The Jayhawks Issue :: Paste mPlayer

The Jayhawks make for quite a pleasurable listen. They hit the musical scene about 15 years or so ago and now have reunited for a new album on Rounder. Check them out! The way their voices blend is unique. If you like melodic folk-rock, this may be a group for you!

The Jayhawks Issue :: Paste mPlayer

The Bronze Buckaroo

Herb Jeffries turned 100 today. He's remarkable for many other achievements besides that one.

Here he is with the Duke Ellington orchestra singing "Flamingo". This song, which has sold an estimated 14 million copies over its lifespan, established Jeffries as a singer.

Looking at the video, I'm struck by how much he and Billy Eckstine sound alike. Also it's notable that there's a certain look that white audiences found palatable with these two singers as well as with the Duke: snappy dresser, copper-toned, gelled hair, and a mustache.

Except, as this promo makes clear, Herb Jeffries had trouble at first finding an audience. Turns out that he was too white for black audiences, and too black for white listeners.

After passing himself off as a Creole and finding an audience with Ellington, Herb Jeffries did something even more remarkable: he became the world's first and only black-singing cowboy, starring in five westerns in the late '30s.

Here he is as a cowboy in a 1938 short. Terrific song, wonderful harmonizing: man, I am a sucker for that lone guitar and a song on the prairie!

I found out about Herb Jeffries in my usual way, by rifling through CDs in a used music shop and taking a chance on a release entitled Herb Jeffries: The Bronze Buckaroo (Rides Again). It must have paid $3 for it, and I haven't listened to it much, but in honor of him I'll listen to it now.

You might want to check this recording out: backup singers for this recording include Take 6, Sons of the San Joaquin, and the Mills Brothers. Herb (who's 84 at the time) duets with Michael Martin Murphey (remember "Wildfire"?) and a host of other singers.

Lou Rawls

I knew him first as a lounge singer. "You'll never find," the rich baritone intoned, "a love just like mine/that can love you/the way that I do." Now here was a song that crossed boundaries! My father loved it and - though I wouldn't admit it at the time - I found it arresting too.

He was a presence on the TV screen with his campaign for the United Negro College Fund. "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" was the slogan. I'd see him host telethons for this venture. The tux put him squarely in Sinatraville.

I didn't think much more of Lou Rawls until I was in a restaurant and heard his duet with Phoebe Snow on their sound system. (The song: "A Lover's Question". The CD: 1993's Portrait of the Blues. It was my first of many Lou Rawls albums.)

Lou Rawls synergized many of his predecessors. He had the smooth and liquid delivery of a Nat Cole or Brook Benton. He could perform a blues howl and holler that recalled Joe Williams in his prime with Count Basie. Given the time when he was making a name for himself, he must have provided inspiration to singers like Otis Redding. I mean, this guy delivers a lyric!

I've been grooving in my car to a 2-CD set that Capitol reissued in 2006. Black and Blue and Tobacco Road were Rawl's third and fourth albums released in the mid-1960s, and they present two strikingly different styles. On the former he dips and dives through a program on blues classics like "Kansas City" and "Trouble in Mind". He hits you hard with Billie Holiday's "Gloomy Sunday" and Fats Waller's "(What Did I Do To Be So) Black and Blue". It is a stunning set that I guarantee will hold your attention, despite the singularity of musical style.

The latter album features swingin' Lou. It's a finger-snapper from start to finish. I especially recommend "Ol' Man River" and "Rockin' Chair". My spirits are lifted immediately when listening to this one.

Sweet Lou - I am so glad that I found you as I matured as a listener. You were one of a kind!

Memorable Music Biographies

I have three music documentaries to recommend to you. Two are about subjects who led troubled lives. One is about a singer who is much more together.

First to get to our troubled subjects. Let's start with Phil Ochs. I loved There But for Fortune. Ochs was a "topical" folksinger who for a short while was head-to-head to many listeners with Bob Dylan before Dylan went electric. His songs are overtly political: ripped right from the day's headlines, as one of his albums titled All the News That's Fit to Sing puts it. Ochs's music survives today because of its startling directness, and the singer's warm, somewhat nasally delivery. There has really been no one quite like him since.

I loved watching footage of him singing songs that are seared in my memory: "There But for Fortune"; "Love Me, I'm a Liberal"; "Draft Dodger Rag" and "When I'm Gone". As the documentary proceeds and Och's great cause (ending the Vietnam War) is realized not with a bang but a whimper, you can see his enervation and frustration showing.

His drinking accelerates and debauched travels begin. Ochs's friends movingly describe his decline and descent into paranoia. It went on for around 5 years until his suicide at the age of 35. The film ends with Dave van Ronk performing "He Was a Friend of Mine" at a memorial concert. Quite moving.

I regret that Ochs didn't continue the direction he had forged when he moved to California in the late 1960s. Check out The Pleasures of the Harbor if you want to hear an idiosyncratic but powerful development as a songwriter. He would have traveled a fascinating road had he survived.



My second tragic tale is of Harry Nilsson, surely one of the most talented pop tunesmiths of the late 1960s to the mid 1970s. It's ironic that Nilsson's hit gold with "Everybody's Talkin'": it's one of the few songs that he sang that he didn't write! Perhaps you also know him for "One" (is the loneliest number that you'll ever do) or "The Coconut Song" (you put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning) or "Living Without You".

This guy had a way with melodies that made the Beatles envious. He was good buddies with John Lennon and a big drinking buddy of John's in the '70s when John was estranged from Yoko. Nilsson cranked out albums through most of the '70s, but the dawn of disco really spelled the end for him. After working on the score for Robert Altman's movie version of Popeye in 1980, he was through. No more work came from him. One assumes he drank heavily and suffered a crisis of confidence for the remainder of his life. (He died of heart problems in the early 1990s).

Nilsson's body of work is justly celebrated by anyone interested in writing moving and memorable pop songs. He was playful at times in his music and then he can slay you with a love song or a ballad of regret. He sang with a lovely voice that drove every word home. I never tire of listening to him.

I enjoyed the documentary, especially the extensive footage showing Harry recording A Touch of Schmilson in the Night. This was an album of standards that he recorded in 1973 with the great Gordon Jenkins and his orchestra. I must say, that album is a desert-island disc for me!


My last documentary is about Bill Withers (Still Bill). What a wonderful guy he is! Withers hit the top of the charts during Nilsson's time with songs like "Ain't No Sunshine" and "Grandma's Hands". The documentary covers this hectic period in his life and then reveals how he stepped away from the limelight in the early 1980s never to return again. But no drinking and no tragedy here! He was just done. He wanted to enjoy his marriage and raising his kids.

I loved Bill's journey back to West Virginia to visit where he grew up, and I was especially amused by the obvious deep admiration displayed by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West as they drop by to visit him. Bill Withers comes across as one cool cat. I was deeply moved by his character and basic decency.

Music documentaries are hit and miss, but you won't go wrong carving out 90 minutes to view any of these works!

Reaching Back

What would a popular singer perform today if he or she were hewing to how Peggy Lee and other performers chose their material in the late 1950s and early 1960s?

This question came to mind as I enjoyed two 1958 sets by Lee: Things Are Swingin' and Jump for Joy. As I listened, I considered how songs on the albums were at least a quarter of a century old at the time she was recording them: "Alone Together" (1932); "Back in Your Own Backyard" (1927); "The Glory of Love" (1936); "When My Sugar Walks Down the Street" (1924): "Four or Five Times" (1927); "Cheek to Cheek" (1935); "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me" (1932); and "Ain't We Got Fun" (1921).

What singer today executes a program with hit songs from the mid-1980s? Hey, what would you choose anyway? What are the "standards" from that time?

This CD is just a marvel. I've been singing along in my car for days now. Mixed in with the previously mentioned gems are songs that were merely a decade or so old, like "Old Devil Moon" (1946); "It's Been a Long, Long Time" (1945); and "I Hear Music" (1940).

I think as contemporary as Peggy gets on these sets in when she sings "Alright, Okay, You Win", a hit for Joe Williams and Count Basie in 1955 and "Music! Music! Music!", a big seller for Teresa Brewer in 1949.

So again, I'm wondering: what singer today reaches that far back? Seems to me that it just isn't done that often, at least by anyone considered a popular singer. It's a shame because great songs remain frozen the past now, no longer informed by a contemporary sensibility.

Anyway, take a trip back to popular song of yore with the sublime Peggy Lee!

If Love Were All

Oh, my thoughts are with the songwriters presently, given the recent obituaries for Jerry Leiber and Nick Ashford. (The latter who with his wife Valerie Simpson wrote such classics as "Ain't No Mountain High Enough", "Ain't Nothin' Like the Real Thing", and so many more).

I reflect upon their impact in my life and how their words stay with me. I wonder about the permanence of a great song. I also shake my head at how indifferent I am to whatever passes for popular music today. Is it as good as the music I enjoyed growing up? Perhaps my silence is judgment enough. Or perhaps I think it best to not speak about something I know little about.

I'm happy to see that Barbara Streisand pays tribute to Alan and Marilyn Bergman on her latest release What Matters Most. I'm thrilled to see the title track revived. (I first heard Kenny Rankin perform it on his wonderful album After the Roses.) I look forward to hearing Barbra's version of "What Matters Most" along with other songs in the Bergman canon.

I caught Streisand on PBS last night performing at the Village Vanguard in 2009. This was a highly exclusive show that was chock full of celebrities like Bill Clinton and Sarah Jessica Parker among the 132 witnesses. I enjoyed it deeply. I am a sucker for nightclub performances, and this one had all the trappings: a tightly assembled audience, a rich red velvet curtain as backdrop, a trio that caressed every melody, and a singer who brought the lyrics to life.

What makes me sad was how dismissive I felt that New York Times critic Stephen Holden seemed in his review of Streisand's What Matters Most. Here's what he wrote. (Italics mine.)
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...Barbra Streisand yearns, sighs, and cries through lyrics by her longtime friends and muses, Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Beyond the therapy-enlightened depictions of relationships at various stages is an unquestioned faith that the traditional happily-ever-after fade-out at the end of a romantic melodrama is an ideal worth pursuing...

"What Matters Most" epitomizes a venerable but failing genre that I like to call the Big Swoon.
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All right. I know it's bad out there. But are you telling me that true love is passé? Or that I should rethink my definition of what constitutes true love?

Here's to any songwriter and singer willing to keep this "failing genre" alive!

Lordy, there's only so much change a fella like me can take!

Jerry Leiber

Jerry Leiber died recently. Together with Mike Stoller, he crafted a slew of early rock-and-roll classics. ("Hound Dog", "Stand By Me", "Jailhouse Rock", and "Yakety Yak" to name a few.) Then, after Peggy Lee made a hit of their song "Is That All There Is?" in 1969, the duo decided to write exclusively for adults.

"The earlier market of swing and Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee and Duke Ellington was pretty much gone," Leiber told The New York Times in 1995. "We liked that kind of sound and wanted to imitate it." He added: "In a way, we had helped kill it with what we had done."

I'd really like to recommend their work in the more adult, "artsy" vernacular, specifically two albums: Peggy Lee's Mirrors (1975) and Other Songs by Leiber & Stoller (1978) sung by Joan Morris.

It is on these albums that you can bathe in Leiber's poetry. Take the opening track on Peggy Lee's album, "Ready to Begin Again". In this song an old woman is dressing in front of a mirror.

When my teeth are at rest in the glass by my bed
And my hair lies somewhere in a drawer
Then the world doesn't seem like a very nice place
Not a very nice place anymore

Wow! What striking images! The song continues with a gradual build.

But I take out my teeth from the glass by my bed
And my hair from a drawer in the hall
Still the world doesn't seem like a very nice place
Not a very nice place at all

Well, at least you're moving, right? Teeth and hair in hand! We continue.

But I put in my teeth and I put on my hair
And a strange thing occurs when I do
For my teeth start to feel like my very own teeth
And my hair like my very own too

That is strange. Yet, as fellow human beings, we can understand. Now we proceed to the song's bridge.

And I'm ready to begin again
Ready to begin again
I'm reaching for the soap
My heart is full of hope
Again, again

I'm ready to begin again
Feeling like I've just begun
Now I'm not afraid
To raise the window shade
And face the sun

The song is heading into high gear now as we return for the last verse.

I put on my bracelets and brooches,
My rings and my pearls and my pins
And as the new day approaches
As the new day begins

Then back to the bridge and the final killer line.

I'm ready to begin again
Looking fresh and bright I trust
Ready to begin again
As everybody must

Peggy Lee is just perfect for this material. Nearly a decade earlier she'd scored a hit with Leiber & Stoller's "I'm a Woman" and their sassy number "Some Cats Know" had been a part of her repertoire too.

This album is gorgeous. Leiber's lyrics are transcendent. Take the words that Lee recites at the start of "Tango".

Oh, the Tango is done with a thin black mustache
A wide scarlet sash, black boots, and whip
Oh, the Tango is done with Seafarin' trash
Reelin' from hash, fresh off true ship
Oh, the Tango is done it's a dangerous dance
A treacherous step and if one should trip
The frail body breaks with a snap and a twist
And a gold watch slips onto a thick tattooed wrist
And a gray merchant ship turns black in the sun
As it heaves to the east when the Tango is done

Whew! A long way from "Yakety Yak /don't come back", wouldn't you say?

Joan Morris, recording three years later, offers her own take on many of the songs, but adds some terrific new numbers. (My personal favorite is "Humphrey Bogart" which was also sung memorably later by Jackie and Roy on Bogie, a desert-island disc for this listener!).

I'm going to keep the soundtrack to Smokey Joe's Cafe on my shelf and instead turn to the comfort of listening to Lee and Morris. I am so glad that in his 40s Jerry Leiber turned to serious songwriting. It's durable music that will always stand the test of time!