Tag: soul

LISTEN: Yola, “Hold On”

Posted on by Editor

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

Editor’s Note: A portion of profits from sales of the track will be donated to MusicCares and National Bailout Collective.

Photo credit: Joseph Ross

On ‘Blackbirds,’ Bettye LaVette Honors Black Women Who Inspire Her (Part 2 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

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.

(Editor’s note: Read part one of our Artist of the Month interview here.)

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.

(Editor’s note: Read the first half of our Artist of the Month interview with Bettye LaVette.)

Photo credit: Joseph A. Rosen

 

How Bettye LaVette Finally Learned to Let The Songs Sound Like Her (Part 1 of 2)

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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.

(Editor’s Note: Read part two of our interview with Bettye LaVette.)

Photo credit: Joseph A. Rosen

WATCH: Matt Rollings, “Wade in the Water” (Featuring The War and Treaty & The Blind Boys of Alabama)

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Matt Rollings
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Wade in the Water” (Featuring The War and Treaty and The Blind Boys of Alabama)
Album: Matt Rollings Mosaic
Release Date: August 14, 2020
Label: Dualtone Records

In Their Words: “Michael and Tanya [of The War and Treaty] and I had decided to record ‘Take Me to the Mardi Gras,’ the Paul Simon classic, for the record. We spent a few hours — Michael, Tanya, Jay Bellerose and I — and wound up with an amazing take of the song and I was thrilled. After listening to the playback of ‘Take Me to the Mardi Gras,’ I spontaneously asked if they’d be willing to try something else. I had been nursing an idea about the old spiritual, ‘Wade in the Water.’ My first real jazz piano influence, Ramsey Lewis, recorded it on his 1966 album of the same name, and I’ve always loved it. After hearing what Michael and Tanya had done with the Paul Simon song, I was dying to hear them sing it.

“I printed the lyrics out and we went for it. This is the first and only take we did of the song. It was so good that we didn’t even try it a second time. After adding acoustic bass, it still didn’t feel quite complete… some background vocals were needed. I thought, ‘Who would the ultimate singer(s) be for this?’ It occurred to me that a real-deal gospel quartet would be perfect and The Blind Boys of Alabama would be the ideal candidate. Somehow I was able to catch them while they were in Muscle Shoals, recording on another project. So I drove down there from Nashville on the appointed day and recorded them on the track. They brought just the magic that was needed. The way they blended with Michael and Tanya is amazing… like they were in the same room singing together. After that, the song was done.” — Matt Rollings

Photo credit: Michael Wilson

The String – Adia Victoria

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

Adia Victoria taps the lineage and resolve of the early Blues queens with a sound made for “the now” on her 2019 album, Silences.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS

Victoria’s journey from South Carolina to Atlanta and then to Nashville reads like no other artist of recent memory. She works hard to set herself apart from the institutional trappings of the indie music business. Critically acclaimed and sharply thoughtful, this made for a fascinating and challenging conversation.

Photo credit: Daniel Jackson at Newport Folk Fest 2019 for BGS

Artist of the Month: Bettye LaVette

Posted on by Editor

The very definition of persistence, Bettye LaVette is among the newest inductees into the Blues Music Hall of Fame, yet she pulls her material from nearly every imaginable corner of music. In addition to her distinguished R&B output that dates to the 1960s, she has interpreted the greats of folk and country music, ranging from Bob Dylan and Patty Griffin to George Jones and Dolly Parton. Now the five-time Grammy nominee is honoring many of the Black women who inspire her with Blackbirds, a collection that takes its name from the Beatles standard. However, as LaVette has stated before, Paul McCartney wrote the song about a Black woman (as British slang refers to a girl as a “bird”). In LaVette’s rendition, though, she is the one who’s been waiting… and waiting… and waiting for this moment to arrive. And, in a specific allusion to this moment in history, to be free.

Set for release on the venerated Verve label, Blackbirds alights on August 28, though the Detroit-raised diva has already issued a stunning rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” as well as Nina Simone’s “I Hold No Grudge” and Sharon Robinson’s “One More Song.” (Songs recorded by Ruth Brown, Lou Rawls, Dinah Washington, and jazz vocalist Nancy Wilson are featured on the album, too.) Read our two-part interview — part one here, part two here — with this candid and compelling entertainer, who’s now based in New Jersey and enjoy our BGS Essentials playlist of August’s Artist of the Month, Bettye LaVette.

 

On These 10 Recordings, Willie Nelson and Black Musicians Share a Creative Vision

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Willie Nelson has long been not just an American musical treasure, but an iconic figure with far more appeal across racial and generational lines than often recognized. At 87, he’s achieved a perfect marriage of artistry and commercial success few have in any idiom. While certainly a country legend, and the only person in the genre to ever achieve a Top 10 hit in seven different decades, he’s also collaborated with an astonishing number of artists across a wide swath of musical styles and approaches. He’s penned numerous anthems that have been covered by jazz, blues, R&B, soul, rock and pop vocalists, and this month he released his 70th studio album, First Rose of Spring.

Nelson’s never been afraid to stand up for social justice, even when those words weren’t part of the popular vernacular. Early in Charley Pride’s career, Nelson actually gave him a kiss on stage in Louisiana, quieting an audience that was allowing some of its more verbally racist louts to heckle Pride on stage. He’s always included Black musicians in Farm Aid concerts, had one of his biggest albums ever (Stardust) produced by a Black man (Booker T. Jones, who raved about Nelson in his autobiography) and has maintained a friendship with Snoop Dogg since long before Lil Nas X appeared on the scene. He also enjoyed a very close relationship with Ray Charles, who Nelson lamented he could never beat at chess.

He’s in the same company with people like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bill Monroe, whose output, personality and consistent brilliance has endured despite changes in production, audience preferences, and many other variables that can negatively affect the careers of popular musicians. Part of the reason for that longevity is Nelson’s undeniable skill in multiple areas. He’s penned a host of songs that are every bit as epic as those from the pre-rock canon he often samples. Had he only written “Crazy,” “Funny How Time Slips Away,” or “On the Road Again,” that would have been enough for one lifetime. He’s also a very credible singer, highly effective in pacing and telling a story.

Nelson has consistently embraced and operated in other genres by neither sacrificing his musical individuality and integrity, nor seeming to pander or simply attempting to seem hip. Actually, he’s the epitome of that term, though in a vastly different way from someone like Miles Davis, who was known as much for fashion and fine cars as musical innovation. The fact that Nelson has appeared in more than 30 films just adds weight to his universal appeal.

Trying to pick the best of Nelson’s numerous collaborations with great Black singers and musicians is a tricky thing. One could easily select 10 one day, then come back and tab a different 10 another time. But these are some (far from all) personal favorites. They are ranked in order only by year, nothing more. We picked a mix of singles and LPs, but it’s just a small sample of the many wonderful things he’s done. By no means would we claim this is the definitive list for Willie Nelson’s collaborations with African American artists, but it’s a good sampler and an indicator of how widespread his impact and willingness to work with various musicians actually extends.

SINGLES AND ALBUM CUTS

“Man With The Blues” with Buckwheat Zydeco
From Five Card Stud (1994)

The greatest zydeco master since Clifton Chenier teams with Nelson for a smoky, delightful romp that sees Buckwheat Zydeco also find a comfort zone vocally and instrumentally. As is always the case, Nelson easily works himself into the arrangement, and the two sound right at home in this setting.

“Night Life” with B.B. King
From Deuces Wild (1997)

The King of the Blues sounds happy and engaged on one of Nelson’s earliest compositions, providing some taut guitar licks and outstanding lead and harmony vocals while Nelson doesn’t try to match the improvisational edge, instead easing into a nice zone that’s part complimentary, part quite different in style and sound, but ideal for the situation.

“Still Is Still Moving to Me” with Toots & the Maytals
From True Love (2004)

Toots brings some Jamaican soul and lots of energy to this collaboration, while Willie seems a bit more energetic as the song works its way through. This is one of many performances that earned this LP the Reggae Grammy, and Nelson had such a great time he made a follow-up of his own and paid Toots and company back by having them guest on it.

“Busted” with Ray Charles
From Genius & Friends (2004)

I know “Seven Spanish Angels” was a number 1 hit and more people remember it fondly, but this late redo of an early Charles hit has equal doses of warmth, reflection and edge in both voices. Charles was certainly not at his vocal peak, but he found a way to make his treatment effective, while Willie as always proves the ideal partner in multiple ways.

“Family Bible” with The Blind Boys of Alabama
From Take the High Road (2011)

The album title indicates precisely what Nelson does here, singing with verve and fire while the Blind Boys bring some of their characteristic Golden Age gospel energy and intensity to this rendition that’s alternately wistful, memorable and poignant. This composition dates back to Nelson’s late ’50s catalog, while he was trying to get heard as a songwriter.

“Grandma’s Hands” with Mavis Staples
From To All the Girls (2013)

Mavis Staples has one foot in the church and the other in the street with her customarily powerhouse voice setting the tone. Nelson manages not to get overridden or canceled out in the process as they do their own special version of the Bill Withers hit, which the Staples Singers cut for their 1973 Stax LP, Be What You Are.

“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” with Charles Lloyd and the Marvels
From I Long to See You (2015)

The great Memphis jazz man Charles Lloyd and his newest group provide the backing for what comes off as a cross between a nightmarish vision and a marvelous revelation, sung in emphatic fashion by Nelson and punctuated by Lloyd adding some nifty licks underneath and the Marvels adding some musical punch.

ALBUMS

Country Man (2005)

A follow-up to his appearance on Toots’ LP the year before, Nelson goes full bore into reggae territory. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but all of it is performed with enthusiasm and joy. Nelson vocally handles the skittering reggae rhythms well, and on the disc’s best songs surpasses what he did on True Love.

Two Men and the Blues (2008)

Wynton Marsalis as a youthful prodigy had a lot of negative things to say about a lot of things back in the ’70s and early ’80s, and country music wasn’t spared in his broadsides. But fast forward all these years later and his gorgeous trumpet solos (both full and muted) made a great musical partner and support system for Nelson, who by now was so familiar with pre-rock, blues, and even traditional jazz tunes and rhythms that it was super smooth sailing from first note to the end. Also recommended: the DVDs Live From Jazz at Lincoln Center with Wynton Marsalis (2008) and Willie Nelson & Wynton Marsalis Play the Music of Ray Charles (2009).

Here We Go Again: Celebrating the Genius of Ray Charles (2011)

Marsalis and Norah Jones joined Nelson to pay homage to his friend Ray Charles, doing wonderful renditions of both hits and more obscure Charles tunes before a rousing audience. Nelson sounded especially energetic throughout, while Marsalis, who’s often been accused of being more technically expert than emotionally powerful, delivered crushing solos and accompaniment, and Jones was equal parts alluring and engaging. As always, Nelson comes across as sincere and genuine, a marvelous mix of down-home sensibility and attitude.

Photos: Pamela Springsteen

WATCH: The War and Treaty, “Five More Minutes”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The War and Treaty
Hometown: Nashville, Tennessee
Song: “Five More Minutes”
Album: Hearts Town
Release Date: September 25, 2020
Label: Rounder Records

In Their Words: “[This] song’s saying, ‘If I have five more minutes to love you, it’s going to be the best damn five minutes of my life.’ … After years of falling in and out of financial and mental depression, I had finally had enough. I was ready to take my own life. But in my darkest moment, where I was ready right then and there to end it all, my wife Tanya asked one last thing of me: ‘Just give me five more minutes. Stay with me. Just five more minutes to love you.’ And something in her eyes, something in her hands convinced me to give her that five more minutes.” — Michael Trotter, The War and Treaty

Photo credit: David McClister

Indigo Girls Expand “Country Radio” With Black, Brown and Queer Musicians

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Hollywood, the 2020 Netflix series from director-screenwriter Ryan Murphy, is a resplendent show dripping in Art Deco that does not wholly reimagine Los Angeles’ golden era, but rather subtly inserts a quintessential question: “What if?”

What if Hollywood hadn’t been as… ___-ist? (Sexist, racist, misogynist, ageist, etc.) If one happens to be born into a region, a folkway, a culture, an art form that doesn’t include you, or that doesn’t quite love you back, one often doesn’t realize it until it’s too late. And then what? Do we, the rural, country-loving queers, wait around for our Ryan Murphy to reimagine the world to better include us? Not quite.

For Emily Saliers and Amy Ray of Indigo Girls — and, for that matter, almost each and every queer who has ever loved roots music — that “What if?” question is existential, but it also doesn’t matter. What if country music loved LGBTQ+ folks? The lyrics of “Country Radio,” a track off the duo’s sixteenth studio album, Look Long, tell it plainly: “But as far as these songs will take me/ Is as far as I’ll go/ I’m just a gay kid in a small town/ Who loves country radio.”

While curating the following playlist of their favorites from country music airwaves and songs they wish were included there, Saliers and Ray offer a quite simple solution actionable in each present moment: Be who you are, listen to the music that brings you joy, love who you love — and be anti-racist.

Emily Saliers: [I began with the idea:] What are the songs that I listened to that I latched onto, that sort of gave me a feeling of “I can’t get into this song [because of its heteronormativity], but I love this song so much”? One of the first songs that came to mind is “Mama’s Song” by Carrie Underwood. 

I should preface this by saying, I don’t expect that there can’t be heteronormative country songs, or that queer life has to be explicitly represented in songs, it’s not that. It’s the feeling of the way a song moves me emotionally, but then it stops me a little bit short of being able to fully experience it because of the language or the obvious implications of man and woman.

I love Carrie Underwood’s voice and she’s taken more of a harder, pop direction since “Mama’s Song,” but she sings this so beautifully. She’s talking to her mother, “He is good… he treats me like a real man should,” and yet the beauty of her song [is in] her telling her mom that’s she’s going to be okay. 

Amy Ray: For me it’s a little different because I never had the experience of feeling like I wish I could put myself in a song. I think it’s because, gender-wise, I always just related to the male singers. I kinda have that gender dysphoria, you know? [Chuckles] I have these filters that sort of make it my own — probably out of necessity, from growing up loving the Allman Brothers, Pure Prairie League, and Randy Travis so much. [Sings] “Amie, whatcha gonna do?” Pure Prairie League!

It’s very odd — Emily’s perspective on this is something I can understand, and I agree that it’s this weird disconnect with country music. We have to kind of acclimate it to ourselves, in some way, using some kind of trick in our minds. But I’ve always had that internal translator…

ES: Another example is Brett Young’s “In Case You Didn’t Know.” Now this is a song that you can listen to and fit your own queer life into it — as far as I remember it doesn’t have any gender pronouns. Then I watched the video and of course he’s singing to a woman who comes into the audience and he plays to her, alone. It’s a love song to his girlfriend — or wife or partner or whatever — so I could live in that song and think back to relationships and apply it in my own life, but then I watched the video and that door shut a little bit.

AR: I love Angaleena Presley, the Pistol Annies. Presley is such a great writer. “Better Off Red” is one of my favorite songs that she’s written… Honestly, if I hear songs, if I like it, I just put myself in it. I don’t really think about it or worry about it. It’s a survival mechanism from my youth, not that it’s the right thing to do. It’s built inside me.

…I thought you couldn’t be a country singer if you were gay and left-wing and a complete dyke. That made me feel more alienated than the songs themselves, that idea of its inaccessibility. Or, if you went to a show and you were sitting there in that audience, in the early days before it all kind of busted open, you would feel scared. Or judged. Or uncomfortable.

ES: Think about what a splash that song by Little Big Town, “Girl Crush,” had. Just the implication of a lesbian relationship or feelings! That song was a big hit, but it got people talking. [Probably] the majority of the people in this world lean more heteronormative, so they’re representing themselves in these songs. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. 

I wouldn’t want to listen to just albums that are for and by queer people, oh my god. No way! But we have to have them as part. I think about what an influence Ferron was, how much Amy and I love Ferron. When her first album came out, it was like, “Oh my gosh this is one of the best songwriters in the country and she’s queer!” I can’t describe how important it was to have an artist like that.

Even Lil Nas X, who had the number one hit forever-ever-ever with Billy Ray Cyrus. It’s awesome to know that he’s queer! And a guy like Young Thug, a rapper out of Atlanta, who’s not gender normative by any stretch, to me. It’s interesting. It’s good to have a mish mosh! It’s not that the majority of songwriters out there can’t be represented in their own songwriting, we just have to have ours, as well.

AR: [We] should add Amythyst Kiah. Amythyst is amazing.

[Racism] is the pivotal struggle of the Americana scene and the roots scene. How do you honor Black and Brown folks who want to be in this scene — and maybe some of them don’t even want to be in this scene because even Americana is rooted in questionable legacy. How much do people of color want to be immersed in that scene when it still feels so racist? Even the best parts of it. It’s a huge question to unwrap and it has to do with such a long history of where country music came from.

We stole the banjo and put it in our hillbilly music in the mountains and called it our own. We forgot all the stuff we learned from “our slaves,” you know? It’s crazy to me, if you think about the racist roots of where a lot of this comes from. Merging this racist legacy with this incredible populist music — music for the people, like Woody Guthrie, like the Carter Family. You get those two things bumping up against each other constantly, how do you entangle that and make this a space where it doesn’t matter what color you are? Where it doesn’t matter what your religious persuasion, or your political party, or your gender, or your sexual preference, or anything.

I think the way we deal with it is by all of us thinking all the time and being mindful of [that racist history]. And including [Black artists] in our playlists and touring with them. Some people are like, “What does it mean if you’re forcing this integration? Is it just going through the motions?” No! No, no, no.

ES: I’ll [echo] the things that Amy said, practically: Tour with Black musicians or Brown musicians or musicians who have not been able to feel that they’re welcome and make everybody welcome. Like Amythyst or Chastity Brown. Those are artists of color who have been discriminated against, who feel other-than in the world of their genres.

I think, first, we all — we white people, we people “of no color,” we “colorless” people — should dig deep, identify our own racism and how far it goes, how much we use it. Break it down, talk about it, identify it in each other. Really start from the core of things and hopefully act outwardly as a result of what we’ve dug through, inwardly. Try to heal and fix, you know? We’ve got to ask artists of color what their experience is like and why it’s like that. I’ve got to assume that there must be some Black artists, who if they hear a song from a white, country, roots singer about the freedom of driving down a dark, country road, they’re not going to feel the same way about the history of Black people down dark country roads. A lot of it is context and, as Amy says, there’s so much to be unraveled. But we are at a tipping point.

AR: Sister Rosetta Tharpe, I feel like there’s a lot of crossover, to me from that and the beginnings of early rock ‘n’ roll. That’s kind of what Elvis Presley was doing and borrowing from. I think about that sometimes, that territory. I like old recordings, like field recordings almost, of all the Alan Lomax type stuff he would collect. Field songs, prison songs. I think a lot of country writers have taken from that stuff, you know? 

I remember an interview with Kathleen Hanna that really resonated with me. She said, when they ask you who your favorite artists are, most of us name all these male artists. That’s who we can think of, because that’s who’s archived the best. Straight men, bands, and writers. If you sit down and really think about who you love and make a list of the women and the queer folks — this is what she was talking about, she wasn’t talking about color at the time or race or the social construct of race — and you take that list to your interviews and rattle off those names, you’ll be more honest, because you’ll be talking about who you really listen to and not just trying to remember [anyone] off the top of your head. 

People are so out of the habit — and so in the habit — of white supremacy that we don’t even know how to do the right things, just in our instincts. We have to learn, write it down, so we remember to do it.

Photo credit: Jeremy Cowart

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

LISTEN: The Sons of the Soul Revivers, “It Isn’t Safe”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Sons of the Soul Revivers
Hometown: Vallejo, California
Song: “It Isn’t Safe”
Album: Songs We’ll Always Sing: A Tribute to the Pilgrim Jubilees
Release Date: July 12, 2020
Label: Little Village Foundation

In Their Words: “Ever since I heard the album the Pilgrim Jubilees put out in 1973, the title is Don’t Let Him Down, I think I’ve gravitated especially to this song, ‘It Isn’t Safe.’ It was the last song on the ‘B’ side. And Cleve Graham, the leader of the Jubilees, shared with us the premise of that song. They were in Chicago, and Cleve said his brother Clay, who’s no longer with us, may he rest in peace, walked in and had a disgusted look on his face. Walking back from church, he’d seen two men attacking a lady. And Clay said, ‘You know what? It isn’t safe anywhere anymore.’ And he wrote the song.

“The message in it, from 1973 and here we are in 2020, and the message is still on point. The distrust of law enforcement, and law enforcement distrusts the public… we have yet to come to a common ground on how we can get along. I’m hoping and praying that this song will resonate with people in general. The lyric goes, ‘We should treat sin just like dirt, and with the broom of faith we should sweep it aside.’ I love that. It’s the only way we’re going to survive. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do to you, I declare that this is all you have to do. It isn’t safe….'” — James Morgan, The Sons of the Soul Revivers

Photo courtesy of the Sons of the Soul Revivers