28 CHICAGO READER | JULY 22, 2005 | SECTION ONE

By Jessica Hopper

W ith a pair of leaf-on-the-wind flutes and anechoing, metronomic

piano—like a ghost of AstralWeeks’ melancholy-woundedorchestra—does velvet-voicedtroubadour Sufjan Stevens firstinvoke our state, almost whis-pering the words to a quiet bal-lad called “Concerning the UFOSighting Near Highland,Illinois.” Other titles refer toDecatur, Jacksonville, Rockford,Bushnell, the region of southernIllinois known as Little Egypt,and of course Chicago. ButIllinois (also referred to as Comeon Feel the Illinoise) doesn’t pre-tend the state is somehow worthyof special attention—it doesn’ttransform Chicago into a muse,for instance, the way Polly JeanHarvey magicked up New Yorkin Stories From the City, StoriesFrom the Sea. Stevens’s 22-trackode to the Land of Lincoln isjust the second entry in a serieshe hopes will eventually cover all50 states. Naturally enoughStevens started with his child-hood home, releasing GreetingsFrom Michigan: The Great LakeState back in 2003 (these dayshe lives in Brooklyn). But even ifIllinois is just another stateSufjan’s making a record about,it’s hard to feel snubbed whenthe record he made about us isso fucking beautiful.

The album casts its generousgaze on 200 years of Illinois vitae,but though Stevens admits thathis information on the state isalmost entirely secondhand, dugfrom books and solicited fromfriends, he doesn’t get all high-school-civics-class on us, pulling

down a map from above theblackboard, cracking the curricu-lum to page one, and working forward from Lincoln in his logcabin all the way to R. Kellytrapped in a closet. His raw mate-rials might be a web of eyewitnessaccounts, downstate fun facts,and Sun-Times headlines, but hebrings them to life from the insideout with an emotionally involvingintimacy and immediacy.

“Concerning the UFO SightingNear Highland, Illinois” is asgood an example of this as any.On January 1, 2000, several peo-ple in and around the town ofHighland—about 35 miles fromSaint Louis in Madison County—reported seeing an enormous tri-angular object with three bril-liant white lights moving slowlyand almost silently. Some sus-pected it was a secret militaryaircraft, but in the words ofStevens’s imagined witness,delivered in an awestruck murmur, it becomes a “spirit ofthree stars”—a “revenant” and“incarnation” that’s “deliveringsigns.” Eighty seconds into thesong, his voice arcs upward intoa frail, impossibly sweet falsettoas he delivers the words historyinvolved itself—and they’re a

good shorthand for his methodof storytelling. Rather than showus history as a distant panorama,he brings it to us through theeyes and hearts of his people.

Of course, it does help thatwhen Stevens refers to history, hepulls from solid sources. FellowChi-town cheerleader CarlSandburg, an audible influenceon Stevens’s more romanticlyrics, gets called out by name inpart two of “Come On! Feel theIllinoise!”—he makes a guestappearance in one of our hero’sdreams, asking “Even in hisheart, the devil / Has to know thewater level / Are you writingfrom the heart? Are you writingfrom the heart?” On“Jacksonville” Stevens drops

details from Vernon R.Q.Fernandes’s 1991 book about thecity, The People of Jacksonville: APictorial History, like it’s quiz-bowl finals: the references rangefrom the first state schools for theblind and deaf, established in the1840s, to the standing debateabout which Jackson the ville isnamed for—future presidentAndrew Jackson or prominentAfrican-American preacher A.W.Jackson. “The Man of MetropolisSteals Our Hearts” repeatedlyinvokes the “Man of Steel”—Raymond Earl Middleton Jr.,who became the first person toplay Superman in public at the1940 World’s Fair in New York,was born in Chicago. (Supermanalso flies over the Sears Tower on

the CD’s cover, at least in the firstpressing—now that DC Comicshas registered its displeasure,he’ll be removed from subse-quent runs.) The song’s stoic nar-rative reads like a tribute to nov-elist Saul Bellow, long associatedwith Chicago, and his hallowedidiom of masculine self-examina-tion (“Only a real man can be alover / If he had hands to lend usall over”). It feels like you couldhunt for references in his lyricsforever and still not unpackeverything: in just the last thirdof “The Tallest Man, the BroadestShoulders,” Stevens nods toShoeless Joe Jackson (of the infa-mous 1919 White Sox), BennyGoodman (born in Chicago),Jane Addams, the Great Fire, the

Music

Music

ReviewsBooks

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Sufjan Stevens

Sufjan Stevens’sIllinoisREVIEW BY JESSICA HOPPER

The Charlie Poolebox set

REVIEW BYMONICA KENDRICK

MagnificentObsessionREVIEW BYJONATHAN ROSENBAUM

Jane FondaMy Life So FarREVIEW BY JESSICA HOPPER

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DEN

NY

REN

SHAW

Ode to UsSufjan Stevens makes Illinois history touching.

Movies

SUFJAN STEVENS ILLINOIS (ASTHMATIC KITTY)

Cubs’ billy goat curse, and thedyeing of the Chicago River greenon Saint Patrick’s Day.

The music is no less obsessive-ly crafted, and the sophisticatedarrangements—though oftenemploying guests on drums,trumpet, or strings as well as acrowd of backup singers—areentirely Stevens’s handiwork.Though he’s widely credited as abanjoist, he also throws downwith guitar, bass, drums, saxo-phone, recorder, flute, oboe,glockenspiel, accordion, vibra-phone, Wurlitzer organ, and thepiano of a Brooklyn church. (Histouring band, with just eightmembers, can only approximatethe album’s splendor.) His banjo

playing is more reminiscent ofKermit on a log than, say, theLonesome Pine Fiddlers, andhe’s no more impressive on oboe,but his competency as a compos-er and arranger shouldn’t beunderestimated. “Chicago” isenormously gorgeous: thehushed verses percolate withurgent organ while the vibra-phone plays peek-a-boo, andthen with a sudden upsweep ofstrings the chorus hits, swellinginto a maudlin summer hymncarried by a truckload of instru-ments and what sounds likeeight honey-voiced virgins liftingthe melody heaven high.

While most orchestral poptakes Pet Sounds as a template,

Stevens’s work is more like some-thing Phil Spector or Motown’sHolland-Dozier-Holland teammight have done on a punkbudget—he can pull back fromthe most overwhelming bombas-tic heights to an intimate mur-mur and still keep a song propul-sive. “Come On! Feel theIllinoise!” begins in a frisky 10/8layered with vibraphone, trum-pet, drums, tambourine, bass,flute, oboe, and who knows whatelse, then shifts into a rocking4/4 splattered with a distortedelectric-piano solo; halfwaythrough there’s a sequence ofriffs that sounds like the Cure’s“Close to You” dancing with TheLatin Side of Vince Guaraldi,

and the quick verses about theWorld’s Columbian Exposition of1893 read like a perverse answerto Petula Clark’s “Downtown,”breezily indicting the fair’samoral vision of urbanity andprogress. It’s a hell of a jam.

But what Stevens does best isinvolve us emotionally. His linescan trip your heartstrings so sud-denly that your eyes well upalmost before you know whatyou’re reacting to. In “CasimirPulaski Day,” a story about hesi-tant teenage lovers from Christianfamilies whose romance is cutshort by bone cancer, every detailthe bereaved narrator remembersis painfully poignant: “In themorning, through the window

shade / When the light pressed upagainst your shoulder blade / Icould see what you were reading.”Not even God is a comfort: “Hetook my shoulders, and He shookmy face / And He takes and Hetakes and He takes.” More thanjust involving us, Stevens seems toinvolve himself. As he describesJohn Wayne Gacy’s victims (“Theywere boys / With their cars /Summer jobs”) he breaks downwith what sounds like an involun-tary “Oh my god,” the last syllablestretched out for two full meas-ures in tender, quivering falsetto.His storyteller’s distance collapsesin an instant. He, too, is rightthere—or, more accurately, righthere with us. v

CHICAGO READER | JULY 22, 2005 | SECTION ONE 29

30 CHICAGO READER | JULY 22, 2005 | SECTION ONE

Music

“You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me”:Charlie Poole and the Roots ofCountry Music(Columbia/Legacy) valuableisn’t that it digs up any dustyforgotten gems—there’s nothingpreviously unissued here—butthat it creates a context forPoole’s innovations.

Poole’s recording career lastedless than six years—he went intothe studio only during his sporadicvisits to New York—but the exam-ple of Robert Johnson proves thata slender oeuvre can be milked fordecades. This sort of fetishization,and the slapdash packaging andrepackaging it encourages, tendsto bolster the unfortunate notionthat a great talent like Johnsonarises magically out of nowhereand has to leave as soon as he’sgotten all the genius out of his sys-tem. The Poole box addresses thisproblem by adding other artists’versions of tunes he recorded,material that influenced him, andtracks by artists who he obviouslyinfluenced in turn.

This kind of thing really doesneed a book to explain it, andNew York banjoist HenrySapoznik—the project’s producer,as well as a music scholar andexecutive director of the folk-artsnonprofit Living Traditions—haswritten a fine one. (Rorrer alsocontributes a short introductoryessay.) The tone’s sometimes a bitdry for the subject—a guy whoonce had his front teeth chippedby a policeman’s bullet in adrunken brawl—but you don’tcome away wondering what allthese other songs are doingalongside the work of Our Hero.And looked at a certain way, thedryness is a form of respect, likethe way Poole slicked down hishair and dressed up in a nice suitto take the big city by storm. Old78 labels and sepia-tinted 80-year-old photos of street scenesin New York City and RandolphCounty, North Carolina, do anice job setting the tone.

The box set also serves as acorrective to another bit ofwrongheaded thinking about tra-ditional music: the longing forpure or authentic forms thatnever existed. They’re romanti-cized fictions, the good-copanswer to all the ugly hillbillystereotypes—during the mininguprisings of the 20s, newspapersportrayed mountaineers astroglodytes who’d never seen atoilet and couldn’t possiblyappreciate the salutary sideeffects of industrial capitalism.What Alan Lomax and HarrySmith and SmithsonianFolkways got weren’t authorita-tive portraits but rather frozensnapshots of something alwaysin motion. The combination of

the African banjo and theEuropean fiddle in mountainmusic may have been an irre-sistible metaphor for the meet-ing of two cultures, but themutation and hybridization nei-ther started nor ended there.

Still, for most of the 20th cen-tury, the culture of the ruralsouth has been seen as a museumpiece, a tourist attraction, some-thing delicate and endangered—the maintenance of historic sitesalong the Blue Ridge Parkway inVirginia and North Carolinastarted way back in the 1930s.Many a young player has studiedthe music of Poole and his con-temporaries to pay homage to thepast, and often the ones born andraised in the hills—sometimesrelatives of the great figures ofyore, or working in decades-oldstring bands whose names haveoutlived all their founding mem-bers—are just as guilty of thisnostalgic oversimplification asoutsiders. But Poole himself wasvery much a man of his present,and seemed more than eager toproject himself into the future.The restless, flashy, freewheelingmusic on this collection of 78soften seems more modern thananything on Ralph Stanley’s lat-est T-Bone Burnett-producedmuseum piece.

Poole was a voracious listener,picking up gestures, inflections,and sometimes whole tunes notjust from jazz and blues but fromvaudeville, black gospel, square-dance music, ancient Englishfolk, and the enduring trove of19th-century popular songs aboutdead children and Civil War sol-diers, all of which informed thesouthern repertoire of his time.Poole made his home base in old-timey music that was redolent ofnostalgia, loss, and grief, and as asinger he was talented enough tobring considerable conviction tomaterial like “Where theWhippoorwill Is WhisperingGood-Night,” a lament for practi-cally an entire generation—but inlife he wasn’t the type to mourn alost past or a faded culture, andcertainly not a lost cause.

Disc one is the main attraction:it’s unadulterated Poole, mostlywith his crack trio the NorthCarolina Ramblers, though origi-nal fiddler Posey Rorer and origi-nal guitarist Norman Wordlieffwere both replaced during theband’s run. (To evade contractrestrictions, Poole and companyalso recorded as both theHighlanders and the AlleghenyHighlanders, on those dates using

a second fiddler and a pianist.)Besides “Where the WhippoorwillIs Whispering Good-Night” and“Don’t Let Your Deal Go DownBlues”—Poole’s first real hit,recorded in 1925, it sold 102,000copies, a high-water mark he’dnever reach again—there aregraceful mountain waltzes, snarkyrural joke songs, and a few exam-ples of the warning-to-young-folks morality tales that hadbecome an Appalachian subgenre(for instance, “Old and Only Inthe Way,” which history wouldrender somewhat ironic, first forPoole and later for Jerry Garcia).Poole’s drawl scrapes againstRorer’s sweet swaying line on“The Highwayman,” and hewrings so much heartbreak out ofthe weeper “Baltimore Fire” thatyou’d think he’d witnessed theinferno personally. On “Shootin’Creek,” where fiddler LonnieAustin replaces Rorer—he’d quitafter a dispute over royalties, andthough Poole was married toRorer’s sister, the two men neverspoke again—the band rides abreakneck groove like whitewater. And though “Husband andWife Were Angry One Night” isabout as sentimental as familyballads get, Rorer’s fiddle tone isrough and almost primitive, as ifthe child narrator were sawingout the melody, and Poole’smelancholy singing freights thetune’s cross-stitch-sampler moralwith the weight of the world.

Disc two is more of a slog,though it does give us a good ideajust how Poole and his Ramblersstacked up against their contem-poraries. Poole’s versions of songsare placed alongside roughly con-temporaneous versions by artistshe influenced or who influencedhim. Poole’s aren’t necessarily themost archetypal or even the mostmoving, but he always thoroughlyinhabits the material, putting hisfeet up on its table and demand-ing a drink. Also included is hissignature number “You Ain’tTalkin’ to Me,” one of many min-strel-show tunes that he strippedof its shuck-and-jive, all but neu-tralizing the racial connotations.

Another is “Monkey on a String,”presented here in both its CalStewart theatrical rendition—possibly the most irritating songcommitted to acetate until “DiscoDuck”—and Poole’s improbablydignified redux, transformed bythe casual luminosity of Rorer’sfiddling. The disc also contrastsArthur Collins’s very New Yorkyvaudeville version of the drolltenement-dwellers’ lament“Moving Day” with Poole’s moresomber down-home take, areminder that the have-nots inthe city share common groundwith their country cousins,should they care to find it.

Disc three pulls a few similarstunts: there’s not all that muchyou can do with a tune called“Coon From Tennessee” (per-formed here by the GeorgiaCrackers), but Poole’s ever-pres-ent sense of droll sorrow giveshis version a startling richnessand intensity. By and large thereare more tracks here by Poole’sinfluences: his idol, banjoist FredVan Eps, contributes “DixieMedley” alongside Poole’s“Southern Medley,” and UncleDave Macon, a fingerstyle ban-joist like Poole, is represented by“Uncle Dave’s Beloved Solo.”

This compare-and-contrastapproach displaces both theGreat Man theory and the notionof traditional musics as staticand isolated, alluding instead toa much richer reality: that of aculture reacting and respondingto itself in a time of great stressand transition. You might thinkPoole would be making likeJohnny Cash if he were alivetoday, seeking out “edgy” materi-al from Trent Reznor and NickCave, but from what I can tellhe’d be just as likely to make offwith a Justin Timberlake tune orsome sappy Elton John balladfrom a Disney movie—and I getthe feeling he’d approve of DollyParton’s attempt at “Stairway toHeaven.” It all goes to show thatthere’s no way to lock your songaway and keep it pure. If theNorth Carolina Ramblers don’tget you, somebody else will. v

Charlie Poole

The Master ThiefThe new Charlie Poole box set is a lesson on the nature of genius.

“YOU AIN’T TALKIN’ TO ME”: CHARLIE POOLE AND THE ROOTS OF COUNTRY MUSIC (COLUMBIA/LEGACY)

By Monica Kendrick

Charlie Poole’s crisp, percus-sive banjo work was thesource of modern bluegrass

playing: in the 40s, when thatstream diverged from the river ofsouthern country, masters likeBill Monroe and Flatt & Scruggstook a bit of Poole with them.But he’s important for other rea-sons too. Born in 1892, Poolelived smack on the edge of manytransitional zones in southernmusic and culture: between theNorth Carolina highlands andthe Piedmont region, betweenrural and industrial society,between the age of music as anoral tradition and the age ofmusic as a product spreadpromiscuously through radioand recordings. With his wry,crackly delivery, which put aninimitable stamp on even thehoariest old standard, he was asgood at projecting his presenceacross the airwaves as FDRwould turn out to be.

But if folks know only onething about Poole’s life, it’s thathe ended it early. He drank him-self to death in 1931, when hewas 39 years old. The Depressionwas hurting him badly—his tick-et and record sales were dwin-dling, and he was forced to bor-row a banjo for his last recordingsession, in September 1930, hav-ing parted with his own for adown payment of $50. He wasworking in a textile mill, just ashe had been when his careertook off five years before, andafter Columbia canceled his con-tract he started drinking evenmore heavily than usual. Thoughin his final days Poole was solicit-ed to record music for aHollywood film—there was atrain ticket to California on hisdresser when he died—he cele-brated his good fortune with asuicidal 13-week bender.

There’s nothing like self-destruction and a premature exitto get a legend going. Sometimesit seems like the archivist classthinks it’s more interesting andhonorable for an artist to suc-cumb to his demons than over-come or at least survive them:Hank Williams may not be morerevered than Johnny Cash, buthe got his turn a lot sooner.

Much of Poole’s catalog hasbeen out of print for decades, buthis recordings have never beenespecially hard for fans of earlycountry to track down. In 1982Kinney Rorrer, a history teacherand the grandnephew of Poole’sfiddler Posey Rorer, published abiography of Poole, and theman’s music has long been astandby on the ubiquitous old-timey radio shows of westernNorth Carolina and Virginia.What makes the three-CD set

CHICAGO READER | JULY 22, 2005 | SECTION ONE 31