Choking Kind. Mavis Staples. 1969. Volt.

 Written by Nashville stalwart Harlan Howard in 1967, Choking Kind appeared that year as an RCA issued single by Waylon Jennings. Two years and a clutch of  distinct variations later, the song shows up on Mavis Staples’ eponymously titled debut record on Volt. From a twenty first century perspective, the two recordings play out like a genre exercise in bias confirmation, fulfilling long held expectations that surround country and western’s idealization of the status quo, its tendency to court market success by often—but not always—reimagining verisimilitude through a personal lens of stasis. In 2024, we call this style conservatism. Mavis Staples’ artistry is kinetic. Her singing voice, like Jennings’, has the power to connect viscerally with an audience without overwhelming you. The major difference between versions is vocal narration. By means of tempo and voice control, Jennings reduces the action of the world around him to a couple’s personal drama, allowing the prevailing emotion of his performance, tenderness, to shadow with faux poignancy what is essentially an emotionless, one-sided breakup. Staples, working with Booker T and the MGs, blows her arrangement wide open, inviting the whole world in. Her typically gorgeous voice, the sexiest in all of rhythm and blues, addresses both the song’s possessive lover and, through the sheer exuberance of her performance, the pop audience, too, with whom she shares an extraordinary amity. In the popular imagination, the concept of American Christian faith can be exemplified by that stunning moment in Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll when a minor character’s name is called, and she emerges, singing “I Shall Not Be Moved.” But secular reality calls for movement, a biological sine qua non that we’ve pushed, in this century and the last one, into so many directions we’ve shattered the compass. Recorded in the echo of fresh gunfire, Staples’ Choking Kind illuminates a way out of bloodshed by unifying her listenership in the beneficence of American rhythm and blues, with its distinctive sensuality that redefines ebullient glamour as flowing organically from the artistic expression of middle class inspiration. Mavis Staples refused the status of untouchability that serves the star class, and she doesn’t sing with the voice of the people; her singing voice holds the full bodied timbre of humanity, and she’s one of the American vocalists—Johnny Cash is another—who dazzlingly transcends the moral limitations of Church based talents to embrace our life-affirming sensual world. In this battle upon Tennessee soil for the hearts of music lovers, Memphis inner city progressivism wins the day.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

City Slang. Sonic’s Rendezvous Band. 1978. Orchidé.

  Near the start of Sonic’s Rendezvous Band—The One That Got Away, Ken Shimamoto’s authoritative online account from 2002     of that band’s searing yet short lived history, which can be found with a Google search, you come across an anecdote told by SRB bassist Gary Rasmussen about a backstage encounter between Fred Sonic Smith and Eric Clapton, following a Cream show at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom, which the MC5 opened. What is remarkable about the recollection of this exchange isn’t so much what it’s about—the absence of a Cream rhythm guitarist—as its setting. Shimamoto, a practicing guitarist with stage and studio experience, whose influences span Hendrix to Pete Cosey, arranges his interviews with band members Rasmussen and Scott Morgan—along with Radio Birdman founder Deniz Tek, MC-5’s Wayne Kramer, Michael Davis, and Dennis Thompson, Stooges’ guitarist Ron Asheton, and Detroit bassist Ron Cooke—along traditional narrative/oral history structures, and features a recu...
Read more

Ça Plane Pour Moi. Plastic Bertrand. 1978. Sire.

  According to internet data, the Lollapalooza tour, 1995, reached Dallas, Texas, on August 10, a Thursday. Five of us rode in one car that I drove from Fort Worth to the Starplex Amphitheater; my fellow passengers were Jo, Pat, Trina, and that woman who lived in Azle, whose name I no longer remember, and who used to come into the record store often, along with her boyfriend. Her musical tastes tended toward the abrasive, commercial metal so popular with the white suburban kids of privilege: Nine Inch Nails, Iron Maiden, Alice In Chains. Her personal style was not that of a typical metal fan, more like Ally Sheedy after her character’s disastrous Breakfast Club makeover. I admired her bright and casual style, her propensity to good humor and cheer, and for not succumbing to conformity and becoming a metal clone like so many of our peers. She rolled joints during the entire car trip to Lollapalooza with the hurried precision of an efficient professional working against a deadline, a...
Read more

Circles. The Fleur de Lys. Immediate. 1966.

Is there any more durable a symbol of middle class consumer excess than an outdoor neighborhood shopping mall with manicured grounds and vigilantly maintained water fountains, and a semi-detached General Cinema twin screen, first run movie theater, featuring nationwide major distribution titles? My childhood enchantment with Seminary South Cinemas I & II began in an edifice erected as an environmental correlative to the late century American personality; non-descript and functional. The lobby, a vast and empty square room with two glass half walls near the entrance, and beyond that, crimson red upholstered walls, is where the intrigue began. From the ticket dispenser machine, a dull silver contraption that functioned at the ticket seller’s wrist level, elegantly spitting out a stamp sized ticket when one of two buttons on a register was pressed, to the mysterious relationship between the concessionaires and their wide variety of candied snacks and sodas, which inventory never seeme...
Read more