Copyright © 2000 by Michael
Segers, All rights reserved
This
week, I’ll mute the raving so we can rove through three very different musical
traditions we’ll be celebrating for three very different reasons. A three-disk
retrospective of the career of Johnny Cash has recently been released, Tito
Puente has died, and Kurt Weill’s hundredth birthday is being
celebrated around the world and around the Internet. I’ll try to avoid
labeling the different musical traditions with which these three giants are
associated, because so often, we hear no more than the label, which drowns out
the music itself. Cash has lately been reaching out to and performing with new
generations of performers in fields far from his home territory, Puente lived up
to the meaning of his name ("bridge"), and Weill made it a project to
transcend labels. Perhaps the greatest artists are bridges that transcend the
labels. Perhaps they even create their own labels.
Johnny
Cash is a singer of songs that people (like me) who don’t like his kind of
music like. At his best, he creates stark songs that are closer to stories by
William Faulkner or even tragedies by Sophocles than to twangy, nasal songs
lamenting that "my dog died, my truck got wrecked, my woman done left with
my best friend, and I shore miss that dog." There are few lines in all of
literature any more memorable than his "I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch
him die," from "Folsom Prison."
Now
in his late sixties and suffering from a rare neurological disease, Cash has
just released a three-CD compilation Love God Murder that reviews the
best of his very varied work. The title, outlining Cash’s three main themes,
reminds me of a remark by a European friend of mine, "You Americans have
more churches and more murders than any other people I know of."
She
didn’t comment on how we rank in the love department. Judging from the disk Love,
Cash seems to be doing quite well, however, thanks to his wife and the love of
his life (that equals one lady, not typical of many songs in his line of work),
June Carter Cash. She wrote Cash’s big love-song hit, "Ring of
Fire," which is included in this collection, together with other great Cash
love songs, such as "I Still Miss Someone." There are also some little
known treasures as well, including, "Happiness Is You," a lovely,
loving song for June Carter Cash which includes this strikingly affectionate
line, "I know now my pot of gold is anywhere you are."
The
second disk God contains sixteen religious songs. Oops, that sounds like
a label to me, but it is surprising how much variety there is on this one disk,
from swinging almost rock sounding numbers like "Belshazzar" to a
rather hokey western, "The Greatest Cowboy of All." Along the way,
there are some songs that can make the hair stand up on the back of your neck
and maybe make your soul reach upward a little as well. "Swing Low, Sweet
Chariot" shows just how powerful a performer Cash is, bringing new strength
or finding old strength in a grand old song like this
Murder
begins with "Folsom Prison" and "Delia’s Gone." If you saw
last year’s TNT tribute to Cash, surely you remember Wyclef Jean’s haunting
performance of this song, with its somehow elegiac, somehow celebratory refrain,
"Delia’s gone, one more round, Delia’s gone." That a rapper could
create such a terrible, wonderful performance out of a song by Johnny Cash is as
much a tribute to the universality of Cash’s artwork as to the depth of
Jean’s insight and artistry. Cash’s artistry rises to the challenge of one
of the most succinct songs ever heard, the folk ballad "The Long Black
Veil."
There
is a good bit of reading with this set, which makes me miss the good old days
when the covers of LP’s had all that space for writing. There’s still
something insubstantial for me about the physical presence of a CD. Cash himself
has some of the best lines, natch, including his observation that God
"tolerates country music and quite a bit of guitar." (I said I
wouldn’t use labels. I didn’t promise not to include them in quotations.)
Here’s a rather label-busting article, in more ways than one, on Johnny
Cash—
http://www.todorock.com/50s/jcash.htm
Ernesto
Antonio Puente, Jr. has died, and while we lament any death, that doesn’t
sound all that important until we realize that as a child his mother shortened
the diminuitive "Ernestito" simply to Tito. It is as Tito Puente that
this good man and great musician built his bridges from his Afro-Latin culture
to the rest of the world. Recognized in Spanish Harlem as an outstanding
musician while he was in his early teens, he was drafted and served in World War
II, earning a Presidential Commendation along the way. Later, he attended the Julliard
School of Music with GI Bill benefits. Pardon me, but I have to say that Puente
became the leading practitioner of "Latin Jazz." His song "Oye
como Va" would later become a standard for Santana, who would be a
bridge for Puente to younger generations.
Ambassador
and role model for Puerto Rican culture, Puente was active in addressing the
concerns of Nuyoricans, the Puerto Rican New Yorkers, as well as those on
the enchanted island of his heritage. Oh, he also released over a hundred
albums. "Vaya con Díos, Tito, y gracias." For a Tito Puente
homepage—
http://www.onlinetalent.com/Tito_Puente_homepage.html
Kurt
Weill, bridging some gaps of his own, ranged from avant-garde Berlin to
consumer-driven Broadway. Early in his life, he dedicated himself to getting rid
of anything that could be considered purely, even merely, entertaining. He and
Marxist collaborator Bertolt Brecht created Mahagonny (from which comes
the song "Moon of Alabama," recorded by the Doors) and The
Threepenny Opera, from which comes "Mack the Knife."
That
weird, jagged ballad in which a knife-wielding gangster stands as a symbol for
capitalism has become the most unlikely candidate ever for the title that I’ve
actually heard bestowed upon it, "The Greatest Pop Song of the Twentieth
Century." One of my strangest musical experiences involves this song. On a
weekend at the beach, I walked along the beach from my hotel to another, where a
karaoke bar (a kind of place I usually stay away from) was going full swing. I
stood outside in the welcomed cool breeze of an August night and was amazed to
see a rather large woman nearby sobbing. "Excuse me," she said,
"but that song always makes me cry." Yeah, baby, Communist propaganda
always has that effect on me, too.
Fleeing
Nazi Germany, Weill came to America, where he joined forces with a number of
American writers to establish himself as a serious writer of American (label
alert) popular song. Performers as radically different as Weill’s wife Lotte
Lenya, opera soprano Teresa Stratas, more than jazz superstar Louis Armstrong,
and popularizer Bobby Darin have drawn on Weill’s weirdly appealing melodies.
They, and many others, have created memorable performances that keep his music
alive a hundred years after his birth, fifty years after his death, the same
year a certain Internet columnist was born.
Kurt
Weill’s music continues to live on stages and radios around the world, and he
lives on also on the Internet. One of the most charming sites dedicated to his
memory is "The World of Kurt Weill"—
http://www.mtr.org/exhibit/weill/weill.htm
Keep
your feet dry, your heart full of noble thoughts, and a song in your heart, a
song of gratitude for such greats as Johnny Cash, Tito Puente, and
Kurt Weill, and while you are at it, take some time to rove around the
most thorough music site I’ve found on the Internet—