Bayou Underground: Tracing the Mythical Roots of American Popular Music - Softcover

Thompson, Dave

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1550229621 ISBN 13: 9781550229622

Verlag: ECW Press,Canada, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

?The Bayou is a world of its own — a marshy, sometimes treacherous, oft-times sinister land of creeping darkness and living shadows, secret legends and vivid mythology. It is that darkness and those shadows that permeate Bayou Underground, the first study of the Louisiana music scene ever to leave behind the bright lights of big city New Orleans, and plunge instead into the wilderness that not only surrounds the Big Easy, but which stretches for hundreds of miles on either side, from Houston, Texas, to Mobile, Alabama.Bayou Underground explores the music of the region from the House of the Rising Sun to gator hunting with Amos Moses (the one-armed Cajun backwoodsman created by country songwriter Jerry Reed) to artists like Bo Diddley, Nick Cave, Bob Dylan, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, who were influenced by unsung heroes of the Bayou.In Bayou Underground, the people and the cultures that have called the bayou home are unearthed through their words and lives, but most of all through the music that has, over the last century, either arisen from the swamplands themselves, or been drawn from fellow visitors to the region, as they seek to set down for posterity the emotions, dreams, and enchantments that the area instilled in them.Part social history, part epic travelogue, and partly a lament for a way of life that has now all but disappeared, Bayou Underground is the gripping story of American music’s forgotten childhood, and the parentage it barely even knows about. By comparison, the Big Easy had it easy.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Dave Thompson is the author of more than 100 books on rock, cinema, and pop culture, including I Hate New Music, London Burning, Never Fadeway, and Smoke on the Water. He lives in Newark, Delaware.

Dave Thompson ?is the author of over 100 books on rock, erotica, cinema, and pop culture, including bestselling biographies of Kurt Cobain (Nirvana), David Bowie, and the Cure. His latest titles include the already-controversial I Hate New Music (Backbeat Books) and London’s Burning: True Adventures on the Frontlines of Punk (Chicago Review Press). Thompson lives in Newark, Delaware.

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Bayou Underground

Tracing the Mythical Roots of American Popular Music

By Dave Thompson, Jen Hale

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Dave Thompson
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55022-962-2

Contents

Cover, 
Imprint, 
Epigraph, 
INTRODUCTION, 
TRACK ONE, 
TRACK TWO, 
TRACK THREE, 
Great New Orleans Voodoo Kings and Queens, 
TRACK FOUR, 
Hummingbird Cake, 
TRACK FIVE, 
Jambalaya, 
Crawfish Pie, 
Filé Gumbo, 
TRACK SIX, 
The Ten Activities Most Likely to Precipitate an Alligator Attack, 
Eating with Amos — Alligator Recipes, 
TRACK SEVEN, 
TRACK EIGHT, 
TRACK NINE, 
TRACK TEN, 
TRACK ELEVEN, 
TRACK TWELVE, 
TRACK THIRTEEN, 
The Queens of Storyville — 10 Notorious New Orleans Madams, 
New Orleans — The Cost of Living, Circa 1800, 
TRACK FOURTEEN, 
TRACK FIFTEEN, 
TRACK SIXTEEN, 
TRACK SEVENTEEN, 
TRACK EIGHTEEN, 
EPILOGUE, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 

CHAPTER 1

TRACK ONE

"Promised Land" by Elvis Presley from the LP Promised Land (RCA) 1975

"Swamp rock" is a horrible term, but every time I attempted to explain to friends what this book was about (friends, that is, who actually care enough about their music to try to slap intellectual labels on it) someone always stopped me halfway through my explanation, raised a hand and then pronounced knowledgeably, "Ah, you mean swamp rock."

Do I?

To me, swamp rock has always sounded like something that was bred by the Cramps in the sewers of late seventies New York City, nurtured by the Gun Club, obsessed on by the psychobilly movement and last seen heading towards Japan, where all the musical dinosaurs seem to flourish forever.

I suppose, if I was to pause for a moment, I could conceive of another definition — but after 30 years spent writing about rock and pop in all of their most fashionable guises, I'd had enough of labels for a while, and wanted to try my hand at something else ... a musical style that wasn't simply indefinable in general terms, it probably only existed in my own imagination.

Even with the headphones on, and a homemade CD pumping mud through my bloodstream, I struggled to discern any coherent musical thread that united Alice Cooper screaming "Black Juju" and Nick Cave lionizing the killer "Stagger Lee," between the Sensational Alex Harvey Band celebrating "Amos Moses" and Creedence Clearwater Revival hearing something through the grapevine. Add a little Robert Johnson to the brew ... but only because I couldn't find my tape of Wild Willy Barrett doing "Me and the Devil Blues," a jag of Juicy Lucy and a generous helping of Sinead O'Connor, and the picture became murkier by the moment.

Except it also became clearer, because the songs I was selecting had nothing to do with any musical style — real, invented or even imagined. They were a mindset, a state of being that existed somewhere between a road map and a ghost story, between the lies that the tourist guides tell out-of-towners, and the truths that they won't even tell themselves. And, if you could then distil that mindset down to one single fragment of recognizable reality, it would probably look a lot like a swamp. Which rocks.

So, swamp rock?

Maybe so.

But not in the way that my well-meaning friends meant.

In 1983, rocker Johnnie Allan described swamp rock, its history, mystery and convoluted development, thus. "It's the musicians who make the sound different. Those guys, Jivin' Gene, T. K. Hulin — virtually all of them speak French and some of them played in French accordion bands just like I did. Consequently, I think we all kept part of this French-Cajun music ingrained in us; you can detect it, something of a Cajun flavor in the song."

For Allan, that flavor erupted out of what is still his best-known recording, an ingenious rewiring of Chuck Berry's "Promised Land," which sounds as fresh and exciting today as it did when he cut it in 1964. Born in Rayne, Louisiana, and a steel guitarist before he started rocking, Allan has been credited with being the first to mash the mutant new genre — for that's what rock 'n' roll was back then — with anything approaching a traditional form, and he did it with such an air of insouciance that it's easy to believe he didn't even think about it. He just took the music he loved and the music he loved to play and married them together across one of Chuck's most endearing three-chord travelogues, and every great version of the song to have come along since then owes something or other to Johnnie Allan's prototype.

All except for one of them.

In 1983, journalist Bill Miller traced the birth of swamp rock ... or swamp-pop or Cajun rock or Bayou beat, as sundry other critics termed the sound, narrowing it down to the 400 miles of highway that stretch from Port Arthur, Texas, to New Orleans, and which are fringed almost every step of the way by the tiny towns and villages whose local music scene developed down such secret byways that, only when all the component parts were placed together, could anything even remotely resembling unity be discerned.

Miller wrote, "There are Lake Charles and Ville Platte, the home of Floyd Soileau's Jin and Swallow labels; Abbeville, where Bobby Charles lives in hermit-like seclusion; Crowley, where Jay Miller recorded the finest Excello blues, and such outposts of swampland as the aptly named Cut Off, Joe Barry's home."

So that's what Bill Miller said swamp rock was, and we have no reason at all to argue. He's right. In fact, if you want to dig even deeper, you can increase the banquet another hundredfold.

Early Elvis Presley and the Sun Records label clash with Joe Falcon, who made the first ever Cajun records back in the late 1920s. Fats Domino and Warren Storm. Earl King, whose "Those Lonely, Lonely Nights," said Dr. John, "is a classic South Louisiana two-chord — E-flat, B-flat — slow ballad." And, back in 1969, with the swamp rock term first coming into fashionable play in the pages of the music press, record producer Jerry Wexler explained it to Billboard in a way that left it even more up in the air than before:

It is the Southern sound! R & B played by Southern whites! It is up from Corpus Christi, Thibodaux, Florence, Tupelo, Helena, Tuscaloosa, Memphis! It is the flowering of the new Southern life style! It is Duane Allman [...] It is Southern rhythm sections made up of young country cats that began with Hawkshaw Hawkins and turned left behind Ray Charles and [Bobby] "Blue" Bland. It is Joe South and his great gift of melody, and the lowest-tuned guitar this side of "Pop" Staples. It is the spirit of Willie Morris, born in the Delta, schooled in Texas, and arrived on the literary scene in New York as editor of Harper's at 32, and who, with Faulkner, calls the black people of his home his kin.

It's country funk. The Byrds put something in it, Ray Charles added a lot. It's a pound of R & B, and an ounce or three of country. The music has Cajun swamp miasma, a touch of Longhair's New Orleans blues rumba, some of Taj's recreations or Cow Cow Davenport's buck dance thing. It has been shaped by Otis Redding's horn thinking, Steve Cropper's and Reggie Young's and Chips Moman's fantastic section guitar work — part lead and part rhythm on the same tune.

It has Tommy Cogbill's structured variations of the rhapsodic Motown bass lines. It has Roger Hawkins' gut-stirring, beautiful...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: ECW Press,Canada
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1550229621
• ISBN 13: 9781550229622
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 243
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland