Down In the Flood

Episode 12: Springsteen, Seeger & Community-Made Music

With his new album, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Bruce Springsteen becomes one in a long line of American popular musicians who have turned to old time music to summon a community. The appeal of old-time is that in its natural habitat it is made not FOR the community but BY the community--tossed off in basements, on front stoops, in the back booths at bars, and of course at prayer meetings.

But Springsteen takes as his jumping off point not the informal circle of song but the work of the father of modern folk revival performance, Pete Seeger. At the core of Seeger's act was the idea of the hootenanny--a singalong that was a deliberate effort to evoke old-time community-made music in the service of left wing politics. It set the mold for an entire strain of American rock.

Listen to Down in the Flood Episode 12: Springsteen, Seeger & Community-Made Music (32.7 MB; 34 min.)

Episode 11: Pops Staples Superstar

Roebuck "Pops" Staples, founder of The Staple Singers, is a forgotten master--a singer, songwriter, bandleader and guitarist whose music formed a direct bridge between the likes of Charley Patton and the likes of Bob Dylan. Born in Winona, MS in 1915, Pops was a contemporary of Robert Johnson's; he grew up on the same plantation where Patton lived and performed; he was a pioneer of the electric guitar establishing an instantaneously recognizable, vibrato-laden sound. But Pops not only bridged eras, he also bridged genres, taking as his model Appalachian family groups like the Stonemans, Pops fashioned a sound and repertoire for the The Staple Singers that ran the gamut from gospel to country to rockabilly to Chicago blues and he influenced everyone within earshot. Levon Helm, whose lead vocal style owes much to Pops, famously said that The Band took the Staples' vocal style as their model for multi-part singing. And The Rolling Stones adapted Pops' gospel moan, "This May Be the Last Time," to their own secular purpose for one of their early hits. Today The Staples' secular hits for Stax and Curtom are well remembered--"Let's Do It Again," "I'll Take You There," "Respect Yourself." Less well remembered are the pioneering songs of the 1950s and early 1960s that placed Pops at the forefront of the creation of what Gram Parsons famously called "cosmic American music."

Listen to Down in the Flood Episode 11: Pops Staples Superstar (43.3MB, 47:22 Min)

Episode 10: Best of 2005

It's year-end list-making time, and DITF celebrates our records of the year:

Good For What Ails You: Music of the Medicine Shows 1926-1937

You Ain't Talkin to Me: Charlie Poole and the Roots of Country Music

Soul's Chapel - Marty Stuart

I've Got My Own Hell to Raise -  Bettye Lavette

Song X - Ornette Coleman & Pat Metheny

Listen to Down in the Flood Episode 10: Best of 2005 (38.5 MB, 41:06 Min)

Episode 9: The Minstrel Roots of Country

For most of the last 50 years blackface minstrelsy has been a taboo topic. The very image of men in burnt cork blackface has been a shocking symbol of national shame ever since Brown v. Board of Education started the process of dismantling the segregation laws that had been nicknamed after America's first homegrown international pop music sensation, a blackface, character-based song-and-dance routine by Thomas "Daddy" Rice called "jump Jim Crow." 

But for nearly 150 years blackface minstrelsy was among the most popular and widespread entertainments in America. In the 1840s it was seen at home and abroad as the first great indigenous expression of American culture and identity. And though the process of "blacking up" has disappeared, minstrel performance lives on in American comedy--Chris Rock's 2003 movie, Head of State, in which Rock becomes the first black President and gets a crowd of uptight white swells to dance and chant, could have been written for one of Rice's stage shows. And of course minstrelsy lives on in American music, not only in the faux Ebonics of singers like Anthony Kiedis, but in the very sound and repertoire of country music.

Listen to Down in the Flood Episode 9: The Minstrel Roots of Country (33:32 min; 31.3 MB)

Episode 8: There's Good Rockin' Tonight

What is this thing we call "rocking"?

A sound, a state of mind, a beat....More than the stomp of ragtime or the backbeat of jazz, rocking is the sound of a perpetual downstroke. Not 1-2-3-4, but 1-1-1-1. All drive drive drive; all go go go.

But like anything else in the history of American music, the idea of "rocking" emerged from somewhere and went someplace else.

This episode of Down In The Flood is dedicated to the fine art of "rocking" from Papa Charlie Jackson to Ronnie Montrose.

Listen to Down in the Flood Episode 8: There's Good Rockin' Tonight (32:37 min; 30.6 MB)

Episode 7: R.H. Harris & the Invention of Soul

In the early days of gospel music there were two ways of singing. The first style came out of the post-Civil War black universities where groups harmonized on spirituals that were old even then, rolling their R's and clicking their enunciation. The other style was less formal, largely congregational, growing out of the new sanctified congregations inspired by the Azuza Street Revival, singing newly written songs from 1920s songbooks like Gospel Pearls. When RH Harris joined the Soul Stirrers gospel quartet in 1938 he fused the two styles effectively creating soul singing and influencing everyone within earshot.

Five years after Harris' death his influence is everywhere, but the greatest of his records are not. Short of spending the next 25 years collecting 78s, there is simply no way to hear Harris' greatest records of the 1940s, not in decent sound anyway.

Today's episode of Down in the Flood is dedicated to the greatest singer you've never heard in your life, the man who basically invented soul singing, the great Rebert H. Harris.

Listen to Down in the Flood Episode 7: R.H. Harris & the Invention of Soul (43:44 min, 41MB)

Episode 6: John Henry & Stagger Lee

This is the tale of two men, two black men, two tough sons of bitches immortalized in American song. Two ballads and identities that tell us all we need to know about sex, and race, and danger in America's first 200 years.

John Henry was a working man, 6 foot 2, 200 pounds, a giant in his day, born a slave some time in the 1840s. He punched holes into mountains so the mountains could be dynamited for railroad tunnels and died after competing with a steel driving steam drill.

Stagger Lee was a pimp who owned the Modern Horseshoe Club in the notorious Deep Morgan section of St. Louis in 1895. He lived in two story house on North 12th with half a dozen crib apartments in back where the girls worked.

These men, and the ballads that grew up around them, launched the careers of two of America's greatest public identities. It's no surprise then that the ballads of John Henry and Stagger Lee have remained core parts of  the American repertoire for more than a century.

Listen to Down in the Flood Episode 6: John Henry & Stagger Lee (39:00 min, 43 MB)

Episode 5: 4th of July Special--This Is My Country

Every Down in the Flood podcast is a celebration of American culture, that bastard, contradictory morass of our basest desires and our highest ideals.

After all, American music sounds the way it does because it expresses and resolves the core tensions at the heart of the American character.

It seems obvious to say that American music wouldn't exist without America itself, but it's worth noting that what is great about American music--it's ability to mix high with low, to absorb immigrant musics, to chase ideals--is directly a result of what is great about the American geopolitical experiment.

So for this episode of Down in the Flood, no more teaching, no more preaching, just the sounds of America itself.

Listen to Down in the Flood 5 (24:44 min, 29 MB)

Episode 4: Steel Guitar Blues

The lonesome swoop of the steel guitar is one of the most immediately identifiable sounds in American music, a distinguishing mark of honky tonk authenticity. But steel guitar playing in America precedes the honky tonk genre by almost 50 years and American steel guitar styles are myriad--from virtuoso redneck jazz played on the notoriously difficult pedal steel to bluegrass Dobro playing to the black gospel style known as sacred steel.

Episode 4 of Down in the Flood looks at how a Hawaiian adaptation of a European instrument became a defining sound in American music.

Download and listen to Down in the Flood 4 (35:19; 40 MB)

Episode 3: Sister Rosetta's Gospel Boogie

If Sister Rosetta Tharpe had been a secular singer she would be hailed today as the original female rocker, a giant one par with genre defining greats like Hank Williams and Muddy Waters, a figure as revered as her contemporaries Robert Johnson and Mother Maybelle Carter. But because Tharpe played gospel music her innovative sound, her adventurous blending of pop and gospel (almost 20 years before Ray Charles), and her chugging guitar riffs are rarely given the credit they deserve. In this edition of Down in the Flood we gig props where props are due, to the gospel boogie woogie of Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Download and listen to Down in the Flood 3 (32:12 min., 37 MB)

P.S.  Thanks to Eric Lunt at Feedburner for helping me out with the feed formatting.

Episode 2: Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and The Big Bang of Rock and Roll

The Big Bang of rock and roll came in the form of two records cut less than 12 months apart --one by a teenaged Tennesse truckdriver, the other by a 30-year-old veteran chitlin' circuit guitar player from St. Louis. One white, one black. One would become rock's greatest idol, the other rock's greatest songwriter and guitarist.

In Episode 2 Down in the Flood explores the nature and origins of Sun 209 and Chess 1604--the records that gave birth to rock and roll.

Download and listen to Down in the Flood 2 (25:44 min., 23.5 MB)

Episode 1: Bob Dylan's Old, Weird America

When Bob Dylan first began casting his dancing spell our way, weaving epic, surreal songs that connected back to America's railroad earth, his art seemed unique.

But thanks to the work of critics like Griel Marcus, and thanks to Dylan himself, we now can hear even Dylan's most surreal music as eminating from a center in American traditional music as surely as earth's magnetism eminates from the planet's core.

Borrowing a phrase (and more)  from Marcus' book about Dylan's Basement Tapes (see the sidebar), the first episode of this new podcast plunges into a sonic exploration of Bob Dylan's music in the context of the music that inspired it.

Download and listen to Down in the Flood 1 (68:50 min., 64 MB)