Biloxi. Ted Hawkins. 1994. DGC.

 Dreamlike and languid, Ted Hawkins’ masterful cover of the Jesse Winchester ballad is paced with the slow and dazed mid-summer eroticism of the season of heat. Like Otis Redding before him, Hawkins sang from deep inside his torso but on record he’s more relaxed than Redding, languorous as the calm Gulf waters he’s singing about it. Hawkins was a modern troubadour, mixing soul, blues, and country folk without making an ostentatious fuss about his influences. In the great folk tradition—Hawkins’ formidable talent easily transcended genre; Robert Christgau called him “an American original”—Hawkins and his voice had the power to unify. After DGC released his breakthrough major label  record, The Next Hundred Years, store employees at Sound Warehouse kept it in heavy in-store rotation. We were a disparate group of the record’s fans, and a large part of its appeal was that a sense of justice had been gained, Hawkins’ great talent having been at last vindicated. Without knowing any of the details of Hawkins’ life we bonded with The Next Hundred Years, trusting it to charge the air around us with the unsentimental poetry of contemporary reality. What Hawkins communicated, using the beauty of his voice, was the durability of the will to withstand the impact of American freedom and all of its terrible, consequential weight. Biloxi’s final verse is a brief, lyrical description of its characters at twilight on the Gulf beach, the overhead sky filled with stars and the surface waters of the Mississippi Sound lit by their reflection. Idyllic, but soon the mood begins to shift. “And the sky is red from off toward New Orleans,” is the song’s closing line, and, recited repeatedly, it acquires an incantatory power that holds together Biloxi’s dreamlike quality while still admitting the distant shriek of anxiety that reality is wed to.

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