Just Deserts

BUTCH HANCOCK
You Coulda Walked Around The World
Rainlight

by Don McLeese

Bob Dylan’s Time Out Of Mind album has generated some of his best reviews in two decades and earned him the cover of Newsweek; Butch Hancock’s self-released You Coulda Walked Around The World isn’t likely to cause much of a ripple beyond the clubs where fans will come to hear these songs and perhaps buy a CD from the bandstand. Without diminishing Dylan’s accomplishment, not only would a half-dozen or so of Hancock’s best new songs fit just fine on the former’s new album, they would raise its quality.

After a flirtation with national distribution through Sugar Hill, Hancock has returned to self-imposed obscurity, the sort of obscurity that comes when the process of writing a song is its own reward, the recording of the song a spontaneous lark, the selling of the song an afterthought. Plenty of songwriters have emulated Dylan (to their detriment, the closer the mimicry), but Hancock has been one of the few to extend Dylan’s inspiration, to out-Dylan Dylan in the organic unity of multi-layered lyricism. What might initially seem like a one-liner or joking non-sequitur in a Hancock song inevitably connects with a deeper insight over the course of a verse or two, as nonsense reveals a higher sense.

In Hancock’s songs, it’s hard to separate the love of language from a love of life, or the way that the sound of words connect with their sense and the words themselves connect with the senses. There’s a reaffirming spirit in even the darker strains, in the vitality with which a line such as "She fought a brutal battle with the bottle and it brought a little hardship to her life" trips off the tongue. When the title of the song promises "One Good Time", Hancock is quick to add "after another," even as the occasion finds the songwriter "down on my knees… scratching the fleas of destiny and decline."

This is seriously playful songcraft, from the most playfully serious songwriter in America. The album is a back-to-basics celebration – the basics in this case being love and metaphysics – inspired by Hancock’s move to the West Texas ghost town of Terlingua, where the urban boom of Austin barely echoes in memory. Amid the starkly beautiful desert of the borderlands, Hancock’s songwriting has been cleansed by the austerity, washing away the cleverness of complexity for the simplicity of grace.

There’s a strong sense of place as well, with songs such as "Barefoot Prints", "Long Sunsets" and "Hidin’ In The Hills" conjuring images of desert life as vivid as Hancock’s photographs, while so much of the rest of the material draws inspiration from such an elemental existence. It’s hard to imagine a more straightforward song than the album-opening "Chase", one that details a life of choice ("You might chase dreams/You might chase flies/You might chase girls/You might chase guys/You might chase the road/The little angels have trod/You might chase gold/You might chase god") in a manner that explores the complexities of existence in the simplest language imaginable.

The album-ending title song brings the theme full circle. Though its "child of mother earth" and uncharacteristic preachiness weaken the song, it’s hard to argue with the blunt wisdom of one of the collection’s more memorable lines: "You coulda talked with masters, instead of jabberin’ with fools."

With such depth of purpose providing the album’s foundation, architect Hancock decorates his musical edifice with some richly detailed evocations of a singularly sensual desert. "Barefoot Prints", "All Curled Up" and "Naked Light Of Day" are as close as Hancock comes to conventional love songs, where romantic love is merely a symptom for a more expansive love of life. (It’s worth noting that between the album’s recording and its release, Hancock celebrated the birth of his first son.)

Representing the more ruminative side of his writing are three songs that rank with the finest of his career, as the elliptical profundities of "Roll Around", a lover’s lullaby, turn apocalyptic on "Red Blood (Drippin’ from the Moon)", and stop time dead in its tracks on the Dylanesque "Circumstance". If songwriters offered mission statements, that last could serve as Butch’s. Amid the bare-bones recording, the song achieves an intimacy that is less voice-to-ear than soul-to-soul:

"All of what I feel/And for all I see/There is no you/And there is no me/No howlin’ wind/No drivin’ rain/No fallin’ star/No lonesome train/And there is no fountain/No river wide/No solid mountain/No crimson tide/Just somethin’ shinin’/Way deep inside/You can’t deny/What you cannot hide."

For Hancock, production, arrangements and even melody are minimal concerns, as long as they don’t get in the way of the words. His tunes sound like folk readymades, the musical equivalent of a borrowed flannel shirt, comfortably weathered. His voice is a wheeze, one that (like Dylan’s) inflects his material with the sort of rough-hewn nuance that more conventionally accomplished singers can’t convey. The album was recorded at Joe Ely’s home studio, with the two of them sharing production credits, though production in this case seems to mean Ely pushing "start" and "stop" and asking Hancock whether he wants a second take.

A better editor might have convinced Hancock that "Black Irish Rose" doesn’t really fit within this album’s context, its cliché of "Ireland’s bonnie shores" beneath him. And a producer with more of an ear toward the marketplace would have insisted upon the punch of a band, from which "Red Blood" in particular would benefit. Though Hancock has already expressed interest in re-recording the album in its entirety with a band behind him, I wouldn’t wait for him to make good on yet another whim. Immediacy and spontaneity have long brought out the best in Butch, and nobody’s songs are any better than the best of these.

(Rainlight, P.O. Box 468, Terlingua, TX 79852.)

Sacred Steel: Traditional Sacred African-American Steel Guitar Music in Florida
Arhoolie

Most people associate the sound of a crying steel guitar with honky-tonk Saturday nights, not with Sunday services at the House of God. Yet as this amazing collection of contemporary field recordings attests, the instrument plays a central role in the worship life of many Holiness-Pentecostal churches. Sacred Steel features five of Florida’s finest African-American steel guitarists performing solo or accompanying individual or choral singers.

Stylistically, the selections range from sublimely lilting melodies (Sonny Treadway) to vamping, funk workouts (Aubrey Ghent). And while nothing here is short of inspired, the performances of Willie Eason, the 76-year-old credited with being the first person to adapt gospel music to the steel guitar, qualify as a revelation. Singing in a sweet, gruff voice reminiscent of the late Ted Hawkins, Eason accompanies himself on mesmerizing versions of "Just A Closer Walk With Thee" and his signature song, "Franklin D. Roosevelt, A Poor Man’s Friend". Pop music fans may be familiar with the latter from the update Jesse Winchester included on his 1974 LP, Learn To Love It.

Except for Glenn Lee, the youngest guitarist on the record, all the musicians here eschew the pedal steel in favor of the older lap or "Hawaiian" steel guitar. Harder to control than the pedal steel, many lap players believe the simpler instrument enables them to heed the pull of the Holy Spirit. All, however, play in the traditional sacred steel style, employing such distinctly African musical devices as heavily accented backbeats, coarse or "dirty" timbres, and gliding leaps in pitch (the last of which often bear uncanny resemblances to the human voice).

While no brief review can do this magnificent music justice, suffice it to say that country blues buffs, even fans of Ry Cooder, John Fahey, and Duane Allman’s guitar work, will fall out when they hear this.

– BILL FRISKICS-WARREN