Rev. Charlie Jackson: Oxford American Music Issue

I have an article in the current issue of the Oxford American about the Reverend Charlie Jackson, a gospel singer from Louisiana. This is the Oxford American's Ninth Annual Music Issue, which is (as always) dedicated to the music and musicians of the American South (a definition the editors interpret as broadly as possible). There aren't many places to find intelligent writing about popular music, but the OA is a reliable one -- and it's supplemented with a thoughtfully-compiled CD.

Instant gratification is available to less patient readers in the form of two video clips of Jackson performing on an Irish television show, I'm guessing in the 1990s. One of the clips features Jackson singing a version of "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" -- a song I discuss in some detail in my article (and below) -- with an ill-suited backup band that has no idea how to keep time, and a vocal quartet that sounds nice, if a little out of place. (Be forewarned: the song begins two minutes into the clip, after Jackson has endured a painful interview with his extremely condescending host.) There is also a clip of Jackson playing "Morning Train," solo, and an mp3 of one of his 'live' cassette recordings.

All of these performances are good, but none can match the work on God's Got It, a recent compilation of 45s recorded by Jackson in the 1970s -- available on CaseQuarter, a record label started a few years ago by Kevin Nutt. Nutt lives in Alabama, where he produces a radio program for New Jersey's WFMU called "Sinner's Crossroads" (click here for an MP3/podcast -- "Sinner's Crossroads" is well worth hearing).

***

"My mother is a fish."
--As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

As I was writing about "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus," an idea occurred to me that never found a place in the article . . . about the song's plausible connection to the standard "Catfish Blues," and its familiar refrain (I wish I was a catfish, swimmin' in the deep blue sea . . . have all you women fishin' after me), which has appeared in various forms over the years, under various titles: first as "Jim Jackson's Kansas City Blues," recorded in 1928 by Jim Jackson and, later that year, as "Kansas City Blues" by William Harris; as "Catfish Blues" by Robert Petway in 1941; "Deep Blue Sea Blues" by Tommy McClennan, also in 1941; finally as "Rolling Stone" by Muddy Waters in 1950, before becoming "Catfish Blues" again when Jimi Hendrix recorded it in 1967 (and so on . . . ).

The Rev. Jackson's "Wrapped Up and Tangled Up in Jesus" does not include the familiar refrain about women, and is performed in a different style -- but it retains the singer who wishes he was a fish, and who imagines himself being caught, reeled in, and submitting to a fate of ecstasy and oblivion. Of course Jackson's vision is of a spiritual, rather than earthly, oblivion in which ecstasy must be preceded by pain and remorse -- to the exclusion of fleshly indulgence. I can't help wondering, then, if the Reverend's song was a pious (even self-righteous) retort to the rambling, rolling stone ethos of the comparatively lackadaisical secular guitar-picker . . .

The Blues Going On and On (Part One): Horace Silver in the Netherlands

What solace is there for me in these strange reverberations, in these unholy echoes, what relief? If in moments of despair I am drawn to the blues because integral to the music (I have supposed) is a response to every cry, an answer to every pronounced existential appeal, at what point will I tire of its evermore mechanical replies -- of these inspired visions that are in fact only shadows of a sun that has long since set?

What to make of my recent, chance discovery -- of Horace Silver, performing on television in the Netherlands nearly half a century ago?

Anyone with a basic grasp of television history, which is to say, virtually anyone who has watched television, even indifferently, should be able to situate this clip in the late-1950s or early-1960s merely by looking at it. Something in its high contrast black and white is synonymous with our perception of the era, and lends Silver's performance the aura of an authentic artifact. How much it must tell us about our past, we suppose, which is to say the phase of collective memory preserved visually in high contrast black and white. Yet the clip wasn't produced as a document of history or even as a document of Silver's performance, but as a performance of its own in which the music would relinquish its precedence to the audience, and to the audience's reception of the music -- as well as to images of individual musicians, and the manner in which they perform. This is not happenstance, given that the backs of Silver and his band have been turned deliberately away from the people who are listening to them, so that the band -- and the process of watching it -- will be captured in a single camera shot. Meanwhile the camera tends to focus on either one musician at a time -- instead of the group as a whole -- or on clusters of individual audience members, at the sake of depicting either the band or the audience as an integrated collective.

The audience, in fact, or the presumed audience, I should say -- a finite group of spectators who in 1959 were assembled in a studio-theater in the Netherlands and saw five musicians playing their instruments -- is ultimately succeeded by a different, more abstract kind of audience -- one not assembled at the time of filming -- who would experience the performance only later, in the relative isolation of its respective homes. Yet the Europeans for whom this clip was intended, who lived within broadcast range of the television station that commissioned it and saw the clip only once, presumably within a few weeks or months of its production, represent a far more integrated body than the world wide web users who (in my case) would not be born for another twenty years but who can watch the clip now as often as they like on their so-called personal computers.

What, though, does this tell us about Silver and his music? Most of what I've said is self-evident. Modern technology has permanently disrupted the relationship between those who devise and those who receive forms of expression once considered immediate. Merely lamenting this disruption will do nothing to reverse its course, nor would such a reversal necessarily be advantageous were it even possible. For the moment, it seems we instead have an opportunity to reconsider those forms -- such as jazz -- that rely on immediacy as their determining factor. The viewer who watches the clip of "Senor Blues" may be justified in regarding it as immediate, in some sense, as an arguably more vivid display of jazz improvisation than an audio recording -- but only within the context of this immediacy as an artifact of yet another technology. The clip didn't simply happen . . . and I wonder how much of its success I can honestly attribute to circumstance, the element so often prized as vital to jazz expression, providing its circumstances were highly controlled and externally manipulated by a group of producers, advertisers, and executives. (Surely there are few scenarios less conducive to the often-professed objective of improvisational freedom than the prescribed, indeed programmed, formatting of television.) So when I assume that Horace Silver's music offers each musician a chance to express himself fully while contributing to the advancement of the work as a whole, I should bear in mind that the camera is enforcing (and possibly even leading me to) my assumption by zooming in on the musicians' faces, one at a time, as they play both solo and as an ensemble. And then if I admire the sweat glistening on the musicians' faces as evidence of their dedication and of the intensity of their efforts, I may likewise consider whether their sweat is only the product of unusually bright lights necessitated by the filming. Or is a hot lamp still a hot lamp?

At the end of the clip, Silver retrieves a handkerchief from the lid of the piano and begins mopping his brow while he bows in recognition to the camera. The studio audience obliges him with applause and he smiles at the camera knowingly, as if the handkerchief, which emerges from the piano in a single almost organic movement, was an inspired, dramatic flourish added specifically for my benefit.

This is the first of what will likely be a three-post series. The second post will consider the relevance of T.S. Adorno's infamous excoriation of jazz within the context of Horace Silver's eternal life on YouTube. The third post will examine Cecil Taylor as a possible counterpoint to Adorno's critique. I haven't written the second or third posts yet, so they probably won't appear for a while.