What Texas Music Really Is
selected music columns from Buddy Magazine; copyright 2009
Cover blurbs:
“Very good listener and very perceptive. I wish there were
more like you.” – Lloyd Maines
“Yours is a voice that at times reaches out gently and turns
my face back around to where I should be looking. Thank you for that.” - Nathan
Hamilton
“I really, really appreciate the careful consideration and
thoughtfulness you put into your writing. It’s refreshing to read an articulate
perspective and response to the music, as opposed to just a regurgitation of
press materials. Yours is the kind of writing that I used to soak up when I was
teenager, and would send me running to the store to explore that music on my
own. So thanks for maintaining a real voice. – Danny Schmidt
“You are one of the best advocates we have, and I thank you
for your non-materialism, your selfless patronage of the arts . . .”- Jeanie
Perkins
“I love the way your mind works, your interpretation of
life, and the way you communicate your perspective.” - Tiffany Shea
“His knowledge of music and the music business is astounding
, , , a real professional and
intellectual.” – Michael “Rockzilla” Johnson
“ . . . Eudora Welty of Texas music.” - Candance Robison
“I’m just drunk enough to tell you that you’re my
most-admired person in Texas music.” – anonymous
Excerpt:
Black dirt mixed with sweat fills the tiny cuts on your
fingers. Your back aches without release in the cotton fields, where the rows
are long and dusty and the first blues notes danced in the heat.
In the old mountains where Celtic music began to become
American music, vague feelings of isolation and inevitability danced with the
changing of the seasons.
In the dark of a long night lit by the moon through an open
window, and perhaps in the one-room church on a Sunday morning, we danced with
one another and we prayed for imaginary sins to be forgiven.
These were among the kinds of spiritual places where people
created the roots of our best music. Good music comes from many places, but
these are the places that call me tonight. In the landscapes and in the
yearnings of the Celtic and African peoples who could lost themselves – and
find themselves again – in the soundscapes that are, at the same time, as
simple and complicated as the at-once real and mythical South. It is easy to
write that most of this nation’s most meaningful art – including music – has
risen from the fundamentalist South. It is easy to write that this art is most
often dearly personal.
The acoustic blues, as a musical form, comes from the
country. The blues got a little more complicated, a little less clean, in the
city. So did the kind of country-folk music I invoke here, although in its revival
today it is, perhaps, less of a novelty than acoustic blues.
Neither kind of music is, by today’s cynical standards,
sophisticated. Which isn’t a problem for people with open minds.
Listen to the stories in the acoustic guitar from the cotton
field style. Perhaps Lightnin’ Hopkins on Blues in My Bottle, or Blind Willie
Johnson on the older “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.”
Listen to the stories in the fiddle (sometimes called the
devil’s instrument, because it’s so hard to master) from the mountains. Perhaps
Stuart Duncan on Dolly Parton’s “Little Sparrow” or “Mountain Angel.” Or to any
number of Texas players.
Listen to the layers of complexity filtered through the
Gospel of Sin and Redemption.
And listen to the unsophisticated voices sharing deep
passions: Parton’s sweet vulnerability and Hopkins’ raw perseverance, among
many examples.
There can be a kinship of the guitar and the fiddle, played
the way they can be played, and of the voices of our most soulful singers. It
is a kinship -–a union of meaning, if not blood – that asks more questions than
we can ever answer. And it is the questions that move us, that make us dance.
Answers too often urge us to stand still.
It is the questions that move us.
Let me write it one more time: It is the questions that move
us. We may see movement, just for a moment, as our own spiritual seeking, a
search for purpose or validation. For a place to belong. It is a popular
pastime again today. And it is, perhaps, nothing more, nor less, than seeking the
truest stories of our own lives in the strangest of lands: Song, Inspiration,
What Was, Love, Joy and Pleasure, Meditation, Tragedy, Memory, Subjectivity,
Comedy, Fate, and Dance.
These are the dozen provinces of the classical muses, whose
roads we travel when we listen to meaningful music. We journey long, and come
to a crossroad from time to time, where the devil lurks in a ramshackle tavern
hoping to buy another soul. We ply him with drinks and play him one sad song
after another on the jukebox, and wish him well as he nods, momentarily, and we
waltz out the door.
The best music is direct and uncluttered, from the heart. No
more complicated than it must be to keep one foot moving ahead of the other.
Ultimately, as we leave the devil nodding at the bar, we
realize that the blues and the folk side of country music are the music of
optimism.
The blues dance in the heat.
Isolation and inevitability dance with the changing of the
seasons.
We dance with one another in the dark of a long night, even
when we are apart.
It is the lyric – our limited language – which sometimes
turns music into poetry. And it is poetry that tries best, and almost always
fails, to put into words the way we feel.
