Terry Callier – The New Folk Sound Of Terry Callier (Prestige)
“900 Miles”
“Cotton Eyed Joe”
Although Friends Of Modern Music exists primarily to champion new music, on occasion I’ll feature an album from Way Back When than either suffers from lack of contemporary appreciation or simply merits continued discussion. Continuing the week-long celebration of all things Chicago, the first entry in the Way Back When’s series is a record that was underappreciated in its own time and remains so today, yet one that encapsulates the creative foment and fertility which ran rife through the music of Chicago’s African-American artists in the 1960s: The New Folk Sound Of Terry Callier.
Although a collection of traditional folk standards (not uncommon for the era), Callier stamps each song on this record with such highly individual character that they become irrevocably his. More than anything else, this is achieved by the deadliest weapon in Callier’s arsenal: his heartbreaker of a voice. In many ways, Callier serves as a mirror to similarly folk/blues oriented singers like Nina Simone and Odetta; where the gravely, low tones in their vocals convey not just the long roads of their lives but also a kind of masculine imprimatur on their femininity, Terry Callier’s high, tremulous voice possesses a feminine sensibility, at once both vulnerable and assertive. Like Simone and Odetta, Callier’s voice is the blues, the concurrent tumult of defeat and indefatigability, of hardship and perseverance, capable of welding pain and sweet joy in simultaneity.
Moreover, the songs on The New Folk Sound set the ideal backdrop for Callier’s vocals. Spare and somber atmospherics dominate, as Callier fingerpicks delicate melodies from jazz chordal voicings over a backdrop of doubled contrabasses (John Tweedle and Terbour Attenborough, about whom I can find little information). The instrumentation betrays an obvious familiarity and fondness for ‘Trane and Ornette, in other words the vanguard of African-American musicianship at the time, but is in practice not at all jarring or confrontation but rather subtle, almost ethereal. Typically one bassist deploys vaguely jazzy pizzicato figures while the other creates hazily emotive backdrops by bowing his instrument. Though the diaphanous and nuanced affect of this instrumentation can be best appreciated on vinyl (indeed this is a record where the sound of the needle in the groove adds exponentially to the experience), one can find themselves transported to a highly personalized and emotionally rich interior headspace even listening in mp3 format.
Opening cut and instant knockout 900 Miles sets the pattern; first Callier’s plaintive fingerpicking swiftly followed by the doubled contrabasses, carving out a bleak, ruminative sonic space. Then Callier’s vocals enter, all heaviness and weariness, and the popular “vagrant song” of ’60s folk contrivance (900 Miles was originally popularized by Woody Guthrie) is transformed into tour-de-force of longing and determined return. Callier begins to strum insistently on his guitar and Tweedle and Attenborough increase their activity on the bass as well, plucking just slightly out of phase from one another, echoing the runt-a-tunt of an accelerating railcar. But there is no true return when one has lost their home, and for the first but not last time Callier is able to recontextualize a traditional American folk tune into the striving for permanence that marked the Civil Rights era. “I hate to hear that lonesome whistle blow,” Callier nearly howls at the songs end, and we know for all his declarations he won’t be finding home anytime soon.
More than any other track on The New Folk Sound, Terry Callier’s complete ownership of Cotton Eyed Joe marks his ability as an artist to forge interpretations of existing work imbued with a new meaning. For anyone whose sole exposure to Cotton Eyed Joe, a song that predates the American Civil War, is the execrable eurodance rendition by Rednex, seemingly ubiquitous in 1990s, Terry Callier’s interpretation will be a revelation. Once again beginning with a subdued fingerpicked guitar figure, Callier’s voice carries a weight of sadness that feels almost unbearable. This is a song about losing the love of your life, and depth of that loss is palpable in Callier’s vocals (as well as the fragile interplay between plucked and bowed bass). Yet the song carries a hint of something beyond sadness. One of the widespread interpretations of Cotton Eyed Joe is that the narrator, presumably white due to the songs popularity in white Southern dance halls, has lost his woman to a man who’s eyes appear like balls of cotton in his face; in other words, a black man. In Callier’s hands, the racial undertones inherent in the folk song’s history are thrown in stark reflect, but are also subverted. This is the black man reclaiming his identity as a human being from the caricature of minstrelsy, locating a social dignity even in his personal loss. With the barest of tools, Terry Callier has completely flipped the song in on its own tradition, and in doing so making it all the more potent.
Although recorded in the early 1960s at the height of the folk revival (the record should be thought as contemporaneous with early Bob Dylan or Odetta’s “jazz” period), The New Folk Sound Of Terry Callier languished until 1968, and Callier himself would not record again until 1972 when he began a string of deservedly lauded jazz-folk releases for the legendary Chess label’s Cadet subsidiary. Today, though he has been subject to a modest revival in stature, Callier’s earliest work remains relatively overlooked in terms of his catalogue; The New Folk Sound was not remastered until 2006, and one could argue that the effort was not quite sufficient. Still, nothing can diminish the very human power captured in the grooves of this record, and few serve as better soundtrack to an evening of quiet introspection.
Buy it from Dusty Groove on CD or LP.
