This morning when I woke, I rolled over and checked that the house still stood around me. The world lurches from apocalypse to apocalypse, after all, as it has since time both immemorial and immoral—and I’m a heavy sleeper. Much changes. Much doesn’t. A nickel on my decades-old desk, which I received in change just yesterday, dates to 1954, the year the Supreme Court deigned that state-sponsored segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Another five-cent piece hails from 1969, the year of Woodstock, the moon landing, and Stonewall riots. And a penny was printed in 1965, the year of my birth.
We carry history, both profound and personal, in our pockets.
Missouri-born, Arkansas-based folksinger Willi Carlisle’s fourth album, Winged Victory, blends the old with the new. As he notes in the press release, “These songs feel poised on the edge of the apocalypse, or at least at the beginning of a great transformation in America. During this borrowed time, the weirdos, cowboys, and dreamers in these songs dare to love, and often pay for it with blood.” “We Have Fed You All for 1000 Years,” a workers’ protest song that dates to 1908, leads into Carlisle’s own “Wildflowers Growin’,” a bouzouki-based tune that catalogs what’s wrong with the world, while encouraging us to stop and smell the roses, anyway.
The title track, like most of the others, is another original. It’s a silly yet profound tale centered on a donkey and, too, entertaining folks in a dementia ward. (If you’ve never set foot inside of one, well, they’re sad, scary and sweet all at once.) “The Cottonwood Tree” sounds like a century-old daydream, just about, while the rollicking song that follows—a cover of a Lavender Country song—is sure to raise the hackles of (and heckles from) some. The brief “Cottonwood Polka” shape-shifts “The Cottonwood Tree” into, well, a fun polka, while “Work Is Work” is a bluegrass excoriation of the zealous sentiment some have for cash. (As the Beatles sang long ago, “Money can’t buy me love.”)
The a cappella “Sound of Fury,” which features Asleep at the Wheel’s Ray Benson amongst the choir, borrows its theme from Shakespeare—and, too, William Faulkner—while exploring the many ideologies that shape the world. Richard Thompson’s “Beeswing,” from his 2017 album Mirror Blue, follows. In the press release, Carlisle explains, “For me, the song turns on the line ‘And they say her flower’s faded now/from hard weather and hard booze/but maybe that’s the price you pay for the chains you refuse.’ If you want to be untouchable by the regular world, maybe freedom is actually a really expensive thing, and maybe you have to try really hard to reach it.”
That freedom extends, in a way, to “Big Butt Billy,” a comical tale set in a truck stop “south of Winnipeg and north of Texas”; it’s there that the narrator, for the first time, is attracted to an “elfin specimen of the non-binary quantity,” aka another man. The album closes with “Old Bill Picket,” written by folksinger Mark Ross; it celebrates the son of a freed slave who became the first Black person inducted into the National Rodeo Hall of Fame. It’s what folk music does best, lifting stories from real life and turning them into songs that we can all sing along with.
Carlisle, by the way, is an interesting character who came of age as the closeted captain of his high-school football team. His musical journey began at punk clubs in Illinois, and eventually led him to folk music after he relocated to the Ozarks for college. He earned an MFA in poetry at the University of Arkansas, rubbed shoulders with literary elites in New York, and came to discover that “page poets” weren’t as welcoming or inclusive as he’d longed hoped. He put that education to use, however, in his songs, which represent the best of modern folk music. It simultaneously reaches into the past to illuminate the present while employing the present to reframe the past.
(Winged Victory is available to stream, starting on June 27th, and can be purchased via his web store.)
The Old Grey Cat 