Allison Moorer – Blood
Autotelic Records/Thirty Tigers – Out Now
Anyone who knows about Allison Moorer will be aware of the teenage tragedy that tore apart the lives of her and her sister Shelby Lynne (interviewed here on Folk Radio) when, one summer night in 1986, they were awoken in their Alabama home to the sound of gunshots, and found their parents dead on the lawn, their father having shot their mother and then turned the gun on himself.
It’s a trauma that’s haunted both sisters’ music over the years, but recently Moorer published Blood: A Memoir, an autobiographical memoir that addressed what happened in-depth for the first time. This album, her ninth, is an accompanying companion piece, one which would be a devastating listen even without the real-life events that it recounts.
Produced by Kenny Greenberg, it’s an appropriately stark affair that uses its instrumentation, which features piano, fiddle, trumpet and tape loops alongside the regular guitars and drums, to minimalist but powerful effect. It opens in brooding style with the foreboding of the slow swaying Bad Weather, a song about depression and needing emotional release as, namedropping Kathleen Edwards, she sings how “The sun ain’t breakin’ through the haze/I’m on the edge of never/Waiting on the rain” and feeling like an “empty porch swing swinging…Longing to serve its purpose/It must be jealous of this chair”.
Cold Cold Earth then jumps right in with the solo strummed account of her parents last hours, of her father, “a slave to the bottle” sat awake slowly going mad “regretting that he’d thrown away the only love he had” and thinking of “a wife and two daughters he treated so terribly”. The closing lines “such a sad, sad story; such a sad, sad world” are heartbreaking in their simplicity. The song originally appeared as a hidden track on 2000’s The Hardest Part, at a time when she wanted to talk about what happened but wasn’t ready to go so obviously public.
Equally stripped back, harmonising with herself the gently melodic Nightlight is a tender song of a protective sisterly bond, the tragedy adding poignant resonance as, recalling lying in bed, hearing their parents argue, she sings “Hold on to my hand; don’t let go/Remember that she will eventually show/But until she hears us call/And tip-toes down the hall/You’re my nightlight”.
The strength afforded by their mother amid the storms visited by their father is given testament in the funky Bobby Gentry-like Southern groove of The Rock and the Hill, sung in the voice of Laura Lynn Smith Moorer “Standing with my babies in the chicken pen/Watching over like a nervous mother hen”.
One could forgive both sisters for carrying hate in their hearts about what their father, did, and yet, movingly, the album and the memoir speak more of compassion for Vernon, an embittered, failed songwriter who drowned his frustrations in drink and took them out on his family, he and his wife bound by a love they couldn’t survive but couldn’t let go. It’s a generosity of the heart that allows her to include I’m The One To Blame, a raw nerved song composed of fragments of confessional lyrics written in 1967, found in his suitcase after his death and completed by her sister, where he admits how jealousy and pride took their toll and asks for forgiveness. Delivered with just acoustic guitar backing, it’s almost impossible to listen to without falling apart.
Equally, on Set My Soul Free, you hear her father’s voice in the moment before taking his own life in the lines “I just can’t stand to see the sun shine one more time without her” and that “Finding a light now ain’t a possibility”.
From here, the journey moves to resolution and the need to accept and move on and find healing rather than be buried under the anger and hurt with the fingerpicked, almost hymnal The Ties That Bind as she acknowledges “I’ve been dragging your legacy/And the weight is just about taken me down” and asks “Can I take the good and leave the rest behind?”
There is though, a difference between forgiving and forgetting and All I Wanted (Thanks Anyway) returns her to those years of domestic violence, of a woman scarred by abuse but inside still harbouring the child looking for a father’s affection (“My body bears your bruise/Your spirit’s on my tongue/But my memory tells the truth/All I wanted was your love”). She declares the impossibility of denying the truth of who you are (“I buried all the clues/Tried to wash away who I was/But I couldn’t get rid of you”), but understands that acceptance and forgiveness, of them and herself, brings catharsis and the ability to recentre and move on because you are not defined by the hurt you have experienced.
The title track actually first appeared on 2015’s Down To Believing, here reduced to the musical bare-bones as, “the keeper of the flame”, she returns to the theme of legacy and identity with “I got your blood running through my veins”, the number now ending with the borrowed coda “No we ain’t got a barrel of money/Maybe we’re ragged and funny/But we’ll travel along, singin’ a song/Side by side”.
It ends with the Mary Gauthier co-write Heal, a spine-tingling piano-backed prayer for release and, tired of being “Another orphan waitin’ in the lost-and-found… fighting a fight I cannot win”, of the courage to “lay my weapons down/Help me give the love I feel/Help me hold myself with kindness/And help me heal”.
By her own admission, Moorer has spent over three decades in a dark tunnel, hiding, repressing, avoiding, plagued by conflicting emotions and self-doubt. Here, confronting the demons, celebrating her mother but recognising that her troubled father, as she puts in the book, also deserves “credit… understanding… recognition… compassion… and love”, she has emerged into the light, bringing with her the finest music of her career to date.
Blood is out now. Order via Amazon
Also, Blood: A Memoir to which the album is a companion piece, is published on Da Capo Press and is available via Amazon here.
Photo Credit: Heidi Ross