Promised Land

 Last week in Iowa, Michele Bachmann launched her bid to become the Republican candidate in the next US presidential election. On the Tea Party far right of American politics, she has a long, lamentable history of anti-gay and anti-abortion activism not to mention whitewashing the history of slavery.

As she made her way to the podium in Waterloo at the weekend ‘Elvis Presley’s Promised Land belted out’. Well the notion of manifest destiny and Americans as the new chosen people is a hardy right wing trope, and at one level there is a connection between the idea of the Promised Land and the American frontier.But we cannot leave the Promised Land in the hands of US Conservatives. The name itself derives of course from the Book of Genesis where God promises Moses the land of milk and honey, not a metaphysical utopia but the actual land of Israel. Over the millennia that tribal foundation myth of a people in the prehistoric Middle East has taken on a universal appeal, holding out the hope of a better world somewhere, some place, some timeIt’s hardly suprisizing that Bachmann chose Elvis Presley’s version of the song, rather than the original by its black songwriter. When Chuck Berry sings it there is no doubt that the songs works on at least two levels. On the surface it is simply a description of a journey from Norfolk, Virginia to California, part of the 1950s/early 1960s mythologisation of travelling across the USA (Route 66, Highway 61, On the Road).

Jackie Wilson’s Melisma – 20 notes for the word ‘for’

‘The extent to which the music is integrated with the literal meaning in soul is apparent in some of its basic stylistic conventions, the call and response structure, for instance, where a phrase from the lead vocalist – which may not even take a verbal shape – is as often echoed by the band as by other singers. Or the distinctive use of melisma – the concentration of several notes into one syllable – by soul performers. The effect of this technique is often to give the impression that the singer is none too sure that the words exist which could adequately convey the power of what he is feeling. When Jackie Wilson packs more than twenty notes into the word “for” in his version “Danny Boy“, the literal meaning of the song is virtually superseded’ (Ian Hoare, Mighty mights spade and whitey: soul lyrics and black-white crosscurrents, in The Soul Book, edited by Ian Hoare, London: 1975)

Check out the closing bars of this song for the example given – 20 notes for the word ‘for’:

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• Jackie Wilson: “To Be Loved” (davidjmarkowitzmusic.wordpress.com)
• Oversouling (schott.blogs.nytimes.com)
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The Cuban Cowboys bring together rock ‘n’ roll and Latin beats with a punk sensibility that brings to mind such post-punk genre busters as The Pixies, Manu Chao, Jonathan Richman, and Moroccan cha’abi rockers Hoba Hoba Spirit. Musically promiscuous and lyrically inventive, head Cuban Cowboy, Jorge Navarro, has found the musical voice on their n

Trails Mixed

S.F.’s Cuban Cowboys flavor Latin grooves with punk power.

By Jeffrey Callen

The Cuban Cowboys‘ new album, Diablo Mambo, doesn’t hesitate to let you know what it is all about. Drop the digital needle on the first track and you learn all you need to know within the first 50 seconds: A Jimi Hendrix lick establishes the rock bona fides before the track morphs into a mambo section overlaid with a post-punk, art rock guitar pattern. The Hendrix lick then returns and signals the transition to driving punk guitars, but with a difference — the usual straight up-and-down thrash is blended with the sway of a Cuban son rhythm pattern. Two musical streams — rock and Latin music — are introduced, then blended, before the story of the song begins.

Bandleader/songwriter Jorge Navarro has interesting, engaging stories to tell. The opening track, “Cojones,” relates an early lesson in navigating the contradictions of the code of machismo taught by his knife-wielding grandfather. Navarro’s songs portray his family’s memories of a mythical Cuba born out of the nostalgia of exile and his experiences as a first-generation Cuban American, immersed in American pop culture and drawn to cowboy boots and rock ‘n’ roll. These two themes establish the narrative poles for the songs on Diablo Mambo, and Navarro skillfully navigates this bi-cultural territory, spinning tales of romance, sex, politics, and family. The music plays an essential role in the effectiveness of the stories, weaving together various tributaries from the two main musical streams — classic rock, punk rock, doo-wop, post–punk, rockabilly, and son, mambo, calypso, and salsa. (to read the rest, go to SF Weekly).

Billed, “A unique communal work, a living portrait of the man in black,” The Johnny Cash Project is utilizing crowdsourcing to create a constantly evolving portrait of the man in black in the form of a video for “Aint No Grave” based on drawings submitted by fans.

The Johnny Cash Project is a global collective art project, and we would love for you to participate. Through this website, we invite you to share your vision of Johnny Cash, as he lives on in your mind’s eye. Working with a single image as a template, and using a custom drawing tool, you’ll create a unique and personal portrait of Johnny. Your work will then be combined with art from participants around the world, and integrated into a collective whole: a music video for “Ain’t No Grave“, rising from a sea of one-of-a-kind portraits.z

Strung together and played in sequence over the song, the portraits will create a moving, ever evolving homage to this beloved musical icon.  What’s more, as new people discover and contribute to the project, this living portrait will continue to transform and grow, so it’s virtually never the same video twice. (Johnny Cash Project)

Related Articles

• Johnny Cash and the future of crowdsourced videos (guardian.co.uk)
• Crowd-Sourced Johnny Cash Music Video Is a Work of Digital Art (mashable.com)
• Johnny Cash remembered in crowd-sourced video (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Johnny Cash remembered, one brushstroke at a time (theglobeandmail.com)

A history of the Sunbeam label by Robert L. Campbell, Armin Büttner, and Robert Pruter includes this fascinating portrait of Pettite Swanson and the scene at Joe’s Deluxe Clug (thanks Ray):

…soon thereafter, Marl Young recorded with his own trio behind vocalist Petite Swanson. Petite Swanson was a member of Valda Gray’s troupe of female impersonators, who for much of the 1940s were the main attraction at Joe’s Deluxe Club in Chicago; Marl Young had led the band there in 1943. Some of the entertainment at Joe’s Deluxe is preserved on the recordings made by two of the house band leaders: Dallas Bartley’s session for Cosmo and his three soundies from 1945, and Bill Martin’s 1946 sessions for Hy-Tone (although Martin used a studio lineup instead of the musicians he was appearing with nightly). But the Swanson session includes the only surviving performances by a member of the Gray troupe. Referring to him as a “fem impersonator,” Billboard announced in its March 22, 1947 issue that Swanson had just been signed to the label. The way indie labels usually did their business, we infer from this that Swanson had already recorded. In his article on the label in Blues & Rhythm, Bo Sandell gives La Swanson’s real name as Alphonso Horsley. In its March 1948 issue, Ebony magazine ran an article on the female impersonators at Joe’s Deluxe Club. Petite Swanson is mentioned as a regular performer there; Ebony spells Alphonso’s last name as “Hersley” and states that he was 40 years old at the time, a former school teacher who “attends Catholic church quite regularly.” According to the Ebony writer, he was a “topnotch blues singer but favorite song is Schubert’s ‘Serenade’.”
Not everyone appeared to understand Petite Swanson’s act. In 1945, a young Marshall Stearns, in from New York, decided to take in Dallas Bartley’s six-piece group at Joe’s Deluxe Club, and wrote a rave review of Bartley’s band–which then included Bartley on bass, Mac Easton on alto sax, Reese Thomas on tenor, and Bob Hall on trumpet (the other two were unnamed)–hailing their music as “real jazz.” He was also thrilled by Swanson, writing, “Highlight of the floor show is a blues singer named Petite Swanson, whose idols are Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. When Petite backs away from the mike and lets go with ‘Evil Gal Blues,’ put up on what she’s putting down! She has the power and tone of the old-time, great blues singers and she knows the style by instinct.” Nothing in Stearns’ report indicates that he was watching a female impersonator floor show, or that the source of Ms. Swanson’s power and tone included some testosterone! In any case, he knew the jazz was real. See M. W. Stearns, “Dallas Bartley Pleases Those in Search of Jazz,” Down Beat, 15 September 1945, p. 2. (http://hubcap.clemson.edu/~campber/sunbeam.html) [The Ebony article is included full text on the Petite Swanson page of Queer Music Heritage website -- more fascinating stuff].

For more interesting history, check out Queering Pop Music Studies.

Big Freedia Queen of New Orleans Bounce (Image by Incase. via Flickr)

Unexpectedly, when I was doing research on the history of a former blues nightclub district in North Richmond, California, I stumbled upon a facet  of that history I had not anticipated: the participant of cross-gendered performers and club-goers. And, in mainstream venues. It flew in the face of all my presumptions of the role of drag  performers in the history of American music and African American music in particular. Sensing that the community members I was interviewing would not take kindly to a slew of questions about drag performers and club-goers, I tread lightly on that subject and the only information I gleaned was from the one bandleader who told me about Jean LaRue, his best (not his only) drag queen singer –she was so popular that she did not work for the band but made separate deals with clubowners.

Transgendered performances became rare in the U.S. by the 1950s (McCarthyism‘s persecution of leftists was accompanied by an as serious persecution of homosexuals that accompanied a newly serious policing of gender roles). Most were for straight audiences as safe parody in the ministrel show tradition that is one of — if not the — wellsprings of American popular entertainment. There were also a few performances for the transgendered community, such as the ball tradition (see the excellent film Paris is Burning), but mixed audiences in mainstream venues did not see transgendered performers. And it still is rare. That is why it struck me when I learned about a sub-style of the Bounce style of hip-hop out of New Orleans called “Sissy Bounce” from a N.Y. Times article by Jonathan Dee in July 2010. Here’s a taste of that article, which is worth checking out in its entirety:

If “gay rapper” is an oxymoron where you come from, how to get your head around the notion of a gay rapper performing in a sports bar? What in most cities might seem plausible only as some sort of Sacha Baron Cohen-style provocation is just another weeknight in the cultural Galapagos that is New Orleans. Sometime after midnight on the sweltering Thursday before Memorial Day, the giant plasma-screen TVs at the Sports Vue bar (which “proudly airs all major Pay Per View events from the world of Boxing and Ultimate Fighting”) were all switched off, and the bar’s backroom turned into a low-lit, low-ceilinged dance club, where more than 300 people awaited a return engagement by Big Freedia, who by day runs an interior-decoration business and who is, to fans of the New Orleans variant of hip-hop music known as “bounce,” a superstar. (from Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap).

The question I’m left with is if there are other transgendered performance traditions that have established a “respectable” position in particular locales or is New Orleans a special case (yet once again)? I look forward to learning more.

Related Articles

• Sissy Bounce, New Orleans’s Gender-Bending Rap (nytimes.com)
• Big Freedia – “Azz Everywhere” Video (NSFW) (Stereogum Premiere) (stereogum.com)
• Big Freedia, Tayisha Busay, MillionYoung, Dinosaur Feathers, Iran & more (Crush Fest) in pics (brooklynvegan.com)
• Your perfect Saturday: Vamps, vagabonds and outdoor opera (timeoutny.com)
• Queering pop  music studies (decipheringculture.com)
• Writings on Transgendered Musical Entertainers

FINDING GLEE IN DR. DRE’S BITCHES AIN’T SHIT

Sociologist Michael Kimmel passed along a fantastic and entertaining example of resistance. In the video below, a Columbia University a cappella group sings Dr. Dre’s Bitches Ain’t Shit. The appropriation of the song works on so many levels: the all-white, all-female group, the sweet choral arrangement, the pastel prep fashion, the strategically placed tennis rackets. They use race, class, and gender contradictions to force us to see and hear the song in a new way. All serve to mock the original, taking the teeth out of the language at the same time that they expose it as grossly misogynistic. Awesome.

“Reimagining” the works of classic artists is nothing new to Turtle Island String Quartet. Their previous interpretations of John Coltrane also hit the mark (on A Love Supreme). Here’s a sample, their rendition of “My Favorite Things” informed by Coltrane’s inspired 1961 recording of the Rodgers & Hammerstein composition.

…one cannot revolutionize a (artistic) field without mobilizing or invoking the experiences of the history of the field, and the great heretics inscribe themselves explicitly in the history of the field, mastering its specific capital much more completely than contemporaries so that revolutions take the form of a return to sources (1996, pg. 238).

Previous writings on:

Tim Eriksen:

• • Postmodern Traditional Music How Tim Eriksen became perhaps the only musician to play with both Kurt Cobain and Doc Watson.
  • Finding a Voice (Interview of Tim Eriksen)
  • “Northern Roots,” “Americana,” “Traditional Music” — The Strategic Nature of Genre Definition

Carolina Chocolate Drops:

• • CAROLINA CHOCOLATE DROPS DROP NEW ALBUM: “GENUINE NEGRO JIG”