Lockdown has stolen headlines from a lot of great musical releases in 2020. One such release that maybe didn’t get its due is Folk n’ Roll Vol. 1: Tales of Isolation, an album by Kenya-born singer Ondara. Released in May, Folk n’ Roll is a spectral snapshot of the hard times that we all have felt during the global coronavirus pandemic. Ondara (formerly J.S. Ondara) uses his pure vocal tone and raw guitar-playing to communicate the incredible emotions that he and others have felt in a time of separation and uncertainty, with songs like “Pulled Out of the Market,” “From Six Feet Away,” and the tune featured in this video, “Isolation Blues.”
The steady, pulsating drive of the acoustic guitar lays a foundation for Ondara’s ghostly voice to fly over and cut right to the uneasiness that has become familiar to so many in 2020. The video depicts confusion and anxiety in a very relatable way. The first release since his debut, Tales of America, Ondara was quick to write, record, and release the album, making it a true window into the human experience in the early stages of a global pandemic. To reflect on what we’ve come through and to hear our shared human experience manifested into song, watch the video for “Isolation Blues” below.
Ma Rainey wants her Coca-Cola. The microphones have been set up in the Chicago studio, her small band have rehearsed and taken their places, the two white men who run the label have the needle ready to cut the acetate, but Ma Rainey won’t sing until she gets her ice-cold Coca-Cola. Everyone pleads with her, but she won’t relent. So two musicians are dispatched to retrieve cold beverages for her while everybody else just waits. It’s a small scene in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, the new film adaptation of August Wilson’s 1982 play, but later Rainey (played with ferocious adamancy by Viola Davis) explains her reasons for delaying the session: If she has power, she is going to exert it. If she is going to let white men profit from her voice, she is going to exact as high a price as possible. Even if it’s just a Coca-Cola.
Despite populating its cast with musicians — including the brash trumpet player Levee (played by Chadwick Boseman in his final role) — Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom is less about music than the business of music: how white businessmen exploit and quash Black talent, how Black men and women navigate an industry and a society that saps so much from them and gives back barely anything at all. To emphasize this point, director George C. Wolfe teases musical performances only to cut away and thwart our expectations. Rainey’s band, sequestered in the basement, talk about rehearsing more than they rehearse. When they do count off a song, Wolfe cuts to a different scene, and their performance becomes the soundtrack. When Rainey finally does perform for the camera, it’s late in the film, but the scene becomes all the more electric for all the anticipation Wolfe has stoked.
It’s a fascinating dramatic strategy, but one that created some headaches for Branford Marsalis, who not only scored the film in the style of 1920s Chicago jazz, but also crafted choreography and auditioned musicians. With barely a month to prepare, he wrote nearly two hours of music for the 90-minute film, knowing that Wolfe would only use a fraction of it. In fact, altogether there is only about 20 minutes of music in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. Most of the film is given over to the sound of Black characters talking to one another, cajoling each other, joshing and joking, lying and pleading, delivering lengthy monologues — all of which is its own kind of music, especially coming from such an animated actor as Boseman.
Marsalis is a musician uniquely qualified to bring this era of Black music to life in a way that bridges the late 1920s and the early 2020s. He has spent his long and diverse career bringing the music of the past to bear on the present, first as a sideman in the early ‘80s for Art Blakey and Lionel Hampton and later as the leader of the Branford Marsalis Quartet. With jazz as his foundation, he has branched out into classical, Broadway, rock (Sting, the Grateful Dead), and hip-hop (Public Enemy). To each project — including music for Ken Burn’s Baseball miniseries in 1995 and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in 2017 — he brings a deep understanding of the attitudes and circumstances of previous eras of American popular music and lets them resonate in the present moment.
From his home in North Carolina, Marsalis spoke with BGS about finding a new appreciation for the music of that era, holding auditions from the other side of the globe, and re-creating 1920s jazz for a modern audience.
BGS: How did you get involved with this project?
Branford Marsalis: The director asked me to write the music and consult with the musicians, help with the choreography, and arrange the songs they were going to use in the movie. It was all pretty rapid. I was in Australia working on a project with the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and that was in early May [2019]. And we had to be in the studio recording in the first week of June! It was not the kind of scramble I like, because everything is being done by telephone or by watching YouTube to hear musicians and hear singers. Not the normal audition process.
But it worked out. I just had to start, man. I didn’t think. To me, it’s like when you play football and the coach makes you do all of these run-throughs. No sane person likes practice! I had a good coach who said, practice is the place to think, and that’s why we keep doing the same things over and over again, so that when you’re on the field, you can just react. That to me is a very cool and very sound philosophy. All of my thinking is done before the gig starts. Once the gig starts, you have the faith that you have a vocabulary that’s good enough to get the job done.
What does all that entail? What goes into a project like this?
First, I had to find a singer to facilitate the process for Viola, and I had to write a song for the end of the movie. I would up writing two songs for the end of the movie, so George would have a pick in terms of style. I had to decide where we were going to record. I quickly decided on New Orleans, because a lot of the musicians there play outside and inside, whereas most musicians don’t play outdoors, especially with acoustic instruments. The sounds of their instruments don’t have an outside sound. The sound is different than it would be if you were playing in a street band or in a parade.
I wanted to get guys that still played in the style that had a feeling reminiscent of what it felt like in the ‘20s. So I called my brother Delfeayo, because he has a big band down there, and he put together a group of musicians for me. Some of them had a great vibe, but weren’t very good at reading music. But that was good. I kind of liked that. It gave the music a certain kind of urgency. Because these guys were scrambling. And panicked! So it had a certain kind of urgency that it wouldn’t have when you have a band full of readers who can read anything.
At what point do you start working with the actors?
That was the next part. When filming started, I met with them to make sure they physically look like they’re playing instruments. As kids, we all aspired to be in pop bands. We idolized those guys, so we had already visualized what it would be like to be on stage and do those things. But no kid dreams of being a jazz musician. No kid says to his mom and dad, “I want to be a jazz musician when I grow up.” And dad says, “You can’t do both!” So we don’t always think about what it would be like to play an instrument like the saxophone.
When people talk about it, they say, Oh, the saxophone’s so sexy, it’s so suave. But it’s not. It’s a very fucking physically demanding instrument, and if you let it, it will manhandle you. There were no saxophones in this film, but it’s the same thing with all of the instruments. There’s a physicality to playing an acoustic instrument. You can’t just be up there with your eyes closed, trying to look as sexy as possible. Because those horns will kick your ass. All of the actors did a really good job of representing physically what it’s like to play those instruments.
Chadwick Boseman was really good at that. His face transforms whenever he puts the trumpet to his lips.
Well, he was actually playing. That’s the point. The trumpet is one that you can play more authentically. It has three positions — combinations of three. You can learn that. The saxophone is crazy because you’re using all your fingers and you’re moving up and down. Chadwick developed good embouchure. His face transforms because the muscles in your face change when you’re blowing air into a little mouthpiece like that.
If an actor isn’t really playing, you can tell. He had to play, and Viola had to sing. Otherwise, the larynx doesn’t vibrate and it’s clear you’re not really singing. People see that, even if they can’t articulate it, and they know it doesn’t look like she’s singing. So everybody had to play. Everybody had to bang on the instrument. They had to be a physical presence.
You’re obviously writing in a style that reflects that era, but with the character of Levee, it’s an era that seems to be changing. How did you approach that historical aspect of the soundtrack?
The music should have an authentic sound. It should sound like the ‘20s, but I wasn’t really interested in faithfully recreating the ‘20s, because then it just becomes a kind of mimicry. I think you have to spend a lot of time immersing yourself in the sound and the style, and then you write. What it becomes, that’s what it is. I’ve been listening to ‘20s music for the last twenty years or more, but in this project I was forced to do a really deep dive. I was listening to ‘20s music from May 2019 until January 2020. A lot of the things that I wrote were based on things that I heard.
Were there any artists that stood out to you during that deep dive?
I locked in on two people: King Oliver and Paul Whiteman. After a couple of months I listened a lot to their music and their bands exclusively. I already had a sense of the ‘30s, and I knew that anything that Levee was going to be doing would be pushing everybody towards the ‘30s. It wasn’t about trying to invent some new sound of music that had never been heard before. It was about recreating a style that would have not been heard in 1927. For the song “Sweet Baby Let Me Have It All,” I used the feeling and the beat of a Jelly Roll Morton recording from the ‘30s called “Jungle Blues,” from his Red Hot Peppers group. It has this beat, and I threw in some horns and all that other stuff, and it fills in around this idea.
Was there any talk about using Ma Rainey originals or trying to recreate the scratchy quality of those early recordings?
It doesn’t make any sense to have a bunch of human beings in a room and make the song sound like a recording. Having them play together in that room would have sounded like what it sounds like in the movie. It would have sounded very different from the recordings. The recordings were so primitive. Everything is mono, and the musicians had to strategically place themselves in distance to the microphones. It must have been fascinating to be in the room with musicians turned in different directions, saxophone players facing the wall. You had to have a perfect sound, because you had at best two microphones. Usually it was only one.
All of the sound from all of those instruments is going into that one mic, so you had to strategically place the musicians in the room to offset. They didn’t have gobos and baffles and all those things they would develop once the recordings became more sophisticated. I think it would be very strange to see a bunch of people in a room and suddenly the singing starts and the playing starts and it becomes a mono recording with scratches. Because it would not have sounded like that. The thing that’s most interesting about those early mono recordings is how you hear the music is not actually how it sounded.
I was limited in a lot of re-creating because of what August Wilson wrote in the play. If you listen to the original version of Ma Rainey’s “Black Bottom,” there are clarinet players, a couple of trumpet players, a trombone, a guy playing wood blocks. There are all these sounds. But this is a play, not a musical. August Wilson wrote for a band with coronet, trombone, piano, and bass. That was it. That’s all I had, so it was like writing for a string quartet rather than a full orchestra. I was limited by that reality, and the arrangements had to reflect that.
How did this project change the way you understand or appreciate the music of this era?
I didn’t really know how great it was. Everybody calls it the Jazz Age, and everything focuses around illegal booze and chicks drinking and dancing and female independence and all these things that had not existed prior to the Volstead Act [the 1919 law enforcing Prohibition]. Most drinking was done in saloons that were like Burger Kings — they were bars that were owned and operated by the people who sold the booze. They were men’s clubs. Women were excluded. Once they passed the Volstead Act, the mobsters were like, Oh, shit, everybody can drink!
So jazz was the music they chose, and that’s what people think about. When I was listening to hundreds of songs from the ‘20s, I was listening to oratorios, comedy sketches, comedy songs, small group songs, big bands songs, string quartets. It struck me as funny how when the society was more socially primitive, there were so many varieties of music and so many ways of expressing. And now as we’ve become more socially advanced, the music becomes more stratified and more limited.
Everything is so stratified now. You can listen to a radio station that only plays the shit you know. That was unheard of in the ‘20s. They played everything, and you could hear everything. That was in the middle of a period when America was in extreme segregation, but you could hear things as diverse as Paul Whiteman’s band or Ethel Waters, Louis Armstrong. There was such a variety, and there was a level of excellence, because you couldn’t overdub back in those days. You didn’t have AutoTune. So everything you heard had to be really good, because there was no way to fix it in post-production.
There’s that great scene where they’re trying to record the kid with the stutter, and they’re throwing out all these ruined acetates, one after the other. It does such a nice job of dramatizing that idea.
There was no such thing as post-production. It was just production. If the kid fucks it up, the recording is destroyed. And that’s costing [the white label owners] money, and they’re pissed off. They don’t really like Black people. Ma Rainey understands that, and in turns she doesn’t like them. And she’s determined to have it her way. At that time in our country, there were not a lot of possibilities for Black performers to play in front of a white audience, and the white audience was the target. Black people couldn’t even come into the same theater as white people.
All of these things were a part of the time that Levee lived in, and his motivation was about ameliorating the shame and the pain of the things that happened to his family when he was a boy. All of his dreams are dashed, and as so often happens in real life, people have a grievance against a thing and they often take that grievance out on the people they’re closest to. Shit, you change the accent and get rid of the swear words, and you could say that this was a Shakespeare play: conflict, rejection, anger boils over, an ending you don’t expect.
Photos of Branford Marsalis: Eric Ryan Anderson (top) and Palma Kolansky (bottom)
This week The Show On The Road is bringing you an episode from another podcast we think you’ll really like! This episode of Under The Radar features the truly fantastic Oakland-based artist, Fantastic Negrito.
Under The Radar is a monthly music podcast by host and producer Celine Teo-Blockey. She’s a music journalist who writes for the longtime indie music mag, also called Under the Radar. She interviews indie songwriters and independent artists, going deep into their childhood memories and the musical milestones that have helped shape their most recent albums.
Committed to giving voice to a diverse host of artists, her guests have included gender non-conforming, Native American singer-songwriter and Black Belt Eagle Scout, Ezra Furman (who also crafted the soundtrack for the popular Netflix show Sex Education,). Other guests include Scottish band Travis and Caroline Rose, who started with an earnest country sound and evolved to electro-pop. The whole series is sound-immersive, using archival tape, field recordings, and music from the back catalogue of these artists.
Under the Radar will be back with new episodes in March 2021 and has some great guests lined up, including Wayne Coyne from the Flaming Lips and Emmy the Great, a Hong Kong-born British singer-songwriter.
Subscribe to Under the Radar wherever you get your podcasts to catch up on their first season and get ready for what’s to come in 2021.
Canadian singer-songwriter Julian Taylor didn’t set out to make a country record with The Ridge, but the album oozes with authentic tinges of the vibrant, pan-Canadian roots music scene. Based for most of his career in Toronto, it’s not surprising that the album (produced by Saam Hashemi) feels crisp, modern, and listenable, but its inextricable linkage to place — namely, the titular Maple Ridge, British Columbia, where Taylor summered on his grandparents’ farm as a child — ensures the folky, rootsy facets of the album feel entirely intuitive, raw, and perfectly placed.
Of course, Taylor is quick to point out that the pre-genre, elemental quality of The Ridge not only stems from his decades in music or geography alone, but from his family, their shared musical connections, and his Indigenous roots. His grandparents and family members feature heavily across the eight original songs’ lyrics, and cousins Gene and Barry Diabo join the band on drums and bass, respectively, literally underpinning the entire project with a sonic connection to Taylor’s Mohawk and West Indian roots. That The Ridge is a critically-acclaimed, stunning work of country-folk is due entirely to his commitment to compassion, empathy, family, and letting all of the above stand on their own merits.
BGS connected with Taylor via phone ahead of his Shout & Shine livestream performance, available to watch live on BGS, our Facebook page, and YouTube channel on November 11 at 7pm ET / 4pm PT.
BGS: I wanted to start by asking you about The Ridge’s connection to place, because it sounds like your story is a pretty classic, roots music/country story — spending your summers on your grandparents’ farm in British Columbia — and the title track evokes the western wild of Canada. Can you talk about the geographical spaces you’re evoking on the album and the longing I hear for them?
Taylor: When I think about Maple Ridge, BC, we’re going back now probably thirty-five years. It’s almost as if, when I close my eyes, I can see the road leading up to the house. There’s a big hill, and my grandfather used to like old cars — it’s funny, I say “old cars,” but I suppose back then they weren’t. So there’d be a big old Buick, a Mustang, and I remember taking the Buick up that hill. You’d have to get the mail way down the driveway, literally a city block’s distance, where everybody had a mailbox and you’d grab the mail, go back up the path, past these two huge trees. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to British Columbia, but I came from Toronto going to visit my grandparents, and I was always in awe of how big everything was. The trees were bigger, the mountains were there, everything was bigger. Even the slugs were bigger! [Laughs]
[My grandparents] lived in a wonderful house, a couple of wonderful places actually, one of them backed up to the Alouette River and you could see the salmon spawn. They had farmland where they had horses and a chicken coop by the horse’s stables, fields where the horses could graze, and in the basement of the house they bred boxers — the dogs. My life would’ve been composed of getting up in the morning with my grandmother, taking care of the horses, my grandfather would take me swimming because he liked to do that at the community pool in town. After that it’d be fishing, hiking, farming, and just a lot of nature. That’s what we did.
To me, the way you’re describing it with so much imagery, it’s really clear that these memories are indelible for you. I think that comes through the music — it’s not just that you’re text-painting to check the boxes of what a country aesthetic is, you’re painting a literal picture you see in your head.
This is true, I didn’t set out to create a country record. I didn’t, I just wrote these words and those were the melodies and arrangements that came to my mind. It was certainly, for me, more of a folk element than a country one.
This record feels like it bridges the gap between your life in Toronto and your experiences in British Columbia, and I mean in the way it sounds, its production, its arrangements. The music is crisp and clean and feels very polished, but there’s still this raw, sort of natural element that I feel like is the mixing of rural and city. Do you agree or disagree?
Now that you mention it, I can hear it and I know what you’re talking about. Before you had mentioned it, I didn’t. It’s a very interesting thing, because I would say the rawness of it is because these are takes that are completely right off the floor, there’s no overdubs except for when we added the fiddle, the pedal steel, and the girls’ voices. Those were the only overdubs, because we couldn’t fit everybody in the room. My cousins Gene and Barry, they’re from Kahnawake, the Indian reservation close to Montréal, so we’d go and play, jam at the campfire, jam on the back porch, jam in the garage, and we’ve been doing that for years.
So when I asked them to be part of this record, I deliberately only sent them songs that were acoustic-based, and didn’t really tell them what I wanted, because I wanted this rawness and I wanted to sing the songs as they were. That’s why I think that particular [sound is evident], it’s a family affair, there’s a conversation between the core band that’s happening anyways. Saam Hashemi, who co-produced and engineered the record, he’s from the UK originally, he’s now Canadian, and we’ve worked together before. His production style is very pristine, the way that he captured it. That’s not deliberate, but it’s a wonderful hybrid for you to pick up on it. I hope others did and after this I hope that more do!
To me, part of this record sounding so country comes out of that Western Canada, American Midwest, Great Plains tradition of Indigenous country music and country bands that come from that region. Is that a community you operate in or interact with? Was that an influence for you, pulling from the generations-long tradition of hardscrabble, garage band, Saturday-night-at-the-local-bar Indigenous country bands of the rural Canadian and American west?
Absolutely, I wouldn’t say that it’s the West or Midwest, for me, because it directly comes from the East, actually, oddly enough! My family are East Coast Indigenous people, my mom’s family is from Kahnawake. It does come from that kitchen party, grab-your-guitar, grab-whatever-you-got — doesn’t matter if it’s a pot or a pan. It comes from that aesthetic, for sure. Absolutely! When you research that aesthetic, it’s not necessarily a country feel, either. It has elements of country and blues. Blues is very big in that, too. The way that my cousins are playing on The Ridge, there’s a gentle sort of shuffle that’s very indicative of what we’re talking about, yet it has this kind of swing to it at the same time. It’s like a country swing. That happens on a lot of the tracks where you can really feel it. On “Ballad of the Young Troubadour,” on the conga and upright bass you can feel it really strongly, as well. It’s a garage band aesthetic, for sure.
It’s a very Indigenous thing! If you go back and watch movies like Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World it’s interesting because the history of American roots music — in my personal opinion, I’ve read books on this and stuff, I know others think differently — without Indigenous people and without Black people we wouldn’t have roots music at all.
Yep. Full stop. It’s that simple.
[Laughs] Yes! Full stop. Exactly. It’s interesting to see so many new Americana artists that are Indigenous and Black, I’m really so honored to be even considered in that group of people!
I wanted to ask you about “Human Race,” because I think that song pretty clearly lays out a framework for creating empathy and understanding and I wanted to ask you where that comes from, within you, specifically. Empathy is such an individual thing, I’m always interested in how people take it from being intensely individual and personal and turn it into something universal and relatable. What is that process like for you? Especially in writing “Human Race?”
That empathy comes across and feels universal because I know someone who is deeply close to me that has suffered from mental disabilities and mental illness and it has affected me and my family. You learn from a very young age, even before you know exactly what it is, that you have to be quiet and patient. You have to be strong, yet at the same time very gentle. You have to allow these loved ones’ triumphs and their dreams to be bigger than anything that you can possibly imagine, just so that they have an opportunity to express themselves in a way that makes them feel important. In writing the song, my message to this particular person was that I believe in them, their strength, and their pain — and to acknowledge that I go through all of those feelings too, just like they do. That’s how that song became so universal, by allowing myself to let go and also praise someone that I absolutely adore.
What have listeners’ or fans’ reactions to “Human Race” been like?
When I first posted it I think people really were shocked and gravitated to it in such a way that I didn’t realize would happen. This is the song that led me to believe I had to put this record out earlier than I was intending to. It was around the time the pandemic lockdown here in Canada started, so it touched a lot of souls. I was very pleased that it did. I think the aspects of the song about inner peace and overcoming challenges resonate with people.
It feels like “It’s Not Enough” is a song about grace, about how we all are enough, but through the opposite lens. So I wanted to ask you about the idea of applying grace to ourselves, especially right now when that feels so much more difficult.
Applying grace to ourselves is such a difficult thing to do, but such a necessary thing to do. People who think and think a lot, other people don’t realize just how much work that is and how tiring it is to try to figure out what’s on your mind, just as simple as that. I’m a person who feels compassion for other people and myself, but I’m also extremely difficult on myself and hard on myself — as most people would say, we are our own worst critics in a lot of ways. I’m trying to be a little less critical with myself and, in turn, with others. I’m trying to accept what is. I think this song, “It’s Not Enough,” in a way is insinuating that for humans to not to believe that is kind of an insidious frame of mind.
Can you tell me about the final track, “Ola Let’s Dance?” There’s a meditative quality to the refrain that resonates with me, the way it’s almost like a mantra, really intentional in the way you’re delivering it. Where does that song come from?
Well, I was thinking about beats in my attic where I do a lot of my demos. The beat came first, I just held onto it forever and ever and ever and ever and ever, just sitting. When my grandmother had passed away, and my grandfather had passed years before, we had to go out and collect all of her stuff. I was the one that inherited most of it. It’s sitting in my attic as we speak. Just rummaging through memories and stuff I found poetry that was written by my grandfather. The poem I recite in “Ola Let’s Dance” was not written by me; it was written by my grandfather, John Thomas Skanks. I just loved it so much, I had to try to write it into a song. I came up with the guitar part — it was very tribal, I wanted the whole thing to feel very tribal. It’s probably the furthest thing from a country or folk song on the record, yet it comes out like that anyway. [Laughs] It’s really bizarre!
The amalgamation of my maternal grandparents is what that song exemplifies, to me. I was trying to sing it, trying to put a melody to it, ‘til one day I just said, “Why don’t I just recite it and see what happens?” [Laughs] I did it and everyone was like, “YUP! That’s how it’s going to go.” My maternal grandmother’s name was Ola. She taught dance at the University of Buffalo for a little while. She raised four girls on her own, doing what she could to survive, and ended up teaching dance. So the song, in my heart, is both the meeting and separation of my grandparents, which brought me to life.
Artist:Yola, with Brandi Carlile and Natalie Hemby on backing vocals, Sheryl Crow on piano, and Jason Isbell on guitar Hometown: Bristol, England Single: “Hold On” Release Date: October 9, 2020
In Their Words: “‘Hold On’ is a conversation between me and the next generation of young black girls. My mother’s advice would always stress caution, that all that glitters isn’t gold, and that my black female role models on TV are probably having a hard time. She warned me that I should rethink my calling to be a writer and a singer…. but to me that was all the more reason I should take up this space. ‘Hold On’ is asking the next gen to take up space, to be visible and to show what it looks to be young, gifted and black.” — Yola
Harmonics with Beth Behrs is the newest show from the BGS Podcast Network. Each episode delves into the intersection of music and wellness. The podcast’s fourth week features actress Tichina Arnold, host Beth Behrs’ co-star on CBS’s The Neighborhood, along with her sister and manager, Zenay Arnold — both of whom Behrs considers her closest friends and sisters.
In episode 5, the three friends discuss faith and trust in the face of life-threatening lupus, the spirituality of music and the musicality of comedy, the timeliness of The Neighborhood as well as the pure spirit on the set, the absolutely necessity of open conversation in active anti-racism, balancing professional and familial relationships, and much more.
Not only was Tichina Arnold in the original Little Shop of Horrors film, but she’s also been a part of countless other works prior to The Neighborhood, including 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and sitcoms like Martin and Everybody Hates Chris. And her sister Zenay, through it all, has been her biggest fan and partner in show business.
In terms of spiritual coaches in her life, Behrs tells us that these two are it. “Their trust in a higher power… and their dedication to leading with kindness is something that is unparalleled in Hollywood, and it’s probably why they’ve had such an incredible career.” The sisters’ belief — that if we lead with kindness, faith, and trust, we’re all gonna make it — is a perfect message for 2020.
Harmonics with Beth Behrs is the newest show from the BGS Podcast Network, which delves into the intersection of music and wellness. The podcast’s second week features country artist Mickey Guyton, who released “Black Like Me” — a song about her pain and struggles growing up as a Black woman in America — earlier this summer amidst protests against police brutality across the nation.
In episode three, actor, comedian, banjo enthusiast and Harmonics host Beth Behrs talks with Guyton about country artists speaking out against racism and injustice, the power and importance of three chords and the truth in the midst of Music Row fluff, lifting other women up as a form of therapy, and, of course, Dolly Parton.
Originally from Arlington, Texas, Guyton has made a name for herself as a powerhouse vocalist and impressive songwriter, being called “one of the most promising new voices in country in recent years.” In 2015, she released her self-titled EP featuring her debut single, “Better Than You Left Me,” and the following year she was nominated for her first ACM Award for New Female Vocalist. On September 11 she released her new EP Bridges, which has solidified her as “the unapologetic voice country music needs right now.”
Listen and subscribe to Harmonics through all podcast platforms and follow BGS and Beth Behrs on Instagram for series updates!
Artist:Rhiannon Giddens Hometown: Greensboro, North Carolina Song: “Don’t Call Me Names” Release Date: August 23, 2020 Label: Nonesuch
In Their Words: “The framework in the song is a love affair, but it can happen in any kind of connection. The real story was accepting my inner strength and refusing to continue being gaslit and held back; and refusing to keep sacrificing my mental health for the sake of anything or anyone.
“I don’t often write personal songs but this one has stayed with me — it poured out then and has just sat there waiting for the right time. I got a chance to do it with some incredible musicians and a fabulous producer and I’m thrilled it’s going to be out in the world; when I listen to it, the anger that I felt then is the anger I feel [now] at my entire country being gaslit, held back, and sacrificed. We have to keep saying NO to toxic behavior, no matter how small or large the stage, and keep saying it nice and loud.” — Rhiannon Giddens
When Bettye LaVette sings “I Hold No Grudge,” she brings the weight of all her years to it. The 74-year-old vocalist draws out certain notes, delivers certain lines almost in a speaking voice, as though she wants to show us how difficult, but also how essential, it can be to let things go. “Deep inside me there ain’t no regrets,” she declares, “but a woman who’s been forgotten may forgive but never, never forget.” She draws out that second “never” to underscore its harsh finality, to remind you that she’ll live with the memory of this slighting forever.
“I Hold No Grudge” has never been merely a song about romantic betrayal — not when Nina Simone recorded it for her landmark 1967 album, High Priestess of Soul, and not when LaVette recorded it more than sixty years later. This new version sounds like it’s addressed to anyone who stood in LaVette’s way so many years ago, in particular those executives at Atlantic Records who saw fit to shelve her debut album in 1972 without so much as explanation, much less an apology. That decision crushed her and thwarted her promising career. “That’s exactly what it is,” says LaVette. “I probably have some grudges, but they aren’t big enough to make me stop. I’ve not been defeated. I’m extending the olive branch once again.”
“I Hold No Grudge” opens her latest album, Blackbirds, which collects her interpretations of songs made famous by Black women in the 1940s and 1950s, including Dinah Washington, Ruth Brown, Nancy Wilson, and Billie Holiday. She calls them “the bridge I came across on,” referring to that era between big band blues of the 1940s and rhythm & blues of the 1960s, when these artists were pushing popular music in new directions.
With a small band led by producer-arranger Steve Jordan, LaVette runs through deep cuts like “Blues for the Weepers,” a song first sung by Ruth Brown (and later made famous by Lou Rawls). It’s a song dedicated to “all the soft-singing sisters and torch-bearing misters,” she sings. “They just come to listen and dream.” She understands that we go to songs now for the same reasons we did sixty or seventy years ago: to find sympathy and solace, but also to find a way forward, perhaps some promise of a better life.
The most familiar tune on Blackbirds is likely “Strange Fruit,” popularized by Billie Holiday ninety years ago at Café Society in New York City and covered by countless singers ever since. As a result it’s difficult to make the song sound new and urgent, yet LaVette manages to do just that. Against her band’s dolefully trudging rhythm, she tilts the melody forward just slightly, as though pulling us toward some horrific destination, and she shreds the syllables of the song’s climactic declaration: “Here is a strange and bitter crop.”
That middle word is frayed almost beyond recognition – “stra-ya-ange” – to make the song’s metaphor sound tragically real. LaVette recorded it nearly a year ago and was startled when it became so heavily relevant again. To hear her sing “Strange Fruit” in 2020 is to be reminded that the injustices so many Americans are protesting — the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many other Black men and women — are not new or specific to the current era.
In the second installment of our Artist of the Month coverage, LaVette talks about growing up with a jukebox in her living room, giving these formative artists their due, and how Paul McCartney fits into all this.
BGS: This record is rooted in the history of popular music. Can you tell me about this particular period and what it means to you?
LaVette: People — especially white people — they throw “rhythm and blues” and “blues” together a lot. And now today, they’re throwing “rhythm and blues” toward young blacks and young whites who want to sound black. When people talk about rhythm and blues, they go back about as far as Etta James, but these women are the bridge that Etta came across on as well. Rhythm and blues was a music that came from blues, of course, and from gospel. When people ask me the difference between “blues” and “rhythm and blues,” I always tell them that you can cry to blues, but you can dance and cry to rhythm and blues.
It’s a short bridge, from about 1948 or ’49 to the burgeoning of Atlantic and Motown’s rhythm and blues, which was about ’61 or ’62. That’s when I came along. We took away the saxophones and added more guitars. We took the blues guitar and sped it up and put it in our tunes. The people who took us from the late ‘40s into the early ‘60s are rarely mentioned, and that’s why I chose this group of women.
I didn’t even know there were Black women who sang, other than Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge. And then, hearing LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown and Little Esther, I don’t know whether it gave me hope or whatever, but it really surprised me. I didn’t know that women who sung in such a bawdy way even existed.
When did you first hear these women?
When rhythm and blues came about, that was when I was young and I was dancing. That was when I was coming up and my sister was a teenager. We had a jukebox in our living room in Muskegon, Michigan, which is where I was born, and it had all the current tunes of the day, which my sister played daily when she got out of school. They were all rhythm and blues songs. You know, they weren’t into jazz — they were either blues or rhythm and blues songs on the jukebox. And gospel and country-western, no less. At one point, my favorite singers used to be Doris Day and Dale Evans.
Wait, you had a jukebox in your living room?
My parents sold corn liquor in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Muskegon was extremely segregated, so if you wanted a drink after dinner or after work, you had to come by my house. These were homes that had been built for the soldiers returning from the Second World War. So they were theoretically projects, but they hadn’t started making them out of brick yet. They looked more like barracks, and everybody’s house was just alike.
It was living room, dining room, small kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom. My parents sold corn liquor and chicken sandwiches and barbeque sandwiches. There was no gambling. Nobody could cuss but my mother. But they could get shots and pints and half pints. And the jukebox was there in the living room where most people’s couch probably was. I was about 18 months old when I learned all the songs on the jukebox — all of them.
How did you choose the songs for this record?
I keep several files. Or, I should say, my husband keeps them for me. I’ve got all kinds of files. I’ve got a country and western file. I’ve got a strictly George Jones file. What I do is, I offer my label two or three ideas based on these files, and they tell me which one they like best. So I have some ideas that I like, and that way I don’t have to take their suggestions. If they find one they believe in and are willing to spend money on, I’ve got the songs already in.
I had this file here of standards, some of which I had done when I did little gigs in places around, just me and a keyboard player. Some of them, like Nancy Wilson’s “Save Your Love for Me,” I had done in other venues that most people haven’t seen me in, because they didn’t come where I was. A song like “I Hold No Grudge, which I heard eighteen years ago, it’s been in my file since then. I thought, if I ever get a chance to do that kind of album, I will do that tune. I wasn’t going to throw it away.
When did you discover that song?
I was living in Detroit, and I was getting my hair done. Usually in Black salons, there’s a radio on that plays Black music, and this song came on. I had never heard it before! And because Detroit is one of the places where I can pick up the phone and call whoever is playing whatever it is and I’ll know them, I called them up and she told me it was Nina Simone. And I said, well, if I ever get the chance, I’m gonna record that tune. That was eighteen years ago.
Just a few years ago I performed at a party for David Lynch, the movie producer, and this gentleman came up to me and said, “I loved your performance. My name is Angelo Badalamenti, and I do all the music for David Lynch’s films.” My husband, who loves David Lynch’s films, was ecstatic. Angelo says, “I have a tune. Years ago, I used to work with Nina Simone, and I wrote this tune for her that I think would be perfect for you.” I said, “What’s the name of it?” “‘I Hold No Grudge.’” I said, “I know you aren’t going to believe this, but I’ve had plans to do that tune for the last fifteen years!” So when I got the opportunity to do this album for Verve, I got in touch with Angelo and sent it to him, and he said he could hear Nina listening to it, closing her eyes, and saying, “Yeah, she got it.” Of course that made me feel very good.
Another song I wanted to ask you about is “Strange Fruit,” which seems sadly very timely right now.
But it just became timely! When we recorded it back in August, it was one of the oldest tunes on the album. And then all of this mess broke out, and the tune became timely! But all of this wasn’t going on when we recorded it. That’s not why we recorded it. We recorded it to fill in the Billie Holiday slot. While we were waiting for the album to come out, all of this happened. And it was just timely — as if we went to look for a tune to describe what’s going on now. So it’s bad that it’s timely — it’s awful that it’s timely — but it’s timely.
I knew the tune had not lost any of its power, and I knew I had to do it completely different from Billie. I’m blessed to work with Steve Jordan because he doesn’t hear these songs the way they were originally recorded. He hears them the way I sing them, because his age is closer to mine. He was born and raised in Harlem, and he grew up with these rhythm and blues tunes. He knew that I wanted “Strange Fruit” to be terse and sad and black and dark, and when we finished recording the music, I said, “Steve! I didn’t want it to sound exactly like they’re standing by the tree playing this song,” but it does. It’s just haunting. That’s the thing that makes Steve so important to me.
The outlier on the album is your interpretation of the Beatles’ “Blackbird.” What made that song fit this project?
The reason that I chose it — and I chose it for the title — is because many Americans don’t know that Brits call their women birds, and Paul is talking about a Black girl that he saw standing up on a picnic table singing one night in a park. He’s talking about a Black girl singing and I thought that that would just be perfect for it.
When Bettye LaVette covered “Your Time to Cry” nearly fifty years ago, she wrung every ounce of hurt and drama from the lyrics, but especially on the chorus. She stretches out the word “time” until it breaks into two syllables, implying a similar emotional break that doesn’t undercut the song’s determination, but shows what cost she has paid for it. It’s a riveting performance, a raw, southern soul slow burner that should have established her as one of the finest R&B voices of the 1970s.
During those same sessions, she also covered Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and John Prine’s “Souvenirs,” among other tunes, yet for reasons that were never made clear, Atlantic Records shelved the project, declining to promote “Your Time to Cry” as a single or to release her debut album. That has been a defining moment in LaVette’s long career — and one she subtly and slyly addresses on her new album, Blackbirds. She is the woman wronged, the embodiment of the music industry’s disregard for talent, especially that of Black women. For three decades LaVette continued to work, developing and strengthening her voice and expanding her repertoire. She explains, “When people say I had a resurgence, I want to say, ‘No, I never stopped. You just didn’t come to where I was!’”
Now, nearly fifty years after recording “Your Time to Cry” in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, she has become one of the finest and most accomplished singers in R&B or any other genre for that matter, with a string of albums that showcase her stylistic range as well as her deep understanding of pop history. After releasing a comeback record on the tiny Blues Express label in 2003, she caught the ear of Andy Kaulkin at Anti- Records, who signed her as a new artist at the height of the soul revival of the 2000s.
Since then, she’s covered The Who for the Kennedy Centers Honors ceremony (famously bringing Pete Townshend to tears), recorded with Drive-By Truckers (back in the Shoals, for an album appropriately titled The Scene of the Crime), and reimagined Dylan tunes so thoroughly even his own bandleader didn’t recognize them. And those original Shoals sessions did finally get an official release, first in 2000 on a small Dutch label and again in 2018 from vinyl specialists Run Out Groove.
Blackbirds is among her most powerful albums: a collection of songs by female artists active from the late 1940s through the early 1960s, including Nancy Wilson, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone, whom LaVette refers to collectively as “the bridge I came across on.” It’s an album that celebrates these artists, but also emphasizes their shared experiences as Black women in the music industry. “Every broken promise broke my heart,” she sings on “Book of Lies,” a song made famous by Ruth Brown. Her voice is lower than it was in 1972, but no less expressive, and she makes that sentiment more than just romantic; it’s also a professional lament, addressed to the industry that derailed her career so long ago.
We spoke with LaVette about Blackbirds in our second half of the interview; here, she tells BGS about her early hopes and disappointments.
BGS: What was your impression when you were down in Muscle Shoals? Had you been there before you recorded?
LaVette: No! What would I be doing there?! What would you go there for, if you weren’t going to record? They had to win me over. I’d wanted to record in New York and Chicago. I always wanted to be very bougie. But after I had accepted how different my voice was — how un-girly-like it was — I identified more with Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding. After I was down there for a day, I was absolutely as happy as I could be. They were absolutely wonderful — and wonderful to me. When I got back to Detroit, I could not stop talking about them, especially with the way they wrote and read music.
Were you ever told why your ‘72 sessions were never released?
That has been one of the big mysteries in my career. I can think of that album and my dog Mickey, that I had when I was 11, and just burst into tears at any time. I had Brad Shapiro, who was Wilson Pickett’s producer. I had the Swampers, who I had wanted. I was at the label that I had loved. But when they told me they weren’t going to release the album, I got up under the dining room table and stayed three or four days. My friends brought me food and wine and joints. I’m telling you, I’m about to cry now. It was to be my first album, after having already had a string of singles. For years, all I had was “Your Turn to Cry.” Whenever people would come in with their latest whatever-it-is at my house or at a party, I always kept that song handy, maybe on a cassette. I’d say, “I made a record that was really, really good one time. Y’all wanna hear it?”
I just found out — when I say “just found out,” I meant in the last twenty years, maybe — that it was a split between Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler. Jerry Wexler was on my side and Ahmet was on Aretha’s side. For the longest time I never knew what happened. I had no idea, and it sounded so stupid, for thirty years, to tell people, “I have no idea.” Many people had heard “Your Time to Cry,” and they said, “If that stuff is anything like this, I can’t understand.” When Atlantic put “Your Time to Cry” out, it was just out. They didn’t mention it to anyone. They just put it out. What you wanted at a label was to have one of everything, and maybe a junior one of everything, too. So they could see where that wouldn’t work with me and Aretha. I think Diana [Ross] is probably the reason I was never at Motown. Those personalities wouldn’t have worked.
Judging by reissues from those sessions, you had already worked up a pretty diverse repertoire.
My manager, Jim Lewis, who was the assistant to the president of the musicians’ union in Detroit and a trombone player with the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, was a hard, hard taskmaster. When we started to work this management thing out, he said, “You’re cute. You’ve got a cute little waistline and a cute little butt, but you’re going to have to learn some songs, because there’s a possibility you may not be a big star.” That’s not a given, but you can be a singer for the rest of your life, if you will learn a lot of songs. He said, “You’re a different kind of singer, and you should learn that.”
How so?
I’ve accepted that I sound more like James Brown than Doris Day. But I used to think I had to sound the way Nancy Wilson sounds, which discouraged me from even wanting to learn how to sing. The thought that I could sing it and it didn’t have to sound beautiful didn’t even occur to me, until Jim came along. He told me, “Just let ‘em come out of your mouth. They’re gonna sound like you.” So I had to satisfy myself with the songs. I had to choose songs that I really like, and I would tell people, “Do you like the song or do you like the record? Because those are two different things.”
Jim made me learn a lot of songs. He insisted I learn “Lush Life,” which permitted me to be comfortable at the Carlyle Hotel for ten years. He insisted I learn “Sweet Georgia Brown” and “God Bless the Child,” which put me in the lead role in Bubbling Brown Sugar. He made me learn country and western. Otherwise, I would have been fighting with the local songwriters over them giving songs to Aretha and not giving them to me, you know? I was able to say, “Hey, I can go on and just be real good.” So I approach what I’m doing a little differently. I thought Jim was telling me to sing these songs like these people, but he just wanted me to sing them how they came out of my mouth. However they come out, sing them like that. Now that I’ve accepted that, I’m not so concerned about how it sounds, but how I feel about the song. That helps me present it. I’m very grateful to him.
That comes through on these sessions from 1972, where you’re covering Neil Young and John Prine and doing a song that Bowie was doing at the same time. There’s that range.
Well, it was after that that I did “What Condition My Condition Is In” by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. And that got me another record contract. Kenny Rogers came to Detroit and Jim said, “Why don’t you take it and let him hear it?” I didn’t think he’d like it, but Jim said, “You don’t know how it’ll sound to him.” So I took it to him and Kenny loved it. His brother, Lelan Rogers, was just starting a record label called Silver Fox, and they flew me down to Nashville. I was with them for four or five years, but still no album. All these albums were set to come out and didn’t come out.
After finally breaking out in the 2000s, you established yourself as an interpreter of songs. What do you bring to a song? How do you make something familiar sound like you? Or is that even something you’re thinking about at this point?
That isn’t something that I plan or set out to do. When I hear the song and start to sing it, that’s just the way I sing it. The thing that makes it new is that it’s different. I doubt I could come up with anything new. But it is different, and so I need for people to change their attitude about it. That was one of the things with Interpretations, my British rock album. The thing that helped me the most recording that album was that I didn’t know most of the songs. I had never heard most of them. They didn’t play them a lot on Black radio. So all I did was just lift the lyrics and sing them the want I wanted to.
Michael Stevens was brilliant, and he did the arrangement of “Love, Reign O’er Me” by The Who that I did for the Kennedy Center Honors. When I went to rehearsal, they got ready to go into the tune, and I told him, “I can’t sing it like that.” And he said, “Well, sing it the way you want to sing it.” So I sang the song to him a cappella, and he took a break and after a while came back and redirected everybody. He’d been listening to this song for thirty years — since he was a teenager! — and I’d only been listening to it for three or four days.
Something similar happened on the Bob Dylan album, Things Have Changed. We had Bob Dylan’s guitarist, Larry Campbell, playing on it, and he had a ball. He said, “I’ve wanted to hear these a different way for seventeen years!” Because he knew about the inner workings of each one of the tunes, more than any of us, he started to find clever little things, probably, that he had always wanted to play, and he played them for me.
How was working with these songs on Blackbirds different?
Working on this album was intimidating, in that I didn’t want to bastardize any of the songs or cast them off. I didn’t want to do anything to them just for the sake of doing something, you know? That was kind of daunting. But that’s the thing that makes Steve [Jordan, producer] so important to me. When we develop an arrangement, what I usually do is I’ll get my keyboard player to go in the direction that I want to take the song.
When Steve hears me with the piano, singing it the way I want to sing it, that speaks to him to put something else in there. He no longer hears Billie Holiday’s interpretation of “Strange Fruit,” and he arranges what he hears in his head, not what the other record was. I’m not going to change any of the notes — I’m just going to put them in different places and say them differently, so you can’t follow that trajectory that you know from the record. It has to be different.
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