We’re back again to start the week with some things we’ve been listening to. Charles leads off, then David, and then our usual reading recommendations.
GloRilla – “Yeah Glo!” (single, 2024)
The latest single from one of the young queens of Memphis rap, “Yeah Glo!” is the kind of hard, spare track that’s been rattling Bluff City speakers since the days of Gangsta Pat and Gangsta Boo. Co-produced by Go Grizzly (an Atlanta-based producer whose signature “Go Grizz!” at the beginning will still sound Memphis-centric to anyone familiar with Glo’s hometown), “Yeah Glo!” is two-and-a-half minutes of snapping brags and smirking rejoinders. GloRilla rides across the shuddering beat with playful syncopation, wrapping the rich huskiness of her voice around bent syllables and the occasional punching triplet. With its brash energy and pulsing hook, “Yeah Glo!” is ready to tear the club up whether in the 901 or anywhere else. - CH
English Teacher – “R&B” (from This Could Be Texas, 2024)
There’s been a lot written, spoken, and sung about the ways that Black artists (especially women) are assumed to make certain kinds of music because of their race (and gender). But I’ve rarely heard the issue addressed with such spitfire spirit as on this track by Leeds-based indie-rock youngsters English Teacher. The group’s frontwoman, Lily Fontaine, folds together a response to her sense of isolation as a woman of color in the indie-rock scene with a discussion of her frustration trying to please a former partner. With Nicholas Eden’s bass supporting Fontaine as she processes, the song rises to the climactic assertion that “despite appearances, I haven’t got the voice for R&B.” When paired with her earlier admission that she tried in order to live up to others’ expectations, this becomes a “laughing to keep from crying” moment matched perfectly by the careening rise of guitar, bass, and drums and the conversational, double-tracked vocals that favorably recalls the nervous noise of Gang of Four. “If I have stuff to write, then why don’t I just write it for me?” she asks. Here’s hoping that she continues to share it with us. – CH
Brit Taylor – “Kentucky Blue” (from Kentucky Bluegrassed, 2024)
Brit Taylor released a very fine album in 2023 called Kentucky Blue, which mixed rock-solid songwriting with roots-minded performances that recalled the heydays of Kathy Mattea, Pam Tillis, Patty Loveless, and many others. She’s returned to the album already, releasing the new Kentucky Bluegrassed, which – as it indicates – pairs 8 of the album’s songs with the acoustic instrumentation and arrangements of Taylor’s birthplace. They were pretty close to begin with, of course, but - particularly on the swelling swoon of the title track - the new versions sure do feel like home. Opening with Stuart Duncan’s plaintive fiddle, “Kentucky Blue” finds Taylor using one of country’s favorite lyrical conceits – geographical puns – to deliver a beautiful and heartbreaking ballad about lost love. Like the best such songs, which gain deeper resonance when delivered with comforting empathy of players like Duncan and dobroist Rob Ickes, “Kentucky Blue” is both about the sadness of what’s gone and the sweetness of what’s remembered. It’s nothing that hasn’t been done for decades, of course, in Kentucky and elsewhere. But, when it’s done this well, I’m not going to complain. Instead, I’m going to turn it up. - CH
Swamp Dogg – “Mess Under That Dress” (from Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street, 2024)
Jerry Williams will tell you that he’s always been country. Even way back in the day, when the iconoclastic Virginia-born singer/songwriter/producer released the mind-blowing albums that introduced his Swamp Dogg alter ego to an unsuspecting world, Williams always incorporated country songs and sounds into his psychedelic-soul mix. (And he co-wrote “She’s All I Got,” which became an award-winning smash for Johnny Paycheck.) He recorded a long-unreleased country album back in the 1980s, which included the all-timer “He Don’t Like Country Music (And He Hates Little Kids),” and he’s long talked about both his country roots and the larger centrality of Black musicians and listeners to country’s history. In recent years, as the Dogg has achieved an unexpected prominence that feels less like a comeback than it does overdue recognition, he’s added some new chapters to the story. The title of his country-forward 2020 album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, and its cowboy-outfit cover photo, feels like deserved shade to those who came late to his party.
But still, the announcement that he made a bluegrass album – Blackgrass, that is, and damn right – comes as a wondrous surprise. (The fact that it’s his debut for Oh Boy Records, the label started by John Prine, who Swamp Dogg famously covered and later collaborated with, makes it all the sweeter.) The first single, “Mess Under That Dress,” is a joyous barnstormer, with Williams’ vocals hopping and soaring above the able backing of the top-flight players backing him on the project. The convergence with other spring releases – including that one, of course, but more importantly this one, also released on Oh Boy – is making this feel like a true season of Black country recognition and re-imagination. I’m so glad that the inimitable, inestimable Swamp Dogg is front and center in the mix. Yeehaw. - CH
Evan Nicole Bell – “Runaway Girl” (radio edit) (from Runaway Girl EP, 2024)
Evan Nicole Bell foregrounds her own electric guitar work throughout her debut EP, but my favorite moment is this seemingly guitar-less, insistently piano-forward version of “Runaway Girl.” Bell presents herself as someone losing sleep and sanity afraid that she’ll be found. Found out? Located or arrested, blamed or killed? Playing it close to the vest, Bell’s not saying beyond insisting that, whatever it is she’s done, “I did it for love.” Her voice is frantic, increasingly desperate, her whole life reduced to peeking through blinds for the danger she’s sure is arriving momentarily. That pounding, circling piano lick never actually changes but it feels louder and louder and louder, closer and closer, ready to pounce. –DC
Wonder Women of Country – “Won’t Be Worried Long” (single, 2024)
The Wonder Women of Country are Kelly Willis, Brennen Leigh and Melissa Carper, but the second release from the trio’s forthcoming EP (I wrote about their first single here) evokes an entire history of country wonder women. This time out it’s Carper singing lead, pulling out her old Loretta Lynn records because she’s feeling lonesome and needs a friend. “I’m worried now,” she sings, to a quiet string band arrangement that highlights Leigh on mandolin. “But I won’t be worried long.” Of course, that title line nods back to another old record, “Worried Man Blues” from 1930, as well as the worried wonder women who sang and played on it, Sara and Maybelle Carter. A. P. Carter awarded himself the songwriting credit though the song was clearly of African-American origin. Fitting, then, that the Carters’ “Worried Man Blues” lyric about a train “16 coaches long” has now been echoed by new country wonder woman Beyonce in “16 Carriages.” The circle remains unbroken. –DC
Ink Spots and Ella Fitzgerald – “Cow Cow Boogie (Cuma-Ti-Yi-Yi-Ay)” b/w Ella Fitzgerald – “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street” (single, 1944)
As you may have heard, “Texas Hold ‘Em” just made Beyonce the first black woman ever to debut atop a Billboard country chart. What you may not know is that “First Lady of Jazz” Ella Fitzgerald came this close (My thumb and forefinger are basically touching, people!) to accomplishing the same feat exactly eighty years ago this week. As I wrote here last time, Louis Jordan became the first black artist ever to top any “country” countdown when his “Ration Blues” hit #1 on the “Most Played Juke Box Folk Records” chart, Billboard’s only “hillbilly”-including chart at the time, in the magazine’s March 8, 1944, issue. Only two weeks later, Fitzgerald debuted on the same chart with “When My Sugar Walks Down the Street” but only at #2 (behind Floyd Tillman’s “They Took the Stars Out of Heaven)”. While its melody is right in line with the sort of ballads crooned by mid-century C&W acts, “When My Sugar…” isn’t a record that reads particularly “country” these days. Switch the horns for fiddles, though, and it’s easy enough to imagine the song (written by and originally a hit for country-pop pioneer Gene “Voice of the Southland” Austin) being sung by Tommy Duncan or Jimmy Wakely, Merle Travis or Red Foley, Floyd Tillman or Eddy Arnold. When her sweetie kisses her, Ella gushes, “I sure stay kissed.”
In a telling juxtaposition, the flip side to “When My Sugar…” was Ella’s duet with vocal-group legends the Ink Spots, titled “Cow Cow Boogie”—a number that most definitely reads country. “He's got a knocked-out western accent with a Harlem touch,” Ella sings. She’s clearly delighted by the cowboy’s “ditty he learned in the city” and what we might as well call his crossover potential. “He’s what you call a swing half-breed,” she clarifies just in case you weren’t following along. Ella and the Spots were covering a big hit here from a couple years prior, by white swing bandleader Freddie Slack and teen vocalist Ella Mae Morse, but both versions of the song explicitly celebrate a no-fences synthesis with loping piano rhythms, jazzy yodels, singing-cowboy imagery, and a crossing-the-color-line narrative. Indeed, Slack and Morse had already crossed that line themselves, musically, when their “Mr. Five by Five” had topped Billboard’s contemporaneous “race records” chart, the “Harlem Hit Parade,” in 1942. Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots’ “Cow Cow Boogie” would top the same chart. These Jim-Crow-era popularity charts often made no sense, even in terms of their own segregated logic. But they also make perfect sense: What we now call country music has always been a much bigger country. –DC
Reading recommendations:
-Jenny Toomey on digital streaming and AI, for Fast Company
-Nadine Smith on the best ‘70s country songs, for UDiscoverMusic.com
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