Male and Female in Christ

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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It’s not a coincidence that gender and genre have the same root. You can see that in romance novels, in metal, in superhero comics — and in classic gospel music.

As gospel scholar Anthony Heilbut has pointed out, gospel is actually two genres — gospel and quartet. Gospel singing, which featured a soloist or chorus with piano or organ backing backed, certainly had male stars (like Alex Bradford), but the biggest names were women like Clara Ward, Marion Williams, and Mahalia Jackson. Quartet singing, featuring acappella harmony performances, had some female stars (most notably, at the tale end of the genre’s existence, Mavis Staples), but was mostly performed by men.

The division might suggest a conservative, Christian, gendered division; men and women, separate but equal, inhabiting different spheres. In fact, though, the interaction of gender and genre in gospel is a bit more complicated. Gospel quartet was overwhelmingly male. But men (quartet or gospel) often demonstrated virtuosity by singing high tenor, trespassing on women’s range, as in this amazing performance by male soprano Carl Hall with the Raymond Raspberry Singers.

Or, as another example, here’s R.H. Harris’ light, lilting take on “His Eye Is One the Sparrow” with the Soul Stirrers.

At the same time as men soared up, female singers often laid claim to the earthy low rough-voiced virile registers.

Rather than a genre in which every gender is in place, then, gospel was a heavenly stew of cross-gender mimicry and performance; the intensity of the spirit burst the bounds of bodies, making women growl down low and men soar to the stratosphere. And just as it broke out of gender, the spirit went flying from genre to genre; Little Richard arguably invented rock by imitating Marion Williams (who in turn, as above, often adopted men’s deep rumble). Contemporary pop started when a man turned a woman’s voice from God to sin.

Little Richard’s violation of gender norms didn’t stop at his voice; part of the theatricality and scandal of his act was always the not very sublimated truth that he was gay. As Heilbut wrote in The Fan Who Knew Too Much, this was hardly unusual in the gospel community either, where sexualities, like voices, often didn’t fit neatly into stereotypical norms. Ruth Davis, Clara Ward, Alex Bradford, James Cleveland, and many others were homosexual — the high notes of the men and the rumbling low notes of the women served as a kind of holy camp, the visible, theatrical, open expression of a hidden truth about both gender and God.

Perhaps the most successfully closeted LGBT performer of the Golden Age of Gospel was the high tenor Wilmer Broadnax — often referred to as “Little Ax,” to distinguish him from his brother, Wilbur “Big Ax.”

Wilmer (sometimes “Wilmur”) is shown here with the Spirit of Memphis Quartet, his most famous gig; he’s the tiny man with glasses in the front row.

Wilmer was trans. No doubt his brother was aware that Wilmer (presumably initially Wilma) had been raised as a girl, but otherwise Little Ax seems to have passed as cis until after his death at the age of 77 in 1994 (he was murdered by his girlfriend, according to Heilbut).

Broadnax’s career as a quartet singer depended in large part on him being a man; again, there were female quartets, but they were far less common, and far less popular, than the male ensembles. But his career was also enabled by the fact that men in quartets could sing like women; Broadnax’s high tenor might have been marked as non-manly or unusual in some genres. But in quartet he’s just another guy who sings in the stratosphere.

Not to say that Little Ax was anonymous. As critic Ray Funk writes about Broadnax’s first recorded group, The Golden Echoes:

“Little Axe’s lead is absolutely distinctive on these cuts. He is the high lead that takes over from the baritone of Paul Foster. His voice is sweet but almost vicious, dripping with emotion, while Foster, in contrast, would offer almost a growl.”

In this amazing 1949 track, Broadnax picks up at around 1:04, finishing Foster’s line, so they seem to fuse into a single seamless multi-octave singer. At 1:25, Broadnax goes even higher, soaring into a Marion-Williams-like ““Ooooooo!”

That’s not the only thing Broadnax borrowed from female singers, according to Anthony Heilbut.

I admired [Broadnax’s] records largely because there was something nonquartet about his delivery. It was impassioned in a way that I associated with women singers of his gneration (he was born in 1915).

You can hear that passion in this performance for the “Spirit of Memphis”, in which Broadnax grabs the lead for a few seconds from (I believe) growler Silas Steel. He doesn’t get much space to work, but his electric moans and affirmations in the background, and his short moment in the spotlight, give the song an electric charge.

Broadnax’s connection to the female gospel tradition is perhaps even clearer in these late career performances, one with the Five Blind Boys of Alabama, and one with his own group on the hoary country classic “You Are My Sunshine.”

By this time acappella style had become less popular, and the addition of instrumentation (including too-insistent drums on “You Are My Sunshin”) puts Broadnax into something that sounds more like a rocking gospel setting. Rather than the interplay of voices, he’s running vocal variations over and around the groove. If you didn’t know he was a guy, these could easily be blow-out, earthy, growling performance by one of the great women of gospel

Again, what makes this more gospel than quartet is in large part that Broadnax has lowered and roughened his voice; he sounds like a woman specifically because he sounds like a woman imitating a man.

Broadnax is not a very well-known performer. There are a few famous names in quartet singing, but they’re all folks like Sam Cooke or Mavis Staples who crossed over to secular music. Even the best known quartet singers who stuck with quartet, like R. H. Harris, Claude Jeter, and Julius Cheeks, have barely any public profile. And though I think Broadnax has a claim to be as talented as any of them, as far as the pecking order went he was a respected but second-tier performer — an obscurity among obscurities.

Broadnax’s anonymity goes beyond that, though. Even among his peers and his (relatively) small audience, no one knew him. He lived his life in the closet, and he didn’t come out until he had passed away — a secret all the more total in that its revelation caused neither stir nor interest. Those who cared didn’t know, and when folks could know, nobody (except the indefatigable Anthony Heilbut) cared.

But that seems like an overly dour conclusion for such a powerfully joyful, uncategorizable performer. Broadnax didn’t hide, unknown, all his life. Rather, he took up his name and his suit and that amazing talent, and shouted what he was, in a voice that was as male as the female gospel performers, and as female as the tenors in male gospel quartet. Even if he isn’t famous down here, he’s found his place in that circle of singers where no one is unknown, singing as a man of God.

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Years back, when I was active on Wikipedia, I wrote an entry on Broadnax for the site. I thought I’d reprint it here for archival purposes; it’s one of the most complete biographies on the web (this site has additional information.

Willmer “Little Ax” M. Broadnax, (December 28, 1916^[1] – 1994) also known as “Little Axe,” “Wilbur,” “Willie,” and “Wilmer,” was an African-American hard gospel quartet singer. A tiny man with glasses and a high, powerful tenor voice, he worked and recorded with many of the most famous and influential groups of his day.

Broadnax was born in Houston in 1916. After moving to Southern California in the mid-40s, he and his brother, William, joined the Southern Gospel Singers, a group which performed primarily on weekends. The Broadnax brothers soon formed their own quartet, the Golden Echoes. William eventually left for Atlanta, where he joined the Five Trumpets, but Willmer stayed on as lead singer. In 1949 the group, augmented by future Soul Stirrer Paul Foster, recorded a single of “When the Saints Go Marching In” for Specialty Records. Label chief Art Rupe decided to drop them before they could record a follow-up, and shortly thereafter the Golden Echoes disbanded.^[1]

In 1950, Broadnax joined the Spirit of Memphis Quartet. Along with Broadnax, the group featured two other leads — Jethro “Jet” Bledsoe, a bluesy crooner, and Silas Steele, an overpowering baritone. This was one of the most impressive line-ups in quartet history. The Spirit of Memphis Quartet recorded for King Records, and Broadnax appeared on their releases at least until 1952. Shortly after that, however, he moved on, working with the Fairfield Four, and, in the beginning of the 60s, as one of the replacements for Archie Brownlee in the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. Until 1965 he headed a quartet called “Little Axe and the Golden Echoes,” which released some singles on Peacock Records. By then, quartet singing was fading as a commercial phenomenon, and Broadnax retired from touring, though he did continue to record occasionally with the Blind Boys into the 70s and 80s.

Upon his death in 1994, it was discovered that Broadnax was female assigned at birth.^[2]

References

Carpenter, Bil; and Kip Lornell. “Willmer Broadnax”. Allmusic.
Anthony Heilbut, liner notes to “Kings of the Gospel Highway,” Shanatchie 2000 (discusses Broadnax’s gender)

Jason Ankeny, “The Golden Echoes,” Allmusic.
Opal Louis Nations, liner notes to “The Best of King Gospel,” Ace, 2003
Liner notes to Detroiters/Golden Echoes “Old Time Religion,” Specialty 1992
For year of death, see Archived February 4, 2005 at the Wayback Machine
For pictures of Broadnax with the Spirit of Memphis, see [1]

Mama Ain’t Nobody’s Fool

Posted on November 5, 2014 by Paige McGinley

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Let’s get this out of the way: this post contains no recorded music. There are no YouTube clips, no media files, nothing ripped from my iTunes library. How frustrating: after finishing this “best band you’ve never heard of” post, you still won’t have heard a thing.

It’s not a sadistic joke, just a matter of fact. Esther Mae “Mother” Scott performed for over seven decades, but she made just one album, at the age of 78. There are only a few copies of “Mama Ain’t Nobody’s Fool” floating around, some of them in archival collections (which is where I heard her for the first time). The reality is that there is still so very much in our musical past that does not exist digitally, and Mother Scott’s music fits in that category. Still, I’ve decided not to let the lack of digital access to her music prevent me from writing about her here.

Esther Mae Prentiss was born in 1893 in the Delta town of Bovina, Mississippi. She was a contemporary of better-known musicians, including Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (born 1886) and Bessie Smith (born 1894) and the trajectory of her early life mirrored theirs. Like Rainey and Smith, Prentiss (who soon was to become Scott) left home at an early age—she told an interviewer that she claimed to be 16 when she was actually 14—to join F.S. Wolcott’s Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels, a traveling tent show of musicians, dancers, animal acts, acrobats, and medicine hawkers. Asked to describe her work on the show, which traveled throughout the Mississippi Delta, Louisiana, and other parts of the Mid-South, Scott—whose stage name was “Big Baby”—said, “I’d play and sing and act and lie!” Like Rainey, Smith, and other blueswomen, her personal history blurs the boundaries between singer, dancer, actress, and entrepreneur, for she was all of these things. Life on the touring circuit was hard, but it provided access to the wider world and a sense of freedom and self-determination not provided by agricultural work or domestic service (the two options most available to black women in the South).

I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of the traveling tent and minstrel shows (as have Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff in their amazing book Ragged But Right), and how attending carefully to these shows helps reframe our understanding of early blues. Here’s what the earliest blues was not: a man walking down a dusty road by himself, a guitar slung over his shoulder. The public in the teens and twenties primarily understood blues to be a women’s form, a popular form, and a theatrical form. It is for this reason that Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and, yes, Esther Mae Scott, should be considered the foremothers of blues, a form and a mythology which was later almost entirely turned over to men.

Why don’t we know about Mother Scott the way we know about Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lead Belly, or Son House—or even Rainey or Smith? Though known widely and well as a live performer, Scott made no recordings until very late in life. And when it came time for the largely white male blues revivalists of the 50s and 60s to “rediscover” forgotten legends of blues, their investment in particular narratives of racial authenticity led them not to the commercial, popular, theatrical female performers of the early twentieth century, but to the male agricultural laborers who more clearly fit their image of “authentic” rural folk. Though her work remained unrecognized and unrecorded, Esther Mae Scott was, well into the late twentieth century, a living link with a largely female tradition of blues singing, comedy, and popular entertainment.

Scott retired from show business for the first time in 1941; she left Mississippi, like so many others who were part of the Great Migration, to move to Washington, D.C. She worked as a housekeeper and baby nurse until picking up her guitar again some decades later. As an older woman, she brought her theatricality, her professionalism, and her humor to civil rights campaigns for senior citizens, and the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, one of the highlights of her career.

And about that album (which has a not-yet-famous Emmylou Harris on backing vocals)… “Mama Ain’t Nobody’s Fool” (Bomp Records) shows us just how widely varied the blueswomen’s repertoires were. There are 12-bar blues here, like the “Gulf Coast Blues” Smith made famous. But there’s also a cover of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel No. 1” (here called “T for Texas”), which shows the proximity of “blues” and “country” among traveling tent show and vaudeville performers like Scott and Rodgers, both of whom were from Mississippi. Like her peers, Scott showcased her ability to adapt contemporary popular songs, and produces a swinging “Can’t Buy Me Love,” which imbues the Beatles’ teen-pop hit with the wisdom of a woman who’s lived a long life. Finally, her “Black Jesus/Alleluia” wittily links the domestic labor of her earthly life to the promise of reward in a heaven that belongs to “Black Jesus:” “When I get to heaven, do I enter the back door? Hang up my robe and start scrubbing floors?” “Black Jesus,” like so many of Scott’s songs, links popular, memorable melodies to calls for civil rights that are irresistibly singable. And so while Scott’s music may not endure on countless recordings, her work as a musician, dancer, comedian, and songleader, persists in the less traceable repetition and reinvention of songs sung in churches, around campfires, and recorded by others whose names we do know: Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, Bessie Smith, and Louis Armstrong.

In the late 1970s, Scott was interviewed for the Black Women Oral History Project at Harvard:

http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/45175352

Find more pictures and poetry of Scott’s here: http://esthermaescott.com/

The Non-Dreary Goth of Jane Jensen

Posted on November 4, 2014 by kinukitty

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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My argument is that music can be industrial/sort of goth and not suck. By which I mean, it doesn’t have to be monotonous and dreary and “transgressive” (God help us). It can be playful and sexy. Seriously. It can sound like something you might want to listen to now. Sort of like disco.

Which – right. Never mind.

You’ve never heard of Jane Jensen (this one, not this one), but she’s charming, funny, and sexy. Really sexy. In a charming and funny way. She started out making industrial music that wasn’t dark and plodding (she wasn’t the only one, but there’s a reason it isn’t remembered as a lively genre) – Nine Inch Nails-y, but her voice is high and clear, and her lyrics are not about wanting to fuck you like an animal or hurting herself today or whatever. This is a different and, I suggest, more engaging experience. (I love NIN, by the way. It would be disingenuous to suggest otherwise.)

Jane Jensen has had a varied career. She was in Chicago theater and New York movies (she was Juliet in Tromeo & Juliet!), and she worked with Die Warzau on a side project called Oxygiene 23, which sounds like a Michael Manning title, but I probably wouldn’t be into it because I never liked Die Warzau. Aaaaannndddd she has a link to comic books, which just seemed kind of thematically pat, Hooded Utilitarian considered. She was friends with Alex Ross, Wikipedia informs me, and she was a model for some of his characters. (Remember this; it comes up again in the next sentence.) This is the joke, or at least part of the joke, behind the title and cover of Comic Book Whore, the album Jensen released in 1997. And as if that weren’t enough steaming topicality for one post, Wikipedia also tells me that Gene Ha “represented” Comic Book Whore in an issue of DC comic’s Top 10. I’m not sure if that means he included an image of it or if he held it forth as a good example, but whatever.

Jensen has recorded with a few groups and under different names, but I’m only going to discuss the stuff you could actually find and listen to. First up: Comic Book Whore.

Just to address the elephant in the room, that cover is not ideal, in my candid opinion. I have always assumed she drew the left side, and if she’s still good with it, then that’s fine. I am very much for self-expression. And, you know, it’s a pretty nice eye.

Eyes are hard.

“More than I Can” is the first Jane Jensen song I ever heard, and it’s still one of my, say, favorite 200 songs (that is not a dig; my Top 200 is a tightly edited list). It has it all – driving but drugged-sounding beats, cynical but potent sexuality, and a beautifully, believably world-weary tone – everyone gets obsessed with me, maybe I was obsessed with you too, but, you know, I’m tired, go away. Her voice teases as she sings “You fail with words and try again/And bring the words into your hands/Onto my skin and there it lands/You want the light inside my body/Makes you nervous/Makes you naughty.”

“Luv Song” is hot. I think. It’s a rollicking, sexy (I keep saying that, but what can you do?) ode to a friend’s awesome, awesome boyfriend. Who among us has not been there? Some of his choice qualities: “Never gets sleepy, he goes down all night …He’s not co-dependent or anything weird like that …Not really much into entomology.” And Jensen’s chatter at the end always makes me smile: “Do you have a bottle opener? Baby, this one’s not cold. Go get me another one.”

“Highway 90” is a little bit of proto-geek girl drama, and the source of the record title (“I dream about a day at a comic book store/I didn’t wanna be a groupie/But I guess I am a comic book whore”), with a nice, cutting guitar line. My favorite couplet is “I wanna be Donna Summer/But I bet she wouldn’t wanna be me.”

This record covers a certain amount of ground, stylistically. I was streaming it online and the little bar on the side kept recommending Filter’s “Hey Man Nice Shot,” which is basically Nine Inch Nails by a different name, so I agree with that. “Listen” is another take on that sound, but more of a Jesus and Mary Chain thing. Several songs rock a style I think of as “alternative performer playing with the four-track.” And there’s “Be Just Sound,” which has a heavy metal guitar hook that quickly turns psychedelic.

Comic Book Whore was put out by Flip, which was a subsidiary of Interscope, which was king of industrial music, back when people were actively listening to that sort of thing. This is of pretty much no interest except that I saw an interview in which Jensen was asked, “What was Flip records like? Especially when Fred Durst took it over.” And she said, “Fred wanted to produce my follow-up CD to Comic Book Whore. I couldn’t imagine how that would work so I declined. I had no idea how deeply he could hold a nasty grudge. We had the same management team – same label – it was difficult for me at that time.” (Burner, Jensen’s follow-up record, was self-produced and independently released.) This whole paragraph is basically just an excuse to point out that Fred Durst (of Limp His Kit fame) is a doorknocker.

Burner is Jensen’s second widely available recording, and it’s the best. It has several “fuck it” rock songs that we take for granted from the boys but seldom get from the girls (I said “fuck it,” not “shake it off”). This album has better sound than Comic Book Whore, and the songs sound more gelled. In fact, there isn’t a bad song on it, with the possible exception of “Angel” – the stadium ballad doesn’t work for her, either. (Although, to clarify, we aren’t talking “I Want to Know What Love Is.” You can hum “Angel” for days after it gets stuck in your head and not want to kill yourself.)

There’s more fuzz and reverb and shit on this one, which makes the sound fuller than the very-indie-sounding Comic Book Whore, and I prefer that, although it does obscure the lyrics somewhat. She has pretty good lyrics, and her delivery is sexy (I’m just going on record here as not really liking any of the synonyms for sexy). At any rate, the overall kick-ass demeanor does come through, although this record is less industrial and more – I don’t know. Varied. “Alternative.” I suspect this has been a problem for Jensen throughout her career, since people frequently want to know what they’re getting.

Looking at individual songs, there’s a cover of “Miss You” that’s credible, I guess. I like her original stuff better. “Rock That” – is funky. “Sick of Losing You” is brilliant for conveying the sheer frustration and annoyance of trying to hang onto a relationship you no longer even like.

“Burner” is a very dirty song – musically, I mean. Well, not just musically. “I’ve got your heart in my hand/I’ve got your tongue in my mouth/I’ve got your thoughts in my head/I’ve got your dreams on the burner.” That right there is a lovely portrait of a certain kind of relationship, romantic and wry. (Would that be a good title for a romance novel?) (Right – no. I guess it wouldn’t.)

Jensen ultimately settled into rockabilly (it’s a logical progression; see the Cramps) and released My Rockabye in 2007. The songs aren’t as strong as the songs on Burner; they remind me more of Comic Book Whore, but a mutated, grown up version. The sound is similar – simple, open, containing a high-hat interlude that sounds like Steely Dan’s “Bodhisattva.” (Fine, there is no high hat interlude on Comic Book Whore that sounds like “Bodhisattva.”)

“Jim Jones” is a surprisingly cute (both surprising and cute) little song about unexpectedly finding a friend. “Who are you? He said, Jim Jones. Follow me and I’ll take you home.” Aww. The halting, almost stuttering beat of “Lovers” reminds me of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” It swaggers, but, er, gently? This song is frank, a moment with a full-grown woman, as it were. “Sweet Child” is a power ballad. (See above.) And “Bedtime Baby” is adorable. I don’t throw that word around much because, contrary to common perception, I do have some dignity. But it is what it is, and that is adorable. This is a fairly traditionally put together rockabilly song about persuading the baby to go the fuck to sleep, as the recently popular book put it, so the parents can get it on. And it is successful. I admire Jane Jensen for this song.

In a way, Jane Jensen does remind me of Steely Dan. (Beyond that slightly unexpected drum thing on “My Rockabye”.) I don’t mean she has unparalleled sound work or insanely tight orchestration or jaw-dropping musicality; I’m talking about the way she skims over a number of styles but doesn’t fully embrace any of them, and mostly makes it work. (Also, this rock critic-type thing is rough – I almost caught myself using the word “uncompromising.”) Whatever genre she’s rocking, she’s a gem.

“Forever is Already There” – Me and Thumb of the Maid

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Osvaldo Oyola

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Sometimes I wonder if what makes a collection of songs “the best you’ve never heard” is the fact that no one’s heard of it. Case in point, the band Thumb of the Maid and their 1998 album of the same name. As far as I know it is some flash in the pan local band from California, but I have such a deep personal relationship to the album from repeated listening over 10 years, that it feels like my little secret. It is a record I can mine for songs to put on mix tapes (I still call them mix tapes even though they are burned on to CD and I haven’t made one in years), but more importantly when I put it on I have deep emotional reaction to its sounds. I am alone in the world with it.

Here’s the thing about Thumb of the Maid and their self-titled album, I know next to nothing about them or the record. I mean, I know it was released by Deaf Khan Records, and that the guys behind it are known as the Moore Brothers. These days they make records under that name, but I’ve listened to a tidbit of the more recent stuff now and then, and nothing is nearly as compelling as 15 songs on Thumb of the Maid. There are 16 tracks, but I almost always skip the first one, “I Love Your Loneliness” It just doesn’t do it for me and seems to lack the weirdo charm of the rest of the songs. It is just a little too straight, a little too transparently trying to be an American take on 60s Brit Pop in the 90s.

No, as far as I’m concerned “Hey Twelve” is the real first song of the album, and it only gets better from there.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. How do I know about Thumb of the Maid at all? This dude. He was a friend of a friend who I helped get a job where I worked and then we became friends and he hipped me to this record. I think he worked at Amoeba Records with one of the Moores. This was a guy who first played me shit like “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots” and “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel,” but who I also geeked out with about Grateful Dead bootlegs (could talk for hours about that May 9^th 1977 Buffalo War Memorial show), and with whom I was a part of a collective of four DJs, who played at parties and switched off in pairs for a regular gig in the city, playing mostly hip-hop, R&B, soul…sometimes we’d throw in some dancehall, roots reggae and even fuckin’ Billy Joel. So we shared a taste for a wide range in music. I don’t remember what he told me about it—he just told me to listen to it and I did, and I have never regretted it.

The songs on Thumb of the Maid (what does the band name even mean? I don’t know) have a simultaneously raw and meticulous quality. Each track is a perfect little package of shifting rhythmic structure undergirded by two guitars and bass, but also with expressive drumming. They are threaded throughout with bizarre lyrics, some kind of sub-psychedelic nonsense that nonetheless evokes meaning through their sometimes strained delivery and slightly off-key harmonies. Thumb of the Maid often strikes me like it emerged from a garage built in a place where Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and the strangest of the Who’s early tracks hang out with some of the lo-fi elements that make Neutral Milk Hotel so compelling.

Perhaps the mash-up of influences I hear is not making the music sound appealing, but I am struggling to find another way to describe it. There is also tension between snark and earnestness that emerges from the strangeness of the lyrical content and the tone of the singing. There is a youthfulness that is evident in the youtube videos of their 1998 appearance on a cable access show that justifies the roughness around the edges. I listen to this record and I can’t help but admire these kids, even if they are middle-aged men now.

Take the beginning to “Hey Twelve.” It opens with an uneven number of its opening little lurching rhythmic rifts before the lead vocal comes in a lyric, what’s it say? I don’t know. It sounds like “I spider-grafted!” Or maybe he’s singing “I photographted.” (putting a ‘t’ in a word where it doesn’t belong). It sounds like that’s what he’s singing the second time around, but honestly it doesn’t really matter. The brightness of the lyric, the way the song jumps from part to part—including a bridge that echoes that lurching opening and its catchy refrain, “That the bomb goes…!”— the singer’s voice inexpertly extends the syllables at the end of words in a cascade, the overlapping voices for the outro—it is a great first song for a record.

And speaking of overlapping voices, I love the way the Moore Brothers (sometimes aided by the rest of the band) layer their voices and sing in close but subtly different, sometimes dissonant harmonies. It sometimes reminds me of XTC or in the case of one of my favorite songs “The Axe” like Thom Yorke before Thom Yorke.

“Freaks in the Pond” is like post-punk Moody Blues with prog-rock time changes and a coda that breaks into an unexpected Latin feel. “Forever is Already There” is an attempt at a ballad that breaks charmingly under the weight of the quirky earnestness of its lyrics that sports nearly a minute long instrumental intro despite the whole song being under three minutes long. I can’t not like it.

“105” is probably the best song on the album. It is the way both the lead vocalist, and the backing vocals he is layered over, warble “One-Oh-Five! I don’t wanna hear about your future plans!” It is just so damn catchy. The verses resound just the right amount of foppish attitude, as when the opening lyrics describes, “Pinky under tongue like a thermometer.”

“Julian Blood Boy”—which sounds like They Might Be Giants via R.E.M or something—is grounded by a fantastically elegant but strong bass line, allowing the bizarre lyrics to float high above with their voices.

You can just listen to “Episodes” from when they lip-synced songs on a Bay Area cable access show and hear for yourself. If you aren’t won over at 1:19 when the “Please be a pal of mine” change comes in, then I fear you might not ever be convinced, which is a shame. All I call I can suggest is to play the video again, but close your eyes, don’t let their dorky bouncing white boy energy dissuade you. Instead, listen to that restrained Johnny Lydon screech the lead Moore brother let out twice in each verse (as when he sings, “What would it prove?”), and the soothing way they sing the word ‘sodes the final time, reinforcing the feeling that all these songs sometimes give, that the sounds of individual syllables are more important than the meanings of the words. Maybe that’ll make a difference.

You can listen to the sweet “Apples in Stacks” on youtube as well.

Thumb of the Maid fills a strange musical niche for me. I like to think I have a pretty wide ranging taste in music, but truth is I think I am pretty conventional in my likes. I don’t have many, if any, claims to super obscure shit as my favorite all-time records. I mean, those are easy: Songs in the Key of Life and Sign o’ the Times. Maybe Amnesiac, Fear of a Black Planet and XTC’s Skylarking. I am not a collector of the rare when it comes to music, but I don’t know anyone else besides the guy that introduced me to it who has even ever heard of this record. I have never gotten anyone to take it seriously. Furthermore, it seems politically inert—probably because so much of the lyrics seem like nonsense, affecting knowledge (in both meanings of affect) rather than undermine its own strange sonic logic with pretentious messages. All music is political, of course, and I could criticize this music from the perspective of having the privilege to eschew politics altogether, but ultimately that is not much of a criticism, except in terms of being just part and parcel of the political economy of white rock acts. As such, I can only write about the way it makes me feel and the aural pleasure of their highly structured but straightforward two to three minute songs.

There is something pleasing about a song like “Seagirl” that lets the slippage between “seagirl” and “seagull” become a beautiful sonic ambiguity. It is reassuring to hear the sweet expression of love(?) in “Mannequin Sea Witch”—the album’s last song—when they sing in delightful harmony, “And if I walk to your house / I’m going to take my time” while wondering if the beloved might be a “mannequin witch”—whatever that is. It is a great last song, ending with a fading reverberating hum.

The thing about an album like this from the perspective of a listener like me, is that despite the secret world I feel it brings me to I still want other people to hear it like I do.

I don’t know why it should matter. And, anyway, some part of me fears that exposing other people to Thumb of the Maid might undermine my relationship with it by opening up the possibility of criticisms I don’t want to hear. I certainly doubt this post is going to do much to make this little record into an underground classic. Rather, if I can persuade one or two people to seek it out and listen as openly as I have, I can only hope they come to understand its pleasures as well.

Best Writer No One Has Ever Heard Of

Posted on November 2, 2014 by Noah Berlatsky

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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Discussing obscure bands that time forgot is a longstanding tradition. Unearthing obscure writers is maybe less so — perhaps just because musicians have a larger audience in the first place, so obscurities aren’t as obscure? Or maybe because the DIY, primitivist tradition in music is relatively well-established; even zine culture seems more associated with punk rock than with any sort of literature.

But be that as it may, I thought I’d see if anyone wanted to weigh in on best writers no one has ever heard of. I’ll kick it off by pointing to a couple of my favorite unknowns. Here’s an appreciation of the unpublished teen diarist Virginia May Garcia. And another of the great online erotic horror writer Tabico.

So who’s your vote for best writer no one has heard of? Let us know in comments, if you’re so moved.

Virginia May Garcia

Who Did You Meet On That Road?

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Betsy Phillips

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.

Editor’s Note: Betsy Phillips had a comment on her post this week in which she speculated on Sleepy John Estes’ influences. I thought I’d reprint it here, along with examples.
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[Sleepy John Estes’] first record comes out in 1929. There’s not much recorded music before he gets his start. Certainly, there wasn’t recorded music on the radio at the time. So, his influences would all have been live musicians.

I wish someone would do a good biography of him while people who remember him are still alive. But, it’s interesting, just in the little bit we do know of him, how linked in he was with other West Tennessee black musicians. He played with Yank Rachell (who wrote “She Caught the Katy” among other things) from Brownsville and Hammie Nixon, also from Brownsville, who came straight out of jug bands and who recorded with a lot of folks in Memphis, as well as Son Bonds, who was hooked in with Sonny Boy Williamson out of Jackson.

So, I have a guess at an answer to who’s influencing him, just based on how far apart towns are. But let me be clear that I am purely guessing. Rural West Tennessee has a large African American population. Like the Mississippi Delta, it’s cotton-growing country. Before the Great Migration, the population in the country would have been predominately African-American. My guess is that there was a small chitlin circuit that ran out of Memphis, over to Jackson and back–again, my guess, is that performers went up 51, first night in Millington, second in Covington, third in Ripley, fourth in Dyersburg, etc. with a stop in Brownsville at some point. My guess is that West Tennessee musicians would take to the circuit when they could and that’s how they were all meeting each other. Because Brownsville is near Memphis now–with a car–but it certainly wasn’t then. There had to be some mechanism that was bringing these guys into contact with each other.

I also suspect in a song like “Milk Cow Blues” that we’re hearing the heavy influence of black minstrel show music (obviously, music from the larger chitlin circuit).

Two things make me think that. We know that performers at the minstrel shows were, obviously, not amplified but needed to be heard above a crowd and we know that every minstrel show featured a marching band. If you listen to the song with those two things in mind, a few things jump out–you could march to that song, the guitar rolls in the song could be nods to the drum rolls you would have heard in a marching band, and you can bellow the lyrics (in fact, Robert Plant regularly did). Estes isn’t bellowing on the record, but, thanks to Plant, it’s not hard to imagine how you could project “Hey, sweet mama, let me be your kid” over the noise of a crowd.

So, that’s my guess–that his influences were the live performers he saw there in Brownsville, but that he probably had the ability to see a lot more good musicians coming through Brownsville then than we realize.

The Karori Cemetery Jogging Mix

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Chris Gavaler

This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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If you ever played a game of Risk, then you know why you can’t find New Zealand on a map. I would have placed it in Indonesia—before my wife won a Fulbright and our family lived in the capital Wellington for five months. Friends and colleagues kept thinking we were going to Australia. One of our college administrators actually wrote “Australia” in her letters. It was as if were traveling to Counter Earth—that near duplicate planet High Evolutionary invented and set in orbit on the other side of the sun. Superman’s radio writers placed Krypton there too. New Zealand occupies the same position relative to the globe and the American imagination. We don’t really know it’s out there.

When we settled into the Wellington suburbs in January 2011, one of my first stops was the Karori public library to get books for the kids and CDs for me. I took a daily, forty-minute jog through the hills of the historic cemetery, listening to whatever new disc I’d downloaded to my iShuffle that week.

It’s an island nation and so home to some evolutionary oddballs: flightless kiwi birds and giant weta insects. Its music scene grows mutations too. “Flight of the Conchords” had already flapped stateside, but I discovered Fat Freddy’s Drop before flying over too: techno, blues, reggae, jazz, rock—they give new and glorious meaning to the term “fusion.” I’d of course heard of Split Enz and Crowded House too, and Neil Finn maintains a deservedly god-like presence. “Weather with You” is simply the best pop song ever—though I didn’t realize that till I heard it covered by the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra.

An early 80s compilation album nearly destroyed my mind with a roster of never-heard-by-me New Wave hits that were not imitations of the bands I grew up with but Counter Earth variants orbiting parallel to them. But it was the recent releases section of the library shelves that most wooed me. Every week I’d select one track from the CD I’d been spinning during jogs and family meals. When we left in May, I had a playlist of my idiosyncratic exploration of kiwi musicology.

The first track is the national rugby team performing a Maori war chant, and the last is another traditional Maori song spilled into electronica. The Naked and Famous followed us home. I didn’t hear Kimbra and Lorde while jogging, but they roosted in U.S. airwaves since our return too. All of these artists deserve the same exposure. Some even got me enjoying reggae, a peculiarly ubiquitous style for a nation floating in a different ocean than Jamaica. Folk and blues and pop and jazz and progressive rock washed up on my New Zealand beaches too. Only 4 ½ million people populate the country, but it’s a planet of music.

Here’s your introductory playlist. I recommend jogging up and down grave-scattered hills while listening.