A Haven For Songs E-Book

Martin Wimmer

• Herausgeber: epubli
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 170

Beschreibung

With A Haven For Songs: Connecting The Dots About Americana Music, selected works of novelist, lyricist and music critic Martin Wimmer are available in the USA for the first time. Martin Wimmer explains his personal relationship with the art of magicians such as Townes Van Zandt, Jerry Jeff Walker, Blaze Foley, Woody Guthrie, John Prine, Bob Dylan, and Johnny Mercer. These artists, among many others mentioned in the book, are the glue that holds together time, love, history, space, and identity. Join Wimmer on a trip down musical-memory lane as he recounts his adventures at the 30A Songwriter Festival in Florida, the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas, and New York City. Finally, experience Wimmer's perspective on the Cajun music of Louisiana, Hawaiian Slack Key, the Paisley Underground scene in California, Americana in Europe, and how each of these music scenes are tied to the "Country & Folk" music we know and love today.

Leseprobe

A Haven For Songs. Connecting The Dots About Americana Music

A Haven For SongsForeword (by Andrea Parodi)Introduction: Dérive / Hill Country RainPressure creates counterpressure. A visit to the 30th anniversary of the Kerrville Folk Festival in TexasNobel Prize for Literature 2016: Bob DylanTownes Van Zandt: Singer of sad songsBlaze Foley: Plastic punk in a honky-tonkWhen old men mourn dying fathers: On the death of a handful of US songwritersFrom room 19: Won’t you lend your lungs to meCowboy boots and bathin' suitsBeach, songs and winter: The 30A Songwriters FestivalFrom zippo to the petals and the thornsIt came from San AntonioVoila, an American dreamHey-ya! The social history of U.S. music in less than 1,000 wordsNot much to celebrate: The music of 1968Revival of the fittest: A journey to very, very old folk musicians in New York CityLoving is my will to live: On the death of Jerry Jeff Walker (Oct. 23, 2020)A trip to HawaiiI wish you love and all the best: On the death of John PrineObituary for Wolfgang Welt(June 21, 2016)This machine: Notes on Woody GuthrieThe old black magic. On the 100th birthday of Johnny MercerWhere sailors go ashore, the whores wait: They play both - Cajun and ZydecoBlack and white blues, red and white wineFour German Americana giants: Markus Rill, Robert Hasleder, Mr Jones and Micha VoigtFrom Easy Listening to GangstagrassAcknowledgementsAbout the authorAbout this bookPraise for the book

A Haven For Songs 

Connecting The Dots

About

Americana Music

by Martin Wimmer

The Borderlord Books

All rights reserved / Alle Rechte vorbehalten

First edition 2021 / Erste Auflage 2021

Copyright / Impressum

Martin Wimmer

D-10119 Berlin

[email protected]

Distributor / Vertrieb

epubli - a neopubli GmbH, Berlin service / ein Service der neopubli GmbH, Berlin

Foreword (by Andrea Parodi)

The love for Townes Van Zandt or Guy Clark is a love unlike any other. It’s something hardly describable, peculiar and intimate. It’s a treasure chest that shortens distances and turns life into a much more beautiful experience. It’s a treasure chest full of music, poetry, endless skies and sunset. The Texan ones. Stories, meetings, friendships.

I was lucky enough to find that chest in a small border town between Italy and Switzerland in the early 90s. I was a young man who used to go to Sesto Calende to see my favorite songwriters. Up to the day I actually started to play with them, then became their tour manager, visited Austin with them every year, till I came up with a Festival entirely dedicated to Townes here in Italy and, since everything related to him can be magic, I ended up getting married with my Elena by JT Van Zandt under a hundred years old Indian oak tree in Joe Ely's ranch.

Stories like this one, all this beauty needs to be shared in the best way and Martin does it, with a lot of passion and competence. His view on the world and his knowledge in music is so broad and deep that I'm fully convinced he would be able to tell more about my music than I could possibly do or than I already know. Because his knowledge goes beyond music and has been shaped and molded by his love for life and for the best things human beings are capable of creating.

His transversal approach in this book composes something incredibly rich, assembling all the elements in harmony in a sort of written sacred geometry that, I promise, will reveal to you so much you did not know.

Andrea Parodi is a songwriter, record producer and festival organizer. He released the fantastic album "Andrea Parodi Zabala" in May 2021, which features contributions by Ryan Bingham, Joe Ely, James McMurtry, Carrie Rodriguez, David Bromberg, Greg Brown, Larry Campbell, David Grissom, Sarah Lee Guthrie, David Immerglück, Tim Lorsch, Scarlet Rivera, Glenn Fukunaga, Brennan Temple and Steve Wickham. Other highlights of his work include a bilingual version of 'Pancho & Lefty,' with a beautiful cameo of Terry Allen, on his album "Barnetti Bros Band - Chupadero!," and a haunting version of 'Tecumseh Valley' on the brillant Townes tribute he produced in 2018: „When the Wind Blows – The Songs of Townes Van Zandt,“ with Sam Baker, David Olney, Chris Jagger, Malcolm Holcombe, Christian Kjellvander, Slaid Cleaves and others.

Introduction: Dérive / Hill Country Rain

"Capitalized time stood still. Without a train, without a metro, without a car, without a job, the strikers made up for the time they had lost in such a dreary way in the factories, on the streets, in front of the television. They drifted, they dreamed, they learned to live," says René Viénet.

And who says: "I write sadder song lyrics than Townes Van Zandt?” My aspiration is that every person be given the education to do so, the free time, the financial resources, the technical equipment, the network of friends, the aesthetic experiences in all fields of art, the freedom to travel in space and time. That general anarchy allows private passion to be nurtured in public discourse. Drift, dream, learn, live, love.

Hank! Sounds of village joy arise. Here is the people's paradise. Contented, great and small shout joyfully. Here I am Man, here dare it to be. Drunk and unshaven, a sad love maven. Gonna sleep over there, that's where the music's coming from. Haven, oh haven. I don't need any guide, I already know the way. Oh, help me in my weakness, I heard the drifter say.

To drift? Dérive? In the second issue of the journal of the Situationist International, an art movement of the 1960s that contrasted being at the mercy of the spectacle of capitalist society with the production of an intense situation as an aesthetic concept, and to which René Viénet also belonged, its mastermind Guy Debord wrote in 1958: One of the most important Situationist practices is dérive, "a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances." The artists suggested: Depending on what you are after, choose a landscape. "Choose the season and the time. Gather together the right people, the best records and drinks. If your calculations are correct, you should find the outcome satisfying." This gathering of experience is what we will try to do in this book: Connecting the dots between landscapes and cultures and history and literature and film and psychology. Music and art and politics and love.

This is not a scientific publication, so you will find no footnotes, no sources for quotations, no references. These texts are not about being correct. Deem them trustworthy. Consider them story songs, pieces of art, literary and lyric essays. They blur the boundary between journal and fiction and poetry. While much of the writings about music we read these days strive to stimulate consumption, these are mostly about the amazement, happiness, blissful sensation, and open questions arising from having an involvement with situations, experiences, emotions. Give me the beat and free my soul, I wanna get lost in your rock 'n' roll and drift away. I'm singin' about a driftin' way of life.

Related to dérive in European and American folk music are the rhetorical figures of driving and drifting. The musician on the road, the flaneur, the troubadour, the vagabond, the tramp, the hobo, the truck driver, the easy rider, the captain. Fair wind in our sails, dead wind in our faces, turbulence: On the road again, ridin' on the City of New Orleans, Hank Williams pain songs and Jerry Jeff train songs, I got boats to build.

A bandit is always on the move. He rides. He bums around. He rambles and gambles. Bandits live outside. In the Appalachian forest. In the Llano estacado. On the Colorado. Along the Gulf of Mexico. On the mountains is freedom, on the sea life is beautiful. Rebels must hide, seek shelter with allies and insiders and fans, gang up. Jenny gathers pirates around her from a ship with eight sails. Brecht's Hannah Cash, Johnny's Rosanne Cash and Caroline from Tecumseh Valley bunch up. Robin Hood had his Friar Tuck, Willie Nelson his Waylon Jennings. Let's organize a posse. Or a band. Dirty red bandanas. Their home is the woods, the trail, the bandstand. They travel in the tour bus, camp in lots, camp in glades, camp and queer and dada. Everglades, evergreens, forever blue. Outlaws live outside the law. Highwaymen don't follow the lawyers and such of Nashville. Castaways live outside, they need horizons, wide open spaces, room to make their big mistakes, echo chambers. They want to be audible, visible, need a platform, the stage and spectators. Revolutionaries need to do good deeds. Steal from the rich. Play solos. This machine kills fascists. Flageolet! Fluxus ole!

Whipsawed, hurled, driven. I have achieved nothing in my life. Not a seed sown. No tree planted. No school founded. No house built. No fortune accumulated. No child begotten. I was no role model to anyone. The cultural footprint of my life is totally fine: "When I leave I'm leavin' nothin' behind," Jerry Jeff Walker sings in "Hill Country Rain," his definitive statement on the Texas lifestyle. So there's only one thing left to do:

"I get a feelin', somethin' that I can't explain, it's like dancin' naked in that high Hill Country Rain."

Pressure creates counterpressure. A visit to the 30th anniversary of the Kerrville Folk Festival in Texas

What women! Janis Ian, spokeswoman for the American lesbian movement, belabors her little black guitar as if she were conducting an orchestra. Quiet Valley Ranch shakes in awe as the 50-year-old bundle of energy jumps off the stage with her instrument and hurries through the standing ovation to the merch booth, the Pied Piper of Kerrville, a host of fans in her wake. Sara Hickman, Susan Werner and Suzanne Buirgy are hardly inferior to her, again and again tearing the women in the audience to a frenzy of enthusiasm in the middle of the song. "Don't you want a lover who knows which way is up, when they're going down down down?", Buirgy asks her sexually frustrated Texan women in her hymn to aging "Experience - not to be confused with old" and earns orgiastic approval. Show 'em, Suzanne, you're so right, Sara, thank you, Susan. And Susan takes it up a notch by spreading her middle and ring finger to Spock’s Vulcan salute: "In the name of the vagina!"

The hardliners among the U.S. presidents were governors of the states of California (Nixon, Reagan) and Texas (Bush and Bush) before their tenure in the White House. No wonder that the two musical epicenters of American alternative music developed in these two states: the hippie city of San Francisco - and the songwriter hotbed of Austin, Texas. Pressure creates counterpressure.

Austin has been home to the crème de la crème of alternative U.S. singer-songwriters since the early 1970s and today proudly calls itself the "live music capital of the world." Artists like Jerry Jeff Walker or Robert Earl Keen, who are largely unknown out of the South, sell up to 50,000 copies of each new CD right off the bat. Without the support of a major label, without wholesale, they distribute their silver discs directly to fans via the Internet or at events that have become cult. In the tradition of the "4th of July Picnic" - once started by legend Willie Nelson to pay off his tax debts - Walker's "Birthday Weekend" and Keen's "Texas Uprising" attract five-figure crowds.

The only larger town between Austin and the festival site is Fredericksburg, a tourist stronghold where the streets have German names and there is an "Ausländer Biergarten" and a "Bavarian Inn". A few more miles through the hills, across the Guadalupe River and soon appears the longed-for sign: "Quiet Valley Ranch". Welcome home, greets us the driveway to this pilgrimage place of the songwriters. The exit will see us off with the iconic sign: It can be this way always. How true. Kerrville is a haven for songs.

On the festival grounds, the appreciation of simple, honest, handmade songs meets a perfect organization for eighteen days, with 500 volunteers managing over eighty concerts, a three-day songwriting course, a four-day music business seminar, a blues workshop, six children's concerts, a competition for thirty up-and-coming artists, three canoe trips, yoga in the morning, and, of course, five church services (three Christian, two Jewish).

The list of artists is immense. Organizer Rod Kennedy, a folk music icon since the festival's founding in 1971, has come up with a lot for the anniversary year, starting with the resurgence of Peter, Paul & Mary. "The next song is by the man who did more for folk music than anyone in the last century," Mary announces eight days after Dylan's 60th birthday, "Pete Seeger!" There is long-lasting applause for this, in Kerrville such kind of awareness for tradition is much appreciated. Tom Paxton and David Mallett recall the good old 60s, while the Westcoast softies Poco and Brewer & Shipley reunite to review the 70s. All quite routine, therefore not really touching. Quite different are the local heroes, Texans like Ray Wylie Hubbard, Jimmie Dale Gilmore or Willis Alan Ramsey. Every song is sung along with. The audience knows each local classic by heart, as well as some interspersed covers (of Townes Van Zandt songs, of course).

But then: the women. Their honesty is rewarded in Kerrville. Honesty that has to do with courage and is not to be confused with the sweaty string strumming of a Springsteen. "I'm an alcoholic." "I've had an abortion." "I can't bear Bush." "I'm against private gun ownership." The female artists take a stand.

All musicians tread musical paths untrodden by the mainstream. Hawaiian Dennis Kamakahi plays an almost unbelievable slack key guitar. The lively Ruthie Foster, only person of color in the official program, presents a nuanced blues brew and Root 1 teach us the Texas reggae. And then silver fox Ponty Bone celebrates zydeco on his accordion. In the band is a 10-year-old washboard player who seems to be his great-great-grandson. At half past one in the morning the stars dance along under the starlit sky. The old hippies trekking from festival to festival gyrate in their batik gown and shake their floor-length beards, the weather-beaten cowboys from the neighboring farms tap their boots, and a young manager who arrived from the computer city of Austin puts his cool sunglasses back on for the sheer joy of life.

Every other wears "his" Kerrville T-shirt from the year in which he was ennobled from "Kerrvirgin" to "Kerrverted". No devotional items are seen from the debut year of 1972. Maybe that wasn't the way with subculture merchandising back then. Janis Joplin had a posthumous world hit that year with "Me and Bobby McGee," penned by Kris Kristofferson. There's no better way to sum up the trend of the time than with this "alternative" country song about freedom, music and love, to which a Texas hippie idol lent authenticity through her self-sacrificing passing.

This spirit has remained with the festival. In the cultural melting pot of Quiet Valley Ranch, organizers and guests also see a symbol for a more tolerant world. The jigs and reels of the Irish immigrants, the Cajun of the French and the brass music of the Germans, the gospel and blues of the black slaves, the Texmex of the migrant workers from across the Rio Grande, the spiritual chants of the Native Americans, all mix together without being pigeonholed. Sometimes pressure produces diamonds. Zydeco, bluegrass, western swing, new folk, honky tonk, klezmer, rock, pop and adult contemporary - labels that don't apply in Kerrville. There is hardly an instrument that doesn't flow into the mix that American folk music can mean today --dobro and piano, bongos and accordion, fiddle and clarinet, bohdran and steel guitar, crystal-clear throats as well as whiskey-soaked voices.

Steve Gillette, one of the festival directors, has been an authority beyond reproach ever since he was given the great and rare honor of being covered by Townes himself. This great master of his guild has stated in his bible for all Kerrville novices "Songwriting and the Creative Process" that every good song has "a kind of spiritual DNA". The search for that DNA is what Kerrville is all about. And every year, new strands are discovered.

Nobel Prize for Literature 2016: Bob Dylan

On October 13, 2016, the news reached me that Bob Dylan would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. One of the quaintest decisions ever made by a committee. Throughout the day I talked about it with many people around me, friends, journalists, colleagues, politicians, artists. A few had gotten off work and started a raucous Dylan party, eyes shining, playing his music, watching his movies, sharing their memories. Many met the subjects of both Bob Dylan and literature with indifference. And then there even were younger colleagues who had never heard the name or only tentatively associated it with music and the time long before they were born, a shadow of the middle of the last century.

So, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016? A songwriter? A lyricist? A writer of autobiographical prose? A singer? A musician? A guitarist? A harmonica player? A keyboard player? A filmmaker? An actor? A painter? The husband of Joan Baez? The father of Jakob Dylan? A chronicler of contemporary events? A drug and alcohol addict? A peace activist? A chauvinist asshole? An icon? A myth? A public relations genius? A self-made multimillionaire? The invention of his manager? A forgotten 68er? A cutting-edge artist? A Minnesotan? A New Yorker? An American? A citizen of the world? A Jew? A Christian? An evangelist? Judas? The Messiah? Dante? Homer? Dylan Thomas? Woody Guthrie? Frank Sinatra? Robert Allen Zimmerman?

Who or what Bob Dylan is has been sufficiently researched. That his work is major league world literature was extensively proven in scientific studies, symposia, magazine features and millions of personal text exegeses and was now only once again confirmed by the Nobel Prize Committee.

But he only accepts the Nobel Prize for Literature as a substitute. Despite his personal genius, his impact, despite his sprawling oeuvre, despite the Neverending Tour and all the adoration that His Bobness receives from fans: The Nobel Prize for Literature 2016 is not awarded to an individual, but to the outstanding representative of the oldest literary genre: the song. Together with Dylan it was awarded to all the songwriters who, from Stephen Foster to Woody Guthrie and Townes Van Zandt, Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry and Prince, to Madonna, Missy Elliott and Taylor Swift, took this art form, a creative act humans learned from birds and handed down to machines, to unimagined heights with their lyrics.

I have seen Dylan live, the films, videos, I read his books, interviews, I have heard him or someone else sing one of his songs a thousand times. But above all, I have looked up the lyrics on record covers, on bobdylan.com or in the thickest of all books, his Collected Lyrics, usually without ever even beginning to understand "what it was really about," but always with the result that this is incredibly great art and an impossibly high standard. Dylan is the most covered songwriter because the lyrics are at the core of his work. They are the substance, the nature of his work, completely independent of the music played to it and of the performer. Frank Sinatra could hum "Blowin' The Wind", Patti Smith whistle "Hurricane", nobody would care. Let a no-name poet debut at a poetry slam with a chaotic recitation of "Up To Me," he'll win the contest.

When Aristotle described lyric poetry in his Poetics, he meant rhythmic, rhymed texts performed to the playing of lyre or cithara. Minnesang and church hymns were the most important genres of the Middle Ages. In modern times, after an initial high as lied in the European classical and romantic periods, the song came to full bloom in the 20th century: In America.

Among the hundreds of thousands of songs that were created in the USA - which, through the audiovisual mass media from radio to TV/cinema to the Internet, exerted enormous influence on the culture of several generations of the American, European, and in some cases Asian and African continents - the work of Bob Dylan stands out as a solitaire. No other lyricist has reached back so far and so brilliantly into European cultural history in his lyrics, no other built bridges from tradition to modernity as he did, from the idiom of the Irish ballad to the Beat Generation to rap, no one shaped what was and is possible as a song lyric in English language like him. Dylan is, in terms of literary history, the knot of many threads, a transmission belt of many forces that affected him from past and future. But he also, more than any other, marks a symbolic break. There is a time before Dylan and a time after Dylan. And it's not because of his themes, it's not because of his hat, and it's not because of plugging a guitar into an amplifier. It's because of his language.