Real Life Rock Top 10: January 2022
1. RJ Smith, Chuck Berry: An American Life (Hachette). Mark Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835; Charles Anderson Edward Berry was born in St. Louis, something over a hundred and twenty miles southeast of Florida, forty-one-years after Twain published a short story about two weeks in the Confederate Army called “A Private History of a Campaign That Failed.” Smith’s book is rich, enticing, its endless details never weighing down the story he has found: that Chuck Berry spent his whole life refighting and rewriting the Civil War.
2. Harry & Megan, episode 2 (Netflix). The opening music is bouncy and celebratory, with a negative undertone at the finish. The ending music is a few seconds of the piano introduction to Erma Frankkin’s 1962 “Pledging My Love,” a song that has signified death ever since the original recording of the song, by Johnny Ace in 1954, became a ten-week number-one on the R&B charts starting the month after Ace accidentally shot himself backstage during a break in a show in Houston. And since, in a bar scene in Mean Streets, Ace’s opening lines cause a soldier to go berserk. And since, as the B-side to Elvis Presley’s “Way Down,” the last single released in his lifetime, it was carried into the top 20 of the pop charts two months before Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977, the day Robert Johnson died thirty-nine years before. Erma Franklin died in 2002. Talk about planting foreboding in the story.
3/4. Joe Henry, “Karen Dalton,” from All the Eye Can See (e-a-r Music) and Karen Dalton, Shuckin’ Sugar (Delmore Recording Society LP). Henry is a singer, a songwriter, a producer: his touch is light, his presence invisible, but the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ unerring Original Negro Jig wouldn’t float on its own unnamed river without Henry on the keelboat. He is also a song theorist. In 2018, at the Aspen Ideas Festival he gave a talk called “The Ghost in the Song: Songwriting as Discovery,” a set of ideas laid out with preternatural clarity, without notes, seemingly off the top of his head, because he’d been thinking about what he was saying, acting it out, all of his working life.