The 'Elephant Dancing' columns, Interview magazine 2006-2008: Crooked Still
September 2006
“One of the ancients by now, whom all moderns prize”—so said Bob Dylan on his first “Theme Time Radio Hour,” now running weekly on XM Radio. He was speaking of Muddy Waters, but he could have been talking about the mostly traditional songs remade—from the ground up, from the inside out—on Shaken by a Low Sound, the second album by Crooked Still, a four-person Boston combo. Not long ago, the New York Times Arts & Leisure section featured one of its patented idiot trend pieces, this one on “Freak Folk,” a celebration of the likes of Devendra Banhart, pixie dust, Joanna Newsom, beard-stroking, “the Vermont musical collective Feathers,” and hugs. There would have been no way to fit in Crooked Still. People die in their songs. People are dead before the songs begin.
Taking up tunes that were tired cliches even during the folk revival of the 1950s and ’60s—“Railroad Bill,” “Little Sadie,” “Wind and Rain”—and some that, though just as old, were never so shopworn—“New Railroad,” “Ain’t No Grave,” “Lone Pilgrim,” and “Ecstasy”—singer Aoife O’Donovan, cellist Rushad Eggleston, banjo player Gregory Liszt (lately part of Bruce Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions band), and bassist Corey DiMario seem to trust the songs they’ve chosen to give up what they’ve never given up before. Each song, you can feel, is like a book written at once in English and an unknown tongue. If you read it you will read what everyone before you has read. If you speak the words out loud, you will say what has never been said.
O’Donovan doesn’t conform the characters in her songs to her gender. It’s a man who shoots Little Sadie—no reason given, a face, a hand to a pistol, a finger squeezing the trigger, and it’s the incomprehensibility of the act, or the obviousness, that’s kept the story alive for so many lifetimes— and so O’Donovan becomes that man. In a high, thin but commanding voice that at first calls back Alison Krauss, Sandy Denny, or the less well-known Anna Domino of Snakefarm, O’Donovan enters the songs as if through a backdoor visible only to her. Finding herself alone in the rooms of the songs, she’s Goldilocks trying out every bed—reliving, as she lay herself down, every nightmare and every act of love each bed ever contained. Then she rises. Facing the judge in “Little Sadie,” the gravestone in “Lone Pilgrim,” the hangman in “New Railroad,” Jesus in ‘‘Ain’t No Grave,” the fields of heaven in “Ecstasy,” she knows exactly what to do.
In “Little Sadie,” it’s a turn Eggleston makes on his cello—really, it’s as if he’s physically turned it, turned its back on you—that opens the song to a kind of suspense it may never have held before. You realize, suddenly, that the simple murder ’n’ justice tale the words tell is not what the song is about at all; now it’s an opening into something much darker, beyond the reach of any law. “Ain’t No Grave” is a stomp, moving fast, a syncopation built on the cello that carries everyone off the edge of the world in a spirit of pure abandon because they know God will be there to catch them. That’s what the words say—but as John Fahey once said of traditional gospel music, the pounding foot you hear is a cloven hoof. When Liszt opens up on banjo-playing easily, then picking up the pace, then playing as if with two instruments and four hands—you find yourself shaking your head in wonder, no idea how you reached the place Liszt has taken you, and not willing to leave. In the same way, as the band crawls into “Ecstasy,” it all but hides itself from the music it’s making, because this song, from the 1844 backwoods hymnal The Sacred Harp, does not belong to the band. But what they learn, as they play, so slowly the rhythm the song makes is a rhythm of coming as close as you can to a complete stop, is that it never belonged to anyone, and never will.
The songs to which Crooked Still now applies itself were made to capture whole countries of experience, fantasy, forgetting, revenge, guilt, and escape—countries that had already vanished as the songs were made, countries as they were, countries yet to come. The band takes up the songs as if they contain knowledge far beyond any person who might sing them. “Hang me, oh hang me, I’ll be dead and gone/It’s not the hanging that I mind, it’s the laying in the grave so long”—it’s not the words that get inside you, because the knowledge isn’t in the words. It’s in the melodies, and, here, you can hear the melodies giving the singer the knowledge they hold, if she can rise to their challenge—like learning that God is real by reciting a prayer.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, September 2006
The devil had nothing to do with it-She is being treated well during her two month illness. She matters to me. That's all I wanted to say.
Thank you Greil for this one. The Crooked Still album is wonderful. I had never heard of them.