Music

“The dirt made me. The dirt made me, like a mother with no shame made me,” she sings, shockingly on “Kentucky Queen.” Who sings like that about their mom, much less about their mom the beloved country star? But Wynonna has been freed to tell the truth as she experienced it, hard as it may be.

A different day
The same ol’ call
Lost your mind in Mobile
Fallin’ off again
It’s too far, I can’t find you
A counterfeit fix, that’s what you run to
I know, Lord, I know

It’s a strange transaction
That nobody wins, but I buy in
Oh, here we go again

And I’m desperate for change
From the rain and stormy weather
I would drag you out of Hell if I could
But I don’t have the power
I can’t save you, but I try
I don’t want to, but I still believe
In a hopeful lie

I hear this song as being about the struggle when someone you love is in and out of rehab, for drug abuse or mental illness issues. She’s saying (I think) that she believed it, or tried to, or said she did, each time Naomi headed toward a recovery, or got more therapy. But perhaps the song is about her daughter Grace, who’s had similar struggles and is currently in jail. In any case, the song registers how the pain has been exacerbated by hope, which is a terrible truth. But she manages to sing about these matters directly, with no obscurity or evasion, and I hope that expressing it with this sort of intensity will help her.

This all happened because he had earned the respect of some lesser-known peers, the first-call musicians who worked in the trenches during these sessions. Nowadays they are known collectively as the Wrecking Crew, and are acknowledged as the leading studio players of the era. Glen Campbell would be remembered today, even if he had never released a single record under his own name, just for his membership in this elite cohort.

He deserved every bit of his new-found success. Rock star Leon Russell, who also worked in these sessions, called Campbell the “best guitar player I’d heard before or since.” Songwriter Jimmy Webb later declared that Campbell could match up with “any guitar player in the world, from George Benson to Eric Clapton.” Eddie Van Halen was so desperate to get a guitar lesson from Campbell, that he traveled all the way to Arizona just to make it happen.

Campbell was that good.

There was, of course, a tiny problem. Glen didn’t know how to read music. So he sometimes asked the other musicians to play a new song without him the first time, so he could hear what was happening. But for the second run-through, Campbell was ready and contributing.

He played for union scale in those early days. That meant $65 for a three-hour session. In the early 1960s that was solid money. Back in Arkansas, Glen had picked cotton for $1.25 for every hundred pounds—that was more than a whole day’s work. Music was a much better option. And Campbell was in the studio constantly now. In 1963 alone, he showed up on 586 recorded songs.

But this young man hoped for more. Glen Campbell wanted to be a star. And he tried everything to make it happen. But nothing worked.

The Old Fiddler’s Convention—or just Galax, as the diehards call it—is the oldest and largest fiddlers’ convention in the world, a place where banjo pickers, guitar players, and other maestros of old-time strings gather to see how they stack up. Founded in 1935, Galax has been canceled only twice since then: once during World War II, due to travel restrictions, and again in 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Galaxers have been going every year for decades, some for as long as they’ve been alive.

There are scads of rules: If you play clawhammer-style banjo in the bluegrass band competition, you will get disqualified. Same if you play bluegrass-style banjo in the old-time competition. If you break a string while performing, you must stop immediately. Playing time during competition is limited to two minutes and 30 seconds. And, crucially, no electric instruments of any kind are allowed, either on stage or in the tightly packed fairgrounds, where self-described hillbillies, accountants, firefighters, and session musicians pick day and night in blistering, impromptu jams amid the RVs.

One does not merely attend Galax. It’s not a music festival. There are no headliners, and no full-set performances. There is a single stage, and over the course of six days, contestants take it one after another to play one song for a panel of judges and a smattering of spectators. There are more than a dozen categories, little changed in the past century: old-time fiddle, guitar, dulcimer, folk song. Cash prizes for individual players range from $35 to $285; a campsite and contestant pass together cost $175. “The prestige of being judged a ‘winner at Galax,’ and the respect for one’s musical talent that goes along with it, far outweighs any monetary award,” wrote Fred Burton in the March 1984 issue of Bluegrass Unlimited.

In the 1980s and ’90s, cars lined up days before the gates to Felts Park opened. The fairgrounds got so full back then that people slept in the horse stables that used to line one end of them. Once, Elizabeth Taylor made a surprise appearance with her then-husband, Virginia Senator John Warner. Rumor has it that members of Old Crow Medicine Show and Leftover Salmon have shown up at Galax, under the radar, just to jam.

And yet, despite appearing well attended to my virgin eyes, the Old Fiddler’s Convention’s numbers are down from the pre-pandemic years, and way down from peak Galax. Folks say it’s not like it was. Maybe, as one long-time attendee speculated, it’s that more kids are choosing devices and passive consumption over face-to-face activity with other humans, or that more and more young adults are fleeing southwest Virginia due to the gutted coal, tobacco, and manufacturing industries. Or maybe it’s just that people around there are dying faster than they’re being born. Glen Alexander, a 55-year-old fiddler who’s been going to Galax since he was a child, put it bluntly: “We’re all scared to death this is gonna go away.”

Like a method actor, Waits immersed himself in booze and cigarettes and slouched like a lifelong alcoholic. He told author David McGee, “I was sick through that whole period. It started to wear on me, all the touring… living in hotels, eating bad food, drinking too much. There’s a lifestyle that’s there before you arrive and you’re introduced to it. It’s unavoidable.”

Waits’ newfound drinking buddies included author Charles Bukowski and fellow singer Chuck E. Weiss (inspiration for Rickie Lee Jones’ “Chuck E.’s in Love”). While acting in the film Paradise Alley (1978), Waits met screenwriter Kathleen Brennan. The two fell in love and married in 1980. Brennan encouraged Waits to ditch his poet lounge singer act and embrace a more experimental, avant-garde approach. The couple wrote songs together and left Los Angeles for Sonoma County where they had three children.

Brennan inspired Waits to join AA and he became sober in 1992. Waits’ famously said, “One is never completely certain when you drink and do drugs whether the spirits that are moving through you are the spirits from the bottle or your own. At a certain point, you become afraid of the answer. That’s one of the biggest things that keeps people from getting sober, they’re afraid to find out it was the liquor talking all along.”

Fortunately, the quality of Waits’ music improved with sobriety. His voice became raspier as well. When music critic Daniel Durchholz told Waits his voice sounded like it was soaked in a vat of bourbon and then taken outside and run over with a car, Waits responded, “flattery will get you nowhere with me.”

From a theological perspective, Lamar’s approach is compelling but deeply unsettling. He affirms biblical themes of sin and divine justice paired with moral responsibility, concepts that clearly align with traditional Christian doctrine. Yet he simultaneously embraces aspects of liberation theology, condemning systemic injustice and calling for accountability from both religious and political leaders. He is, in a sense, both the prophet and the skeptic, the confessor and the judge.

Perhaps the most significant theological tension in Lamar’s work lies not in his invocation of suffering, but in the nature of that suffering. The biblical category of the “suffering servant,” most explicitly articulated in Isaiah 52–53, is profoundly substitutionary. The servant suffers for others, bearing their iniquities and accomplishing their reconciliation with God. “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:5). This distinction is the theological axis upon which Christianity turns.

The central question remains: Does Lamar’s vision of justice and mercy align with a biblical perspective, particularly from an Old Testament standpoint? The Hebrew Scriptures depict justice (mishpat) as more than a reaction to wrongdoing. It is, fundamentally, the establishment of righteousness in society (Isaiah 1:17, Micah 6:8). Mercy (hesed), often paired with justice, is an active covenantal love that calls for repentance and restoration within a community (Exodus 34:6-7). The Old Testament refuses to separate justice from divine holiness; rather, it demands that righteousness be upheld while mercy is extended within the bounds of God’s covenant.

Lamar echoes the prophetic tradition in calling for justice but often lacks the full biblical view of divine holiness that frames it. The prophets condemned oppression (Amos 5:24) but always tied justice to a return to God’s law and not systemic reform. His vision, while powerful, sometimes veers toward a justice divorced from divine standards, making it susceptible to cultural reinterpretation. Likewise, his pleas for mercy often emphasize human struggle over divine grace, missing the foundational biblical truth that true mercy flows from God’s character rather than human effort (Psalm 103:8-12). While he critiques corruption and personal sin, his solutions lean toward self-actualization and personal throes rather than the transformative work of Christ.

By collapsing the distance between personal suffering and salvific suffering, Lamar’s vision risks conflating empathy with atonement. The result is a theology in which awareness substitutes for redemption, and articulation becomes a stand-in for transformation. The cross, in this framework, becomes more of a symbol of shared human pain.

The popularity of home taping exploded in 1979, with the introduction of the Sony Walkman. At last, you could listen to what you wanted when you were on the move.

The music industry wasn’t pleased with this development, blaming it for a pronounced drop in the sales of vinyl records. The British Phonographic Institute, a trade association in London, mounted a campaign with a reproachful slogan: “Home taping is killing music. And it’s illegal.” In the United States, music executives pressed lawmakers to place a fee on blank cassettes and home recording equipment. George David Weiss, the president of the Songwriters Guild, likened home taping to theft.

None of it stopped youthful Gen X-ers from turning themselves into amateur curators of sound. While this new pastime gave them the chance to to hear their favorite songs in the order of their choosing, it served other purposes, too. “I am what I play,” David Bowie sang on the 1979 song “D.J.,” and the living-room D.J.s of the early 1980s used the medium of the mix tape to claim their identities, introduce themselves to others, flex their musical knowledge, telegraph messages and even flirt.

Forty years after I started making and exchanging mix tapes, I can still remember which friend introduced me to which artist. Mix tapes had a way of casting an indelible imprint on our musical taste, fashion sense — even our worldview.

One night at Smalls, the venerable jazz club on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, I asked Spike Wilner, the venue’s proprietor, “Whatever happened to that beautiful cat that used to haunt this place?” (Though I can’t verify it as fact, it’s possible that across America, many jazz clubs have an official house cat that slinks around the club. A cat amongst cats, as they say in the jazz world.)

Spike raised an eyebrow. “Minnow. Do you know the story about Minnow?”

I did not know the story about Minnow, though I remember that regal feline creature with a spectacular mane that used to sit atop the piano, but only when certain musicians played. “Tell me about Minnow,” I said, encouraging the club owner.

The band was between sets, patrons coming and going. It was spring 2019. I sipped some tequila. Smalls is a basement joint known for its lively mix of students, hipsters, and true jazzheads from back in the day. “Well,” answered Spike, “to tell you about Minnow, I first need to tell you about Harry Whitaker. Do you remember Harry?”

I did remember the late Harry Whitaker. Beginning in the late 1990s, Harry was a regular performer at Smalls. He was a piano player of prodigious talents. I never met Harry, but I saw him play a few times at the club. I was stunned by his facility on the piano and wondered why I was unaware of this artist, who was maybe the best pianist I ever heard perform live. By then, Harry was in his 60s, heavy-set, like a big African American buddha. His hair was gray, and he had a pronounced lower lip that seemed to protrude as he got into a groove on the piano. He often slumped on the piano bench when he played, as if he were under hypnosis, eyes closed, his mind and spirit in some other place, but his artistry present in ways that tended to hush an audience into awe.

Spike’s voice became somber when he mentioned Harry’s name. I gathered that Whitaker had special meaning to him. “Okay, then,” I said. “Tell me about Harry.”

What followed was the beginning of a dialogue that started that night and would continue, off and on, over the next year. What Spike told me about Harry lingered in the ether of my imagination. As well as being a club owner, Spike Wilner is also an accomplished piano player. Harry had played a crucial role in Spike’s development as a musician, and taxed his emotions, as Harry succumbed to bouts of mental illness that would eventually be his undoing. The club proprietor and the piano legend became the inheritors of a spiritual symbiosis that is at the essence of jazz. Minnow the cat also played a role.

Much has been made of this album’s cover art — by the noted photographer William Claxton — of city guy Rollins in the Mojave Desert with cowboy hat and holster, armed with his tenor horn, but the backstory to the recording session, detailed in Koenig’s original liner notes included here, is still more revealing. (For fans of Claxton, who did several books of jazz photography, a more conventional portrait of the urbane Rollins, in dark suit and dress shirt, is also included in the new box.) Since all three musicians were performing at night, and Manne and Brown — both of whom, as Koenig noted, were just voted number one in the popularity polls of Down Beat, Metronome, and Playboy — had gigs during the day, the recording session took place between 3 and 7 in the morning.

According to Koenig, the three had never played or recorded together before. Clearly, though, they had an intuitive simpatico. Manne — who also raised horses in his ranch outside L.A. — sets the tone immediately by perfectly mimicking the clippety-clop of a Standardbred’s slow gait in “I’m an Old Cowhand.” Throughout, he and Brown are like two middle-infielders so sound they can turn a double-play blind-folded and still afford to showboat now and again. (A few years ago, when I reported on the bassist Linda May Han Oh and observed her teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, she consistently brought up Brown to her young students. “In terms of fundamentals,” she would tell me later, “if you want to be a solid working bassist and Ray Brown is all you checked out, that would be great.”)

Way Out West is traditional, at least superficially. It has a standard (“There Is No Greater Love” — Rollins wows on both takes) and a piece of Ellingtonia (“Solitude”); two originals by the leader (“Come, Gone” and the title track); and, extending the cover concept, two cow-poke ditties from the old westerns Sonny so enjoyed as a child (“Wagon Wheels” and that opener “I’m an Old Cowhand”), albeit with a modernist, hard-bop spin. But then look at the trio again, and how emphatically untraditional it is: tenor saxophone, bass, drums. It’s a configuration that had hardly been used at that point. As critic Neil Tesser writes in his informative new essay for this re-issue, “Only Lucky Thompson had recorded in this format, and he did so in only one song, in early 1956.”

It was Rollins who established and popularized this combo: He would play with just a drummer and bassist often after Way Out West and again post-hiatus — as would Albert Ayler and Dewey Redman later in the 1960s, David Murray in the ’70s, Joe Henderson in the ’80s, to Mark Turner into this century, Ingrid Laubrock, and now the 26-year-old Kevin Sun, who has absorbed Turner and so much of the jazz canon, and advances the concept in his excellent debut album Trio, just out, in which he’s joined by bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Matt Honor. A sixty-year line, however undulating, from Sonny Rollins to Kevin Sun.

Without the chordal structure of the piano, Way Out West anticipated free jazz. As Rollins told Tesser last year in preparation for this re-issue, “[In the trio] I could have the rhythmic support of a drummer, and then I could have the harmonic support of a bassist. But that’s the thing about it: It wouldn’t be more intrusive on what I might be playing. It’s still very freeing to just have the bass providing harmonic content.”

Almost exactly 50 years ago, in late November 1936, a 25- year-old blues singer from Mississippi made his first records in San Antonio, Tex­as: among them “Terraplane Blues,” “Come on in My Kitchen,” “Walking Blues,” “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day.” In January 1970, just a month after Altamont, the all-day Rolling Stones rock festival, where I’d witnessed the worst violence I’d ever seen in the flesh, I walked into a record store, not looking for anything in particular; I just wanted to buy a record. I flipped through the blues rack and saw the name Rob­ert Johnson. It didn’t mean much to me; I’d noticed it as a songwriting credit on Cream LPs, for tunes called “Crossroads” and “Four Until Late.” The previous fall, I’d watched the Rolling Stones play a pristine version of “Love in Vain,” a track on their then new Let It Bleed, but I hadn’t known it was Johnson’s — for rea­sons I’ve never figured out, they credited it to someone called “Woody Payne.”

I was just starting out as a rock critic, though after Altamont I felt a hundred years old; I thought I ought to know where Cream songs came from, so I bought the Robert Johnson album, King of the Delta Blues Sing­ers. It was one of those moments when you get your life changed — like picking a college course that leads you to think for the first time, or walking thoughtlessly into a room and falling in love.