5 Songs Friday Dec. 13, 2024

It's always scary when Friday the 13th falls on Friday, but this music is safe

Marty Robbins – “I Guess I’ll Be Going” 1961 from Just a Little Sentimental. Yeah, it’s just a little sentimental, as this farewell to a great love happens to include the sound of her husband’s car pulling up in the driveway. So, maybe the narrator here is a heel himself. Oh, well, Marty Robbins sells the heck out of the sadness in this goodbye song. I’ve been watching every episode of Midnight Special as they get uploaded to youTube once a week – there are 88 of them so far. Robbins hosted a few country episodes, and he revealed himself to be one of the most cornpone characters in the biz. But, man, he could shift from jokes too silly to make the cut on Hee Haw to heartbreaking balladry on a dime. I think he wrote this number himself – it’s a great example of state of the art Nashville countrypolitan production in 1961, and I love it, right down to the tinkling piano and the smooth as silk background “ooh”s.

Mac Wiseman – “No One Will Ever Know” sometime in the early 60s from Just Because. I know Mac Wiseman primarily as a bluegrass singer, but he moved into the Nashville country pop world for a while in the 1960s. This song is just a deep album cut, but I find it exquisite. That gorgeous tenor voice holds all the hurt he’s trying to hide from the world. The idea is he’s miserable since she left him, but he’s pretending that’s what he wanted, I guess so that she doesn’t look bad for dumping him. Probably not the healthiest reaction, but it makes for a beautiful song full of pain and self-sacrifice. Helping immensely is one of the best pedal steel performances in an era of great pedal steel performances – every line from that instrument is a match for Wiseman’s suffering.

Betty Carter – “Feed the Fire” 1994 from Feed the Fire. Most jazz singers were supported by jazz musicians – Betty Carter always sounded as though she was equal to the jazz musicians. Whether singing lyrics and melodies straight or scatting into the stratosphere as a soloist, Carter was one of the most remarkable singers of all time. This late-in-life live album is as perfect an example as I know. For one thing, she works here with an a-list line-up – Geri Allen on piano, Dave Holland on bass, and Jack DeJohnette on drums. Allen wrote this bouncing bubbly tune, and Carter scats it like she’s in turns a trumpet, trombone, and saxophone. With the band holding down the rhythmic and harmonic forts, Carter takes off from the melody and investigates every twist and turn she can think of in two incredible solos, one at the beginning and one at the end of this long cut. In between, each player gets a fine solo as well. The rest of the album is awfully good takes on standards, but this cut is something special.

Betty Wright – “How Could You Just Walk Away” 2001 from Fit For a King. Thirty years after her breakthrough hit “Clean Up Woman,” Betty Wright was still making strong records – in fact, she kept on doing so for another ten years, and kept producing others until she passed away in 2020. She stayed in touch with what was happening in r&b as her career unfolded, and this particular cut could easily have been sung by Toni Braxton around the turn of the century. It’s a sad ballad bemoaning the way her man just up and left her despite everything she’d done for him. A sultry groove with emphasis on hi hat ticks from the drums underlays the way she sings with an ache in her heart the infectiously simple melody. You know how the charts work – it’s always hard for somebody older who hadn’t had a hit in decades to break through – but damned if this doesn’t sound like a record that could’ve passed a blindfold test at the time.

Lucinda Williams – “You’re Gonna Need Pure Religion” 1979 from Ramblin’ On My Mind. This is from the debut album by Lucinda Williams, released nine full years before she became the big deal singer/songwriter we all know her as. In the early days, she was singing blues, country, and gospel songs from her record collection. This is a country gospel number I’ve not heard by anybody else. With just her own guitar and lead guitar by John Grimaudo – don’t know who he was, either, I’m afraid – she takes us through the death of a child with an emphasis on the parents watching. It’s one of those clear-eyed unsentimental songs that pushes down the sorrow by insisting that the parents need to get religion in order to deal with it. I’m not saying I agree with it, but I do like the straight-forward propulsion Williams gives the performance.