Remembering Rose

THE MADDOX BROTHERS & ROSE
The Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America (4-CD box)
Bear Family

by Dan Moser

One doesn’t even have to hear a note of music by the Maddox family to be enthralled by their quintessentially American story. In a true-life version of The Grapes Of Wrath, this dirt-poor clan from Boaz, Alabama, headed to California, driven by its forceful matriarch in search of fortune, or at least a decent living. There, while they eked out a living as farmhands, Lula and Charlie Maddox’s sole daughter and her four older brothers begin to carve out a musical career in the late ’30s, first on local radio and ultimately helping to invent the rebellious California country sound that stood in such stark contrast to Nashville’s increasingly buttoned-down approach.

And then there’s the music. Utterly ahead of their time (hell, occasionally they sound even ahead of this time), Rose and the boys delivered a souped-up, at times deranged hillbilly boogie that at times veered pretty damn close to rockabilly at their peak in the late ’40s and early ’50s — years before anyone else was even close to that sound. Those astonishing sides are available on two single-disc collections on the Arhoolie label (titled America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band, volumes 1 and 2) and are simply essential listening.

Now, the fine folks at the German label Bear Family have issued this pricey but highly entertaining exploration of the Maddoxes’ later years at Columbia Records (1952–58). It’s the first time much of this music has been in print for decades and it’s long overdue, particularly given Rose’s death this past April.

The pleasures of the Maddoxes’ Columbia output perhaps aren’t quite as pure as those of their earlier music. This box set reflects the sound of a band settling into a career as professional musicians rather than recording whatever and however the hell they wanted to because they didn’t know any better — or more likely, didn’t care.

Still, some of the Maddoxes’ most essential sides are included here. The four-CD collection’s opening cut, “I’ll Make Sweet Love To You”, sets the tone for much of what follows, as Rose’s bellowing voice is punctuated by whoops, giggles, guffaws and other sounds of frankly indeterminate origin. Behind her, brother Fred leads the band on slapping bass, while the rest of the clan — Don on fiddle, Cal on acoustic guitar and Henry on mandolin — play up a storm, making up with sheer energetic abandon what they lacked in musicianship.

This is a formula the Maddoxes returned to often, with endlessly entertaining results. There’s the hilarious “Ugly And Slouchy”, which finds Fred bragging about his woman’s homeliness (“She’s far from a-bein’ queen,” he drawls proudly). “Hey Little Dreamboat” features some great, bluesy picking by Merle Travis, and another great guest guitarist, Chet Atkins, contributes terrific licks to another near-rockabilly tune, “You Won’t Believe This”. Joe Maphis, yet another legendary guitarist, also puts in several appearances, even playing banjo in some places. Rose even covers Ruth Brown’s R&B romp “Wild Wild Young Men”, and she and Don do a very cool hillbilly version of Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange”.

And then there’s “The Death Of Rock And Roll”, which has to rank as one of the wildest, weirdest songs ever committed to wax. This parody of Ray Charles’ “I’ve Got A Woman”, which had recently been covered by Elvis, sounds like a drunken brawl as the Maddoxes poke good-natured fun at the King, this new music called rock ’n’ roll that was emerging (much to the detriment of country, of course) and, most notably, themselves. Forty-odd years later, it’s still impossible to hear this inspired mess without amazement.

The Maddoxes were hardly one-dimensional, however: There are some fine ballads here (including the obligatory violent country death song, Fred’s chilling “It’s A Dark, Dark Place”) and some heartfelt gospel.

To be sure, there is dross among the 96 cuts. Not surprisingly, Columbia struggled mightily to figure out just what to do with the Maddoxes’ unbridled style. Too often, they saddled Rose with uninspired session players (occasionally even a churchy organ!), syrupy background vocals and questionable material — and excluded her brothers altogether. Rose is a trouper throughout; she always sings wonderfully, yet a listener can’t help but feel frustrated at “what could have been” if the label had just trusted the family’s instincts more.

Happily, though, the music on this collection makes an even better case than the Maddoxes’ earlier sides for the importance of the four brothers to their sound. Certainly, Rose has been justly celebrated as the star of the clan: She went on to a fairly successful solo career in the early ’60s, and her influence on other female singers is incalculable, if largely overlooked. Dolly Parton learned to sing by listening to her; Kitty Wells launched her career by covering one of the Maddox records; Janis Joplin followed Rose from show to show as a teenager in Texas.

But the guys get plenty of chances to shine here, with their vocals (especially Fred’s homely but irresistibly warm voice) front-and-center on numerous cuts. Of course, Rose, even as a background singer, is impossible to ignore, with her whooping and crazed cackle.

Finally, even by Bear Family’s reliably high standards, the packaging of this box set is sterling, as fine as the label has ever produced. There’s a lively history written by Robert K. Oermann and a savvy appreciation of the music by Deke Dickerson, of the late Dave & Deke Combo. Perhaps best of all, though, are the pictures: a shot of Rose hugging a shirtless Jerry Lee Lewis, with whom, it was rumored, she had an intense fling (a story that by God ought to be true even if it’s not); another of her standing next to the buttoned-down Mitch Miller, a truly loony look in her eyes; and yet another photo of her onstage with a young Sleepy LaBeef, who’s eyeing Rose warily, as if he can’t believe she’s for real.

Rose and her brothers were about as real as they came, of course — with a bawdy, independent spirit reflected in both their remarkable, ageless music and in the irrepressible and very American ambition that drove them. It’s ironic, albeit not surprising, that it took a foreign record label to make this music available again, but maybe someone stateside will consider a single-disc compilation of these Maddox years, not to mention Rose’s solo music for Capitol, also unavailable but for an expensive Bear Family box set.

(Bear Family, Box 1154, D-27727 Hambergen, Germany; bear@bear-family.de)

BUTCH HANCOCK
The Wind’s Dominion
Rainlight

It’s tempting to call The Wind’s Dominion Butch Hancock’s Blonde On Blonde, given that Hancock has often been referred to as “the West Texas Dylan,” and that this epic double-album arguably stands as his greatest studio achievement. Originally released in 1979, The Wind’s Dominion must have struck like a coming-of-age lightning-bolt for fans of Hancock, who had made his solo debut the previous year with West Texas Waltzes & Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes after first gaining attention in the early ’70s as a member of the later-to-be-legendary Lubbock group the Flatlanders.

West Texas Waltzes was a charmingly small-scale introduction to the artist, with nothing but Hancock’s “voice, guitar, foot and harmonica” (as the credits read) scratching out aural snapshots of desert life such as “Dry Land Farm”, “Little Coyote Waltz” and “Just One Thunderstorm”. The Wind’s Dominion subsequently blew in like a Tornado Alley twister, a fifteen-song opus full of rambling yet finely detailed border stories, character studies and metaphysical meditations.

Like many such musical masterpieces, The Wind’s Dominion starts off on an unsuspecting note, with Hancock — hardly a Pavarotti of the Plains — crooning an obscure a cappella tune called “Sea’s Deadog Catch” written by Milo Flagg. “Capture… Fracture…And The Rapture”, a song as abnormal and complicated as its title suggests, follows, blazing a trail for what’s to come with rapid-fire lyrical wordplay and lightning-quick instrumental interplay (courtesy acoustic lead guitarist David Halley and fiddler Richard Bowden). Next up is “Long Road To Asia Minor”, which is more in the vein of a traditional country-folk tale — except for a jarring minor chord that sonically shanghais the last line of every stanza.

Having thus confounded expectations enough to establish his individuality, Hancock then fills the fourth slot with an unabashed classic, “Smokin’ In The Rain”, a song so perfectly constructed that it deserves to be mentioned alongside his best-known numbers such as “Bluebird” and “She Never Spoke Spanish To Me”. One of the most naturally flowing melodies he’s ever written weaves its way through no shortage of profoundly expressed observations: “Allow me to elucidate/Like they see theirs I see my fate/And babe I hope you see yours just as plain/It’s fire in the skies/It’s fire in your eyes/And it’s smokin’ in the rain.”

From there on out, Hancock just keeps upping the ante. The mood captured in “Personal Rendition Of The Blues” lives up to the song’s name; “Dominoes”, long a staple of Joe Ely’s repertoire, is as painstakingly constructed as the rows of dominoes that keep tumbling throughout the tune; “Own And Own” has more words (and more meaning) than you’ll ever hear anyone cram into a song that’s just two minutes and five seconds long; “Mario Y Maria” is a heartbreaking tale of lovers’ misadventures punctuated by a sad, simple truth: “There are those who never come home.”

All this builds up to the double-zenith of “Eternal Triangles” and “Only Born”, which clock in at 7:24 and 10:01, respectively. The former stays true to its triptychal title with three sets of three verses each — rendered, of course, in three-quarter time. “Only Born”, whose lyrics fill two pages of the CD booklet, is perhaps Hancock’s “Desolation Row”, or, in keeping with the Blonde On Blonde analogy, his “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”. The album ends with a two-song denouement, the title track finally surrendering all that has come before to “The Wind’s Dominion”.

Hancock’s legacy leapfrogged in the ’80s with several more releases on Rainlight, his own label; most of those likely will reappear in the years ahead as Butch continues the long-awaited transformation of his back catalog from vinyl to CD. It may well, however, never get any better than this.

— PETER BLACKSTOCK

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

THE CARTER FAMILY
Longing For Old Virginia: Their Complete Victor Recordings 1934
Last Sessions: Their Complete Victor Recordings 1934–1941
Rounder

These two collections are the final chapters in an extensive reissue campaign of the Carter Family’s marathon recording sessions with RCA Victor. Culled from old 78s released on RCA’s budget-line subsidiary, Bluebird, these Rounder reissues display A.P. Carter, his then-wife Sara, and Maybelle singing and playing self-penned material as well as hand-picked traditionals from the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Longing For Old Virginia includes eternal compositions such as “Are You Tired Of Me My Darling?” and “I’m Working On A Building”. Pure as a mountain stream and heartfelt as the day is long, these vintage performances encompass the evolution of an American songwriting tradition at its finest.

The Last Sessions disc showcases both the mature songwriting and interpretive talents of all three Carters. Maybelle is credited for tunes such as “Lonesome, Homesick Blues”, while Sara revives old numbers including “Fifty Miles Of Elbow Room”. Sara and A.P. were separated by the time of their final recording session but the original lineup of this classic ensemble sounded no worse for wear.

— MITCH MYERS

STONEY EDWARDS
The Best of Stoney Edwards: Poor Folks Stick Together
Razor & Tie

With the success of Charley Pride, major labels were, however briefly, emboldened to look for black country talent. Stoney Edwards was all three, a multi-ethnic artist whose resume included bootlegging, major health problems, and a lifetime of hard, honest work. Born in Seminole, Oklahoma (but discovered at a Bay Area Bob Wills tribute), he wrote and sang in the style of Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizzell.

Edwards nibbled the charts often enough in the early ’70s to keep Capitol interested, but was dropped in the late ’70s. It is tempting, in the hindsight of political rectitude, to argue for the unfairness of the brevity of his career, but this solid twenty-song set doesn’t quite make the case. Edwards had a warm, supple voice that is just a half-step from being exceptional.

The pity is that his songwriting (and Edwards was illiterate; one wonders how much he wrote that was lost with his death April 6, 1997) has been so little recognized, for he did have a rare gift. Beginning with his first single, “A Two Dollar Toy”, Edwards revealed a gentle, caring — and telling — eye for the details that distinguish poor folks’ lives. Altogether, this set is a fine introduction to a singer well worth knowing.

— GRANT ALDEN