CD Review

Steve James
Boom Chang
Burnside Records

(reviewed by Andrew Calhoun)

Steve James, once called the "high priest of Austin's blues shamans," traffics in American roots music - early country blues, with echoes of old-time minstrel shows and vaudeville. He's an intense, spooky performer who abandons himself to his material. Introducing at song at a recent concert, James said quietly, "what I'm saying is, I learned this from an old man who learned it from an old man." There are a number of faithful practitioners of old blues. But no contemporary songwriter enters its vernacular as convincingly as Steve James. He's an heir to this music and its creators.

On Boom Chang, this man's cinematic song world is full of hard luck, rain, and women who serve as reminders of one lost and haunting love. It's all about trips and breakdowns, and whether this is a quest or an escape is up to you.

We begin listening to James' musings in "Galway Station":

" I'm five thousand miles away from home
Carving another line on my own tombstone
Thinking about something I heard an old man say
About by and by, some sweet day.
Comes that lonesome day, I'll be standin' around
Doin' like I'm doin' now,
Waitin' on a bus southbound"

To "go south" - that's to die, to fail, but that's also to go where the blues is born. "The Gina Reel," an original tune played with a bottleneck on slide guitar, comes second; then comes Roosevelt Williams' lonesome blues "Way Out In The Desert:" "Hey, hey, out on the Texas plain, Can't find nobody knows my baby's name."

"Stack Lee's Blues" revisits the great folk villain "Stag-o-lee," or "Stackerlee." In Mississippi John Hurt's version, "at twelve o-clock they killed him, they was all glad to see him die, he was a bad man, that cruel Stackerlee." Steve James, as much a scholar as a travelling blues artist, researched and rewrote the story, giving its villain a human face. The mulatto bastard son of an ill-tempered steamboat man and a prostitute, Stack shoots Billy Lyons over a Stetson hat lost in a poker game. "How's it feel to get lucky, Billy, that's something I ain't never done," he says. The inclination of injured pride to violence has the inevitability of tragedy, and we're left with the disturbing feeling that Stack's act is one we understand. Steve's rewrite is the best version of a song that's been kicking around for most of a century, moving the listener a little closer to the prophet's injunction to "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Chalk one up for the folk process.

Ted Daffan's pop standard, "Born To Lose," something of a musical departure for James, unfolds beautifully and slides right in the flow of the theme. Bo Carter's "Country Fool" follows, depicting yet another guy in the wrong place: "He really done wore holes in the bottom of his last pair of shoes / And his pants behind is cryin' now / I got them righteous holy blues." This is the one of three full band tracks. Musicians are: Gary Primich on harmonica; Alvin Youngblood Hart on mandolin, 6 & 12-string guitar; Cindy Cashdollar on Hawaiian guitar and dobro; and Mark Rubin on Bass, Tuba and 3-stringed cello. After the too-many-cooks production and poor mix on James' previous disc, Art and Grit, the players and techs nail it here on Boom Chang. The back half of the disc peels out like a road trip through the blazing South, and it leads us to James' mighty evocation of the soul of blues, "Sonny Payne." James shouts out this mystical, time-warped snapshot of the Mississippi Delta like he's working a juke joint with no amp:

"Hard times here but I'm tellin' ya
Be better times again
Walking the streets of Helena
Talkin' to Sonny Payne."

It's an ominous, rocking, mind-blowing rave you'll want to put on repeat until sunrise. "Saturday Night In Jail" follows - a catchy, campy ditty with a surprise group chorus after the fade.

After the breakdowns, poverty, loss and sorrow, Luke Faust's "Seeds" ends the disc, a musical sermon that has its moments: "We are all seeds, in this green garden, each with a flower hid within - give us - a windy hillside, or some vacant lot where the bees buzz free." But Faust betrays his own metaphor ö the rooted flower - in a recycled new-age adage about process in the third
verse. Well, nobody makes perfect records. "Seeds" is like a toothpick of hope set up to catch the line of dominoes falling to sorrow and defeat, in this mortal's game that started back on track one. The toothpick falls over too. If you want to get the real story, go back to "Galway Station" and listen again, to the truth about people, and flowers, and the blues:

"Looks like this rain's gonna last all night for sure
They say that's alright - it makes the flowers grow
But the bus southbound ain't showed up yet
And I ain't no flower ö my boots are getting wet."

All lyrics quoted by Steve James, Pork Chop Music, except where otherwise attributed. If you're interested in acoustic folk blues, and/or very classy songwriting, put Boom Chang on your short list. [-AC]