294: Sweet Baby James, by James Taylor

James Taylor (USA)
Sweet Baby James (1970)
11 tracks, 31 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

After a debut album that proved to be a commercial flop, James Taylor went back to the drawing board and came back, two years later with Sweet Baby James and solidified what quickly became, in the immortal words of Buzz Aldrin, his ‘unique brand of bittersweet folk rock.’

It was a defining work in many ways, and at least four of its 11 tracks remain on Taylor’s setlists to this day. The songwriting on display is just on another level. On the title track’s simple, romantic but lonesome cowboy lullaby and the rumination on a friend’s suicide that is ‘Fire and Rain’, he shows his ability to write in a truly affecting way, while still managing to also include songs with a sense of humour: in taking the piss out of boring white-man blues rock in ‘Steamroller Blues,’ he still somehow managed to make an amazing rhythm’n’blues song – he got to have his cake and eat it too, the lucky bugger. And he can flip between these different moods without interrupting the vibe one jot because the whole album shares a genius arrangement that marries country music, American folk and light rock in a stripped-down and laid-back fashion.

There are also so many amazing individual moments in the tracks, tiny things that turn good songs into remarkable ones. It’s the rich sound of a bowed double bass on ‘Fire and Rain’ and the weeping pedal steel on ‘Sweet Baby James’; the slight pause on ‘Lo and Behold’ that marks its flip from simple folk to a gritty gospel-blues and the smooth jazz chords behind the country standard of ‘Oh, Susanna’.

I know I bring this sort of thing up a lot, but Taylor was only 21 when he recorded this album, and that absolutely blows my mind. The lyrics are so mature and insightful, the music so understated to the perfect degree and filled with special moments. How can a 21-year-old come out with that sort of stuff? Baffling, but all the better for the musical world that he did.

I’ve also got a personal reason for choosing this album as well as it just being Last month I talked about John Prine’s ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ as being a song that I adored as a little kid, even though I subsequently forgot what it even sounded like. Well, a similar thing happened with ‘Sweet Baby James’, except I never forgot it. I was obsessed with it when I was little. I even went as far as to proclaim it ‘my song,’ which would make more sense if it weren’t for the fact that my name isn’t actually short for James. Regardless, it sure is a beautiful song, once again proving that I have never had anything less than an impeccable taste* – and apparently a particular fondness for country music that I am only now making a proper effort to rekindle.

With Sweet Baby James, James Taylor not only struck upon the gentle country-folk formula that would stand him in good stead for the rest of his career, but also managed to capture that particular turn-of-the-decade sound that would come to epitomise a certain branch of acoustic-based post-hippiedom and from there the whole ‘singer-songwriter’ genre for generations to come.


* Let’s ignore the S Club 7 period.

292: GP, by Gram Parsons

Gram Parsons (USA)
GP (1973)
11 tracks, 39 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

After short, musically successful stints with various country-rock groups and as a volatile muse to the Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons cut his debut solo album, GP, released in 1973. And, to be fair, what a wonderful album to make your big debut. He moved away from the rockier side of things that he’d explored with The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Byrds and let the full-on country and western vibes lead the way – albeit with little bits of gospel and rhythm’n’blues to smooth things along. It’s all there: jangling acoustic guitars, fiddles, banjos and some luscious pedal steel guitar (I’m an absolute sucker for pedal steel and it’s used especially well here).

The most important elements, though, are the lyrics and their delivery. Parsons’ writing, and the covers that he chooses, all reflect the typical country themes of love, heartbreak and the simple and familiar aspects of working-class American life, but he suffuses the poetry of each one with a real bittersweet beauty. His performances only serve to heighten that. He sings the songs with a small smile, but one tinged with sadness, his voice delicate but full of soul. Then there’s Emmylou Harris, whose vocals are such a stand-out in this album that it really should be double-billed. Their two voices are very different but combine so well, they’re like chocolate with salt. When they sing together, the harmonies are exquisite, and when they sing to each other, there is such emotion to them, and such intimacy, that they inhabit their characters completely. It’s not hard to believe that they’re singing these songs directly from the heart.

The sweetness of GP sheds no light on its chaotic creation. It was by all accounts a fiasco, with Parsons himself barely able to function due to severe anxiety and his regular binges of alcohol and cocaine. It’s amazing how none of that translates to the sound of the album – and lucky, too. It could so easily have turned out a mess, but instead it’s a beautiful, touching work that is simultaneously so country and yet moved the scene in a radically different direction. In the end, it was the only solo album he ever saw released in his lifetime. Gram Parsons died of an accidental overdose months after GP came out, aged just 26. What an impact he had in such a short time, and what a wonderful body of work to leave behind in spite of the turbulence that plagued him.

269: Diamonds in the Rough, by John Prine

John Prine (USA)
Diamonds in the Rough (1972)
13 tracks, 39 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

When I was a little boy, I really attached myself to John Prine’s version of ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ in a way I can’t really account for – it was one of my very favourite songs. Over the years, I stopped listening to it, and until a couple of years ago, I’d completely forgotten what it sounded like. Then, all those years later, I was making a present for my nephew – a mixtape-CD of my favourite music when I was his age – and I remembered this one. I listened to it back and…no, no recognition there, but damn, I had good taste as a little boy.

It’s such a simple song. It only has two verses, both sharing the same melody, with a plain little story about finding religion. It’s completely a cappella, just the three voices of Prine, his brother Dave and guitarist Steve Goodman. The harmonies are strong and powerful and only very slightly, humanly, imprecise and their voices, with their mix of registers, blend well. This performance of ‘Diamonds in the Rough’ is at once very blokey – in an old fashioned, stoic sort of way – and yet very full of emotion. It reminds me a bit of this video of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners singing ‘The Old Triangle’, in a way. The closeness of harmonies seems to reflect the closeness of the singers’ relationships, a way that men can show their vulnerability and love for each other in a society where that is usually frowned upon. It’s a style of singing that sounds perfect in a pub too, which is always nice.

The song is even more effective if you’re listening to the whole album. Coming right at the end of a whole load of jangly country music guitars and mandolins, the warmth and roundedness of human voices seems to resonate in the soul. Which is not to cast any sort of shade on the rest of the album either, because it’s really good. It begins on a strong note with a perky, upbeat song about shooting the shit with Jesus, and makes it sound like a jolly old time, but also contains an important and humanist message about being there for people. After the opener, there are a few more upbeat tunes and some introspective ones, but what I love about it is that whatever the mood, it is suffused with a heavy wistfulness, even a saudade if you want to go Portuguese about it. Among the standard love-and-loss lyrics are many observations of humble daily life, and there’s a great sadness in a lot of it, heightened by his inherited Kentucky accent. Listening to John Prine feels in some ways like reading a Great American Novel.

Considering that for a long time, I thought I didn’t like country music – or, more accurately that I’d just dismissed it out-of-hand – it was a sort of mini-revelation when I came to listen to this album for the first time in potentially 20 years. It was only relatively recently that I’d embraced country music and started to understand its place in the musical world, and to play Diamonds in the Rough was to realise that I’d actually ‘got it’ for a long time. There’s a lesson and/or challenge for you: go back and listen to the music that Little You liked. Trust their tastes – you may rediscover something great!

232: Bright Like Gold / Once a Day, by April Verch

April Verch (Canada)
Bright Like Gold (2013)
20 tracks, 62 minutes
Spotify ∙ iTunes

For a long time, I’ve known that I want to write about an album by April Verch on this blog, but I've been unsure about which to choose, as there are two that I really like that are in rather different styles. I figured I'd make my choice when it came to it. And now The Algorithm has decided that today’s the day I write about her…and I still can’t decide. So I’m going to cheat…

April Verch (Canada)
Once a Day (2019)
15 tracks, 40 minutes
Bandcamp ∙ Spotify ∙ iTunes

That’s right, I’m writing about two today! And I’m counting them as one so the whole 365/every day of the year thing doesn’t get messed up. My blog, my rules. But we both have lives, you and I, so I’ll try to keep it brief…ish.

April Verch is a fiddle player, step-dancer and singer from the Ottawa Valley in Canada. She has many styles in her repertoire, and that’s why I decided to pick two. The first, Bright Like Gold, was just released when I first saw her perform live, at WOMEX in Cardiff. I’d never really considered the Canadian folk tradition before, and her show was a real eye-opener and completely spellbinding. Like Canadian culture in general, her music is reminiscent of so many other cultures that have come together into something unique. In any given piece, her fiddling can sound like zydeco one moment and Irish folk the next, her singing making like a country song but the guitar sounding Scottish. There’s a lot of bluegrass in there, even elements of Western swing and Manouche jazz.

Although there are lots of songs on this 20-track epic of an album, I feel like the focus is definitely on Verch’s fiddle playing, which is extraordinary. Not only does she bring in all of these styles in a very subtle way into her own sound and make them feel that they have always belonged in the folk tradition, but she does it with such panache, with so many extravagant slides and impressive little twiddles or slight ornamentations that give her playing a real richness. It’s a style that’s both flamboyant and flashy, but still somehow understated in what is perhaps an insensitive Canadian stereotype. I just get the feeling that it’s less ‘look how amazing and skilful and virtuosic I am’ and more like ‘hey, check out this neat thing I can do!’

But where Bright Like Gold is still grounded in the Ottawa Valley sound (even if it does go to many other places besides), this year’s Once a Day goes all the way to Nashville and stays there. This is real, high-grade country cheese. Each of the fifteen songs here are county classics from the 1950s and 1960s, rendered with a beautifully authentic sound and with an obvious joy in the performance unhindered by the lyrics of heartbreak, jealousy and betrayal. Verch still plays some fiddle here and there, injecting elements of folk into the country style (as opposed to her usual vice versa), but this album focuses much more on her singing. Her voice is distinctive – high-pitched and girlish – but it works so well within this country music setting, and when she’s joined with those delicious close harmonies, it will throw you all the way back to that classic era. This wasn’t at all what I expected from a new April Verch album, but it makes total sense in terms of her own sound, and it’s difficult not to love those schmaltzy, funny, sometimes painful and always cheesy songs and their expert arrangements.

Something that isn’t brought to the fore on either album (although there are short sections in Bright Like Gold) that definitely deserves a mention is Verch’s step-dancing. That makes sense, as it’s as much visual as it is musical, but she is a master of it. To see her graceful, playful movements somehow translated into an incredibly complex rhythmic pattern with a whole range of sounds just coming from her shoes and the floor is absolutely mesmerising. You can see a good clip of her both fiddling and step-dancing in this YouTube video, but I urge you to seek her out for a live show – her party trick of playing her virtuosic folk fiddle and creating her similarly virtuosic step-dancing at the same time is just gobsmacking. I can’t even watch telly and brush my teeth at the same time. It’s ridiculous behaviour from Verch and I heartily approve.

So that’s two albums by April Verch. They’re both so different but so great, and both worthy of your valuable time and attention. And for the purposes of this blog but absolutely nowhere else, they just happen to be classed as one single album. How weird is that?

163: The Rough Guide to Country Music Pioneers, by Various Artists

Various Artists (USA)
The Rough Guide to Country Music Pioneers (2013)
25 tracks, 77 minutes
Spotify playlist

As Rough Guides go, this is a pretty obscure one. It’s never actually been properly released as a stand-alone, as far as I can tell. Thing is, it seems like there was a point where someone at the World Music Network realised there were thousands of out-of-copyright recordings from the US that could be hoovered up for use in compilations and they just released a whole slew of them – mostly focussing on different types of early blues, but some, like this one, featured country music. There was also the added benefit that these recordings – mostly the 1920s and 30s – were also restricted by how long they could be. Most of them hang just under the three-minute mark, which means you can cram a whole bunch of them onto a CD. That behind the scenes stuff is all conjecture on my part, but it would make sense why such an expansive and well-curated compilation as this one just ended up being released as…a bonus disc to another compilation. The Rough Guide to Jimmie Rodgers, to be precise. Now that one is also a great album and a well-rounded introduction to the Singing Brakeman, but the bonus disc fascinates me even more, for its diversity if nothing else.

Just as I like listening to all the musical geographies present in yesterday’s album, the range of tracks presented on today’s really lets you hear the stylistic scope of that era of country music. It is all undoubtedly country music, and you can trace a clear line from these beginnings of the style to the Nashville sound and the more pop-like hybrids that came later, but if you listen with just slightly different ears you can hear so much musical history. On this album, there are tracks that can be clearly heard as part of the traditions of the blues, gospel, and English, Scottish, Irish and even French and Scandinavian folk. There’s elements here that got drawn into bluegrass and even hot jazz on both sides of the pond – this really was from a time when all these musical labels were much more fluid and less defined. And on top of all that stylistic stuff, it’s all sung with a range of the most amazing accents from the Deep South of America, which makes the whole thing such a delight to listen to from so many angles.

With 25 tracks on this album, there are so many great ones to choose from. There’s ‘Chevrolet Car’ by Sam McGee, ‘Pretty Polly’ by B.F. Shelton, ‘Sugar Baby’ by Dock Boggs, ‘Tell Mother I Will Meet Her’ by E. Stoneman, E.K. Brewer & M. Mooney…and the list goes on. As I’ve probably mentioned before, I am really interested in country music but I’m forever looking for ‘ins’ that allow me to explore this fascination – The Rough Guide to Country Music Pioneers is absolutely perfect for that – so many musical lineages and leylines to be followed up on…and even if you don’t feel like doing that, there’s enough here to keep you occupied all by itself. And then you still have a whole CD of Jimmie Rodgers to catch up on too!

061: Escondida, by Jolie Holland

Jolie Holland (USA)
Escondida (2004)
12 tracks, 48 minutes
Spotify • iTunes

Country music can be many things, from deeply traditional to almost parodically cheesy and pop-inflected, but wherever it is on the spectrum, the best of it (for me) evokes a very specific emotion: a soft, wistful melancholy, similar to the Lusospherical concept of saudade. This album by Jolie Holland captures that emotion perfectly.

She has a really beautiful voice that she shows off brilliantly here. Gentle but slightly reedy with a really strong Texan accent and a fragile vibrato that she uses very sparingly but always in the right places – it absolutely melts me. As an album, Escondida is mostly in the country realm, but there are blueses and elements of hot jazz in there too, which allows it to go nicely off-kilter sometimes. Wherever she takes it, it’s always with a calm that’s almost lazy in the most agreeable way, but that doesn’t stop her making some interestingly angular and jazzy melodies to her own compositions.

My favourite tracks are two traditionals that Jolie makes her own in different ways. The first, ‘Old Fashioned Morphine,’ is a take on the spiritual and blues standard ‘Old Time Religion’ with lyrics changed to reflect the different rumination. The song is slow, the feel is cool and the melody is lovely, but it becomes extra special when the horns come in. The trumpet and soprano sax weave slinkily in, out and around the layers of the piece, intertwining with each other and Jolie’s voice. It makes for some really interesting comings-together and movings-apart and puts me in mind of C.W. Stoneking at his best.

The other is ‘Mad Tom of Bedlam,' a traditional English folk song. It’s quite popular, so I’d heard it a few times on the London folk circuit before listening to this version, and sang it a couple of times in floor spots myself, too. Now Jolie’s broken it for me. Her version is fast, accompanied only by a trap kit played with brushes and it is so bluesy. She’s not changed it from the English version that much, just a few tweaks to the rhythm here and there, and a few bends to the pitches at the correct moments and that’s it – I can never hear or sing it the same way again. It’s a blues piece now. It just never knew it until Jolie Holland got her voice around it.

Country music is a style that I really enjoy listening to, but I feel like my knowledge base is never as broad as it should be. This is an album I really dig, so if you have any ‘If you like this, then try…’ suggestions, please do chuck them my way. I’m all ears!

045: Palm Wine Guitar Music: the 60's Sound, by S.E. Rogie

S.E. Rogie (Sierra Leone)
Palm Wine Guitar Music: the 60's Sound (1988)
12 tracks, 38 minutes
Spotify (not in UK) · YouTube

Listening to palm wine music for the first time, it could be quite hard to pin on the map. Depending on who’s playing it, it has sounds from Trinidad, the US, Cuba, the Congo, Ghana or the UK. The world-spanning nature makes sense when you consider that it was the sound of the ports of Liberia and Sierra Leone, invented by sailors and dock workers who blended all the music they heard on their travels or were taught by passing-through foreigners, mixed with the traditional music of the region and played on guitars and beer bottle percussion (it was booze music, after all).

One of the stars of palm wine was Sooliman Ernest Rogers, better known as S.E. Rogie, and this compilation gives a nice succinct guide to his swingingest period. S.E. Rogie’s warm, deep voice and lovely finger-picking guitar gave him the ability to adapt palm wine to whatever he wanted it to be: he could use it to impart sage advice, have a good laugh or just make you rock around the joint. It worked stylistically too, because depending on what piece you listen to, it could be calypso or surf rock, highlife or jive. In fact, my favourite tracks on this compilation are ‘I Wish I Was a Cowboy’ and ‘A Time in My Life’ – as you can tell from the former's title, these are straight-up country songs. Sing them with a slightly different accent and they could be direct from Tennessee.

There’s just something about his music that is so sweet and cheerful, which is understandable when the songs are on partying, drinking and how in love you are (happy Valentine’s Day!), but quite a feat when the song is as unrelentingly bleak as ‘A Time in My Life,’ where he talks about a series of increasingly bad circumstances before contemplating suicide. But he manages it! Maybe it’s because the residue of palm wine alcohol is so firmly embedded in the wax that you’ll just end up grinning along through thick and thin.

Later in his life, Rogie also released an album on Real World Records, Dead Men Don’t Smoke Marijuana, which included guest musicians such as Danny Thompson on bass. It’s quite good, but it is definitely the album of an older gentleman, and doesn’t really have the same energy as this one. If you want to hear S.E. Rogie in his prime, twisting and crooning with the best of them (and recorded for a local audience, too), Palm Wine Guitar Music: the 60’s Sound is the one to go for.

040: Ten Thousand, by the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir

Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir (Canada)
Ten Thousand (2008)
14 tracks, 44 minutes
Bandcamp · Spotify · iTunes

This blog is already coming up trumps – I know I love this album, but it must be about seven or eight years since I’ve given it a listen. Now I get to love it all over again!

The Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir are not what they tell you they are – they’re actually a quartet from Calgary whose style feels like it’s dredged up from the time when there was no difference between country music and the blues. I’m not sure about their religious beliefs though, so there is that. But what’s in a name?

There’s a lot of twanging going on on this one. The sound is centred around the combination of banjo and acoustic guitar and everything fits in around those: the double bass is flabby in exactly the right way, the kick drum is very loose and boomy while the rest of the drum kit is bolstered by what sounds like the contents of a kitchen. It all suits the gruff voice of Judd Palmer and the high-n-scratchy voice of Bob Keelaghan to a T. Captain Beefheart and Tom Waits are immediate frames of reference, and in fact, they are mentioned in basically every review of them – so much so that the comparison seems dull, not to mention reductive. There’s much less of the jazz or rock here, but there are bluegrass, zydeco and even Tuareg influences. The cartoon of Son House on the cover lets you know what to expect – it’s not pretty, but it’ll get you stomping.

This album is crammed with great tracks, and catchy ones too. ‘Nehemiah’s Misfortune,’ ‘Life is Wrong,’ ‘Dumb It Down,’ the Son House-penned title track ’10,000 Years’ and the insightful opener ‘Go Back Home’ (spoiler: you can’t do that. Thomas Wolfe, innit) will all get you hollering along with the choruses even before they’ve drawn to a close.

Ten Thousand came at the perfect time in the UK. 2008 was in the middle of a bit of a blues boom, with listeners rejecting ultra-polished blues-rock for a grittier sound that looked back at its earlier roots to meld with modern sensibilities. It was the same sort of time that brought popularity to Seasick Steve, Son of Dave and C.W. Stoneking, and the Agnostic Mountain Gospel Choir fit well in that scene. It’s a shame that this album turned out to be the last of their three. The group did a couple of UK tours but eventually went on their separate ways, onto puppet theatres and film soundtracks. But then, three great albums (such as AMGC have) is a good run, and don’t they always say to quit while you’re ahead? They didn’t release any duffers this way, and we still have a load of great music of theirs to enjoy – and to rediscover after all this time! Still, if they ever decided to reform and do more tours over here, I would not say no…