CHARLIE PARR has been around for a long time. His natural-sounding authority in songs about farmers, coal miners, deadbeats and depressives never misses for a beat. It's easy enough nowadays to imitate a 1959 dirt farmer singing on his front porch but PARR'S performance goes way beyond imitation. His character and his life seem to have been so long attached to this music that his own voice gives first hand wisdom on themes and stories that have never been away. It sounds linked by blood and stubbornness to known ancestors, with new songs woven in among fragments of a continuous past. There is the roughness of contemporaries like Johnny Dowd in his singing voice and now and again there's the ghostly purity of Blind Lemon Jefferson to chill the blood.
ROUSTABOUT is a seventh collection of his songs. It was recorded, in mono, in locations around Duluth, Minneapolis, St Paul and Winona on a a Nagra reel-to-reel tape machine by regular collaborator Tom Herbers of Third Ear Studios in Minneapolis. Tom was kind enough to put me straight on the Nagra (He used a Nagra IV-S - introduced in 1971- from the same Swiss firm that lent a prototype miniature to Alan Lomax for his field recordings in the southern states with Shirley Collins back in 1959).
That tenuous connection to folklorists of the last generation matters to me, at least. Responding to the up-close quality of these unvarnished recordings and prompted by CHARLIE PARR'S magnificent "Adrift in Lake Superior at Sunrise" I start to remember swimming in the waters of Lake Superior, near Duluth, as a small boy in the summer of 1960. I remember too, just a few years later, hearing recordings of Mississippi Fred McDowell on English pirate radio.
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As well as accompanying himself on National resonator guitars, a twelve string guitar, or a fretless banjo, PARR calls on guests Emily Parr (vocals); Dave Hundreiser (harmonica); Mikkel Beckmen (washboard and percussion); Dave Simonette (vocals and guitar); and Ryan Young (fiddle). It makes for a richly varied set of sounds, spontaneously achieved and always in support of the songs themselves.
The album has no weak tunes at all. Blind Willie McDowell's "God Moves On The Water" is a thrilling climax. "Walk Around My Bedside" has a Skip James feel to it, with Emily Parr's close harmony drawing out the mournful shivers to perfection. The nearly eight minutes of "Midnight Has Come And Gone" is harrowing stuff. Probably my favourite, it rolls along like a late John Fahey tune, with something sinister and guilty haunting the air and seems to gasp in the very last moment .Its death rattle is roughly exhaled and its secret remains untold. The following "Come Along And See" picks things up with sprightly banjo playing and (like the slightly more sinister "Cropduster") sounds like it could have been a Woody Guthrie children's song.
He is playing some UK dates at the end of February, and on the strength of this album I'm going to try hard to get to one.
www.charlieparr.com
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