perfidy

Everyone who knows me (and who doesn't know me? I'm the cat with a bazillion friends!) knows that I really dig emanations from what Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America." Whether it's the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the half-fried blues stylings of the late R.L. Burnside, or video footage of the great Bobby Rush taming the wild booty ooty ooty.

Cast King, a 79 year old native of Old Sand Mountain, Alabama - a place too small and remote to show up on maps readily available on the newfangled interweb - has been making music on his own for sixty-five years now. He toured extensively in the 1940s and 1950s with his band, "Cast King and the Country Drifters" and even recorded a few sides for Sam Phillips at the Sun studios in Memphis. But nothing really came of those sessions and King settled down to life on Old Sand Mountain, writing songs for the benefit of himself and those around him.

He was rediscovered, according to the presskit I have, when a musician named Matt Downer began making field recordings of local musicians in and around Old Sand Mountain, and on the recommendation of practically every other musician around tracked down Cast King and his "sackful of songs." Downer eventually persuaded King to sit down and record some of these in a shed next to his house, and the result is now an album, Saw Mill Man.

Cast King's debut is a interesting document, literally a transmission from the old weird America I treasure, something that sounds like a lost fragment of the Harry Smith or Lomax brothers collections. At 79, King's voice is soft and tremulous, which only adds to the fragility and plaintiveness of the songs he has written, every one of which is about drinking, death, heartbreak, or the futility of living on another day. (Now that's entertainment!) His homegrown style of songwriting has a great deal in common with the folk-infused country that eventually catapulted Johnny Cash to fame - a sound that has long transcended fashion and cliche to become part of the DNA of the American songbook. Some of the songs feature Matt Downer helping out on his Stratocaster to provide some ornament, but mostly they float past one by one, bouyed by the quiet strum of King's guitar and swaying lilt of his hoary voice.

Having developed over fifty years a unique conversational lyrical style, King has a knack for lining out a scene in a few well chosen words. Not every song is equally great, and some rely a little too much on cliche, but every so often an especially stark stanza reaches out of the speakers to smack you on the head. For example on "Numb," King sings

I don't care if your tears fall in my whiskey
I don't care if he hurts you more and more
I don't mind that drunken clown
Pushing that old man around
For I'm as numb as the knob on the door.

That's about as succinct as country weepers get. The best songs on Saw Mill Man hit with this same soft punch, especially "Cheap Motel," "Wino," and the miserable hard-luck song "Saw Mill Man." On "Long Time Now" and "Peggy," King raises the ghost of authentic rockabilly, the half-crazy kind that got kicked off the radio (or co-opted) by the rise of rock and roll. It's a hoot to hear a new recording in 2005 that could have come directly out of a Bobby Sisco session for Mar-Vel in 1955. Some, like the worst-party-ever vignette of "Wrong Time To Be Right" and the funereal murder ballad "Under The Snow" sound especially great in King's weary baritone.

Overall, what seems at first blush to be a slightly muddy set of moderately interesting old-timey country songs reveals itself after repeated listenings to be a set of archetypal country songs sung by a man who, if life had been just a little different, might have had a real shot at being on the Opry stage next to Carl Perkins and Buck Owens. I don't know if it's something in the water or something in the whiskey, but Cast King of Old Sand Mountain has made a bleak and affecting debut album. I hope there's more where this came from.

Cast King's Saw Mill Man is available directly from Locust Music