Let's Go Huntin'!
11/18/2005 11:47:31 AM
By Steve Fielder
“Let’s Go Huntin’.” How many times have you heard those words in the course of your coon hunting experience? They may have come in a phone call at dusk from your hunting buddy or perhaps at a midnight gathering of the final four at a coonhound money hunt. Whether invitation or challenge, the words inspire the same result – “We’re about to cut ‘em loose!”
Cutting loose is what performer/song writer Tim O’Brien does in his latest offering from Sugar Hill Records, the label of choice of some pretty recognizable talents such as Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and Ricky Scaggs.
I became acquainted with O’Brien, who just happens to be from my home state of West Virginia, when brother Randy sent me the Cornbread Nation CD for my birthday. I ripped the entire album to my MP3 player and was literally blown away by the entire body of work, but especially so with the fifth cut, “Let’s Go Huntin’” which I simply had to share with visitors to Coonhounds at the AKC. Here it is:
Our special thanks to Molly Nagel, Director, Artist & Media Relations at Sugar Hill Records for the opportunity to share the artistry of Tim O’Brien with coon hunters everywhere.
For more information on Tim O'Brien and other Sugar Hill artists, visit the Sugar Hill web site at: http://www.sugarhillrecords.com/
More about Cornbread Nation
Tim O’Brien
Sugar Hill Records
“You don’t need to tell a Southerner about the cozy relationship between music and food. Both are nourishing and better with some spice. They both come from ancient sources, but you can make a new dish or a new song today if you take a mind to. Best of all, both express individuality. A song or a recipe will look the same on paper to ten different people, but they’ll give you ten different expressions of the same thing.
“That’s just a bit of the philosophy that made Cornbread Nation the title track of Tim O’Brien’s new electro-coustic neo-folk album on Sugar Hill Records. The tune itself, an O’Brien original, was inspired by a book and radio show of that name about Southern food. The sound, of the song and the album, was shaped by a certain tug toward the Delta, where the skillets are blacker and greasier. That took form with a call to the Kennys, specifically guitarist Kenny Vaughan and drummer/percussionist Kenny Malone.
“Vaughan has become one of Nashville’s most sought-after guitarists, as beloved for his tasteful ensemble playing as for his chin-shaking leads. He’s played with everyone, but recently became an anchor in Marty Stuart’s band. "Getting Kenny Vaughan in on the project turned it in the right direction,” O’Brien says. “I wanted to get a little dirtier with it."
“Meanwhile Malone, a drummer with decades of experience in Music City, has become the heartbeat of many O’Brien projects since they first collaborated in about 1999. “He doesn’t rule anything. He’s always reinforcing what’s happening,” says Tim. “He just knows the right thing to do. It’s kind of magic. He anticipates somehow.”
“In addition, there are key contributions from banjo player Charlie Cushman, fiddler Casey Driessen, guitarist John Doyle, and old friends like Stuart Duncan (fiddle), Jerry Douglas (dobro), Darrell Scott (vocals), and Dennis Crouch (bass). As with every other Tim O’Brien album, it’s a collaboration—a real-time sound adventure where the contributions of all add up to something good enough to eat.”
The Tracks:
Keep Your Hands On The Plow
Bass player Crouch sets this traditional gospel song a-moving with a Johnny Cash backslap, while guitarist Vaughan decorates the track with tasteful electric twang.
Moses
Nashville singers Odessa Settles and Todd Suttles lend their powerful voices to this old hymn, which Tim found on a recording by the Georgia Sea Island Singers. Darrell Scott leads the singers in a free-wheeling call and response that makes the track jump like a Baptist sermon.
Cornbread Nation
It’s been a book and a radio show, so why not a song? Tim’s lyric shows off his skill at crisp, fast-moving wordplay. You might say he’s cooking.
The Foggy Foggy Dew
This curious tale of an imprudent relationship became a hit for fifties folk crooner Burl Ives, and Tim began imagining his own version after hearing the much more gravelly and contemporary Greg Brown track it. Tim’s version swings sweetly, “sort of Dean Martinized” he quips.
Let’s Go Huntin’
This tub-thumping hillbilly rave-up was one of the first songs Tim knew he wanted to record. The jump-start was an Alan Lomax field recording made in Texas. Casey Driessen sets the hound-dog feel with outrageously blue fiddling, and the ensemble rocks along like a wagon with bad shocks. “We just did one take. I said this is music we can’t mess up,” Tim remembers.
Walkin’ Boss
Like many folk music fans, Tim heard the song first from Doc Watson. “You think it’s a work song and then you realize it works with some of the ‘Nine Pound Hammer’ verses, most of which are couplets from very traditional sources,” Tim says. “‘Rings like silver, shines like gold,’ for example. Other words are from ‘In The Pines.’ It’s a nice groove.”
The House of the Rising Sun
Tim came of age singing the infectious and now famous arrangement of Eric Burdon and the Animals. And they are said to have copped it from Josh White. But Tim now knows even earlier recordings of this searing tale of a girl lured astray, and they informed this take. Says O’Brien: “it was kind of nice to go back to it and say, ‘this is a little closer to what started it up.’”
Runnin’ Out Of Memory For You
Written at the turn of the Millennium with an Irish professor friend, this spoof was inspired by a joke about brains and computers. Some of the song’s dial-up era references seem archaic already, so it passes muster as a folk song. That’s why bluegrass star Del McCoury sounds so good on harmony vocals.
Busted
“I used to sing it with Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers,” says Tim. “I love the song. I learned it from Hazel Dickens’ version and then realized that Cash had sung it at Folsom Prison, and Ray Charles did the hell out of it really. It sounds like a Depression-era song. I don’t know what Harlan Howard’s background is that way. But it’s a real working man’s viewpoint.”
California Blues
O’Brien sees parallels between this Jimmie Rodgers yodel and Busted -- a confident optimism in the face of hard times. “Rodgers always had this kind of devil may care attitude. That’s in there. He doesn’t sound quite destitute. That’s an American thing, the idea that you can pull up stakes and go.”
Boat Up The River
“I read a book recently on the big flood in 1927 and all the political and social ramifications of it. It’s a really interesting story,” says Tim. And that story was related in numerous songs. Tim married a melody from Ola Belle Reed with a lyric from Roscoe Holcomb he found on the internet. The cyber-folk tradition in action.
When This World Comes To An End
This one comes from the singing Hammons Family in West Virginia, and it was new to Tim. “I was looking around for stuff, and I thought this would work great. I almost cut it like a bluegrass song, but it just happened that Kenny Vaughan was there that day, and it was working out so good I said, ‘turn your amp up a little bit more.’” Todd and Odessa return here for a searing gospel outro to the album.
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