VARIOUS ARTISTS - Theme Time Hour Volume Three (Ace)

The third and final season of Mr Zimmerman’s indispensable theme-based meander through the panoply of twentieth century popular American vernacular music, and its tributaries and byways, featured such subjects as “Fruit”, “Blood” and (appropriately enough) “Goodbye”. But the key words for yet another immensely enjoyable fifty song romp through the highlights of the show are probably “rhythm” and “blues”, reflecting this volume’s centre of musical gravity in the geographical and chronological cradle of the southern United States circa mid-last century, and incorporating the influences, descendents and classy contemporaneous side-products that reached into middle-America and beyond.

Aside from the great man’s asides, it was the adherence to genuine, big-selling music from Dylan’s youth (step forward Fred Astaire, Sarah Vaughan, Annie Ross) that anchored the shows in radio-era America, whilst re-casting the roots influences - folk, blues, country, gospel, doo wop, jazz - in their proper place alongside and vital to the mainstream, past and present.

To wit, the arresting habit of exposing original versions of numbers integral to pop’s rich tapestry - highlights this time Bessie Banks’s deep soul precursor to the Moody Blues’ Go Now, and Clarence Ashley’s depression-era chiller Little Sadie, later transfused into versions by Johnny Cash and Dylan himself. Speaking of murder songs, a word for Los Socios De San Antonio’s corking mid-70s corrido, La Muerte de Fred Gomez Carrasco, earthy accordion gratifyingly to the fore, the ensemble vocals transcendent and touching. And great to see Jesse Winchester get his (over)due props, and so too Brenda Evans, the (at the time) 12-year-old vocalist receiving equal billing on Elizabeth Cotton’s achingly bittersweet Shake Sugaree.

All those punctuated by the aforementioned R ‘n’ B and its cousins, from Elvises P and C through Professor Longhair to the mighty vocal pipes of O.V. Wright, taking in reggae and calypso too (early, hilarious Mighty Sparrow) and topped off by Bob’s hero, the man who closed the series and (but for Roy Rogers’s evocative Happy Trails) this collection, Woody Guthrie bidding so long to a collection of depth, heritage and quality.

VARIOUS ARTISTS - Theme Time Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan - Series 2 (Ace)

Here’s the distillation of the songs played on the theme-based radio show’s traipse through the jukebox of Bob Dylan’s imagination, and among the themes for the second series were…well, the nominal subjects hardly matter really without the comic between-song exposition of Dylan’s arch mock-cornball drawl, so suffice it to say that members of his nugget-picking team (Eddie Gorodetsky, Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen and Ace records’ Roger Armstrong) have trawled through some great, good and at times fairly obscure choices to produce another exuberant celebration of all the roots music tributaries that flow into the raging river of American popular music (and beyond).

Rhythm and blues is the hub around which the collection revolves, liberally spiced with rockabilly, soul, gospel, reggae and blues (with chanson and yé-yé a Francophone supplement to Cajun). Country and jazz are particularly strongly represented genres this time round, sharing around a third of the fifty tracks, and there’s something of a novelty – or humorous - element running through the selection too.

Witness Hal Swain and His Band and their knockabout 1930 hit Hunting Tigers out in India (“well, I see nothing to hinder ya”) or Red Ingle’s drunken corruption of The Sons of the Pioneers’ Cigarettes and Whiskey and Wild, Wild Women. Humour also abounds in Little Esther’s smoky Aged and Mellow Blues (“I like my men like I like my whiskey…”) and Loretta Lynn’s combative Fist City, while Ricky Harper takes a rare lead on Buddy Johnson and His Orchestra’s light-hearted Louis Jordanesque romp A Pretty Girl (A Cadillac and Some Money).

All that and there’s serious stuff from lesser known names, and some biggies too, including Louis A and Billie H as well as James Brown, Mose Allison and Edith Piaf. With an evocative introduction from one Billy Bragg (romantically riffing on the conceit that Dylan might have chanced on these tracks in his dial-twirling Duluth youth) and a who’s-who of roots experts and fans providing the track notes, Theme Time Hour Volume Two is a fine compendium of an absorbing radio series.

www.acerecords.co.uk

This review first appeared in fRoots magazine

VARIOUS - Theme Time Hour With Your Host Bob Dylan (Ace)

When Bob Dylan was given his own series of weekly hour-long programmes on American radio, each containing songs based around a certain theme, even the most blinkered worshipper of His Bobness might not have anticipated quite how engaging a DJ he would be, or the treasures mined as he and his researchers used conveniently generic topics as a mechanism to cherry pick American popular music’s rich heritage (“weather”, “mother” and “drinking” were the initial subjects of the fifty-episode first series).
The show is akin to tuning in to an iPod shuffle of Bob’s musical memories, a fragmented succession of aural snapshots as he might have encountered them over the airwaves, filtered largely on the blues and country music radio stations of his youth and laced with a more than liberal smattering of gospel, soul, reggae, pop, jazz, conjunto and rock music from the ‘20s to the present day.
All of which has been expertly sampled, deftly sequenced and rolled up into a knowledgeably annotated two-CD package by Theme Time producer Eddie Gorodetsky, Dylan's manager Jeff Rosen and Ace records’ Roger Armstrong. Bookending the collection with songs that extol contrasting virtues of the wonderful world of radio (as religious conduit on Grandpa Jones’ ‘40s country hit Turn Your Radio On, as urban automobile jukebox on Jonathan Richman's loose-limbed classic Roadrunner from 1976), the compilers weave together a tapestry of venerated artists (from Billie to Bo Diddley and beyond) and unheralded gems (including a treat for lovers of the recent Krauss/Plant album by Li'l Millet and His Creoles), with the odd foray away from the USA (the militaristic, scattergun roll of The Clash’s searing Tommy Gun, Celtic Cajun Geraint Watkins at his bluesy best, some soulful ska from Jamaica) dovetailing into the broad theme of succinctly delivered, timeless nuggets of everyday American life.
The only obvious difference from the shows themselves (apart from an absence of hip-hop tracks) is the absence of Bob’s dry, laconic delivery. No corny jokes punctuate the tunes here, no surreal, rasping diversions into his meandering thought processes, no homespun wisdom or comic erudition. Just fifty prime cuts from one of the choicest radio shows of recent times.

This review first appeared in fRoots magazine.