Former Hot Damn JammersFree Energy made a video for their incredible summery new single on DFA called “Free Energy,” and we think you should watch it. Their freewheeling ’70s sound is an amalgamation of all the great easygoing, good time rockers like Tom Petty, Steve Miller, Joe Walsh and Cheap Trick, with a bunch of power pop sweetness thrown in to keep things from getting too heavy. The video makes being in a rock band in the city in the summertime look like just about the coolest thing possible.
For everybody who decries the state of contemporary pop music as a vast wasteland of disposable, commercial junk, and for anyone who longs for the days when composers like George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, and Hoagy Carmichael wrote beautifully crafted songs with hummable melodies and clever, story-based lyrics with real characters in them, I present to you the soundtrack to the film Synecdoche, New York.
Featuring music by journeyman producer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist and Los Angeles man-about-town Jon Brion, the soundtrack also showcases two tracks — “Little Person” and “Song for Caden” — co-written by Brion and the film’s director Charlie Kaufman, sung by jazz vocalist Deanna Storey. Both of these songs are superbly crafted tunes in the tradition of the American Popular Songbook style as well as being reminiscent of the storied ’60s Brill Building sound of writers like Carole King and Burt Bacharach. Furthermore, Storey’s georgeous, subtly emotive voice brings to mind a young Barbra Streisand, who herself made a mark with such Broadway soundtrack hits as “People” from the musical Funny Girl.
Perhaps sensing that moving on was a predominate American response to solving a whole host of life’s problems, and recognizing that the long haul trucker was a close cousin to the river boat gambler, Dave Dudley shrewdly grafted reverb-heavy Telecasters to a slowed down rockabilly rhythm and almost single handedly invented the truck driving subgenre of county in the early 1960s. He would stretch the long lonely road metaphor from Nashville to Bakersfield in such classic trucking songs as “Truck Drivin’ Son-of-a-Gun,” “There Ain’t No Easy Run,” and the decidedly un-PC “Two Six Packs Away.” With his deep, workingman’s voice, Dudley made a kind of cowboy poetry out of the nomadic lifestyle of truckers, and lines like “The highway is a part of hell that never caught fire” from the Tom T. Hall-penned “Listen Betty (I’m Singing Your Song)” give his best recordings a timeless shelf life — unless, of course, America ever falls out of love with motion. Which isn’t likely. So that means that Dudley’s “Six Days on the Road,” probably the greatest trucking song ever written, will continue to be relevant as long as there’s an Interstate Highway System and the need for a six day work week. It’ll stay relevant even beyond that. It’s a song about coming home.
The Uniques’ “Watch This Sound” is based on a mishearing (either by accident or on purpose) of a Stephen Stills song recorded by Stills’ group Buffalo Springfield called “For What It’s Worth.” Stills had written the song after observing a heated encounter between kids and police outside Pandora’s Box, a teen rock club on L.A.’s famed Sunset Strip, in 1966. The club, one of the few in the area that opened its doors to kids under the age of 18, was slated to be torn down for a road- widening project, and when the LAPD instituted a tight 10 p.m. curfew for minors, an impromptu protest outside Pandora’s Box began, leading to the confrontation that Stills details in his song. “For What It’s Worth” became the debut single for Buffalo Springfield, hitting the charts in 1967. Meanwhile, back in Jamaica, the second incarnation of the Uniques (the first version of the vocal trio had included Slim Smith, Roy Shirley and Franklyn White) with Slim Smith, Jimmy Riley and Lloyd Charmers was just taking shape, and they eventually came up with an arrangement of the Stills tune, hearing the original chorus of “stop, children/what’s that sound/everybody look/what’s going down” as “stop, children/watch this sound/everybody look/what’s going on.”
In 1965 a striking single called “New York’s a Lonely Town” by a group called the Trade Winds flitted briefly across pop radio. Telling the story of a California surfer stuck in New York for the winter, the song was beautifully produced, echoing some of the studio techniques then favored by Brian Wilson, and although the song’s premise seems even more ridiculous now than it did then, “New York’s a Lonely Town” has such a memorable, lilting melody and projects such willful yearning and innocence that it is somewhat of a lost pop treasure.
It is interesting to note that the pop calypso (as opposed to real calypso) boom of the mid 1950s was engineered largely by a charismatic singer born in Harlem and a Julliard-trained composer from Brooklyn. Both Harry Belafonte, whose mother was from Jamaica, and Irving Burgie, who spent his childhood in a West Indies neighborhood in New York, had musical roots in the Caribbean, certainly, but their version of the islands was largely an imagined one, although imagined so well that their collaborations have actually filtered back into the folk music of the region. Intelligent, confident, and with a firm grasp of artful arrangement, Belafonte almost single-handedly brought world music into the commercial pop arena with the Burgie-composed “Day-O” song, and in Burgie he had found the perfect songwriter, a man whose compositions had the lilt and flow of ocean sunlight. Several of Burgie’s songs (and Belafonte’s versions of them) have become stone cold classics, including “Banana Boat (Day-O),” the lovely “Jamaica Farewell” (both of which were centerpieces of 1956’s million-selling Calypso album that made Belafonte an international star), and the joyful “Kingston Market.” Calypso from Jamaica contains all the tracks from that ground-breaking release plus related tracks from Belafonte’s subsequent RCA albums to make a wonderful sequence of artful, faux Caribbean folk that isn’t particularly Jamaican, although it definitely is shot through with a West Indies sensibility. The only actual folk song from the Caribbean included on the album is the gorgeous 19th Century ballad “All My Trials,” which by the 1950s had migrated to the American south and by the 1960s had become a staple of the Folk Revival. Whatever the origins, the songs collected on Calypso from Jamaica have a wonderfully summery vibe, and if most of them didn’t actually come from the Caribbean, they certainly ended up there, and many of these tunes have become mento standards. Calypso from Jamaica is the most generous single disc currently available of this phase of Belafonte’s career.
If ideas move forward on the shoulders of giants, and that is certainly true in the world of American pop music, then Stephen Foster’s shoulders are the ones at the bottom of the heap, because he is the first truly American songwriter. Drawing both from the transplanted song traditions of the European émigrés and the rhythmic sophistication of African-American spirituals and folk pieces, Foster cobbled together a truly multicultural base for popular American music in the 1840s, turning out such enduring compositions as “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home” (probably best known as “Swanee River”), “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Old Kentucky Home,” pieces that dressed up aspects of the frequently risqué and racist minstrel tradition in fine new clothes (with the offensive parts thankfully excised). Foster was the founder of the pop music you hear on your car radio, whether it’s country, rock, or rap, because all of these forms draw on the cross-thatching of traditions that Foster first joined into a single stream of American music nearly 150 years ago. As a cautionary tale, Foster was also the first American songwriter to get royally fleeced by the music business, and he died in 1864 with only 38 cents to his name, a forgotten resident of the Bowery. Foster’s songs have all too often been viewed through the lens of nostalgia (a device Foster deliberately employed and willingly exploited), but their deceptively simple melodies and rich cultural histories full of merging rhythms from different continents make them a good deal more than that, not only the first true American songs, but also among the best. Their amazing longevity proves the point, because in pop music nothing survives without utility.
Although Reverend Blind Gary Davis is generally considered a blues singer, he was, in fact, more of an evangelical street preacher who just happened to play guitar like someone well acquainted with the angels, and the bulk of his material was made up of reconstituted church hymns and traditional pieces. Nothing in Davis’ repertoire, however, sounds quite like a guitar instrumental called “Civil War March” he recorded for Moses Asch and his Folkways Records imprint in New York in the mid 1940s, most likely in 1945. At five minutes and thirty seconds long, “Civil War March” is actually a collaged medley of military marches, with occasional spoken interjections by Davis, and it shows an accomplished guitar player (and decidedly not a blues one) chiming his way through the piece while mimicking trumpet, brass and bass lines on his guitar, even banging on it to make explosion and gun shot effects. There’s nothing about the medley that ties it specifically to the Civil War, although some speculation has suggested that the medley may have originated in that era. Or it may have been Davis’ own creation, a way to show off his considerable guitar dexterity on the street corners where he used to play. Whatever its origin, “Civil War March” is a wonderful recording, totally unlike anything else that Davis did, and in a way, it pre-shadows the post-modern guitar vision of players like John Fahey.
Former Hot Damn Jammers Free Energy made a video for their incredible summery new single on DFA called “Free Energy,” and we think you should watch it. Their freewheeling ’70s sound is an amalgamation of all the great easygoing, good time rockers like Tom Petty, Steve Miller, Joe Walsh and Cheap Trick, with a bunch of power pop sweetness thrown in to keep things from getting too heavy. The video makes being in a rock band in the city in the summertime look like just about the coolest thing possible.
![Synecdoche, New York [Soundtrack]](http://image.allmusic.com/00/amg/cov200/drl800/l866/l86631z6234.jpg)
For everybody who decries the state of contemporary pop music as a vast wasteland of disposable, commercial junk, and for anyone who longs for the days when composers like 
Perhaps sensing that moving on was a predominate American response to solving a whole host of life’s problems, and recognizing that the long haul trucker was a close cousin to the river boat gambler, 
It is interesting to note that the pop calypso (as opposed to real calypso) boom of the mid 1950s was engineered largely by a charismatic singer born in Harlem and a Julliard-trained composer from Brooklyn. Both Harry Belafonte, whose mother was from Jamaica, and Irving Burgie, who spent his childhood in a West Indies neighborhood in New York, had musical roots in the Caribbean, certainly, but their version of the islands was largely an imagined one, although imagined so well that their collaborations have actually filtered back into the folk music of the region. Intelligent, confident, and with a firm grasp of artful arrangement, Belafonte almost single-handedly brought world music into the commercial pop arena with the Burgie-composed “Day-O” song, and in Burgie he had found the perfect songwriter, a man whose compositions had the lilt and flow of ocean sunlight. Several of Burgie’s songs (and Belafonte’s versions of them) have become stone cold classics, including “Banana Boat (Day-O),” the lovely “Jamaica Farewell” (both of which were centerpieces of 1956’s million-selling Calypso album that made Belafonte an international star), and the joyful “Kingston Market.” 
If ideas move forward on the shoulders of giants, and that is certainly true in the world of American pop music, then Stephen Foster’s shoulders are the ones at the bottom of the heap, because he is the first truly American songwriter. Drawing both from the transplanted song traditions of the European émigrés and the rhythmic sophistication of African-American spirituals and folk pieces, Foster cobbled together a truly multicultural base for popular American music in the 1840s, turning out such enduring compositions as “Beautiful Dreamer,” “Camptown Races,” “Old Folks at Home” (probably best known as “Swanee River”), “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair,” “Oh! Susanna,” and “Old Kentucky Home,” pieces that dressed up aspects of the frequently risqué and racist minstrel tradition in fine new clothes (with the offensive parts thankfully excised). Foster was the founder of the pop music you hear on your car radio, whether it’s country, rock, or rap, because all of these forms draw on the cross-thatching of traditions that Foster first joined into a single stream of American music nearly 150 years ago. As a cautionary tale, Foster was also the first American songwriter to get royally fleeced by the music business, and he died in 1864 with only 38 cents to his name, a forgotten resident of the Bowery. Foster’s songs have all too often been viewed through the lens of nostalgia (a device Foster deliberately employed and willingly exploited), but their deceptively simple melodies and rich cultural histories full of merging rhythms from different continents make them a good deal more than that, not only the first true American songs, but also among the best. Their amazing longevity proves the point, because in pop music nothing survives without utility.
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