The Dark Song Blog

August 13th, 2010 — Jacques Coetzee | 1 comment

PROPHECY

I think the first protest song I ever loved was Joan Baez’s version of Joe Hill. In it, a dead activist appears to the singer in a dream: “I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night / Alive as you or me / Said I, ‘but Joe, you’re ten years dead’ / ‘I never died’ said he.” By the end of the song Hill (who was a real person, executed in the state of Utah in 1915 for a murder he probably didn’t commit) has come to stand for all workers who defend their rights against seemingly impossible odds.

So when I heard Dylan’s I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine from 1967’s John Wesley Harding, I was immediately curious. Apart from the almost identical first line, St. Augustine has a very similar melody to the older song, and its stark accompaniment (Dylan’s guitar and harmonica with simple bass and percussion behind it) seemed to belong to the world of rousing folk songs I knew. But St. Augustine is a different kind of song altogether.

Whereas Joe Hill ends with a call for the downtrodden to organize, St. Augustine is haunted by anxiety and sorrow. He is a messenger from another time, “alive with fiery breath”, and his apparently futile mission is to search “for the very souls / Whom already have been sold.” His complaint is that “no martyr is amongst ye now / That you can call your own.” In the third and final verse the singer becomes one of the crowd “who put him out to death.”

The shift from Joe Hill’s simple protest is decisive: it is as if Dylan had turned the protest song inside out, training the light that had exposed injustice “out there” in the world in on the listener. If St. Augustine remains enigmatic, the response of the crowd that kills him is not. The song ends on a note of bewilderment: “Oh, I awoke in anger / So alone and terrified / I put my fingers against the glass / And bowed my head and cried.”

What distinguishes St. Augustine from the protest music of its time is the fact that the singer includes himself in the outrage that is expressed. There is no sense that things could be better if we could unite against a common enemy, because the enemy is inside us.

That same prophetic anxiety pervades All Along the Watchtower, the most famous song from the album, in which businessmen, jokers, thieves, princes and barefoot servants once again suggest a spilling over of ancient characters and values into the bedeviled present. But for me even that song doesn’t chill the spine and stir the blood like the uncanny St. Augustine.

I wonder what Joe Hill would have made of it.

The Dark Song Blog

August 5th, 2010 — Jacques Coetzee | 5 comments

UNREST

It has happened so many times that I should be used to it by now. Barbara and I were driving to take the dogs for a walk, and I absent-mindedly turned the radio onto the Solid Gold Sunday show. We listened to three, four, five schmaltzy songs in a row, and I turned it off again. “Do you want to listen any more?” I asked her. “No,” she said.

When I was growing up in Worcester in the early 1980s the South African music scene was a sleepy place; the airwaves were littered with dull, sentimental love songs. Perhaps David Kramer was the first artist who showed my generation that local music could be challenging. There had been others before him – Roger Lucey and John Oakley-Smithto name two - but I only learned about them decades later.

I first encountered Kramer’s engaging Afrikaans persona at the age of seven or eight on an SABC talent show. I liked him – he could tell a story in song like no other Afrikaans singer I knew. Then my sisters, older and wiser than me, started to listen to this other music Kramer was making. For these songs, from his 1981 Bakgat album, his voice was rougher, and there was a fury in the songs. I could identify Kramer’s indignation before the words of his songs were intelligible to me. I understood nothing of this. Safe in a world of family, school and church, I could not fathom why anyone should be so angry. I think I worried about his soul.

By the end of the decade, when Shifty Records was releasing confrontational material by Koos Kombuis and Johannes Kerkorrel, I was experiencing a musical as well as a political awakening. There was a sense of euphoria: our imagination had been fired by singers who came from small towns like ours, who had measured the world of certainties in which we lived and had found it lacking in both truth and beauty. “Ons soek ‘n nuwe energie”, Kerkorrel’s call to arms from his Eet Kreef! Album, became ours also.

Twenty years down the line, with draconian sensorship a thing of the past, I listen in vain for the raw power of those songs. True, something of the energy has survived: one is much more likely to find a roaring rock ‘n’ roll party than two decades ago, and that is surely a good thing. But the unrest, the close observation of real people and situations, the sonic adventurousness - these are absent from the South African musical mainstream. But while alienation is absent from the music, listening to it is often alienating, as local artists try their best to sound like their overseas counterparts. In the end we’re down to sentimental love songs again. Where are the unsentimental love songs for us to sing along to?

If proof is needed that music of public and private unrest can be for the body as well as for the mind, listen to Bernoldus Niemand (that’s James Philips’ Afrikaans alter ego, if you didn’t know) sing his hilarious Hou My Vas, Korporaal. Because of its political (and possibly sexual) ambiguity, it wasn’t played on 1980s South African radio. Sometimes, only sometimes, I wonder what station would play it if it was released today.

The Dark Song Blog

August 2nd, 2010 — Jacques Coetzee | 0 comments

LONGING

When I go to a blues concert these days, what I hope for is something bold and strident, something defiant and electrifying in the style of Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. But if I had to choose one blues track to take to a desert island, it would be Blind Willie Johnson’s Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.

Ry Cooder called it “the most spiritual, transcendent piece in all of American music”, and used it as the basis for his haunting Paris, Texas soundtrack, which is where I must have heard it first, though I didn’t know it then.

There are no words to the song. There is only his slide guitar, accompanied by his gravelly moans. Because of the way he bends the notes it is uncertain whether the song is in a major or minor key, but the longing at its centre is unmistakable.

In 1977 Carl Sagan was looking for samples of music to include on a Golden Disc that was to be sent out into space on the Voyager space craft, the idea being to represent to whatever life forms were out there as much of human experience as was possible. Sagan and his team chose Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground as an expression of human loneliness.

I like to think of Johnson’s dark music floating into space, defying gravity as it travels towards an unknowable destination. But there is something earthbound in the song, as its title suggests. One doesn’t have to refer to the meager biographical information we have about Johnson’s life. Listen to the slow way the notes bend: there is joy mixed in with the longing, but it takes a long time to reach them.

I have noticed the same tendency to slide into a note rather than hitting it directly in recordings of South African choral music. The effect is one of longing for something that is never specified, no matter how happy, even triumphant, the words may be.

A friend of mine, who had made many field recordings of such choral singing, had the good fortune to meet the great bluesman Taj Mahal in the US some years ago and expressed surprise at this similarity, as these rural South Africans would never have heard the blues. Taj Mahal answered that it isn’t necessary to hear the blues to understand them – you just need to have them.

In spite of the apparent resolution at the end of the song, a question hangs in the air each time it stops playing. Carl Sagan heard it, and associated it with the plight of all those who face the sunset without knowing where they will sleep that night. The closest we can come to Johnson’s own thoughts and feelings is through the body of his work. In one of his best-known songs he asks repeatedly: “Won’t somebody tell me, answer if you can / Want somebody tell me what is the soul of a man.” This is the territory Johnson explores, bending those notes with his guitar and voice as if he wants to pluck everything life has to offer out of them.

The Dark Song Blog

July 20th, 2010 — Jacques Coetzee | 8 comments

SOUL

The revelation was a gradual one. I first heard Solomon Burke sing Up to the Mountain, written by Patty Griffin, on Richard Haslop’s riveting, greatly missed Roots to Fruits show one Wednesday just before midnight. I can remember it captured my attention, but not so much that I rushed out next day to buy the record it came from.

About a year later I was sitting in Dave Ferguson’s car after one of our first gigs together when he put one of Burke’s albums in the CD player. The sound was warm and reassuring – you could tell that Burke wanted to give pleasure. That might sound obvious, but it isn’t really: much contemporary music is born from and feeds on ambivalence towards its audience.

Burke is a soul singer, and that means that he combines vocal range and technique with a kind of generosity that’s hard to describe. I could say that he always puts his heart into the song he’s singing, but that’s already a metaphor. To understand what I mean, you would have to hear him.

Up to the Mountain, the song I first heard on Richard’s show, is subtitled “The MLK Song”, and is, among other things, a tribute to Martin Luther King Jr. Its title refers to a speech he delivered the day before his assassination. As such it has a political resonance, particularly when sung by a man like Burke, who knew King personally. But that is only part of the story.

Burke begins: “I went up to the mountain / Because you asked me to.” The biblical language in places suggests that the other party referred to could be God, but in others the sensuous voices of Burke and Griffin (who sings backing vocals) suggest a much more secular context. That is the way of soul music – reinvigorating popular music with the style and passionate energy of gospel.

In the end Up to the Mountain makes nonsense of such opposites. It is a song about someone who has seen everything: “I’ve seen all around me / Everywhere / I’ve seen all around me / Everywhere.” His voice lingers over the word “everywhere” in a way that suggests all the effort it has cost him to do so.

Then he hits the chorus: “Sometimes I feel / Afraid I might fall / And though the sun shines / I see nothing at all.” I know nothing in music more profoundly moving than this. It’s not so much the words, though these are beautiful in themselves. It is the conviction in the voice that carries, and something like generosity: you know he wants you to hear every note, every nuance of feeling that he has inside him.

But in writing about Burke, or any other great soul singer for that matter, you quickly fall back on metaphors and clichés. Language at its best is once removed from the immediacy and passionate energy of this music. In the end you have to experience it for yourself.

The Dark Song Blog

July 13th, 2010 — Jacques Coetzee | 0 comments

BEGINNINGS

The first band that wanted me as a member was called The Flying Ants. It was the result of a friendship between me and guitarist Roy MacGregor. Roy came to stay at my house in Stellenbosch in the spring of 2000, at a time of personal upheaval for both of us. He had a seemingly inexhaustible ability to dream up chord sequences I had never heard of. More importantly, he had written a multitude of songs. Learning to sing these became my focus at a time when I needed it badly.

There was one song that particularly fascinated me, a round that began: “The end and the beginning / Are the same – depends where you stand.” The song came back to these words again and again - in theory it could go on forever, or as long as you could improvise new words to the melody.

At the time this song had a mantra-like significance for me. I felt as if I was falling out of my previous life as an academic in training, into a new life in which I would have to find my own way, my own words. The song seemed to promise that new beginnings were possible without sacrificing continuity.

Soon Roy and I had rehearsed about thirty songs, some quite polished, others sequences of chords to which we would hastily improvise throwaway lyrics that changed at a moment’s notice. That was an important aspect of the music – that it should never sound the same twice.

That summer we took these songs down to the V&A Waterfront and busked every day. Neither of us had other jobs at the time – we had staked everything on this venture.

I don’t look back to my time as a busker with nostalgia: for one thing, the competition from other musicians, not to mention passing trucks, made creative work almost impossible. For another, it’s hard to learn about interacting with an audience that changes from one moment to the next. Still, I will always go back to those days for the mad enthusiasm I felt then, the mad courage that I would break through to a new start even if it killed me.

I remember going to a talk once by a famous local artist. She was astonishing – wise and funny at the same time. I remember she suggested that being an artist was in accordance with the textbook definition of madness: you keep repeating the same action again and again, each time hoping for a different outcome.

I can only add that we keep this madness going by convincing ourselves that we are always at the beginning; that we can always start over if we wanted to. No wonder I loved that song so much.

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