Song ID Blog

“Rymoka String Band” (1985) – Rymoka String Band * Produced by Gef Lucena * Recorded by David Fanshawe * LP: Spirit of Melanesia* Label: Saydisc

The late British composer and ethnomusicologist David Fanshawe captured this group of Papua New Guinea students as part of his enormous archive of worldwide field recordings. The liner notes for SayDisc’s Spirit of Melanesia compilation explains that the song was recorded at the 6th anniversary celebrations (July 28, 1985) for Passam National High School.

Fanshawe’s liner notes say the following:

“This most attractive song, recorded on BigDay at Passam National High School’s 6th Anniversary Celebrations, was led by Trudi Egi and Vincent Raka from Tubusereia. Their group Rymoka won the string band competition and this number, one of my favourites, was especially recorded in the cool of the evening in the chapel.”

“Rymoka String Band”
 

“Tennessee Stud” (1993) – Johnny Cash * Written by Jimmy Driftwood * Produced by Rick Rubin * LP: American Recordings* Label: American Recordings

Rightfully celebrated for providing the overdue bare-bones presentation Johnny Cash’s legend demanded, the Rick Rubin-produced American Recordings album also had a bone-dry sound of sonic disinfection, which risks coming off as disaffection (if you’re not Johnny Cash). It’s a trend in solo acoustic recordings of the ’90s, like Bob Dylan’s Good as I Been to You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), both of which sounded as if all involved wore hazmat suits. The overwhelming backdrop silence plays counter to the very trueness the recording philosophy espoused.

Cash’s recording of “Tennessee Stud,” then, stands out because it happens at the Viper room on Sunset Strip in front of a crowd of giddy and supportive invite-only attendees. So there’s the kind of human-contact atmosphere that served his beloved At Folsom Prison album so well. The nature of the audience doesn’t matter so much. As Tony Tost writes in his 33 ⅓ treatment of the album, they “cackle and hoot like refugees from the Hee Haw cornfield,” but their responses to the song echo the responses you’re supposed have.

First recorded in 1959 by the one-man folk song factory Jimmy Driftwood, “Tennessee Stud” became a staple in the repertoires of Doc Watson and many others. The song recounts the exploits of a rounder who slips out of dangerous situations on his “long and lean” horse who’s got nerve and “the blood.” His adventures begin with confrontations between him and his sweetheart’s kin, and end with him straightening it all out by whipping her brother and pa.

The crowd whoops it up during this last section and you realize that you’re listening to the ultimate version of the song. You’re hearing the intimidating man depicted on the American Recordings album cover, who confirms he has just arrived to whip somebody. And when you—yes, you—later reach the inevitable times in life when you’re called upon to whip the proverbial pa, you’ll draw your resolve from Johnny Cash’s 1993 version of “Tennessee Stud.”

Media uses/misuses: Jackie Brown (1997)

“In a Big Country” (1983) – Big Country * Written by Stuart Adamson, Mark Brzezicki, Tony Butler, and Bruce Watson * Produced by Steve Lillywhite * LP: The Crossing * Label: Mercury * Charts: Billboard Hot 100 (#17), UK Singles (#17) (numerologists take note)

Amid the foggy synths and posh vocals American radio listeners heard in those days, it was likely the guitar bagpipes of Scotland’s Big Country that declared with highest certainty that a British Invasion was on. So distinctive were the twin skirls of Stuart Adamson and Bruce Watson, as showcased on their radio hit “In a Big Country,” that they could have copyrighted the approach. (What is Adamson shouting throughout the song? “Shout,” apparently. But it always sounded to me like “Ciao, hot shot.”)

Theirs was an era when male pop and metal bands alike attempted to out-girl each other in appearance, but Big Country, in their plaid button-downs, offered up a comparatively blokey and earnest middle ground. Their sound was big, too—producer Steve Lillywhite’s extended version of “In a Big Country” was less a dance mix than a muscle mix, ultimately receiving the most airplay and being the one they included on their debut album. 

Big Country’s widely viewed music video, which presented the band giving chase to a young woman across pastoral, cottage-dotted landscapes, attempted to undermine any of the music’s muscularity with visual tweeness. Image example 1: The band riding three-wheelers with helmets—sensible and safe but not rock and roll. Image example 2: All four of them getting knocked over like bowling pins by one female. Image example 3: The band darting across the water in an air-pump boat. 

The outdoorsy video images would have worked fine, say, for a Hamm’s Beer “Land of Sky Blue Water” ad campaign. And listeners didn’t need to listen closely to the lyrics to surmise that a positive evocation of well-being was at work. But a close listen reveals them to be rather poetic words of encouragement having the power to ease pain and change a life.

Stuart Adamson sang these in 1983, but ended his own life after struggling with alcoholism and depression in 2001, a tragedy that gives “In a Big Country” a poignancy that one hopes will continue affecting people for the better.

As part of the song’s ongoing legacy, I offer up my own experience of seeing Big Country playing live at a small-ish venue in 2013 with Mike Peters (of The Alarm) handling lead vocals. This was a remarkably big-hearted performance, after which all band members passed the mic around to express personal thanks. (Joining guitarist Bruce Watson on the twin guitar attack was his son Jamie.)  Peters is a survivor of lymph cancer and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and it wasn’t until I heard him deliver the “stay alive” refrain as an outright exhortation (“Stay alive!”) that I fully grasped the song’s power a full thirty years after I first heard it. 

“Sonnet 18” (2016) – Paul Kelly * Written by William Shakespeare (words) and Paul Kelly (music) * Produced by Paul Kelly * 10″ LP: Seven Sonnets and a Song * Label: Gawd Aggie

It’s unexpected but not inconceivable for the Australian workhorse Paul Kelly to step forward with a Shakespeare collection (with a bonus track by Sir Philip Sidney). In the 2012 documentary Stories About Me, Kelly points out, after all, that anything that he (or any other songwriter) is apt to express has already been touched upon in the folios. Still, his intrinsic plainspokenness and the Bard’s floridity don’t suggest an immediate merger.

The memorable one is his treatment of Number 18, arguably Shakespeare’s most famous sonnet (“Shall I Compare Thee…”), and it’s also the only one with Kelly as sole producer. By putting it in a minor key, he brings sorrowful shades out of the words that aren’t immediately apparent. There’s an eerie 1973 film called The Pyx, which opens with Karen Black singing verses from the Song of Solomon. If you’ve ever heard that, Kelly’s “Sonnet 18” will summon it. 

“Big Sky” (1968) – The Kinks * Written and Produced by Ray Davies * LP: The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society * Label: Pye

Head Kink Ray Davies crafted an exercise in nostalgia as understated as it was grand with the Village Green Preservation Society album, focusing on the real and imagined cultural touchstones of an English upbringing. A certain archness, though, bends his delivery in every song. While it was clear in “Dedicated Follower of Fashion” (1966), for example, that he was poking fun by taking on an aristocrat’s accent near its fadeout, the subject matter in VGPS feels heartfelt if only for its very outpouring. So sportive is Davies’s voice, that you wonder if he’s feeling self-conscious about the project. (His face on the album cover, far right, makes you wonder doubly so.)

“Big Sky,” halfway through, is the biggie, where Davies rolls out God Himself as one of his album’s endangered curios. “Big Sky feels sad when he sees the children scream and cry,” he sings. “But the Big Sky’s too big to let it get him down.” He sounds like an imperious, inaccessible monarch who refers to himself in the third person. Davies once expressed regret over his delivery, and one wonders if he’d have rather sounded more sympathetic, angry, or less affected. 

The band does the rest of the heavy lifting, giving the track all of the pent-up emotion, release, puzzlement, and memorialization the subject calls for. Being so big, the song can be taken a number of ways, a believable consensus being that it rouses the listener’s spiritual awareness. This brings to mind Tolstoy’s Andrei Bolkonsky, who lies inert on the War and Peace battlefield and discovers that “everything is empty, everything is a deception, except this infinite sky.” It’s an observation that sounds at first like mockery or disappointment, but in fact gives Bolkonsky new life, and for this he thanks God, a.k.a. Big Sky.

“Love Goes Down the Drain” (1980) – The Monochrome Set * Written by Bid * Produced by the Monochrome Set * LP: Strange Boutique * Label: Dindisc

The notion of college rock sprouted out in a jiffy from punk as a better-read, more culturally observant version of the new rawness. London’s Monochrome Set were a good example, with their color wheel of ideas filtering through their eponymous conception of limited tone. It served them well: Their first few singles (“He’s Frank,” “Eine Symphonie des Grauens,” and “The Monochrome Set”) are clear attention-grabbers amid the era’s ocean of independent UK vinyl. Group leader Bid (Ganesh Seshadri) sings his weird words insouciantly with little raga curves while guitarist Lester Square maintains strict, sharp angles to modular and moody effect. 

After 1980, the sharpness dulls, although their first album, Strange Boutique, holds on to portions of it, especially during the three-song stretch of “Love Goes Down the Drain,” “Ici Les Enfants,” and “The Etcetera Stroll.” The LP version of “Love Goes Down the Drain,” which should have been a single, is post-punk college rock 101 – an articulate, culturally literate, good-humored statement of self-loathing. The John Peel version that appeared on the B-side of their 1983 “Jet Set Junta” is more sluggish than this one. 

“You’ve Changed” (1958) – Billie Holiday * Written by Bill Carey and Carl T. Fischer * Produced by Irving Townsend * Arranged by Ray Ellis * LP : Lady in Satin * Label: Columbia

For a worthwhile overview of the stardust-sprinkled wonder that is Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin album, read Will Frielander’s entry in his book The Great Jazz and Pop Vocal Albums (2017). This gives a refresher on the lifetime of personal pain she brought to the sessions, and also her unlikely pairing with Ray Ellis, whose own artistic banner as a studio sugar man waved considerably lower than Holiday’s.

One track on the album emerges with special glory halfway through and stops listeners in their tracks. This is “You’ve Changed,” and although others had previously dampened it with their tears, Holiday transforms it, with her peerless control and inflections, into something that seethes and devastates.

And why does this lament about a love interest who has become woefully incompatible manage to jibe so well with its angel choirs and galactic backdrop? Because it has a secret message of hope, a subliminal flip side of meaning that taps into one of humanity’s fondest anticipations that people can, indeed, change. 

“A Good Year for the Roses” (1971) – George Jones * Written by Jerry Chesnut * Produced by Bob Moore * 45: “A Good Year for the Roses” / “Let a Little Loving Come In” * LP : George Jones with Love (1971)* Label: Musicor * Charts: Billboard country: (#2, entered 11/28/70 and peaked in ’71)

Daniel Johnston may have claimed that no woman could “make a George Jones” out of him, but his East Texas subject’s own self-pitying, heartbroken performance on “A Good Year for the Roses” could make a George Jones out of anyone. Put aside those aspects of the song (written by Jerry Chesnut) that come off as what Dave Marsh, en route to otherwise praising it, labeled unselfconscious chauvinism. (“After three full years of marriage, it’s the first time that you haven’t made the bed,” the Possum laments in his wobbly way.)

It’s the image of him sitting on the porch and watching his untended yard flourish that leads you to an assorted flowering of meaning. There’s that aspect of feeling immobile and letting the world do its thing—for better or worse—all around you; the tactic of distraction, allowing little cheerful things to crowd out the troubling ones; or this: that maybe the breakup was for the best and the blooms will, in the long run, continue attesting to that. (She did leave the baby too, right?) Whatever the interpretation, it’s a melancholy road to arrival.

Jones recorded two versions of the song, both produced by Bob Moore, in early 1970. The first one (a January session) clocks in at 3:12, has prominent piano lines in the intro, and a microphone pop on “funny.” The second one (February session) clocks in at 3:03 and is haunted by Pete Drake’s steel guitar and Bill Pursell’s winter piano. This was the radio version that reached #2 on the Billboard country chart and appeared on the 1971 George Jones with Love LP.

I mention this because that first version showed up, perhaps by accident, on a 1981 budget Gusto label cassette compilation called Golden Hits and reached the ears of many a listener. The discography in the 2009 Bear Family compilation A Good Year for the Roses: The Complete Musicor Recordings 1965-1971 (Part 2) overlooks this, rolling it out as a previously unissued first appearance. So goes life with country discographies, unkempt as George Jones’s lawn.

Elvis Costello reached the UK #6 singles slot with a genre-exercise rendition of this in 1981 featuring a Billy Sherrill production. Alan Jackson did a low-charting tribute duet with Jones in 1994.

“Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” (1985) – Daniel Johnston * Written by Daniel Johnston and Bill Anderson * Produced by Pam Peltz * Cassette: Continued Story

The suspicion is that when heartache happens to a Texas male, the mental George Jones jukebox lights up. That’s why the title of Austin savant Daniel Johnston’s “Ain’t No Woman Gonna Make a George Jones Outta Me” looks like something defiant. But a listen reveals that it’s already too late. No, he hasn’t begun singing in the manner of the East Texas icon, nor is he necessarily drinking too much or missing important engagements. He’s just a woman-sick subject who’s trying to wrap the blues around his head, and he’s chanting those words as an incantation that might chase the existing affliction away.

Johnston, whose level of cult notoriety had upticked after appearing on IRS Presents The Cutting Edge on MTV in August 1985 (in a ragtag episode focusing on Austin), wrote the song with Bill Anderson of the band Texas Instruments, who also plays lead guitar on it. Musician Pam Peltz plays the role of the unattainable, inscrutable female. Stubbornly crude as it is, the track sounded to Johnston regulars like a beefy upgrade.