Flatt and Scruggs: “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down”
I was forty-one before I discovered that country western music wasn’t all bad.
I shared a house for a while with Jack Hanna, who taught design at Cornell (then) and the University of Houston (now). When we were downstairs, cooking, eating or doing whatever, music was usually playing. We both had fairly catholic tastes but his didn’t include much jazz and mine didn’t include CW.
The closest I’d gotten to country music was bluegrass. I loved Flatt and Scruggs! –had ever since I took a chance and bought a couple of albums of theirs based on a laudatory review in Downbeat. I particularly liked their renditions of “Jimmy Brown, the Newsboy” and “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down.”
Willie Nelson: “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” (1975)
The first record of Jack’s that soaked into my consciousness was Willie Nelson’s 1975 Red Headed Stranger, his western retro album. I’ve bought other albums by Willie since then but Stranger is special among them for its self-conscious oldness, the singer-guitarist’s deliberate attempt to bring back the mood of an Older West. Shortly before Esther and I moved into our first owned house –whoo! that’d be 1989 or 1990!– I bought Stardust. I remember playing it as we lay on the sofa in the great room of our new place, looking out the French doors at the trees outlined against a darkening sky. We’d only been there a day or two.
Jack moved to Houston. Esther and I moved to Utica, NY, where I took up my first administrative job in higher ed, and director of special programs at a fledgeling SUNY (State University of New York) school whose name, three iterations down the road, would eventually be the SUNY Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome. (Located, by the way, in neither place, but in Marcy. The school had the longest name in SUNY.)
Jack sent me a couple of music packages: a compilation of Gulf and Bayou music called Deep Elum and my first ever records of Lyle Lovett (I now own four albums by him), Nanci Griffith (six), Marcia Ball (none), and 
Clifton Chenier (my first zydeco record –I now own albums by the Neville Brothers, Professor Longhair and Dr. John).
Luciana Souza-Till Bronner, “Pra Dizer Adeus”
I sent him the first of Luciana Souza’s three duet albums with guitarists.
Gina Kancheli: “Theme from Kin-Dza-Dza”: Andrei Pushkarev, vib. (2013)
And the wonderful ECM Record’s Themes from the Songbook, owner-producer Manfred Eicher’s 75th birthday gift to Georgian composer Giya Kancheli ,with three of his musical friends playing Kancheli’s program music for plays and movies –Gidon Kremer on violin, Andrei Pushkarev on vibraphone, and Dino Salluzi on bandoneon. Here’s what a reviewer wrote of the album.
Outside Europe, Giya Kancheli is likely familiar only to classical music followers of conductor Dennis Russel Davies, the Kronos Quartet, violist Kim Kashkashian, and Latvian violinist Gidon Kremer. But closer to his birthplace in Tblisi, Georgia, the multifaceted composer’s incidental film and theater music has enjoyed widespread popularity. Its appeal is especially evident in the 20 stripped-down treatments delivered here by Kremer, Argentine bandoneon master Dino Saluzzi, and Ukrainian vibraphonist Andrei Pushkarev. Offering their work as a surprise birthday present for the 75-year-old composer, the musicians improvise from melodies taken from Kancheli’s 2009 piano songbook. The album culminates in an orchestral piece with conductor Jansug Kahkidze adding voice. Along the way, it’s held together by the exquisitely slow tempos of Pushkarev’s minimalist arrangements; the vibist’s delicate interplay with both Kremer and Saluzzi; a deep-breathing melancholy and poignancy that never turns lugubrious and is momentarily relieved by gypsy and tango playfulness; a graceful tartness that keeps sentimentality at bay; and simultaneously widescreen and tight-focus sonics that grant full, independent resonance to shimmering vibraphone tones, sleek and frayed violin timbres, and the dynamic wheezes and button taps of the accordion- like bandoneon.
There’s a great deal of country western music I still don’t like but I listen to quite a bit more of it now –mostly singers I care for –Willie and Waylon, Merle Haggard –a little Johnny Cash, ditto Dolly, though I don’t own records by either– and Emmy Lou Harris, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith, Gillian Welch, Iris DeMent, Cheryl Wheeler, Kate Campbell. Around the edges, Gulf music: Chenier, the Neville Brothers, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, Sleepy LaBeef. The Holmes Brothers(from Virginia) almost fit. The Three Pickers album, a concert for PBS featuring Earl Scruggs (banjo), Doc Watson (vocals and guitar) and Ricky Scraggs (vocals and mandolin), with Alison Krauss sitting in for a few songs on fiddle and vocals.
Lyle. Nanci
The Neville Brothers. Prof. Longhair
One of the things I like about CW music is that many of its practitioners are masterful story tellers. An example: here’s Kate Campbell, “Mississippi and Me.”
Kate Campbell: “Mississippi and Me”
Kate Campbell
Daddy was a preacher in Sledge / We were living on Gospel and bea-ea-eans / Every Sunday night Deacon Jones / Would give a silver dollar to me-e-e / On the way home my poor momma / Would pry it from my hand / And say it fell from heaven
Way down in me a river runs deep / Reminding me just who I am / Good or bad, it’ll alway-ays be / Mississippi and me / Mississippi and me
Cissy was a beautician next door / She had the worst hairdo in tow-ow-own / She always smoked Pall Malls and drank Tabs / And hung out at the Delta Lou-ou-ounge / But I heard she finally found herself / She runs the best motel / In West Memphis, Arkansas
Mr. Thomas Lee ran the bank / And made a fortune on catfish fa-a-arms / Every time you’d try for a loan / You had to twist his arm / I heard one night in Tupelo / He stepped out of a window / He thought he was Elvis
Way down in me a river runs deep / Reminding me just who I am / Good or bad, it’ll alway-ays be / Mississippi and me / Mississippi and me
ADDITIONAL LISTENING
Lyle Lovett and His Big Band: “Here I Am”
Nanci Griffith: “Boots of Spanish Leather,” the great Dylan song
Professor Longhair: “Tipitina,” the original 1953 single
The Neville Brothers: “Amazing Grace” and “One Love” (1994)
MUSIC & ME 