When That Rough God Goes Riding (20 page)

And after: Morrison recorded “Alabamy Bound” with Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber as part of
The Skiffle Sessions
, the album recorded at Whitla Hall in Belfast in 1998
.
Donegan starts slowly, not hiding his English accent, Barber hiding his even less so when he takes the song, but when Morrison comes in, first singing background, then swallowing the song whole, he sounds like a sea monster, and his accent seems to have been something the song was searching for all along.

Andrew Das, “Obama Fever on the Field,”
New York Times
, 8 November 2008: “On Thursday night ... after scoring the winning touchdown against the Browns with 1 minute and 22 seconds to go, [Denver Broncos receiver Brandon] Marshall reached into his pants and pulled out a glove before his teammates quickly surrounded him.

“Marshall told the NFL Network postgame crew: ‘When we look at the 44th president, Barack Obama, he inspired me. And not just me and my teammates, but the nation.’

“Marshall said his planned celebration—which was stopped by teammate Brandon Stokely, who worried that a 15-yard penalty could cost the Broncos in a see-saw game—had its roots in the black power salutes of John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics.

“Carlos and Smith each wore a black glove for their salutes, but Marshall said his was black and white.

“‘I wanted to create that symbol of unity because Obama inspires me, our multicultural society,’ he told reporters after the game, stopping several times during his news conference as emotion overwhelmed him. ‘And I knew at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised the black glove in that fist as a silent gesture of black power and liberation. Forty years later, I wanted to make my own statement and gesture to represent the progress we made.’

“Marshall probably would have been fined if he had carried out his salute, but he said, ‘Social landmarks are bigger than fines to me, especially two days after the election.’”

It’s
all
in “I Cover the Waterfront,” as Morrison once recorded the song with John Lee Hooker—as Hooker, not Morrison, sings the standard as a ghost, back for another look, to make sure nothing has changed.

“Well, actually it’s Ulster Scots,” Morrison said as he retraced the story in 2009 in a conversation with Dave Marsh. “We’re taught in school, and also places in Europe—I don’t know if they teach it in America—the Scots were actually from Northern Ireland, originally. When they went to Scotland, they called them Scots. It’s the same people. And the same people also later went back to Ulster. They were going back and forth all the time. And at one point, the kingdom of Delradia was Northern Ireland and the western part of Scotland—which was a kingdom unto itself. They’re so close, Northern Ireland and Scotland—it’s so close, you can see it on a clear day.”

In 1974, just as he was about to release the record, Morrison went on KSAN in San Francisco to promote it. “The album’s called
Veedon Fleece
,” he said. “V-E-E-D-O-N F-L-E-E-C-E. And it doesn’t, it means, ah”—and at just that instant there was a huge burst of static. He might have been saying “it means what it says,” but I wouldn’t bet on it.

When the movie version came out in 1929, the producers took no chances: Austin’s song was right there too, with Jules Bledsoe’s dubbed vocal coming out of Stepin Fetchit’s mouth. Morrison recorded a colorless version in 1993.

Along with “Dangerous Blues,” “Big Mac from Macamere,” “No Mo’ Freedom,” and “Penitentiary Blues” with accompaniment by other singers, Mattie May Thomas’s “Workhouse Blues” first appeared in 1987 on
Mississippi Department of Archives and History Presents Jailhouse Blues: Women’s a cappella songs from the Parchman Penitentiary, Library of Congress field recordings, 1936 and 1939
(Rosetta Records, 1987), with liner notes by Bernice Johnson Reagon, Leon F. Litwack, Cheri L. Wolfe, and Rosetta Reitz, with photographs by Dorothea Lange and Marion Post Walker, including one of the sewing room where the recordings were made. Minus “Penitentiary Blues,” Thomas’s recordings gained a wider audience in 2005 when they were included on the anthology
American Primitive II—Pre-War Revenants
(Revenant), a collection of recordings by performers about whom almost nothing was known (according to Reitz, in her notes to
Jailhouse Blues
, Thomas learned “Workhouse Blues” in a penal facility in 1926, and served two previous terms at Parchman before recording there in 1939). A few years later, as entranced by Thomas as I’d been when I first heard her, it occurred to me that the general release of her songs might have sparked someone—a relative, a neighbor, a friend of a friend—to set down who she was. I googled her—and there she was, Mattie May Thomas, with her own MySpace page. An anonymous fan had put it up: her four songs and someone else’s face.

The fan turned out to be the Greek techno artist who records as Biomass, who later posted videos of his reworkings of Thomas’s music. Each takes a Thomas performance and cuts it up, loops it, shuffles words and phrases, repeats them in stuttering echo, adds clicks and hum and whine, and sets it against footage of conflict: a tank speeding through the Iraqi desert; heavily armed police driving back Italian protesters; what might be film from the Vietnam War. Most striking is a piece that opens with split-second flashes of people running separated by much longer segments of black screen. As it goes on, the moments of action imperceptibly lengthen, until you begin to realize you’re watching the riots in Paris during May 1968. The glimpses of people and streets accumulate, building a tension to the point of explosion, all to Thomas as if she’s looking back on the event, not forward to it, not on some other plane of being, her voice carrying “No mo’ freedom” as students throw stones, rush forward, burn cars, are beaten, and even when as a comment on the ameliorating powers of modern capitalism they are replaced by three black women in a nightclub, dressed in furry bikinis and doing the limbo—one of the women giving Thomas the face she now bears.

As I write, you page down to Thomas’s 134 MySpace friends, including Nina Simone, Pablo Neruda, Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Sun Ra, Jack Kerouac, Alicia Keys, Janis Joplin, Suicide, James Brown, and Guy Debord, whose 1973 film
La Société du Spectacle
is the clear inspiration for Biomass’s “No Mo’ Freedom” video. It’s something to contemplate: What if these people, almost all of them dead, really had heard Mattie May Thomas? What if those living still haven’t? How lucky they are to have that ahead of them.

A mother’s curse on her blues-singing daughter, from Gayl Jones’s
Corregidora
(New York: Bantam, 1976).

Sigman also wrote a spoken introduction: “Remember this: Where love’s concerned, at times you’ll think your world has overturned. But if he’s yours, and you’re his, remember this—”

A photo taken at a Bang Records launch party for Morrison—a launch party held on a boat—shows a tipsy Morrison, a beaming Janet Planet, the Brill Building songwriter and Berns associate Jeff Barry, Berns himself as a ringer for Gene Vincent, and a big man with a bigger cigar sticking out of his mouth like a screwdriver—the most mobbedup-looking picture of the New York record business I’ve ever seen.

While agreeing to include two Berns estate–owned compositions, which turned out to be “Madame George” and “Beside You,” a version of which Morrison had also recorded with Berns, on any new album.

Specifically “Robh thu ’sa’ bheinn? (Were You in the Mountains?),” a Gaelic waulking song from the isle of Barra, off the coast of Scotland, sung by one “Mary Morrison and a group of old women”: “They sing to aid their labour as they pound homemade cloth, ‘waulking’ it round in a sunwise direction against a board.”

The movie was directed by Alan Parker and produced by Lynda Myles, who, when in 2009 I asked about Morrison’s involvement, wrote: “VM came over to see Alan and met in Alan’s hotel room in London. He arrived with his manager, having been sent pages of the script in advance. The manager said that VM required a club sandwich. There was no small talk while this was delivered and VM ate the sandwich. The manager kept saying how keen VM was to be in the movie. Van continued to eat the sandwich. He was asked to read but refused. When Alan asked why not, VM said ‘because it’s shit.’ The meeting was then basically abandoned.”