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 SINGING THE FLESH ONTO OUR BONES Alvin Youngblood Hart Summer 2000 By Adam Gussow
Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With The Wolves (1992) Alvin Youngblood Hart as Wild Woman? Hart was startled but intrigued when I suggested that Estes' Wolves held the key to his blues-based but wildly eclectic musical vision. No, he'd never read the book, but he knew a lot of women who had. With his debut release, Big Mama's Door (Sony/550, 1996), Hart dove down into his maternal-side Mississippi roots, exhumed the skeletons of Charley Patton ("Pony Blues") and Blind Willie McTell ("Hillbilly Willie's Blues"), lassoed an unlikely Leadbelly C&W gem ("When I Was A Cowboy"), tossed in a British hangman's ballad for good measure ("Gallows Pole"), and sang impassioned new microtonal flesh onto bones we'd forgotten we had. Quickly embraced, along with Keb' Mo', Corey Harris, and Guy Davis, as one of a new breed of African-American acoustic blues revivalists, Hart shed that false coat almost immediately with his second release, Territory (Hannibal, 1998). Deep-country blues were merely a springboard, it turned out, for the next stage of Hart's psychic land-reclamation project. America? Our submerged history of racial murder and tribal displacement, our restless expansiveness, our aching midnight moans and breathless intimations of grace? Hart wanted it all, and gave it back to us in song: the sweet Texas-swing balladeering of Bob Wills ("Tallacatcha"), the high-lonesome modalities of the Carter family crossed with Leadbelly ("John Hardy"), plus Rudy Vallee ("Dancing With Tears In My Eyes"), Captain Beefheart ("Ice Rose"), and big-band ska ("Just About To Go"). Loud, raunchy electric guitars had been swirled into the mix on a couple of tracks. The true coat of powerful instinct and knowing had been donned; the bandages were starting to unfurl. And the blues critics were starting to come unhinged. "A critic for a blues magazine said of my last release," Hart recently told the press, "that I should find one thing that I do well and stick to it. As I enter the 22nd year of my guitar career, I hope I'm doin' it well." The unspoken subtext here, of course, is race: Why can't Hart just give us more of those haunting, if comforting, deep-country blues that come from the mouths of so many edgy young black men? Why does he insist on stepping all over our paternalist fantasy of "proper" blue-blackness? Why is he so ... audacious? Let Dylan and Springsteen handle that. Besides, we already have Taj Mahal! Only one rootsy, griotic, all-over-the-map black guy at a time, please. And the Frank Zappa shit has to go. Only white guys are allowed to be that weird. Hart's new album, Start With The Soul (Hannibal), reveals the artist as amped-up, Telly-driven soothsayer: bandages flapping in the wind, medicine harsh rather than soothing. Two albums' worth of root-work under his belt, Hart seems freed up at last to sing with brooding directness of his own heartaches—which are yours and mine, of course. "Manos Arriba" is his story of being stopped for no reason by a posse of Chicago cops while pushing his two-year-old son down the street in a stroller. "You won't let me go in style," he sings. "You say I fit the profile/It don't take long to discover/That I'm the one takin' over." And he is, too. Song by song, singing our flesh back onto our bones. For the record, how many different instruments do you play? Ah, not too many, just whatever, you know. Guitar, banjo, mandolin, a little bit. A little bit of harp? Yeah, a little bit. Pedal steel? Some kind of accordions here and there, I mess around. Mostly the guitar. The easiest one to fake. [laughs] Blues critics and fans who related to Charley Patton tunes on the first album didn't quite know what to make of the second one? Or was it just a few select critics? You know, it wasn't really that many, man. I was sort of like ... taunting Blues Revue, just to see how far I could push it. You mean with the quote on your press release? With the second record! You know what I mean? And I sort of couldn't wait to see the review I was gonna get in there, and it was just as I expected. That was the guy who said I should find one thing I do well and stick to it. But, for the most part, from the blues press, everything was mostly thumbs up. When did music first grab you? I can't really remember so much, but when I was a kid, you know, there was the Beatles cartoon. See, like I was too young to see the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. But I wasn't too young to see the Beatles cartoon show. So I was aware of the Beatles and their music. And up the street from me in my neighborhood was this band called the D-Dynamics. It was really funny, man. It was the funniest thing on earth. They were black mop-tops, basically. The D-Dynamics. Yeah. And they played live? You would hear these guys play? Oh yeah, we'd hear 'em practicing. We'd go up to their house, sometimes maybe just one would be out in the garage. We're like three or four years old, you know. We'd go in there and the guy's got an electric guitar, steps on the foot switch and turns on the trem, you know. Wha-wha-wha-wha-wha! And we'd be like, Wow man! [laughs] You grew up in Oakland? I lived on the outskirts of Hayward. It was like a chicken-farmin' town back then. What about Brownie McGhee? You dedicated the first album to him. Yeah, I met Brownie I think around '94 maybe, and I'd see him at blues events here and there in the Bay Area, and got to know him a little bit. He actually lived about 10 minutes' walk from where I lived, so every now and then I'd walk over there and we'd sit out in his garage and listen to him talk about the first time he met Leadbelly, and things like that. Yeah, Brownie was actually gonna—he consented to play piano on a song on that first record, you know. And right about the time the whole thing was coming together, Brownie got diagnosed as terminal. So I didn't pursue it anymore. One of those things that should have happened and didn't. You have a continuing relationship with Mississippi. Yeah, well, that's where my parents came from. What part of the state? My dad sort of grew up moving around the Delta. He was actually born in Chicago, and his parents got divorced when he was really young, he don't even Remember. So my grandma moved back down to Mississippi, and my dad was raised by his grandparents who were tenant farmers. So he moved around the Delta alot, different towns. And my mom was born in a place called Carrollton, which is in the hills just east, like, 20 miles east ofGreenwood. That's where they live now. That's where my mom's family comes from. They had their own land there, so they were kind of better off. They were farmers also. When I was playing with Mister Satan, we played something called the Mississippi Crossroads Blues Festival in Greenwood, and I found out much later that was the seat of Klan activity. We never had too much of your standard Klan violence or anything like that. It's always been more of a political thing as long as I've been around there. For the last 25 or 30 years. Yeah, before that there was a lot of wildness. I wrote a song about it, actually, on the second record. "Countrycide" is about these two mixed-blood black Indians there in Carrollton who were rolling some molasses barrels, and bumped into this white man. And a shouting match and all that. You started out doing the acoustic stuff. Did you get a little restless doing it at a certain point? You know, at a certain point I just got kind of acoustic-bluesed out. The blues community in particular can be a little narrow-minded ... Oh yeah. "We want the next Robert Johnson!" I once saw an ad in Living Blues that called Corey Harris "something that a lot of us dreamed of a 26-year-old African-American acoustic bluesman who plays and sings like he stepped out of the Delta in 1931!" I find that a little creepy. It was like that whole acoustic thing.... In '94, Sony started slamming Keb' Mo' real hard. And pretty successfully. It suddenly opened these guys' eyes, you know. And they were saying, "Maybe I can get one." And I got caught up in that whole thing, too. Did you have to shake that off at a certain point? I'm still shakin', man. [laughs] |
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