by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Thanksgiving in Nashville, With Ry Cooder and Friends

       This time every year I listen to the Last Waltz concert, which took place on Thanksgiving Day 1976 in San Francisco: the Band and friends – Joni, Neil, Bob, Muddy, Eric, Van, and the rest – celebrating the band’s history and saying a weird and needless farewell.  

Concert Vault has audio of the full four-hour-plus concert, including a bit of the “Canterbury Tales” read in Middle English and the Lord’s Prayer recited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of all people.   Lately, it has added full video: a simple black and white feed probably used by the sound and light technicians to keep track of things.  (It’s available on YouTube, too.)   To see The Last Waltz in B&W is a strange, reverse effect; this concert, known first through a movie expertly filmed and edited in 70mm by Martin Scorsese and put out in wide release, is now a video bootleg, a concert seen through the keyhole.

That’s the effect of seeing so  many of the full-length concerts now posted on YouTube.   Once a home for short videos, the site now hosts dozens of shows that are seen as too long to support a commercial release.  The Tedeschi- Trucks Band’s full-concert reworking of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen is one.  

The Americana Music Association’s concert honoring Ry Cooder is another. It took place in September a year ago, but I wouldn’t have known about it except for YouTube.   I graze there for old slide guitar videos from time to time, and one night, there it was: a Last Waltz-style gathering of Cooder and his friends and associates from over the years – Flaco Jimenez, Loretta Lynn, Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell, Jason Isbell, Taj Mahal (doing a stage-shaking Statesboro Blues) and Jackson Browne (doing “Fountain of Sorrow”).  Through it all, there is Ry sitting on a chair stage left and working his rack of customized guitars: the sideman as star.  

Meant as an ending, The Last Waltz was the beginning of something: it was the concert that carried the old-time musical revue (perfected at the Grande Ole Opry) into the age of the multiplex, whence it has migrated to YouTube.

The Americana concert is here.   Happy Thanksgiving from Ry Cooder and company.

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 63: Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights”

Allen Toussaint was to play the Hamilton in Washington on November 30, and a plan was fallling into place for a group of us to go hear him after an event about the death penalty that day – which is the World Day Against the Death Penalty.  But Toussaint died earlier today, age 77, struck by a heart attack after a concert in Madrid; and with him two traditions – the tradition of pre-rock-and-roll New Orleans music, and the pre-rock-and-roll tradition (still going on in Nashville) whereby songwriters subsisted through royalties for versions of their songs done by other artists – go a little deeper into the grave.

It’s an apt coincidence – if not a happy one – that this post follows immediately on one about Elvis Costello, who collaborated with Toussaint in all sorts of ways in recent years – and who has done as much as anyone to carry forward Toussaint-style songwriting, at once direct, complex, and tender.

If you’ve never heard Toussaint singing his own song “Southern Nights,” do yourself a favor and click on this video.   It’s from Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York, where Toussaint graced the city with several dozen Southern nights of solo performances after he was displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.   On this video, Toussaint tells the stories of some of those southern nights, adding sound effects on the piano – with such easy elegance that you come away thinking we’ve lost not just one of our great songwriters, but one of our great storytellers, too.