What kind of heart

Words are so often inapropriate, empty in the face of the reality that they hope to convey. Frustrated we turn to the muse of music to convey those emotions and to unlock those doors to our hearts.
Certain songs, certain voices have the power in their words and in their melodies to pick the padlocks to our guarded emotions.
To let things be as they are.
To free the caged bird


Lhasa had that power, Lhasa had that grace, Lhasa had that beauty..
Here is a version one of her songs, in celebration of her life.
May she rest in peace..


p


P.S For this fourth in the series, I am accompanied by the violinist Rodrigo D'erasmo.

Cypress Grove Blues

Those of you who’ve been to a gig recently may well have heard me sing this haunting song first written and recorded by Skip James back in the 1930’s.
When I was 17 years old and I was into picking up cheap second hand vinyl in
the markets in London, I’d often buy music on a whim, not knowing the artist or the genre.
That was how I ended up with a record that I chose initially for the cover and the price before being rooted to the spot as the turntable revealed the inimitable sound of Skip James, his unique picking guitar style, his high voice and his extraordinary lyrics. It’s no understatement to say that song and that moment changed my life.
I sold my electric guitar, stopped playing with my band at the time, threw away my plectrum and learnt slowly how to play with my fingers on a battered old Epiphone.
I spent the following years addicted to all types of acoustic blues from the Mississippi Delta and I was incapable of listening to anything else, with the exception of Malians, Ali Farka Toure and Boubakar Traore who I’d also picked up on vinyl back in the day!

To cut a long story short, it took me pretty much twenty years to find the courage to play this song, I have never had a music lesson in my life, I’ve only ever learnt from records or from playing with other musicians over the years. Skip James was and will always remain an absolute master for me, someone who took the form of song to its most poignant and touching heights.

He wrote complex and immensely poetic lyrics, not merely to have words to moan and wail to the music but to express as a poet would, profound and specific images, ideas and stories through his words. (See his “Washington DC hospital Blues’ or his ‘Cherry Ball Blues’)

The idea that I would one day be able to play, in some form or other, this man’s music is some testament to stubborn determination and hard work. When I first heard that song all those years ago, I was capable only of strumming open chords and struggled with bar chords!

When Ben Harper heard me play Cypress Grove he jokingly said, ‘No one plays Skip James’ meaning you’d have to be crazy to learn a song that difficult!

Like all of these songs in this little series of covers, if people get to discover Skip James through my humble little version, it’s a good job done for me!

I will always carry the torch for the great Skip James.

'I used to have a good mother and a father'

I first heard this song many moons ago when the bulk of what I listened to consisted almost entirely of music from the deep American south recorded between 1920 and 1933. Such was the power, artistry and invention of the great and innumerable artists from this time and place that everything else seemed to pale in comparison. Aged twenty I tried very hard to become a delta bluesman before realising the comic futility of my ambition but sometimes we are so touched by something, we inevitably at first try to become it.
Back then I wanted to sing and touch the places that Skip James reached, not what the English
pop-stars of the time were singing about but I later realised that you can't sing another man's life, you can only sing your own. Realising that was the most important step I made in becoming a songwriter.

We cannot be what we are not and yet paradoxically music can only move us if it speaks to something already inside us. Falling in love with a song outside our usual cultural references is the proof of existence of a common echo that binds us all and pulls us back to a primal universal source.  I'm getting carried away but roll with me for a few lines!
This is the wonderful paradox that makes a Tokyo businessman become obsessed by Charlie Parker or a Scandinavian postman by Cuban Son or a Nigerian taxi driver by Hank Williams to pull some unlikely examples out of the hat

Early black American music always transported me, mysteriously these voices called to me.
Years later I've tried to understand what it was that resonated in me then and to put it clumsily into words , I came to see that it was a recognition or acknowledgement of something that goes beyond race, culture and geography. Since then I've experienced this same resonance not only in the early bluesmen from Mississippi but in music from all over the world and in places much closer to my place of birth. I once heard a blind Irish street musician on a cold London street corner sing note for note the same melody that Mississippi John Hurt had sang 60 years earlier and that I'd listened to that very morning on an old scratchy record.

There's a phenomenon in music called sympathetic resonance that you can hear clearly in Indian classical music. In an instrument like the sitar there are strings which are plucked by the player but there are other numerous strings that are never physically touched and yet when tuned carefully simply play themselves, activated by the vibration of the strings that are plucked by the player.
When i hear Washington Phillips I feel like those strings that play themselves, humming in shared resonance.

So what is this primal sound, this universal hum, if we can call it that? You could also call it, the song of being, it's at once an anguished wail and a celebratory cry. It's the essence of what you hear when Souther Italian Uccio Aloisi roars, when Bukka White moans, when the Malian troubadour Boubacar Traore sings or even when June Tabor bears her heart a cappella. If we had to play one song to a Martian for him to understand what music is, I'd play him Washington Phillips's 'I used to have a good mother and a father.'

I meant to talk about the song specifically but I got carried away, waxing lyrical as the French country side whistled past me from the window of a high speed train. There is a beauty in this song and in the manner in which it was played by Washington Phillips all those years ago that will freeze you to the spot. No words can describe its power, its grace.

My humble version is just a small homage or a doffing of the hat to this forgotten master of early gospel music and if my version alone leads you to his miracle of early recorded song then it's job done for me..

We are what we hear, for we can only hear what we are!

see you folks and thanks for bearing with me in my mystic ramblings..
next cover will be up in November..watch this space!

P

I had an idea to start recording a little collection of covers over the next few months, the plan being to record one a month and to then to put them one up on the website as I go.

The songs will be downloadable for free for a couple of weeks after I post them and after that we'll make a playlist as we go..

I'll be recording at home on a very basic studio set up but the lo-finess'll be part of the process. For the most part, it'l be just a case of putting a mike in front of the guitar and another for the voice and pressing record with a quick mix afterwards.

The first song in the series takes me back to my teens and the band I and so many others in the U.K fell in love with, The Smiths. In my first ever band when I was fifteen we used to play half our own songs and half Smiths tunes.
So starting with this song is a way to build some kind of story together in the series about the various influences that I have. I'll leave you to guess which other artists I'll cover later!

For me the idea of this cover series is just a way for me to share the joy I have in playing these incredible songs..It's no more than that, hopefully you'll dig them too.

Sometimes I might be tempted to stray from the original arrangement othertimes I'll stick closer to the versions I first heard of the songs like I have here in the first one in the series: Please Please Please let me get what I want by The Smiths

So here's to melancholy adolescence
and all the fruits it bears in the hearts of lonely souls!

Thankyou Morrissey and Johnny Marr!
p