The Watusi

The name of the early Sixties popular dance called the “watusi” is obviously African (for instructions on how to dance it, go here), and while there was a film released in 1959 titled Watusi (a remake of King Solomon’s Mines [1950]), the name was widely popularized in America in 1962. In June 1962, a United Nations General Assembly resolution terminated the Belgian trusteeship of Rwanda (then spelled Ruanda), and granted full independence both to Rwanda and Burundi effective 1 July, 1962, to be governed by Tutsi (Batutsi) leadership. Hearing the name in early 1962 and liking the sound of it, Kal Mann, a songwriter at Cameo-Parkway Records, subsequently wrote “The Wah-Watusi,” eventually recorded by The Orlons, a vocal quartet from Philadelphia. “The Wah-Watusi” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart on 9 June 1962 and remained on the Hot 100 chart for over three months. That same year, Chris Kenner recorded perhaps his most famous hit, “Land of 1000 Dances,” containing the lyric, “Do the watusi like my little Lucy.” “Land of 1000 Dances” was later covered by Cannibal & the Headhunters (1965), Wilson Pickett (1966), and Patti Smith (1975). Wilson Pickett’s version is perhaps the most well-known of the many versions of the song recorded over the years.

And while the dance known as the watusi sustained its popularity at least through 1962, the next year Puerto Rico jazz musician Ray Barretto’s recording titled “El Watusi” debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart on 27 April 1963 (in other words, about a year after “The Wah-Watusi”) and remained on the Hot 100 chart for over two months. Apparently filmmaker Martin Scorsese was a fan of “El Watusi,” as he included it on the soundtrack to his film Who’s That Knocking at My Door (1967). Later, Brian De Palma used Barretto’s “El Watusi” in Carlito’s Way (1993). Meanwhile, the watusi—although by then the dance craze had long faded away—appears in the Sidney Poitier-starring film The Slender Thread (released December 1965), and two years later, having transformed into a signifier no longer referring simply to a form of benign dance, but to the possibility of miscengenation, the watusi is invoked in another Sidney Poitier-starring film, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967), in which Poitier tells Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, “You folks dance the watusi; we are the watusi.”

Suggested Reading:
Garza, Oscar. 2005. “Land of a Thousand Dances: An R&B Fable.” Popular Music 24.3: 429-437.

Recordings:
Chris Kenner, “Land of 1000 Dances” Land of 1000 Dances (Collector’s Choice)
Cannibal & the Headhunters, “Land of 1000 Dances” Land of 1000 Dances: The Complete Rampart Recordings (Varese Fontana)
Wilson Pickett, “Land of 1000 Dances” Wilson Pickett’s Greatest Hits (Atlantic/WEA)
Patti Smith, “Land” Horses (Arista)
Mud Boy & the Neutrons, “Land of 1000 Shotguns (Part 2)” They Walk Among Us (Koch)
The Orlons, “The Wah-Watusi” The Best of the Orlons Cameo Parkway 1961-1966 (Abkco)
The Ventures, “The Wah-Watusi” Mashed Potatoes and Gravy/Going to the Ventures Dance Party (One Way)

The Ictus and the Remiss

The word ictus is derived from the Latin icere, to hit with a stroke, the stress placed upon an accentuated syllable. Etymologically speaking, therefore, ictus means accent or emphasis, and in the language of music, ictus means an accented or marked tone. In the study of prosody, dum, for instance, is a metrically strong syllable—the ictus. In contrast, de is a metrically weak syllable—the remiss. The ictus and the remiss together constitute the foot (dum-de), and hence the foot and the ictus make up the rhythmic elements of music. For music theorists, the moment prior to the initiation of the ictus represents the downbeat: the critical moment when the conductor lowers his baton. To understand fully the function of the ictus is to understand funk, with its accentuation of the downbeat (as opposed to R&B’s emphasis on the backbeat), meaning the One, the first (and occasionally third) beat of every measure (foot). George Clinton, Stevie Wonder, Sly Stone, and James Brown all contributed to the invention of the funk “groove”—that is, they all understood the function of the ictus.

A Baker’s Dozen Of Funky Grooves (Guaranteed To Tear The Roof Off):

David Bowie, “Fame” Young Americans
The Brothers Johnson, “Get the Funk Out Ma Face” Look Out For #1
James Brown, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” 20 All-Time Greatest Hits
Chic, “Le Freak” Dance, Dance, Dance: The Best of Chic
Curtis Mayfield, “Superfly” Superfly
Funkadelic, “(Not Just) Knee Deep (Part I)” The Best of Funkadelic, 1976—1981
The Meters, “Africa” Funkify Your Life: The Meters Anthology
The Ohio Players, “Fire” Funk on Fire: The Mercury Anthology
Parliament, “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker)” Parliament’s Greatest Hits
Sly and the Family Stone, “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)” Greatest Hits
Steely Dan, “Black Cow” Aja
War, “Low Rider” Anthology, 1970-1994
Stevie Wonder, “You Haven’t Done Nothin’” Fulfillingness First Finale

Mitch Mitchell, 1947-2008

News reports indicate that Mitch Mitchell (at the right in the picture, with Hendrix and Noel Redding, left), the drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience, was found dead yesterday morning in his Oregon hotel room. He was 61 years old. Reports say Mitchell was found dead shortly after 3 a.m. Wednesday in his room at the Benson Hotel in downtown Portland. He apparently died of natural causes. The article reporting his death from the L. A. Times can be found here. Mitchell was the last the trio to live; they are all gone now.

The Sound of Money

There is an oft-repeated story that once when Chet Atkins, at the time the country & western music producer at RCA Victor, was asked to describe the so-called “Nashville sound” he helped to create, he shook the loose change in his pocket and replied, “It’s the sound of money.” His response was not so much evasive as it was a statement of fact, for the post-World War II rise of the Nashville or “countrypolitan” sound was in fact a way to address the general problem of how to make money. Essentially the “Nashville sound” was pop production (studio engineering) applied to country songs. As Michael Jarrett observes, the Nashville sound was an attempt to refashion country & western as “pop music for adults” (p. 256). The two primary architects of the Nashville sound were Chet Atkins at RCA Victor and Owen Bradley at Decca. The Nashville sound might be best understood by looking at the following set of structural oppositions, the features characterizing the “Honky Tonk” sound—the pre-war sound of c&w that continued through the mid-50s or so—on the left, with the features of the Nashville sound on the right:

• Raw/Cooked
• Found/Made
• Folk/Pop
• Fiddles/Strings
• Volume/Crooning
• Kitty Wells/Patsy Cline
• Jimmie Rodgers/Jim Reeves
• "T For Texas"/"He’ll Have to Go"

Faced with the competition of rock ‘n’ roll (or “rockabilly”), the country & western industry reinvented itself as a pop music industry, adapting pop music song structures and pop music production (studio engineering). Hence early examples of rock musicians making country albums (e.g., The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, 1968) can be understood not so much as “country rock” but as attempts to recover a rawer, more “authentic” form of country & western music, one that hearkened back to a time prior to the invention of the "slick" Nashville sound.

Spider Dreams

The tarantula is clearly the favored arachnid both in music and the movies. Not only does the tarantula have a movie named in its honor (the John Agar-starring Tarantula, 1955), but also a dance. According to the Dictionary of Dance, the tarantella is an Italian folk dance executed in accelerating 3/8 or 6/8 time that takes its name from the Italian seaport of Taranto where, legend has it, in the fourteenth century people who had been bitten by a tarantula contracted tarantism, a peculiar disorder characterized by an uncontrollable need to dance. The supposed cure for tarantism was to dance the tarantella, which was to be performed until the spider’s poison (not deadly, but quite painful) was sweated out of one’s system. There have been ballets based on the tarantella, including Coralli’s La Tarentule (1839), but Swan Lake contains an even more famous instance of the tarantella. Nino Rota drew on Italian folk music to compose a tarantella for The Godfather, while Mario Lanza performs “Tarantella” in For the First Time (1959), his last movie.

A Few Representative Recordings:

Al Caiola, “Sicilian Tarantella,” Italian Guitars
Charlie Haden Quartet West, “Tarantella +,” In Angel City
Mario Lanza, “Tarantella,” For the First Time/Mario Lanza Sings Caruso Favorites
The Lounge Lizards, “Tarantella,” Voice of Chunk
Evan Lurie, “Tarantella,” Selling Water by the Side of the River
Turtle Island String Quartet, “Texas Tarantella,” Spider Dreams
Squirrel Nut Zippers, “La Grippe,” The Inevitable Squirrel Nut Zippers
Various, “Tarantella,” The Alan Lomax Collection: Folk Music and Song of Italy
Various, “Tarantella,” Music for an Italian Wedding

Jukebox

A “juke” or “juke joint,” according to answers.com, is “a roadside or rural establishment offering liquor, dancing, and often gambling and prostitution.” “Jookin’” means to play dance music, especially in a juke. The word is derived from the Gullah word juke or jook, meaning “disorderly, wicked,” and is of West African origin; it is akin to the Wolof word dzug, “to live wickedly,” and the Bambara word dzugu, meaning “wicked.” While the multiselection, coin-operated phonograph was invented in the early twentieth century, this particular form of technology was not referred to as a “jukebox” until after the repeal of Prohibition in 1933. Afterwards, companies such as Seeburg, Rowe International (then known as Automated Musical Instruments, or AMI), and Wurlitzer were able to install thousands of these automated, random access machines in various establishments, not only in juke joints but in drugstores furnished with small dance floors. For various reasons, after World War II, teenagers were not as inclined to dance but stand and listen, and jukeboxes were relegated to bars and beauty parlors. In the 1950s, with the rise of the portable phonograph and the vast popularity of the 45-rpm record, teenagers were more inclined to dance at home or at private parties, and the Golden Age of the jukebox was over. Nowadays, these machines have been remotivated as found objects, and hence artworks, and are highly prized by collectors. What was junk to an earlier generation is art to the next, having undergone the transformation into a found object.

Selected Reading:

William Bunch. Jukebox America: Down Back Streets and Blue Highways in Search of the Country's Greatest Jukebox. St. Martin's, 1994.

Katrina Hazzard-Gordon. Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture. Temple University Press, 1992.

Frank. W. Hoffman, The Cash Box Singles Charts, 1950-1981. Scarecrow, 1983.

Vincent Lynch. Jukebox: The Golden Age. Lancaster-Miller, 1981.

David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America. Harvard University Press, 1994.

Pedal Steel

Although typically defined as a type of guitar, the pedal steel guitar is actually an unusual instance of a stringed instrument becoming a keyboard instrument. The pedal steel is an electric guitar placed on a narrow table with legs, usually plucked with fingerpicks, with foot pedals and knee levers changing the pitch of the strings that are played with a steel bar. In America, the origin of the pedal steel guitar—perhaps the most recognizable instrument in country music—dates back to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915, when Americans were introduced to the Hawaiian steel guitar and the way it was played, flat on the lap and fretted with a piece of metal or bone or the back of a comb. Within a few years, steel guitar music became a national craze, augmented by the phonograph record. By the late 1930s, the electric steel guitar, now with pedals and manufactured by Rickenbacher, Fender, and others, had become strongly associated with American country music, even though its origin was Hawaiian. Thus country music is, in fact, an eclectic form of world music. In 1953, Bud Isaacs and Webb Pierce recorded “Slowly,” revolutionizing the use of the pedal steel guitar in both country and popular music in America.

In country music, the pedal steel is the musical equivalent of drunken self-pity, a form of self-indulgence in which one entertains the belief that one’s life is sadder and more difficult than everyone else’s—as the old adage says, suffering transforms the common man into a philosopher. Hence the pedal steel gives expression to inner emotional turmoil. The 1950s recordings of Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, collected on the highly prized CD Stratosphere Boogie: The Flaming Guitars of Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant (Razor & Tie), influenced countless pedal steel guitarists who followed, and prepared the way for the pedal steel to be employed in rock music—by The Byrds, The Rolling Stones, The Flying Burrito Brothers (check out “Christine’s Tune” here), and many other bands.

Some Exemplary Recordings Featuring the Pedal Steel:

B. J. Cole, “Clair de Lune,” Transparent Music (Hannibal)

Jimmy Day with Ray Price, “Crazy Arms,” on Hillbilly Fever! Vol. 3, Legends of Nashville (Rhino)

Pete Drake, “Lay Lady Lay,” on Bob Dylan, Nashville Skyline (Columbia)

Josh Dubin, “First Song for Kate,” on Bobby Previte, Claude’s Late Morning (Gramavision)

Buddy Emmons, “Silver Bell” Amazing Steel Guitar: The Buddy Emmons Collection (Razor & Tie)

John Hughey, “Last Date (Lost Her Love on Our Last Date),” on Conway Twitty, 20 Greatest Hits (MCA)

Bud Isaacs, “Slowly,” on Webb Pierce, King of the Honky-Tonk: From the Original Decca Masters, 1952-1959 (MCA/CMA)

Sneaky Pete Kleinow, “Christine’s Tune,” on Flying Burrito Brothers, The Gilded Palace of Sin (Edsel)

Ralph Mooney, “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” on James Burton and Ralph Mooney, Corn Pickin’ and Slick Slidin’ (See-For-Miles)

Speedy West, “Stratosphere Boogie,” on Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant, Stratosphere Boogie: The Flaming Guitars of Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant (Razor & Tie)

Jimmy Carl Black, 1938-2008

I only today learned that Jimmy Carl Black (pictured at the far left on the back cover of the Mothers’ album Freak Out!) the former drummer and sometime singer for Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention, died last Saturday, November 1, after a battle with cancer. He was 70 years old. Like most anyone who’s seriously listened to the Mothers’ music, I remember Black primarily because of his amusing soundbite on the Mothers of Invention album We’re Only In It For the Money (1968), “Hi Boys and Girls, I’m Jimmy Carl Black, and I’m the Indian of the group.” (Black had Cheyenne Indian ancestry through both parents.) Black would later appear as one of the more interesting characters in Zappa’s largely uninteresting art-house movie 200 Motels (1971), singing “Lonesome Cowboy Burt.” After Frank Zappa disbanded the Mothers of Invention in 1969, Black formed a band named Geronimo Black that released an eponymously titled LP on MCA/Universal in 1972. I purchased a vinyl copy that year and have returned to it many times over the years, and while critically highly regarded, apparently the album did poorly in terms of sales. According to his obituary in the L. A. Times, after the failure of the Geronimo Black album, Black quit playing music, at one time “earning a living working in a doughnut shop” and later “as a house painter and decorator.” Some years later, in 1980, he joined ex-Mothers Bunk Gardner and Don Preston in The Grandmothers, a band that split and reunited many times over the next twenty years. For reasons I do not know, Black moved to Italy in 1992, and then to Germany in 1995. He appeared as a singer with The Muffin Men, a Liverpool band that specialized in the music of Zappa and Captain Beefheart. He is survived by his wife, Monika, whom he married in 1995 following the death of his second wife; three sons and three daughters.

Jimmy Carl Black was a member of the Mothers of Invention in their most musically adventurous and hence interesting period, which is why I’m aware of him at all, and why I bought some of his later records. Later incarnations of the Mothers never captured my imagination the way the band did during the period from Freak Out! (1966) through Weasels Ripped My Flesh (1970). As a figure who loomed large in my early musical explorations while I was a teenager, I will always fondly remember Jimmy Carl Black. Additional information can be found on his website.

Election

Election Day: Whichever candidate you support, today America is on the verge of history, as this article from the L. A. Times online points out. I won't blog much today, as most eyes will be on election results--here and elsewhere in the world. So enjoy this historic day, everybody!

The Brush Arbor Style

I’d fully intended to post the following entry on the brush arbor style this weekend, in connection with the Western Christian holidays of “All Saints Day” (November 1) and “All Souls’ Day” (November 2), the religious holidays that follow Halloween. It is therefore a little late, but the spirit was willing. According to Michael Jarrett, brush arbor is “a variety of sacred country music, similar to bluegrass, characterized by the collision of string-band delicacy and Pentecostal zeal” (p. 205). The brush arbor style takes its name from the Southern practice of making crude shelters that could be used as places of worship. According to Brush Arbor Quarterly:

The Brush Arbor meetings got their name from the crude structures under which these meetings took place. Brush arbors were roughed-in shelters made of upright poles driven into the ground over which long poles were laid across the top and tied together in lattice fashion to serve as support for a primitive roof of brush or hay that served to protect the worshippers [sic] and seekers from the elements.

In many rural areas during those years, no formal church existed. Small congregations were often unable to afford a full-time pastor or shepherd for the believing flock in their little community.

According to Jerry Sullivan (pictured, with Tammy Sullivan), the brush arbor style “is more like families sitting down with a guitar, maybe a mandolin, and playing. They followed the Carter Family sound a little bit. It’s a mixture between the country sound and bluegrass” (qtd. in Jarrett, p. 205). Michael Jarrett relates an anecdote that when Marty Stuart sent Bob Dylan a copy of Jerry and Tammy Sullivan’s brush arbor-inspired album, At the Feet of God (pictured, 1995), “he enclosed a note that read, ‘I hope you enjoy this backwoods, Southern, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel record’” (pp. 205-06).

The fictitious group, The Soggy Bottom Boys, featured in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), are an homage (of sorts) to the Stanley Brothers. Some of the “roots music” featured on that film’s soundtrack is inspired by the brush arbor style.

A Selection Of Country Gospel:

E. C. and Orna Ball, E. C. Ball with Orna Ball (Rounder)
The Chestnut Grove Quartet, The Legendary Chestnut Grove Quartet (County)
Alison Krauss and the Cox Family, I Know Who Holds Tomorrow (Rounder)
Doyle Lawson and Quicksilver, Rock My Soul (Sugar Hill)
The Louvin Brothers, When I Stop Dreaming: The Best of the Louvin Brothers (Razor & Tie)
Jerry and Tammy Sullivan, At the Feet of God (New Haven)
The Whitstein Brothers, Sweet Harmony (Rounder)
Stanley Brothers, The Complete Columbia Stanley Brothers (Columbia/Legacy) [contains "Man of Constant Sorrow," covered by Bob Dylan on his first album]
Various, Something Got a Hold of Me: A Treasury of Sacred Music (RCA)
Various, Southern Journey Vol. 4: Brethren, We Meet Again (Rounder)

So You Want To Be A Rock ‘n’ Roll Book Writer?

David Barker, editor of Continuum’s “33 & 1/3” series of books on classic rock albums, announced yesterday on his blog that Continuum is now accepting proposals for future 33 & 1/3 books, to be published in 2010 and 2011. A significant change in this year’s submissions policy is that the “one book per band/artist” rule no longer exists. Therefore, the review board will consider proposals for books about any album that hasn’t already been covered in the series, or isn’t already under contract.

For those interested, one can find a list of titles already published in the series here, which also lists those titles “Coming 2008” and “Titles Announced for 2008 and 2009.” Apparently the “Unknown Status” list consists of proposed titles that are no longer under contract (with the exception of the books about Kate Bush, Lucinda Williams, and the Clash). The deadline for submission of proposals this go-round is midnight, December 31st, 2008.

Last year I proposed a book on Wall of Voodoo’s classic album Call of the West (1982) for which I had the full support of Stan Ridgway. Not only did he provide me some great material for the proposal, but he also enthusiastically endorsed the proposal, saying he would be happy to sell the books at his concerts. Foolishly believing the proposal would be accepted, I began writing it, only to learn about halfway through the manuscript that my proposal had been rejected. That incomplete manuscript now resides in my file cabinet. The same thing happened to my friend Tim Lucas, who in fact completed his manuscript on Jefferson Airplane’s Crown of Creation (1968). His proposal was also rejected, but he’s announced on his blog that he intends to re-submit his proposal—which he may, in fact, already have done. I have been strongly considering submitting a proposal on The Zombies’ 1968 album Odessey and Oracle—an album specifically mentioned by David Barker as one he would like to have in the series—but there is another title I’m also considering, more outré and avant-garde, that I think should be in the series also. If I don’t do it, who will? (No, it’s not for Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music—that’s been proposed already.)

I own roughly half the titles in the 33 & 1/3 series, primarily those on albums that strongly interest me. It is a splendid concept for a series, of course, and while I think the series appears to have at this point given up too quickly on classic albums, that may change now that the “one book per band/artist” rule is no longer in effect, opening up proposals for other Beatles albums, for instance, or different albums by Bob Dylan, Neil Young, The Rolling Stones, and others. I for one would sure like to see a book on Neil Young’s Tonight’s the Night (1975), as well as a book on the Brian Jones era of The Rolling Stones—Aftermath, for instance (hint, hint). And no book on Elvis Presley in a series on rock albums? That's shameful. Someone should write up a proposal on From Elvis in Memphis (1969), one of the great albums of all time.

Good luck to everyone submitting this time! Wish me luck as well.

Van The Man

Last month I posted a blog on Van Morrison’s upcoming shows at the Hollywood Bowl—happening at the end of this week, Friday and Saturday, November 7 and 8—during which he will perform live his masterpiece Astral Weeks (1968). In conjunction with his upcoming performances, the L. A. Times posted both an article and a rare interview with Van the Man that anyone even remotely interested in his music must read: he discusses his life, his career, his music, poetry, and art all with remarkable candor. I am very disappointed that I cannot attend his concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, although information in the Times article as well as his website indicates that the concerts will be recorded and released on both vinyl and CD by the end of the year. When the actual dates are announced I will post them here.