The Angels Took My Racehorse Away. Richard Thompson. 1972. Reprise.

 Writing about Richard Thompson’s 1972 debut solo record, Henry the Human Fly, for his Album Consumer Guide, Robert Christgau tells us, “Thompson intensifies the common-folk sympathies of the best English folk-rockers into militant class consciousness.” It’s a useful observation if only because it reminds us of two things at once; that The Angels Took My Racehorse Away has more in common with Hank Williams than it does Eric Clapton, and that country music, far from being the contemporary roost for bourgeois arrivistes that it’s now become, was at one time the popular voice for the working poor, foreign and domestic. The song kicks off with the wild fluttering of the wings of angels; accordion and fiddle by John Kirkpatrick and Barry Drunsfield, respectively, and what follows is the uptempo narrative of the loss of a great, beloved beast and good fortune. A large part of what gives this song durability is of course Thompson’s brilliant guitar play, but also the depth of emotion he gives to his singing voice, similar to what you hear Mick Jones doing on London Calling’s The Card Cheat—another terrific, impassioned song about gambling and its intrinsic relation to chance and mortality. The role of chance in nature—“It’s such a gamble when you get a face!” Richard Hell once declared—should have collapsed our faith in divine intelligence and design decades ago, but chance is an essence that, because of its intrinsic unpredictability, modern man has refused to endow with an anthropomorphic intelligence capable of dispensing ad hoc judgements. Because of our predisposition to dependency, and because of chance’s havoc-wreaking potency, we’ve granted power to the modern oligarchy to make it another exploitable commodity like disease or the weather. Culturally, it’s become just another face in our godless mythological pantheon, capable of wringing tears and payrolls from anyone on the economic tiers in thrall to its ever expanding wheel. Country music, with a few exceptions, is now largely the domain of the moneyed class, and a mouthpiece for GOP values; much of pop music is. Earlier this year Pink tweeted about Rolling Stone magazine, a publication whose journalists consistently turn in reportage that varies from income inequality to the trending visibility of white supremacists, “this is the biggest sellout in fucking history when it comes to a publication we all once trusted. Fuck rolling stone [sic].” A racehorse wasn’t all the angels took away. Honesty among multi-millionaire pop stars is now a thing of the past, too. With Linda Peters and Sandy Denny on backing vocals.

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