Sort of. Maybe. Possible. Wishful thinking. We’ll see.

The fact is, to those of you who followed my dozen or so years of writing a weekly column for No Depression’s website, I just burned out about six months deep into the pandemic in 2020 and quit. Recently I saw a quote that summed it up well: there was no more toothpaste left in the tube. I tried to switch over to here, the website, whenever I got the urge to write but as you probably can tell, that hasn’t worked out too well.

Where my efforts have been largely focused are on the The Real Easy Ed American and Roots Music Daily page over on Facebook, now exceeding 3,400 followers in what I had anticipated to be only a few hundred when I began it. I aggregate music news, videos, reviews, history and humor, with occasionally breaking off for a whirlwind of words on topics excluding those mentioned. Call it political or cultural, social or whatever is on my mind, simply for laziness I title these A Daily Broadside. A more apt description might be therapy, or a release of the thoughts and ideas from a troubled mind.

I’d ask how y’all have been, but there’s no place to reply because the comment section here was deactivated long ago when I first started the site. Instead, you can share over on the FB page until your heart’s content, often receiving an acknowledgement or dialog from me or fellow followers. It’s become a nice little community of music fans which needs little water and feeding. The garden is mostly self-tended, although I tend to sometimes toss out any cult members who might offend me with their 45-isms. And emails are welcome as well, but stop asking me to write reviews for your music at No Depression….that’ll get you nowhere.

Here’s A Daily Broadside you may have missed from January 1, 2020:

 

So here’s a bit of family history I’ll share with y’all.

This album on the left was released in 1972, and included actual test sheets that you’d fill out after listening, to see what your score was. It was co-written by my cousin Arnold Maxin, who served as president of MGM Records throughout much of the 60s, and previously did A&R for Okeh in the 50s. His production credits include Screaming Jay Hawkins’ ‘I Put A Spell On You’, about half of everything Connie Francis ever recorded, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

He got the parent company MGM Studios in California to let him prove to them there was a market for soundtracks, and he also turned several films into Broadway shows. He was there signing deals for groups like the Animals, Cowsills and Ultimate Spinach, and was featured in a piece for Billboard that stated Dylan had created a new genre for singer-songwriters that would be the future, and one of his final acts as prez was picking up distribution for a label called Poppy Records in 1966. Soon after he left MGM, Poppy released the first Townes Van Zandt album.

Between then and the release of this first and only album on his own label, I guess he may have been busy doing the research. After that he was involved in a number of projects, both in and out of music. And that’s pretty much the end of the story, as he passed on a few decades ago. On the right he’s with Hank Williams Jr. In defense of Arnold on how MGM milked Hank Sr.’s catalog after his death with endless schlock releases of albums with added strings and duets with Jr., that all came out of the Nashville office which wielded their own power and decisions. Our family legacy remains intact.

Spencer Williams, Jr.was an actor and director who entered the film business at a time when “race movies” were being made alongside the Hollywood versions. Race movies were low-budgeted and mostly aimed at black audiences in segregated movie-houses of the South and where large city black populations lived in the North.

What might make this interesting to American roots music fans is his continual juxtaposition between the gospel of Sunday mornings versus the blues and jazz of Saturday nights in many of his storylines. I got a chance to watch a montage of film scenes last night, and discovered today that many of his films are available on YouTube.

Most film historians consider The Blood of Jesus to be Williams’ crowning achievement as a filmmaker. Dave Kehr of The New York Times called the film “magnificent” and Time magazine counted it among its “25 Most Important Films on Race.” In 1991, The Blood of Jesus became the first race film to be added to the U.S. National Film Registry.

I should also mention that many of his films have also been the subject of criticism. Richard Corliss for Time wrote:

“Aesthetically, much of Williams’ work vacillates between inert and abysmal. The rural comedy of Juke Joint is logy, as if the heat had gotten to the movie; even the musical scenes, featuring North Texas jazzman Red Calhoun, move at the turtle tempo of Hollywood’s favorite black of the period, Stepin Fetchit.” 

He had a long career as an actor, writer, director, and producer in motion pictures before becoming known to general audiences for his role as Andy in the television version of The Amos ‘n Andy Show (1951).

Let’s take a moment or two and talk about albums that were released in 2021. As those who’ve followed me know, I absolutely abhor those ridiculous end of the year lists whether from reader polls, reviewers or hacks like me. There are no arbiters of what one’s treasure versus trash is, and at best all we can do is perhaps share some things we’ve enjoyed and maybe you might want to explore it yourself. Rankings, and words like best and greatest, are an affront to the hard work that all artists put into their work. Same reason I hate negative reviews: if you have nothing good to say, why say it? The only benefit to any list is that there really is too much music being released, and it’s impossible to sort out on one’s own.

So this year on the FB page I gave everybody a chance to list one and only one favorite album, with the rule being no duplicates. So you needed to read ’em before adding your own. Turned out pretty interesting, with about 75 responses.

But then, knowing that there are those who have suffer from OCD and have a desperate need to share their own lists, I created the above. Here’s some – but not all, sorry – responses. Represents a really wide spectrum of taste, and not quite looking like all the other cookie cutter Americana lists out there in the internet ether.

From Matthew Bashioum, who gave me the idea: