It’s a mystery to me how Ian Matthews makes as much out of “Mobile Blue” as he does. The original, recorded by stalwart Nashville songwriter Mickey Newbury, is built around his coarse, hoarse instrument. The lines — “Drunk and down and out and making time / With anything that comes my way” — are often twisted around over the top of bars, like barbed wire. It’s hard to imagine its being picked up by Matthews, the original male singer for the English folk group Fairport Convention. With the clean, reedy intonation of a choir graduate and the same studiously correct phrasing, he seems just the wrong person for the job. But maybe — this seems often to be the case — it’s just because of that. In any case, he was more a follower of American folk forms than English. The LP it appears on, 1972’s Journeys from Gospel Oak, is based firmly in those traditions. And it’s one of those oddities — a grab bag of mostly covers, recorded hastily to fulfill a contractual obligation — that, through the consistency of the band and its unfussy production, sounds like it sprung into existence not in five days but instantaneously.
In “Mobile Blue,” Matthews simplifies the phrasing, drawing out the nuance of the lyrics, and they benefit from it. Newbury makes a lot of significant details: being caught with “some wired-up chick from Jacksonville / And brother did we look like we could fly” (I believe present-day Jacksonville retains the appropriate evocations). And regretting it, staggering to the Greyhound station to get back to his baby — yelling out “put me on that dog take me away.” The craftsmanlike construction of the song combined with its weird, penetrating diction reminds me of Jimmy Webb — whose “Bride 1945” Matthews also covers on the record.
The folk tradition has become thoroughly bourgeoizified. At present there is no way for the artist to get at it. — Louise Bogan, The Partisan Review (1943)
James Agee used this quote as an opportunity to survey the degree of commercial corruption in jazz, describing what he saw as the “sophisticating” of “this extremely sophisticated art, out of all relation to its source and, in the same gestures, achieving a once-over-lightly loving-up betrayal of the unaroused body of all the rest of the music” (“Psuedo-Folk,” in The Partisan Review, 1944). Though his argument relies on understanding of jazz that is true to its origins (i.e. black folk music), he doesn’t draw lines along skin color except as an expression of a degree of understanding. So Sinatra and Crosby aren’t the target of his vitriol (they’re “very respectable folk-artists … in their special kind of class”) but rather those that seek to smooth out or homogenize (“bourgeoizify”) the music in favor of cleanliness. By way of an example he compares two versions of Louis Armstrong playing “West End Blues,” and finds the later one, for all its merit, “sugar-and-spiced, forcedly much less forceful, and sadly urbane.”
Reading that, I couldn’t help but think of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It was the follow-up to a series of intermittently brilliant records that combined strains of folk, pop, country and psychedelic rock embodied in songs by (respectively) Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, Carole King & Gerry Goffen or Jackie DeShannon, rearrangements of traditional tunes and increasing numbers penned by the band’s own more-than-capable trio of Roger McGuinn, Chris Hillman, and David Crosby (with the occasional knockout by Gene Clark).
Almost completely abandoning that model, new hire Gram Parsons essentially reinvented the band for Sweetheart by convincing them to do a country record by-the-numbers. Apart from the bookending tracks by Dylan, the songs chosen are rather obvious nods to roots country—the Louvin Brothers, Woodie Guthrie, Merle Haggard—augmented by second-tier originals by Parsons. (None of the entries were written by the core members.) It ends up a country album for people who don’t listen to country. Earlier cover songs always stressed the the Byrds’ signature arrangement: closely paired vocal lines by McGuinn and Clark, incandescent guitar tears, choruses with vaulting multipart harmonies. Sweetheart essentially gave up on all of this, often substituting an airless single vocal with a wry twang, and dismissing the dense, complex Rickenbacker confusion of e.g., “Eight Miles High.”
Which isn’t to say there’s nothing to be found here. The record is good, there’s no doubt about it. It is unusually consistent in quality and even if it never approaches the genius of the psychedelic era’s “What’s Happening?!?!” or just about anything on Mr. Tambourine Man, it is saved by (to appropriate more Agee) the band’s “instinctive equilibrium and scarcely impaired skill.” And though it lacks the interior dimension of Parsons’ best work with the Flying Burrito Brothers, nonetheless his warmth and talent carry through. I just mourn the exchange of the Byrds as a living organism—messy, mixed-up—for the clean, polite country simulation.
Delbert McClinton and the Ron-Dels put out a handful of 45s in the mid-60s. The second, “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go,” was cut in 1963, in an era where Texas seemed uniquely blessed at combining blues and country music: blues structure and sentiment were married to country subjects and instrumentation. This combination seemed on the whole less conscious than that of examples elsewhere—e.g., the brilliant, but more deliberate musicians at Muscle Shoals. (And in later decades, much of the work in this direction dressed itself a motley of the exterior tics and lyric tropes of both genres.) McClinton’s lyric is as simple as any: somewhat repetitively emphasizing the sense of desperation at the prospect of loss. It’s the strain in his voice, reinforced at intervals with harmony, that provides necessary dimension. I would contrast this with typical genre-form lyrics, which may be successful combinations of words and music, but fail to convey a particular sense of the speaker: they are songs—often good songs—but songs without a voice. McClinton connects.
McClinton was a professional musician from fifteen—not quite as prodigious as Doug Sahm1—at which point he was in a Ft. Worth house band backing Howlin’ Wolf, Junior Parker, and Bobby Bland. In a story recounted in Hit Parader he says:
One night we were playing a song called “Fanny Mae” by Buster Brown. We were backing him up and Jimmy Reed in the same night, and I had just bought me a harmonica because they were two of the best, ya know, and I was ready to learn. Well, we were sittin’ in the dressing room before the show—I didn’t drink at the time—but they were both passing a quart of Old Grand-Dad, and I was sittin’ in the middle helping em drink it—never did see the show.
But anyway the harmonica took him on a European tour for Bruce Channell’s “Hey Baby” in 1962, where he met the Beatles and, as quoted in Hit Parader “taught whichever one to play something on blues harp” (some other accounts have it as Lennon). A certain resemblance also follows between “If You Really Want” and the Beatles’ “I Don’t Want To Spoil The Party.” Perhaps that was what helped it eventually hit Billboard, if two years after its initial release. It finally became something of a Texas country standard probably thanks to a version recorded by Waylon Jennings. But success eluded McClinton himself until the late-70s, when he penned “Two More Bottles Of Wine,” which became a number one hit for Emmylou Harris. And in the ’80s—on, as it happens, the Muscle Shoals label—his music became commercially successful but slackened compositionally, trading its hard-earned blues for what sounds to these ears like second-hand soul.
1. Sahm was a San Antonio blues-country musician asked on as a permanent member of the Grand Ole Opry while still in primary school. In fact, Sahm’s Sir Douglas Quintet covered this tune on their first LP, Mendocino — in 1969, by which point they were hippies and this song was firmly an oldie; yet reconfigured on that album to accommodate Augie March’s Vox transistor organ, it melds in perfectly with their repertoire: McClinton and Sahm, as different as their lyric personalities may be, do seem to share that particular Texas country-blues sensibility.
