Play Traditional Cajun Music

I’m not a flag-waver and never have been, but I don’t mind saying this: The United States are home to some of the greatest music traditions in the world.  I came to particularly appreciate this while traveling in France.  They’ve got trad music in Brittany, a bit of Basque music down in the Basque country, and some authentically Parisian styles, but most of the rest is just ‘European’ — a couple thousand years of influence blended together into no particular regional style.  Here in the States, we have two great things going for folk music: immigrant populations from around the world, and a huge country with a high degree of geographic isolation.  It’s a perfect recipe for diverse and distinct musical styles to emerge.  So we get Cape Breton stuff in New England, Scots-Irish influenced old-time in Appalachia, African spirituals in the Southeast, Cajun music in Louisiana, Native American styles throughout the plains, Tex-Mex conjunto in the Southwest, Hawaiian guitar on the islands, to say nothing of jazz, the blues, rock and roll, swing, and on and on.  If you can’t find traditional American-born music that you like, then you truly haven’t tried very hard.

Which means that exploring American folk music can easily be a lifetime pursuit, and is for a lot of people.  It’s as deep a rabbit hole as you care to make it.  You can casually pick up a Smithsonian Folkways compilation and skim the surface of a lot of things, or you can spend the rest of your life in East Kentucky learning everything there is to know about a handful of particular musicians.

As for Cajun music, I’ve only barely started dipping into it.  I’ve long been aware of it, always liked the bits of which I was aware, but never really put my toes very far into the water.  That started to change for me in France, of all places.  On a night out in Paris, I ended up at a punk club dancing to the sounds of Sarah Savoy and the New Francadians.  They do their share of traditional Cajun, but also cross into the classic country music that I’ve been performing the last few years.  But instead of Hank Williams, it was Hank Williams translated into Cajun French.  The Parisian punks loved it, and I did, too.

So I did some homework.  I already had some of the real 1920s and 1930s vintage Cajun from the early days of recording: bands like the Hackberry Ramblers, scratchy old recordings with no bass tones and indistinct vocals.  So I decided to fast-forward to the folk revival, and picked up The Balfa Brothers Play Traditional Cajun Music.  While the title may lack creativity, the music more than makes up for it.  It is, without question, dance music.  The rhythms are smooth and slippery, the vocals pained and unrestrained, the accordion rich and booming.  It has quickly become one of my favorite albums, both to listen and dance to.

I don’t know how far down the Cajun rabbit hole I’ll venture.  As with old-time music, it’s bottomless. But if you’re looking to dip in, this album is about the best place to start that I can imagine.

The Index Masters

I’m not typically one for nostalgia, and I’m particularly unsympathetic to 80s musical nostalgia.  Folks, the 80s were not a good time for music.  Vacuum tubes gave way to transistors and spawned a million horrible sounding guitars.  Cheap commodity synths made it possible for every kid who ever took a piano class to be a rock star.  (Keytar, anyone?)  The Michael Jacksons of the world turned the Motown sound into watered-down bubblegum pop.  Aside from east bay punk and harDCore, there’s not much music from the 1980s that interests me much.  I don’t want to relive the Debbie Gibson and Tiffany era, thank you.

But then, one night in the early 1990s, watching late night television, I received a broadcast from 1982:

Undeniably 1980s.  Crazy analog drum machines.  Guys in dark suits playing keyboards.  Crappy transistor-filtered guitar.  But somehow blended with spaghetti western themes and narratives and turned into something else altogether.  So I checked out The Index Masters, which included the original 1980 Wall of Voodoo EP and a bunch of previously unreleased live material.  A totally deadpanned version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire”.  Covers of the theme songs from “Hang ‘Em High” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”.  The industry shrugged and called it New Wave, which was early 80s short-hand for “What the hell is this supposed to be?”

The Talking Heads they are not.  If Wikipedia can be believed, Wall of Voodoo was born from Acme Soundtracks, an attempt by Stan Ridgeway to make money writing film music.  A failed attempt at writing film music.  It’s hard to imagine what sort of films Wall of Voodoo would have fit into.  “Cowboys vs. Robots: The Musical” maybe?  There’s a genre there still waiting to be exploited.  (Or, crap, maybe Will Smith already did that.)  I don’t know why it works.  It’s like Wall of Voodoo tried to be kitsch, but they were just too weird to succeed at it, so they ended up something else.  Something spooky and good.

Now, by the force of circumstance
And by the belt that holds up my pants
I’m held responsible
For this idea that never had a chance

Jackson and Anya had been doing the duet singing thing for a little while before they got picked up by the folks from the Crooked Road, Southwest Virginia’s juggernaut of cultural tourism. Carter Fold, the Floyd Country Store, Olen Gardner’s workshop, and a bucketload of string bands intended to showcase the authentic sound of the Virginia Appalachian mountains. This caused at least some anguish for Jackson: the thing is, he’s not from the Appalachians. He’s from Portland, Oregon. Like me, he cut his teeth as a punk musician, and has the tattoos and the piercing scars to prove it. For him, old-time and bluegrass music was a redemption, not a birthright. So it made him uneasy to be showcased as an example of the sound of the mountains.

I can sympathize with that. I have no idea how often I’ve been photographed, recorded, or videotaped by tourists in pursuit of some glimpse of a “folk culture” that largely doesn’t exist. Once money gets involved, it becomes more about entertainment than preservation. The Crooked Road is a fine example of it. When money came into the Floyd Country Store, it got bright lights, a professional sound system, and retail galore: brand new barrels of candy, a restored antique soda fountain, and a Carhart shop so the cultural tourists can buy authentic country overalls. None of that is necessarily a bad thing, but it is a manufactured thing. When you bring in the antique soda fountain with state grant money, you’re restoring the place to something it never was, but to what the cultural tourists want and expect it to be. And the irony is that it keeps things alive, but changed. The store can pay the bands now, which it never did before. The music hasn’t changed significantly since the money showed up. Our CD sales are up. How can you really complain? But I share Jackson’s discomfort. I’m an Dutch-Irish descended, California-born, Pennsylvania-raised punk turned old-time musician. I don’t make any claims to the contrary, but I’m sure it’s not what the throngs of tourists are thinking when they photograph me on stage. They think they’re getting Appalachian culture. And, in a sense, they are.

But about the CD: when it’s good, it’s very, very good. The duet singing on the slower songs is sublime. “Wild Bill Jones” will never again be the same tune for me. The bluegrass tunes impress me much less. Bluegrass is, by definition, kind of busy, and the vocal harmonies do best with more space around them. So of the 14 tracks on the CD, there are about four that I listen to, and usually skip the rest. But those few tracks are worth the price of admission. When you hear Anya and Jackson do “Moonshiner” a cappella, you won’t worry about where they’re from or whether the sound is authentic enough. You’ll be absorbed by great singing and a great melody, and that’s as much as any music lover can ask.

Paul Clayton and the Foc’sle Singers straddle the line uncomfortably. For some of the songs, they made the bewildering decision to include banjo accompaniment. What the hell? Why did the revivalists have to put banjo on absolutely everything? (Example: the Rainbow Quest videos, in which Pete Seeger can’t resist playing his banjo on f*cking everything, whether it makes any sense or not.) Banjo on eighteenth century sea songs? Check! Never mind that the banjo wasn’t actually invented yet when the damn things were written — it’s FOLK MUSIC! But there are some gems on the album, and those gems tend to be the a cappella tunes with minimal harmonies, like the outstanding rendition of “Haul Away Joe”. There are also a few diamonds in the rough, those tunes that actually have good material buried beneath the rather silly renditions.

I sound like a curmudgeon, and I probably am. Certainly I don’t have the standing to be much of a purist on anything, much less sea shanties. I’ve never been anything but a landlubber and a hack. But I do know what rings true for me and what sounds like hollow facsimile, and most of this sounds like facsimile trying to pass as authenticity. No doubt the same can be said about most of the music that I make, but nobody is offering me a Smithsonian Folkways grant to do it It may be that some of this material would have vanished if the revivalists hadn’t preserved it under straight teeth and cardigan sweaters. Whether it’s better off dead or shrink-wrapped and packaged, I don’t claim to know.

It’s hard to pin down just what’s so great about Mr. Bungle, and that’s probably exactly what makes it so great. Unlike Faith No More, Patton’s slightly-more-straightforward metal project, Mr. Bungle hardly ever maintains the same groove for more than eight measures at a time. Hell, they hardly maintain the same genre for more than eight measures at a time. A few bars of ska, a few bars of circus music, a few bars of thrash metal — it’s like a schizophrenic kid with ADD left his iPod on “shuffle”. I guess we can expect no less from an album produced by John Zorn. And yet it’s coherent — the album, the artwork, the gimp masks — they all hang together and make my brother dance like a pornographic zombie clown. In my world, that’s a good thing.

Does it hang together? Yes — Rebuild the Wall is relentlessly coherent. Does it have listening longevity? Not really. It’s a fine joke, but once you’ve got the punchline, there’s not much to bring you back for more. Because, like other parodies, it just can’t transcend the source material, and ultimately it can’t be more than a footnote — which may be all it was intended to be in the first place.

But if I did, I would be obliged to point out that Dignity and Shame is a good one. Eric Bachmann has certainly had some musical changes over the years. I remember seeing him first at the Black Cat in the Archers of Loaf days when he was a tower of a young man awash in a sea of electric guitars. And then again at Lounge Ax in Chicago a couple of years later, sombre and solo with only a guitar and an digital delay pedal. And then once more at the old OttoBar in Baltimore with Crooked Fingers, for an acoustic set complete with cello and banjo. Dignity and Shame sets out in the full band direction again, going further beyond the mariachi horns of Red Devil Dawn into full-on orchestrated rock. Not the awash-in-electric-guitars sort of rock of the Archers, but a studio-produced sort of rock awash in mature songwriting and textured instrumentation and the trademark Bachmann gravelly vocals. And I guess maturity ain’t always a bad thing.

“I would change for you, but babe, that doesn’t mean I’m gonna be a better man…” — Crooked Fingers