(Covering) Strange
Location, location, location, as in when Fred Moten theorizes about the tropes and aesthetics of escape and fugitivity that power certain black expressive cultures, it is always almost understood this also about a devotion or incarceration (take your pick) to place. Simply put, there's nothing never to escape to or escape from if without this fidelity to someplace, somewhere. So when Stuart Gorrell got to thinking about "Georgia on My Mind" it was the sister of Hoagy Carmichael (who wrote the music) and we'll accept that the feminine can be a metaphor for place, but when Ray Charles sings "Georgia on My Mind" it can never be nothing but place.
Lizz Wright's most recent recordings, Dreams Wide Awake and The Orchard, evoke the beauty of the pastoral south, which for African-Americans of southern heritage, animates the irony of loving (even aesthetically) the very Southern plantations that were the literal sites of our brutality; so desired because of that very beauty (amidst the betrayal) and the capacity of these places to generate a generational wealth that we hungered for. It's no surprise that many of the institutions in Black America have appropriated some aspects of the political economy of the plantation--including aesthetically--in order function as legible subjects in an American contexts. I can't help thinking about what's on Lizz Wright's mind.
In publicity photos, Wright often possesses a sly look of bemusement, like someone whose very being is linked to a fated incarceration to the images that propel her into a relative celebrity among jazz contemporary aficionados. Wright's smile--something like an offhanded joke played out only in her mind or an all too secret shiver in her coital region--is less about the boredom of doing yet another photo-shoot where Verve can exploit her own pastoral beauty (in direct opposition in the girlish android-noids found in contemporary R&B), but an artful act that itself represents an engagement (not a masking) of the full weight of having to be in this place.
To think this "Strange" place, to turn a phrase on Wright's cover of Patsy Cline's country classic, or to consider Chocolate Genius's invocation to chase said Strangeness (duly amen-ed by Wright), is to engage in an almost remembered mythology about how race and music are supposed to be imagined. And even as we hear the strains of Craig Street, with ample assistance from Toshi Reagon, order the very logic of The Orchard, it resists being an event; instead drawing from the everyday strangeness of the those who have struggled to make sense of our devotion to that which we should (and do) ostensibly hate. I mean, imagine Lizz Wright walking into a country bar in Macon in 1962 singing somebody's Patsy Cline. And yet, how many black folk might have shed a tear when Cline's voice was silenced, as they might have shed a tear for Hank Williams, Sr. a few years before?
As such Wright's choice of covers--easily the strongest performances on The Orchard--give pause; demons (Ike Turner) and royalty (Sweet Honey in the Rock) and curiosities (Cline and Led Zeppelin) among them--the cynic in me wants to think that Wright (or likely her record company)was picking covers like one might pick peaches from an orchard in the month of June, but yet the execution of these covers suggest much more. Lizz Wright is not Norah Jones.
Wright's performance of the Ike & Tina Turner's "I Idolize You" is rife with all of the dramatic irony that was wholly missing in Tina Turner and Beyonce's recent Grammy performance of "Proud Mary"; Ms. Turner and Ms. Knowles index the considerable distances between the worlds that they and Ms. Wright inhabit, where Ms. Wright finds a freedom--laying in the [strangeness]--to critique, speak back to, argue with, and even embrace the music that was produced in collaboration with one of the most volatile and violent relationships that pop music has ever known. With our second sight firmly recalled, "I Idolize You" gives more inkling to the unhealthy obsession that Ike Turner had for the woman who served as his idol, his inspiration, and his meal ticket. Wright's version, which forces us to taste everyone of those lyrics, manages to find something there needing our care, asking us to consider how Ike Turner might have been betrayed by that place and the people trying to make sense of the absurdity of that place. Got forward a few years and listen to how Ms. Turner screams "Nutbush."
And if you've ever heard Robert Plant scream, it is perhaps apropos to ask what terror(s) he gives voice to. Plant's plaintive vocals on the original version "Thank You" sanction an emotiveness--and we can write Jeff Buckley into this also--that spoke to the boundary collapsing--politically, socially, aesthetically--of the late 1960s; boundary collapsing that was immediately policed (in some spheres they called it busing). We should read Wright's cover in that same light--of course a young black woman from rural Georgia should feel compelled to cover Led Zeppelin. Ask any black kid, who was bussed to a largely white school district (and this is my man Jon Caramanica's argument, by the way), and damned if they weren't fully present in that experience, if they tell you that they were never forced to listen to Led Zeppelin or some other version of Jesus Rock ("yes, I've seen the great guitar god!"). Perhaps ask Bettye LaVette what it means to speak back to that, though the same kids who claim to love Janis Joplin, ain't never heard of Bettye LaVette and that's the very reason why Lizz Wright has every right to sing Led Zeppelin or anybody else she so pleases to cover.
Tags: Lizz Wright, Musical Covers, The South
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