The Dust In The Headlights

Although I no longer have my {{cough cough}} former journal to guide me any longer for such details, I think it may have been around this time last year when I bought this copy of Otis Taylor's White African CD from my store, but it's just now a year later that I am truly beginning to absorb and appreciate what an incredible piece of work this really is. I only sort of played this sporadically throughout 2005 but for some reason when I pulled it out to play on January 2nd driving to work on a cold and sloggy afternoon the music really took a fast hold on me, leaving me with a strange after-aura that felt like I was trickling the album's eerie gray ectoplasm over wherever I walked and whatever I touched. I haven't been able to stop listening to it since.

Otis plays banjo, electric banjo, and mandolin with a kind of pared down to its essentials that does sort of remind me of some of the minimalist early stuff that I've heard from John Lee Hooker. His producer Kenny Passarelli plays bass while Eddie Turner puts in some lead guitar work on only 4 of the album's 11 tracks. There are no drums, which is pretty much how Otis rolls with it. But it's his plaintive moan, sometimes accompanied by his daughter Cassie's phantom background whispers and wails, that fleshes out what has to be some of the darkest, most truly downright depressing lyrics I think I may have ever heard. And this coming from a genre that specializes in, well, bringin' the blues.

Each song is a story of the downtrodden -- poverty, hunger, racism, injustice -- there isn't a single track on this disk that doesn't threaten to break your heart. On "Saint Martha Blues" Otis tells the story of how his great grandfather was lynched and cut up into pieces, and how his great grandmother walked the streets of town searching for where he was discarded, dragging a bag behind her to take whatever was left of him home. "3 Days And 3 Nights" is about a homeless man who's infant daughter is dying from illness. "I went to the hospital/The doctor wouldn't even let us in/I went back home to my cardboard box/And laid my little girl down/I said don't worry, don't worry/'Cuz Heaven will let us in." Even the standard blues thump and cadence of the bassline brings to mind the image of a quietly frantic man pacing the floor, trying desperately to stay awake because he doesn't want his baby to die alone, though he assures her that Jesus will be there to hold her hand if her daddy can't make it by her side.

I wanted to put up a temporary music file for the track "My Soul's In Louisiana", about a train-hoppin' hobo who was gunned down for allegedly murdering a railway worker. The song, with an upbeat, almost optimistic-sounding rhythm, has Otis singing as if he were the ghost of the hobo returned to tell us all defiantly that he never killed anyone. And yet the music itself seems to just keep rolling along as if the listener were in that boxcar himself, feeling the sun on his face and wind in his hair (this sense of freedom smacks of irony considering the injustice of the hobo's execution, basically for being black in the wrong place and time). I cannot put this track up right now since yousendit.com seems to have crashed as of yesterday. But check out some MP3 files online if you can find them. Or better yet, get the album (locals, we sell it at my store). Musically, lyrically, structurally... it really is an album too potent to ignore.