Look Again to the Wind Revisited Poster
Various Artists
Look Again To The Current of air
Sony Masterworks 06067
www.sonymasterworks.com
Forthcoming film:
We're Still Here: Johnny Cash's Bitter Tears Revisited directed past Antonino D'Ambrosio
Johnny Cash was "a holy terror … a nighttime and unsafe force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his swain human beings," said Kris Kristofferson (his friend and teammate in the Highwaymen) at the Human being in Blackness's funeral in 2003. As his son John Carter Cash once put it (on the DVD Johnny Cash'southward America), "My male parent had a fashion of reaching out and singing songs for everyone in need and becoming the spokesperson if demand be for those who couldn't speak."
This yr marks the fiftieth anniversary of his Bitter Tears , a concept album addressing centuries of wrongs washed to our Native American population. Coming at the onset of national turbulence over the Civil Rights Movement and and so the Vietnam war, the LP spoke for a people whose worthy issues were often overlooked amid the era'due south altruism. Native American singer and activist Pecker Miller says the anthology "was a phenomenal boost for my spirit. … It made me feel that someone cared," in the forthcoming film We're Still Here: Johnny Greenbacks's Bitter Tears Revisited directed by Antonino D'Ambrosio, whose thoroughly researched book A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (Nation Books, 2009) was the inspiration for the new tribute CD Look Once again to the Current of air: Johnny Cash'southward Bitter Tears Revisited. The arresting film is meant to be a companion to the tribute.
Cash'southward original Bitter Tears (Columbia) was a concise 32-minute, eight-cut collection with v tracks penned by Peter La Farge, two by Greenbacks himself and 1 by Johnny Horton. The tribute album mostly retains the original's song sequence just doesn't endeavour to recapture Cash's charisma and gravitas. How could it? Nor does ace guitar mainstay David Rawlings mimic the trademark tick-tack rhythms on Cash tracks since his early days on Sun Records.
The opener "Equally Long as the Grass Shall Grow" (half dozen minutes long in Greenbacks's hands) becomes a 9-minute meditation by Gillian Welch and Rawlings on the 13-cut tribute, where track ten is a shortened revision of "Equally Long," this time including Norman and Nancy Blake – Norman being the sole survivor among performers on the '64 original. (Past the style, John and June Carter Cash afterward revamped the ballad into a love song. Long unissued, it surfaced on his posthumous box Unearthed.) The original song has a shut-to-nature chorus while the verses pointedly deal with the American government disregarding a 1794 treaty President Washington signed with the Seneca tribe in order to build the Kinzua Dam forth the Allegheny River. (The Kinzua controversy too fueled Buffy Sainte-Marie's aroused "Now That the Buffalo's Gone," which opened her debut LP, Information technology's My Way , in 1964). We run into the dam's ravages to Native American state on We're Still Hither.
Moving on, "Custer" drolly – fifty-fifty mockingly – relives the legendary 1876 Boxing of Little Bighorn. At one signal, Cash laughed sarcastically on La Farge's composition. Steve Earle (who's been known to write fictionally of a loathed 19th century military homo) treats information technology as a talking blues with an audio-visual system that would fit on his 1995 comeback CD, Railroad train a Comin'.
Next comes the final runway of the original LP'due south side i. "The Talking Leaves" – now quietly narrated by Nancy Blake – speaks of Sequoia, a Seneca who was told that white people's paper with dark markings conveyed pregnant so, over fourth dimension, he created a written alphabet for his ain tribe's tongue.
The album's most powerful track of all, La Farge's composition "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," dramatically began the '64 LP's second side. (Coming midway on a unmarried-sided CD, its impact is lessened.) Kristofferson gives it a grizzled sound. And who, some may inquire, was Ira Hayes? A Pima Native American from Arizona, Ira Hamilton Hayes was amid the World War Ii soldiers in Joe Rosenthal's iconic 1945 photo of the American flag raising on Iwo Jima (afterwards recreated at the Iwo Jima Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery). A war hero upon returning dwelling, he savage victim to unemployment and drink. In 1955 at historic period 32, he died in a ditch from exposure and alcohol poisoning.
For truth'due south sake, D'Ambrosio's book points out that Rosenthal's photo doesn't actually capture a moment of victory. Hayes and his mates were really just replacing a smaller flag that had already been raised in that location. It seems the Second Battalion commander wanted the original flag for himself. (Ever putting Bitter Tears into historical context, the book also discusses the irrigation system that for centuries had enabled Hayes'due south Pima tribe to thrive agriculturally until whites redirected their water supply for their own use.)
Did self-destructive Cash identify with Hayes, no longer a hero in his concluding dissolute years? We're All the same Hither has a clip of him singing "Ira Hayes" on Pete Seeger's TV evidence Rainbow Quest. His confront is a painful mirror of substance abuse'southward ravages. How did straight-pointer Pete feel about his guest's condition?
Another La Farge composition, "White Girl" (covered past the Milk Carton Kids on the tribute) tells of an interracial love that cannot be. A few years afterward, Janis Ian would revisit the theme on "Lodge'south Child" as Merle Haggard would on "Irma Jackson."
The LP'due south powerful finale, "Vanishing Race," gets expanded by part-Native Rhiannon Giddens of Carolina Chocolate Drops. The original piece was penned by Greenbacks's angling and séance buddy Johnny Horton ("the singing fisherman"). After years of honky tonk discs, Horton had finally found the road to pop distinction with a series of lively American history songs geared for teenagers, starting with "Battle of New Orleans" in 1959 and followed by "Sink the Bismark" and "Northward to Alaska." "Vanishing Race" shows a socially concerned side to Horton his hits never revealed. Using his guitar to create a tomtom'southward sound, he merely did it as a demo tape in 1960, a few months before a drunk driver killed him en road domicile from a gig. All the stronger for its blank-bones backup, his demo can be heard on Youtube. Recorded before the '60s' topical songwriting blast, it leaves us wondering how his writing would have evolved had he lived into the folk revival.
The tribute closes with a number not institute on Greenbacks'south original LP. It'south the vocal that becomes the tribute'southward title track. Bill Miller's sonorous rendition of La Farge'due south "Look Again to the Wind" offers a concluding annotation of optimism in a drove filled with biting tears.
And how was the LP received in the polarized 1960s? We're repeatedly told of Columbia Records' negative response. One label exec told Cash he should entertain, not educate. He furiously paid for an ad in Billboard excoriating the media for, in his mind, non having the courage to go behind the anthology. Nonetheless information technology made #two on Billboard' s land charts, while challenging "Ira Hayes" hit #iii as a country single, showing that it must have gotten airplay and that some country fans were far more progressive than outsiders to their culture stereotyped them. Greenbacks's earlier recordings on Sun enjoyed their share of trad folk, just Bitter Tears proved he belonged at Newport Folk Festival as much as on M Ole Opry. Equally an artist, the Man in Black defied pigeonholing.
So did Cash himself have Native American blood? Bitter Tears' notes ended with "Johnny Cash is proud of his Cherokee blood." Then, years subsequently, as nosotros hear on the Johnny Cash's America DVD, he acknowledged, "I wanted to be part Indian and so bad I said I was."
Mentally troubled Peter La Farge (1931-65) sometimes claimed to exist full-blooded Native American. More often, he said his parents had blood from New England's Wampanoag and Narragansett tribes. Born into wealth every bit Oliver Albee La Farge, he was the great grandson of John La Farge, a stained glass artist involved with the cosmos of New York's Cathedral of St. John the Divine. In 1930, Peter's father Oliver La Farge (a strong advocate for indigenous peoples rights) won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Laughing Male child, nearly of whose characters were Native Americans. When young Peter's mother and step father moved the family to the Southwest, his interest in Native concerns grew. Equally a vocalizer/songwriter in New York's folk community, he recorded for Columbia and Folkways and wrote for Sing Out! He too helped Seeger build his fireplace and chimney. For a photo of him, Look Over again' south booklet but reprints a 1966 Sing Out!' south cover. (For that matter, A Heartbeat and a Guitar ofttimes cites Sing Out!) We're Still Here has footage of him performing. The circumstances of his death are shrouded in ambivalence.
So volition the new CD and moving-picture show lead audiences to become exploring backwards to Cash'south original Bitter Tears? And from there to La Farge'south discs and to ongoing Native American issues? JR Cash would surely take hoped for the latter.
— Bruce Sylvester
Source: https://singout.org/various-look-wind-johnny-cashs-bitter-tears-revisited/