- Oxford American's 10th annual music issue
- Various artists
- Oxford American magazine
Separation Blues, in Oxford American's annual music issue, is the title of Sven Birkerts's article on sixties singer-guitarist Patrick Sky. Separation blues, as if there were any other kind.
Oxford American, a respected literary magazine, "proudly published from the University of Central Arkansas," puts out each year an all-star collection of writing on southern music, accompanied (always splendidly) by a CD of songs relating to the stories. This time around, it's a special deal: Celebrating the accomplishment of the music issue's 10th year, a second CD doubles the listening. It's eclectic, funky stuff, 55 tracks in total (not including Morgan Freeman's spoken introduction), with material along the lines of Blind Willie McTell (whom nobody sings the blues like), Lucinda Williams, the candid duo of Elton and Betty White (with two tracks, including the respectful ass-ode A Jelly Behind Woman Blows My Mind), Ella Fitzgerald (improbably having at a brassy Sunshine of Your Love), Erma Franklin (you know of her sister Aretha) and Sister Rosetta Tharpe (a daring pop-gospel pioneer who wore high fashion and played electric lead guitar).
There's another thing different this year — a spirit of defiance, mixed with a lamenting sense that times are changing, fast. "The Oxford American covers old music, mainly, though not exclusively," spells out the magazine's editor, Marc Smirnoff, explaining that contemporary sounds have plenty of their own venues.
In defending its choice of music, OA simultaneously fights for its own life. Smirnoff's charismatic song-by-song liner notes no longer appear in print, but at the journal's "re-energized" website. Tucked in the back of the issue is a rant against Internet-based music journalism, written by Grant Alden, co-founder of alt-country periodical No Depression, which ceased to publish in 2008, the same year that saw the downsizing of Rolling Stone magazine and a perilous drop in CD sales.
Certainly there's romanticism to scratchy LPs, tape hiss and hold-in-your-hands reading material, but there's more at play than the notion that old music is better music. Sure, Allan Lowe, with his piece on late sixties artsy roots-rockers Hampton Grease Band, touches on the virtues on analog tape and tube amplifiers. But he and many others explore the notion that with a passage of time comes an understanding of what the old music (or the music of one's youth) can come to mean. The separation of years carries with it abilities of wider reflection.
Varying motives are at work; different conclusions are reached. Derek Jenkins's piece on the "5" Royales addresses the underrated role of black music in the 1950s, a "lost decade" worth finding. Donn Cooper's search for vanished country-soul singer Doris Duke (who is something less than emancipated on the stirring 10th track, Divorce Decree) ends with more questions than answers. With the story of under-regarded Stax artist Wendy Rene, who bares her soul on the ballad After Laughter (Comes Tears), writer Zeth Lundry speaks to the " douceur of rediscovery," and that after years of neglect, pieces of the past "make sudden, fresh sense."
But, then, there's a piece on peg-legged country bluesman Furry Lewis (1893-1981), who once concluded: "Time done been/ Won't be no more." It's hard not to notice the back-cover advertisement for Golden Moon Hotel & Casino, which encourages to "come play in the heart and soul of Mississippi." Some have said the boom of gambling halls has actually stripped some of the South's soul, drawing attention away from juke joints and traditional live music venues. The magazine launch for OA's southern-music issue takes place at the end of the month at Ground Zero Blues Club, a touristy place of fabricated authenticity, owned by actor Freeman in Clarksdale, Miss.
Panoramic-voiced soprano Neko Case, a member of Vancouver's New Pornographers and the subject of two pieces in the OA music issue, sings that the advice to "hold on, hold on" is a lie. Who knows what the future brings, when even the past keeps changing. Perhaps, in the end, the late psychedelic trailblazer Arthur Lee was on to something, when he sang, as noted in Hayden Child's tidy piece, "You gotta live before you know the reason why."
