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For all intents and purposes Carters Ghost is Brian Hall. There are, technically, two other people in the band, Mark Dalton and Robin Tolley, but the CD cover merely mentions their names, and the web sites I was able to find do little more. But there is plenty on Brian Hall, the singer and main songwriter for Carters Ghost, who is something of a renaissance man. A self-proclaimed "composer...photographer...singer...writer," he is also the founder of Outside Records the label for which the band records. He lists a disparate array of influences that range from the blues-heavy folk of Greg Brown to the low-fi, indie sound of Stephin Merritt to the avatar of bluegrass himself, Ralph Stanley. And with various bands such as Gypsy Moon, Shytown, Waxing Moon Hats and Snake Forcefield, Hall has tried to combine the different sounds which inspire him, but on When Maggie Turns to Fly, he strips the sound down to the bare-ass basics of his Lynchburg, Virginia, musical roots. First off, it's important to understand that despite the implications of the name, Carters Ghost, in honor of Ralph's venerable accomplice in all things Stanley, this is not a straight bluegrass CD; in fact, if anything, it leans more in a neo-folk direction. Certainly Brian and the boys use instrumentation usually associated with the music of the mountains -- guitars, banjos, mandolins, no drums -- but on songs like the lead-off track "Step Into the Water," a bittersweet remembrance of young love, the sound has more in common with David Wilcox than Del McCoury. And on "Amigo," a highly allegorical, if sometimes too '60s-ish folk song that evolves into a spiritual on racial harmony, when Brian Hall sings "Sometimes it kind of sounded/Just like a band of angels/If a band of angels was here on Earth/And singing out of tune," he sounds like the son Loudon Wainwright III never had. But that is not to say they stray entirely from the sound and subject matter that Appalachia holds so dear. On "Round and Around," a romantic little tale of young love, war, death and suicide, and "Johnson Breedlove," which was written by the mysterious Mark Dalton, about a Mississippi farmer who goes off to fight at Chickamauga during the Civil War, the vocal inflections and swirl of the guitar, banjo, and mandolin work to conjure that sense of dark, gothic foreboding that is the essence of mountain music. And on "She Stayed Young," a high-energy bluegrass number that uses rollicking music to cloak menacing lyrics, an older man fruitlessly pursues a young girl until he realizes the most sure way to make her his own. And you do what you're told But, for me, the stand-out track on the disc is "Love Takes Me to Church," a Dostoevskian blues song about a man who commits murder and is then left to face the psychological and spiritual ramifications of the act. The singing is the most soulful to be found on any of the tracks, and the lyrics are permeated by a gallows humor that even Randy Newman would have to admire. They told me when I was young, girl, the Lord knows all
you have done So, if you've damn near worn your O, Brother CD transparent and are a little curious as to what direction the more modern practitioners of mountain music are heading in, Brian Hall and Carters Ghost are the signpost you need to be looking for. Good musicianship, good singing, and poetic lyrics, it don't get more basic, or elusive, than that. If you ain't hankering for a little high lonesome sound by
now, you need to check your pulse. Go to www.retroweb.com/brianhall.html
for tour dates, lyrics and sound samples and to www.angelfire.com/biz/outsiderecords
to buy When Maggie Turns to Fly and other Brian Hall CDs
and tapes. |
Having recently moved
back to the South Charlotte, North Carolina to be exact
from central Florida, I have, understandably, found myself
in various and sundry situations with which I am unfamiliar.
And having been a Texas exile to begin with, the transition
from the subtropical Bronx to the Queen City damn near took on
the dimensions of a Swiftian voyage but, if nothing else, I have
learned through these travels the importance of that old philosophical
adage about a book and its cover. So when I received a copy
of When Maggie Turns to Fly by Brian Hall and Carters
Ghost, I looked at the name of the band emblazoned across a cover
featuring a black and white photograph of a young woman in front
of a small-town movie theatre and quickly came to the conclusion
that this must be another one of them alt.-country CDs. Well,
philosophy was never my strong point.
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