irritate the Hell into me, but listening to this album was certainly the answer to the mystery of how such a top-class song as SWEET EMMYLOU found its way into Catherine Britt's oeuvre.


Catherine Britt's recording:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxbSb5KvkEs


Two young men doing a sweet, poppy version:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktI2g7nv0jc

Johnny Horton

April, 2011: I look forward to sing-sings with my cousin Brooke the same way I used to look forward to the Christmas holidays. Other members of our family are also essential to the sing-sing, but often, alas, their voices won't rise above a sotto voce murmur. We had a sing-sing a few weeks ago at my aunt and uncle's house. Brooke sang her newly-composed song 'Virgil', which I think of as the last words that go through a woman's head before she gets out her pistol and shoots dead her husband, Virgil, and perhaps also the girl in the red dress whom he's dancing with. The last lines are the sinister: "You're not much, you're not much, you're not much, Virgil, but you're mine.". Then I sang my newie, which is heavily indebted to 'Virgil': a murder ballad, my one and only, about a woman who sets fire to the hut where her ex-boyfriend and his new girl are lying in each other's arms. Brooke and I both disapprove of murder ballads. I tried to start a genre called 'rape ballads' (e.g. my 'Beneath The Bridge', and also Gillian Welch's 'Caleb Meyer'). Evening up the score with a few more murder ballads where the women do the murdering is hypocritical...but sometimes songs just come out, and that's that.

Once we were onto murder ballads, Brooke and my uncle sang Jimmie Rodgers's 'T. For Texas', which I hadn't heard before - first Jimmie sings "gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall", then a couple of verses later, decides he'll also shoot "the rounder who stole away my ga-a-a-a-l". A double murder seemed a bit shocking, until Brooke and Peter sang us Johnny Horton's MISS MARCY. It's not a murder ballad - it's a massacre ballad! When I was back in Sydney once again, I checked out these two songs on the Google (Jimmy Little's graceful construction), and set about learning them. I don't really like singing T. For Texas, a typical swaggering cock (rooster) murder ballad, except that the yodels are so beautiful, and good to practise on. But for some reason, I don't mind the blood-bath MISS MARCY. I sang it while my nieces and their friend Thea was at my house, but first warned them about all the body-counts. My eldest niece is one of those innocent children who seek to protect their own innocence; I was watching a bit of the movie Disgrace when she and my sister came in the room, and I said, "It's a good story - but there's a lot of adult content." At this, my niece promptly skittered out of the room. But not even she minds all the blood spilling in Miss Marcy. I'm not going to give the story away. Check it out for yourself on the Google.


Here it is:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw3JyvO4V64

Billy Bragg

March, 2011: Bob Ellis and Rhys Muldoon organised a fundraising night for the orphans of the refugees drowned off Christmas Island, and they asked Darren and me to sing a few songs. It was a Labor Party gathering, so Darren and I racked our brains trying to think of any of our songs that could possibly be construed as having a political or social theme. "All my songs are about girls," says Darren, and all my songs are about men. In the end, we scraped up my Dalton/Lehmann co-write 'Six Hours West', Darren's new duet 'Where Will We Live?' and then boosted our political content by the power of ten by learning Billy Bragg's BETWEEN THE WARS.

I had three days to learn it. It's four chords (1,4,5, with a minor 2 chucked in), but as Andy says, sometimes it's those three- (or four-) chord songs that really get you into trouble. I wonder what it is with those simple songs: it's as though the melody can go all over the place, and a particular note isn't connected to a particular chord. And yet, you must get it right, or else you'll turn it into a different song. BETWEEN THE WARS has three verses, each made up of sixteen lines - four blocks of four lines ever so slightly different in melody and chords. So it was a puzzle at first; now that I've got it, I can hardly remember finding it tricky.

It is a beautiful song. Cramming a song into my head (foie gras style) could have caused me to hate it, but instead my respect for it only increased. Every word, when you're cramming, exacts a whole lot of brain power, and if the word is sloppily chosen, then it is resented. I once learnt The Strokes 'Is This It' for a party, and the lyrics were eighty percent garbage, and as soon as the party was over I duly threw the eighty percent back out of my brain (N.B. I actually really like that song, but it's a shame about the lyrics). Sometimes I think, "Well, I don't write political songs because we live in prosperous, moderate, peaceful times, and there's nothing extreme enough to penetrate my walls and provoke a song." I know that's a weak excuse. BETWEEN THE WARS is a reminder that times like the one we're living in shouldn't be taken for granted. Peace, prosperity and moderation aren't the default settings - they are fragile constructions that need to be protected. The last lines bring tears to my eyes:

"Sweet moderation, heart of this nation - desert us not, we are between the wars." I should try to get my mind off men for a moment and write a song about the world. And after the recent State election, I've decided to join the ALP.

Billy performing on a tv show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjUA3RU4B8E

Andy Baylor

February, 2011: I had too much fun in the first four days of this year's Tamworth Country Music Festival; when I said that to Adam, he wondered what I meant - exactly how does a near-teetotaller have too much fun? What are the consequences of having too much non-alcohol-or-drugs-fuelled fun? The other day, I read a little interview in the Sun Herald with Julian Assange's mother, who denied he had Asberger's; she said that sometimes very intelligent people find intellectual and creative pursuits more stimulating than social interaction. Well, I find social interaction very stimulating - my too-much-fun was meeting too many new people, having too many interesting conversations with my new friends, not getting enough sleep, and finding the world altogether too wonderful. I needed to go off by myself somewhere and mull over it.

The day I started to come down from my high-on-life-high, on Mara's recommendation, I took my shredded nerves and growing misanthropy to Andy Baylor at Southgate. He and his Cajun Combo played impeccable covers of songs written for another time and place. Couples waltzed. I thought of Errol's phrase "museum piece", and wondered whether this band was another example of how people are eschewing the values of the '60s-to-now (self-expression, originality, re-invention) for earlier times, when music was more about craft and tradition. For the first few songs, I found Andy Baylor very pleasant and soothing. A man beside me said, "I wish he'd put himself out there a bit more!" - he is a reserved and reticent performer. Sometimes reserved performers are the best: they don't grab you by your shirt collar and yell, "Listen to me!", but they stand there and wait for you to come to them. It requires confidence (in your intrinsic worth) to be a reserved performer. Andy Baylor doesn't try hard because he knows he has a gift. Suddenly, as I watched the Combo, I was drawn in. I'd almost forgotten how mesmerising it is to see someone who can really play. Thoughts - words - are silenced, as there is no adequate way to describe music when it gets going.

I tried to see Andy Baylor and his Cajun Combo one more time before I left Tamworth, but misguidedly went to the Bill Chambers's session instead; though I walked as fast as I could from the Pub to Southgate, as I walked in, I heard the Combo finishing their last song. When I eventually came home, I found Andy Baylor's website and took my pick of his CDs - I went with The Bush Is Full Of Ghosts because it had a nice title and a rustic photograph on the cover. The title comes from a co-write with Nicholas Langton, the lyricist for five of the twelve songs. I like the album as a whole; I'm resistant to singling out a single song and scrutinising it. Maybe the songs are vehicles for the playing, rather than little discrete works of art. I used to listen to J. J. Cale a lot, and ended up with about six of his records; now, and possibly even at the time, I could hardly tell you a single J. J. Cale song. It is music.


Here's a little sample of Andy and his Cajun Combo:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cdI0_Rkj2A

Mary Gautier

January, 2011: One of the upside of finding myself at home on Saturday night is that, at ten o' clock, Felicity Urquhart's 'Saturday Night Country' show starts up on Radio National. It is a revelation to listen to the radio and to hear songs I actually like! I lie in bed, reading and listening. When Felicity played Mary Gautier's (google-challengingly pronounced "Go-Shay") song I DRINK, it was one of those listening experiences where all my concentration hung on each line as it unfurled, making me gasp with admiration: each perfectly-chosen word paints a picture, tells a story, evokes an emotion, with simplicity and dark depths. Who would have thought you could give profound significance to the lines: "Chicken TV dinner, six minutes on defrost, three on high, beer to wash it down with then another little whiskey on the side"? Or "I know what I am, but I don't give a damn"? I suppose I have a vested interest in what it's like to be an alcoholic, having gone out with so many of them. So it was a song that kind of answered questions...kind of.

It's a feat to write a simple song about a big subject close to your heart. I end up writing novels about the big subjects close to my heart. But Mary Gautier has the restraint, and the turn of mind, that can distill the big subject into two verses, a chorus and a one-line middle-8. It's awe-striking. In almost equal parts, it both inspires me to greater songwriting heights, and also makes me want to throw in the towel. The 'inspire' part is slightly greater, so I keep going, consoling myself with, "Oh, well, being second-rate isn't so bad."

P.S. I saw Bill Chambers supporting Kasey last night at Rooty Hill RSL. I think Bill has his good points, but I'm not sure that he's a frontman, and I haven't yet heard a song of his that impresses me. And last night he said, "Here's a drinking song," and sang I DRINK, ripping the heart right out of it. He didn't even credit Mary Gautier. He made the lines, "I know what I am, and I don't give a damn" sound swaggering and boastful. The last line of the chorus - "I drink" - had none of Mary's fatalism, or wretched matter-of-factness. He made it sound like a Slim Dusty song. He should be prohibited from singing it. I said to Sophie, who was taking the opportunity to check the weather on her Iphone, "He ripped the heart out of that song." She replied, "Are you surprised?" But I don't mean to hoe into Bill, I like him. He just missed the point of I DRINK.


A beautiful live performance by Mary, with arty violin.  It's so restrained!  I teared up all over again, watching it:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJ1aPaP1_Ew

And here's Bill.  Is my criticism fair?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrPUSQiwA-0

Justin Townes Earle

November, 2010: One of the gigs that always appears on my very short muso-C.V. is the one where I supported Justin Townes Earle at the Annandale in 2008. That night, I managed to resist the general bewitching that he performed on all the girls in the audience. I thought, "Yes, he's an amazing performer, but his songs aren't that great." No matter how bewitching a performer, most solo artists, especially when you don't know their material, will start to sound very repetitive after forty minutes, let alone at the end of a ninety-minute set. But I recently heard a new song of his on Felicity Urquhart's 'Saturday Night Country' radio show, so I legally-downloaded* the album with the voucher I was given for being in Heat Nine of The Telstra Road To Tamworth. At first I said, "It's okay, but the songs are a bit samey, and I think he needs to get out and have a life, because the songs are either about being constantly on tour, or else lonely nights on tour, or problems that occur at home because you're constantly on tour." Then, after listen number two or three, something happened. I suppose it was the bewitching. Certainly, the songs on Harlem River Blues are very simple, almost entirely structured with 1, 4, 5 chords, and featuring oft-used (potentially hackneyed) phrases and words and themes - "wandering", "troubled mind", "Tell my father I tried". But something creeps in. His gnawing loneliness? And so he becomes a companion of the moment. "I've always been a fool for a conversation and a couple of smokes. And when I'm feeling this low I just need someone to laugh at my jokes." Apparently he is one of the world's twenty-five most stylish men. So it does occur to me that this album is predominantly style, and in a year, we will all have discarded it for the next stylish album. I hope not!


JTE looks rather tired and discouraged in a lot of his videos, presumably due to overwork, but here's one where he seems happy:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLIN17QcXN8&feature=related

For the sake of contrast, here's one where he looks sick of the whole business:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AaohmyVtAY


*This legally-downloading business has been fun: I like Kasey & Shane's Rattlin' Bones and The McClymonts's first album, and at first I liked Teddy Thompson's A Piece Of What You Need but then it lost me.

Angie Hart

May, 2010: Adam Gibson took me to see Holidays On Ice about four years ago. Adam is a long-term fan of Angie Hart, and has even written a song about her, ‘Angie Hart Made Me Want To Move To Melbourne’ (he didn’t). The Aerial Maps perform that song, and as erstwhile Aerial Maps member, I’ve sometimes spoken Angie Hart’s part, which is meant to be along the lines of: “Hey, nice suit! Where did you get it? Let’s go to one of Melbourne’s many uncomfortable-but-trendy cafes and have the best coffee in Australia!” See, even writing my lines down now, I can’t resist meddling with them. Sometimes when my mic seemed to be low in the mix, the lines would degenerate into, “Hey, nice suit, wanna fuck?” Adam is a good sport, and I discovered it’s hard to ruffle him - in fact, he likes being ruffled. So we went along to the Sando to gaze at Angie Hart, and I quickly became almost as big an Angie Hart fan as Adam. She has a beautiful voice, and she gives a whole lot in her performance, but - even better - keeps something back for herself. She makes herself vulnerable, but is supremely self-composed. It’s a really interesting combination.

Much as I enjoyed the show, and especially the Angie/Ben Lee co-write, ‘Sand’, which haunted me for days afterwards, I didn’t follow up my new fandom. There was another Angie show at the Sando that I missed because my phone was on the blink and I got Erik’s message a week late. Then my sister rang up a couple of months ago, saying she’d just seen Angie play. One thing I love about my family is their/our memory for detail. There’s never the unsatisfying response, “Oh, I don’t know, just because.” Julia described the show evocatively, quoted slabs from the songs she’d liked best, and provided me with speculations (and evidence) about the current state of Angie’s personal life. So I went out and bought Eat My Shadow. I’m not crazy about the production - it’s too diverse, too embellished. Angie Hart doesn’t need embellishment, and the diversity is in the content and mood of her songs. The songs are top quality. All are co-writes; as the lyrics are so idiosyncratic, inimitable, I would guess the co-writer contributes mainly (or exclusively) to the music and arrangement. The song I had to listen to many times per day became ‘LITTLE BRIDGES’, a co-write with Mark Seymour, and a duet with Bonnie Prince Billy. It brought on a much-needed cry, and going through the lyrics in my mind soothed a very unpleasant anger that was waking me up in the middle of the night. The whole song is naked and beautiful. It makes me shiver. There is nothing obscure in any of Angie’s songs - she wants you to be able to figure out what it was that prompted her to write the song. But they’re completely poetic: “Some people talk, and some people do - there are two kinds of ways to pass the time. I heard, through a door, a conversation; I heard your voice, I heard a name, and it was mine. The picture that you painted was black and white - there were no shining lights or shades of grey. You made me sound like I was a stranger; I should have turned and closed the door and walked away.” I’d like to transcribe the whole song. I feel excited (relieved!) that such an excellent songwriter is living and working in our time and geographical location. “Do you take great comfort in believing all the things you think I am that you are not? Does it put safe distance between us? Was it something that I said that I forgot?”

Mary Kay Place

March, 2010: In March, I spent three weeks rewriting the ending of Earthly Things, now known (I think) as Dust, on the veranda of the Railway Hotel in Koorawatha. Several days after arriving (arrival: stepping down from the Countrylink coach with 21kgs of books and food, Sunday 4pm, looking across the Olympic Highway at the pub, rallying myself as though the pub were a treacherous pass I now had to cross) I thought, erroneously, “This is a place where, when someone new appears, not only does everyone know about it, but they also know who he or she is related to.” It was the most beautiful season: hot days, cool nights, and a day of torrential rain, when the hill at the end of the main street was completely obscured by the rain. Drifts of native bluebells, silky grasses. Soon enough, I began to think of ‘STREETS OF THIS TOWN (ODE TO FERNWOOD)’, sung by Mary Kay Place for a ‘70s TV show Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and written by Paul Grady. This song describes a country town that is a ghost of what it once was, where the past is bigger and noisier than the present. This atmosphere - the one you pick up when wandering around a rundown, half-deserted country town - is something I think of as my bread-and-butter. It sets me off into daydreams: it’s imagination provoking. I hadn’t heard or played this song for several years, and it came back to me in full over a few days of memory-racking. I’d never been able to decipher the whole of the last verse; when I first learnt the song about seven years ago, I even checked it out – in vain – on the Google. This time, I just made it up, pleased to be able to cut a notch in the song that would always remind me of my three weeks in Koora. Here’s the last verse: “The streets tonight are quiet and serene/ Dream a dream of things that might have been/ Just a trace of the lives/ Of the hearts broken, the fortunes lost/ As I walk down streets of this town, I can see what was.” I also made a change in the second verse: “Smoke from the tip blown in by a high lonesome breeze.” In the original, the smoke comes from the factory, which is inapplicable to Koora. I sang “wheat-fields” (Americanising “paddocks”) until the afternoon they burnt off at the tip.

Brooke McInerney

January, 2010: My cousin Brooke, who’s now in Seoul (not “into soul”, as misheard by Darren) briefly stopped in Sydney en route from Koorawatha back to Korea. Months previously, we’d planned a large, family sing-sing for the eve of New Year’s Day, which was fine for me as I’d spent the previous night walking the city streets with Tim, but maybe not so ideal for my brothers, who positioned themselves gently on the sofa, at a safe distance from our loud, enthusiastic voices. We sang for hours. My highlights: the songs where Ada played the bass notes on piano, or sang the chorus - ‘Long Black Veil’ and Bob Wills’s ‘Stay All Night’; then ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, ‘Stormy Weather’ (co-written by inner-west resident Leo Sayer) and ‘Jamestown Ferry’, which Brooke and I have sung together often enough now that we are pretty solid on our parts; Jimmie Rodgers’s ‘Waiting For A Train’, which is a favourite of my uncle’s; ‘I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry’, which Brooke played – I was surprised by the fourth chord; and I loved it when everyone else (more quietly) joined in for the album that had been a favourite of both households, Best Of The West, Vol. 1, which includes ‘Battle Of New Orleans’, ‘Stand By Your Man’, ‘North To Alaska’, ‘El Paso’. But my favourites are always Brooke’s songs. She’d emailed me ‘YOU’RE THE ONLY HANDSOME MAN LEFT NOW THAT PAUL NEWMAN’S DIED’, and it’s always thrilling finally to match the harmony I’ve separately worked up to the real-life voice. Brooke’s songs always have at least a few sharp edges, and although ‘…PAUL NEWMAN…’ (best ever song title) is strictly a love song, “Sometimes I feel like you’re my only home”, it’s one written by a very restless rambler, who, on her travels, says in her brutal way, “If I could forget you, life would be so easy”. But, damn it, she can’t! Wes, Brooke’s boyfriend, said, “What do you say, Lucy?: ‘They’re all fictional’.”

Fred Eaglesmith

Dec 2009: I was on the Bell’s Line Of Road (if there is a more beautifully-named road, I’d like to know it) with my mother today, driving back from a blessedly* rainy Christmas in the Cowra district (*blessed by the clouds). As we drove through mist and apple farms, hearing the occasional bell-bird, I put on Fred Eaglesmith’s new-ish album, ‘Tinderbox’. I didn’t like it much when I first heard it – his voice was too much of a tuneless, Tom Waits growl, and the production was rackety and messy. But out of respect for Fred, I persevered, and the ideas behind the album – to me, it’s a ‘concept album’ – made themselves apparent. Only a very experienced songwriter could, coming the full circle, write such simple songs. At first I thought he’d done an album of traditional, gospel-leaning covers; I was very surprised, on checking the liner notes, that he’d pretty much written all of them. There was only one that had the Eaglesmith hallmarks: ‘Quietly’ sets up a vivid scene of a woman rising from her lover’s bed, quietly getting dressed, quietly shedding a couple of tears, quietly kissing him, quietly walking out the door; and then comes the Eaglesmith volta, where we realise that the man has been awake the whole time, and is worn out by her rather self-absorbed tragicality (just as we, the listener, is, too), and has decided to let her go. I love the whole album, but the final song, ‘WHEN’, is the one I learnt on the piano. The refrain, “If not now, when?”, is repeated several times to make up the chorus. There are two very spare verses, the first being, in entirety: “Not yesterday, no-oo, not tomorrow, wo-oe, not a minute ahead, not a minute behind.” Its simplicity provokes a songwriter like me to slap herself on the head and say, “Damn! Why didn’t I think of that before Fred did?” Every time a longing gets too much for me, I sit at the piano, play ‘WHEN’ a few times, and have nothing more to add. It’s a prayer, offered up – in my case – to the clouds.

Just to add a slightly relevant (if the concept behind ‘Tinderbox’ could be summed up as ‘faith’) footnote: this sceptic-atheist had an experience a few days before Christmas that has completely re-converted me to Santa Claus. The Toxteth Road Miracle occurred while I was walking home and saw on the footpath a plastic bag that looked as though it had been ripped open, snuffled through, then pissed on by a dog. In among the old T-shirts spilling out, I chanced to spot a floral print. “It looks like beautiful, 1950s silk, but it must be some phony, polyester reproduction,” I thought. Nevertheless, I bent down to investigate. Pinching a corner between finger and thumb, I dragged out the garment. It WAS beautiful, 1950s silk! - a little blouse, handmade, that (once washed) turned out to fit me perfectly. If that’s not proof, then you’re hard to satisfy!

Linda Ronstadt

Nov 2009: There’s a wonderful live recording of Linda Ronstadt singing ‘RESCUE ME’, a song written by W.C. Smith and R. Miner (whoever they are) and made famous by Aretha Franklin. When Linda sings it, she sounds so desperate, and so insatiable. You get the impression that she’s singling out a few men from the audience and singing it pointedly to them; her hard-working manager then rounds up Linda’s selection, and rosters them on, one after the other, to wait their turn outside Linda’s hotel-room door. I’ve always loved singing along to it, and recently thought, “Well, why don’t I try to learn it?” It seemed hard! It IS hard! If you don’t completely let go, then you may as well not bother singing it at all – it’s one of those songs. I saw the Maladies play at their record launch last week, and Daniel, their singer, is a shining example of allowing himself to be completely possessed by the act of singing – it’s great to watch. But you can’t do it by halves!

So I sing at top volume, “Rescue me! Love me, baby, squeeze me, baby! ‘Cause I’m lonely, and I’m blue. I need you, and your love, too – rescue me!” I want to tell my flatmates, “That song’s not one of mine. It’s an old classic. It’s just a song. It’s an exercise. I don’t really mean what I’m singing.” But I do, I do!

Correction: Chris informs me that it was Fontella Bass, not Aretha, who made this song famous. “But didn’t Aretha do it, too?” I lamely protested, stopping short of saying, “I read it on the internet!” Chris said, “I’d know.”

Gene Clark/Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

Oct 2009: Gene Clark has been one of my best friends, ever since that first mixed tape Nic made me in 1997. A flatmate, Cassie, reported at the time, “Lucy listens to that tape over and over, even though it seems to make her sad.” ‘THROUGH THE MORNING, THROUGH THE NIGHT’ is an obvious stand-out…but although it stood out in those first hearings, its magic has never faded, not one bit. When I played the song over and over in ’97, I would have been thinking about Justin, who had left me in the middle of the year to go to Alaska. I started going out with Nic. Nic and I broke up for a month or so. Justin returned to Sydney. Nic and I got back together. “To know that another man’s holding you tight/ Hurts me, little darling, through the morning, through the night.”

Last month, on the day of the dust storm, I went up north to visit Justin. He made me a copy of the recent Alison Krauss and Robert Plant album, plus a bonus track at the end – his song of the moment, by an unknown band he saw at an open-mic night. “It’s a very melancholy song,” I said. “Do you think?” said Just, “I could listen to it all night.”

A week later, I was further north, and all the way over on the other side of Australia. Fred Eaglesmith’s album, ‘Tinderbox’, which I’d bought in Brisbane, was rejected by Clint’s CD-player, so I listened to my other CD, Alison and Robert, over and over. Their version of ‘THROUGH THE MORNING, THROUGH THE NIGHT’ is incredibly beautiful – Alison’s glassy voice, Robert’s yearning harmonies, and the gentle waltz underneath it. Of course, my guitar was travelling with me, and I learnt the song, hoping I wasn’t waking any shift-workers as Alison’s high register took me out of my bedroom voice and into my paddock voice. I was still singing ‘TTM, TTN’ when I finally returned to Sydney. The upside of being home is that now I can also play the song on the piano (having wiped the film of red dust off it).

When our heart is aching, why don’t we cheer ourselves up by listening to happy songs? Most of us don’t work like that – it’s one of the mysteries of human nature. Instead we seek out songs that chime with what’s going on inside us, as though – with like attracting like - the songs draw the poison out of the wound. “I dreamed, just last night, you were there by my side,/ With your sweet love and tenderness easing my pride,/ But then I awoke and I found you’re not there,/ It was just my old memories of how much you cared.”

This song returning to me; one man reminding me of another; and vice versa; magic that won’t fade: all this makes me feel, quite eerily, that I’ve come to the point - the seamline - where the pattern of my life starts to repeat itself. No one is ever supposed to see this seamline! We’re supposed to believe that life’s capacity for invention is infinite. The tape has ended, the player has whirred, clunked, and now automatically starts up again.