Off soul-searching in the Deep South

I’VE had quite a journey this last week.

I started off in Jackson, Mississippi on the trail of a little-known folk bard called Geeshie Wiley. Back in the 1930s, Wiley and her playing partner Elvie Thomas scraped a living of sorts scratching out country blues in the Deep South. I learnt a little along the way about some of her contemporaries: people with names like Blues Birdhead, Bayless Rose, Pigmeat Terry, Kid Brown and Mattie Mary Thomas.

They penned heartfelt songs – now, sadly, mostly obscure – with titles like "Shaking Weed Blues", "Big Bed Bug" and "Workhouse Blues". They sang about personal hardships and sometimes feelings of futility. It’s Wiley’s "Last Kind Words Blues" which has come to be regarded by aficionados as "an essential work of American art". Of course, I wasn’t literally across the pond truckin’ all over the USA. No.

But thanks to John Jeremiah Sullivan whose latest collection of magazine essays, Pulphead, I did embark on a "fun-house hall-of-mirrors ride through the other side of America"...to Indiana to investigate the formative years of Michael Jackson and Axl Rose, to the Ozarks for a disconcerting account of a Christian rock festival and – best of all (in my eyes) – our time with the fine Geeshie herself. "All we know about Wiley," Sullivan reveals, "is what we don’t know about her." In other words, not a lot.

We know she recorded just a handful records in the 1930s. According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, "there are no known photographs or images of the artist in existence." "If Geeshie Wiley did not exist, she could not be invented: her scope and creativity dwarfs most blues artists. She seems to represent the moment when black secular music was coalescing into blues," according to Don Kent, the bluegrass enthusiast.

That said details of Wiley’s early and later life, her career, and her legal name are virtually unknown.

So let’s just concentrate on "Last Kind Words Blues." There are various examples on You Tube, including the original Wiley version. It’s a finger-picking beauty! Ghostly, haunting, soulful... heartbreaking.

Sullivan explores its roots and its lyrical etymology. It is a remarkable insight. "Not may ciphers have left as large and beguiling a presence as Gheesie Wiley’s," Sullivan reckons. "Three of the six songs Wiley and Elvie Thomas recorded are among the greatest country-blues performances ever sketched into shellac."

Pre-War Revenants, a comparatively new CD collection of those original primal songs, is literally a ‘comeback’ of a no-longer-quite-so-lost body of music...

Well, by my reckoning, all roads come to a crossroads at some point or other.

In my mind (full of dark recesses, I appreciate), I somehow made the leap to the Land of Oz and the Australian heavy metal outfit AC/DC. Hardly an obscure bunch of musicians: they have sold more than 200 million albums worldwide – with more than 70 million sales in the States alone.

When I had read about all those early blues singers – many of them impoverished and persecuted by the legacy of their racial history– it was difficult not to be affected by their struggles. Many succumbed to various addictions, most obviously alcohol and drugs. A few even resorted to prostitution and died prematurely of sexually transmitted diseases (the ‘bed bug blues’) – if there were treatments available, they certainly could not afford them. Some even went insane.

All of them took to music as a lament and release from the daily grind. AC/DC has a raw and base track called "The Jack" about, of all things, venereal disease. Primal, bluesy it’s a no-holds-barred thrash more than fifty years after Black Americans began to articulate their own feelings of hopelessness.

AC/DC singer Bon Scott is less circumspect than his predecessors and uses the cryptic analogy of a card player shuffling her pack as he alludes to a woman of ill repute dealing more than her players bargained for! It’s just another, more modern take on an age old social issue ("the world’s oldest profession") that music, especially, seems to so graphically express.

BBC 4 had a fascinating profile of the enigmatic singer-songwriter Richard Thompson, one of the founder members of the innovative 60s band Fairport Convention. "Solitary Life" provided a genuinely interesting biopic of Thompson’s development as an eclectic artist charting his days as the precociously talented lead guitarist who helped pen Liege and Lief the band’s fourth album released in 1969 – and later voted ‘The Most Influential Folk Album of All Time.’

The programme charted Thompson’s musicianship from the fatalistic "Meet on the Ledge" to contemporarised tracks like "Tam Lin" which provided a modern interpretation of a traditional folk tale. Indeed the band sought to transform songs hundreds of years old into new more vitalised renditions whilst writing new songs as if they were, themselves, hundreds of years old.

It was a story which reminded me of Geeshie Wiley. From their early influences in American folk music, Fairport Convention developed a niche of contemporising traditional English folk traditions renowned for their electric lead guitar jigs and reels – something no-one had thought to do before.

Sandy Denny, the band’s lead vocalist, was herself a tragic figure. Her songs were pre-occupied with "loss, loneliness, fear of the dark, the passing of time and the changing seasons." "Who Knows Where The Time Goes" is one of those hauntingly beautiful songs that cuts you to the core.

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving

But how can they know it’s time for them to go?

Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming

I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?

Listening to Sandy Denny’s version is like hearing something else. Alas she died too young. A victim of substance abuse and erratic behaviour, the "pre-eminent British folk rock singer" was just 31 when, in 1978, she fell into a coma following an injury sustained when she fell down a staircase.

So my journey from Jackson, Mississippi took me through all sorts of musical crossroads and cross-overs. That’s what I love about music, especially now that with internet access we can so instantly listen, at the press of just a few buttons, to such a diverse range of genres. They may seem remote and distant from one another, at times, but actually if you listen closely you can hear the links and chart their progressions.

I reckon Geeshie Wiley – I think she was a soulful woman who had plenty time to reflect on all of life’s vagaries – would appreciate many of the songs that followed her original blues renditions that are still audible today on scratchy vinyl – and You Tube.

And I reckon she and Sandy Denny are up there somewhere jamming together and sharing "kind words" and wondering "where the time goes"...

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