Taking
its lead from the ‘Americana Music Association’, Wikipedia describes
‘Americana’ as "contemporary music that incorporates elements of various American
roots music styles, including country, roots-rock, folk, bluegrass, R&B and
blues, resulting in a distinctive roots-oriented sound that lives in a world
apart from the pure forms of the genres upon which it may draw. While acoustic
instruments are often present and vital, Americana also often uses a full
electric band."
Like its
well-received predecessor, the music on this second volume of Americana,
showcases a slightly different take on this phenomenon. ‘Contemporary’? Well,
most of these recordings, sourced from the golden musical decades of the ‘70s
and ‘80s, nonetheless fit very snugly with an interest in all things folk-funk
that, while a marked tendency amongst the kind of people who are usually more
interested in black music styles since at least the ‘90s rediscovery of Terry
Callier, is very much of the ‘now’ as we get deeper into the twenty-first
century. ‘Roots’ music? Well, most of this stuff has a commercial, professional
sheen, redolent less of the back porch and wide open plains than the urban pub
and the college campus. The musical syncretism found here represents an ‘easy’
strain of American popular music that was less ‘lock-up-your-daughters’ than
‘wow, I think Mom and Pop will like this too.’
As such,
it represents a progressive, adult rapprochement with the civil rights
movement, a moment in American cultural life before Reaganomics had fully
achieved the backwards march that was a catalyst for the rise of hip-hop and
the racial and class-based fracturing of the progressive post-war consensus.
Life feels good, if a touch complacent, in these grooves.
It’s
often the reception and not the production that crystallizes a musical style,
and the relatively disparate sounds to be found on this album find their home
together thanks to the particular aesthetic of renowned crate-digger/archivists
Zaf Chowdhry and Mark Taylor. Both steeped in black music, these guys found
they shared a penchant for its ‘blue-eyed’ variant. Blue-eyed soul has of
course always been a part of Britain’s black music scenes, and the discourse
has hopefully moved on from the days when earnest record collectors would
debate whether only blacks could sing the blues. The quest for ‘authenticity’
that characterized those discussions really comes unstuck with these kinds of
recordings: it’s precisely their inauthenticity as R&B that makes them
authentic. The kind of melismatic, churchy, enraptured vocals characteristic of
classic R&B are absent here, in their stead is something cooler and more
definitively secular.
If they speak to us now, it’s because we’re nostalgic for
the kind of fit between music and identity that has become so lost with the
advent of new recording technologies and brutal commercial realities. Bland,
but expressive of new identities, new communities and the searching, reflective
self that characterized the singer-songwriter role in the second-half of the
twentieth-century, this album deepens our understanding of the influence of
black music on American culture, and indeed of American culture more generally
on the UK’s black music scenes, whilst spreading the love a little wider than
the small circles of cognoscenti who have previously cherished these records.
This
survey of a sound touches bases of all of those aforementioned UK and
world-wide black-music scenes too. If the two-step scene has yet to pick up on
the likes of Jaye P. Morgan, it’s been sleeping. Elsewhere, lightly jazzy
instrumental funk (Luc Cousineau) jostles the deeper, heavier sounds of Lucy
Stone. Artists such as Madcliff could work comfortably on the stompiest of
Northern dancefloors, southern soul stalwarts Rhodes, Chalmers and Rhodes go
disco, TR’s Hot Ice fit with the punk-funk/disco-not-disco template, and Hal
Bradbury and Steve Eaton can pass muster with the more discerning of collectors
as ‘proper’ soul records. All in all, it’s another in-depth look at a neglected
area of American musical history with a direct line to the eclectic
sensibilities of twenty-first century black music collectors.
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