Sam Amidon – Fatal Flower Garden
Nonesuch Records – 15 November 2019
At the point of writing this – 27/11/19 – it’s twenty-eight years since the passing of Harry Smith. Famed for his experimental forays into visual art and filmmaking, the master hoarder also compiled arguably one of the most influential collections of recorded music in history. Released in 1952 and reissued by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings in 1997, the Anthology of American Folk Music ‘synthesised interconnecting worlds of art, literature, anthropology and esotericism’, whilst serving as a ‘bible’ of sorts for countless curious musicians. Alongside Smith himself, it’s considered quite the enigma.
“He didn’t eat food, he subsisted entirely on the mysteries of culture” joked Sam Amidon recently, the next artist in a long line to take up the mantel and perform his own spin on four Anthology classics. He continued:
“I love listening through the Anthology for its window in to 1920s musical practices in all their varied glory, but also for the silent consciousness of Harry Smith behind the whole thing… whether it was the feeling of Thelonious Monk’s rhythmic phrasing; the patterns in string games and Ukrainian egg painting designs; the wild fiddle tunes; or the epic folk ballads. He understood American Folk Music to be a wildly heterogeneous category that included multiple cultural, racial, and linguistic elements.”
Initially commissioned as a live concert by Ancienne Belgique in Brussels, Belgium, Fatal Flower Garden sees the left-field folksinger pair up with Shahzad Ismaily & Leo Abrahams, as Amidon intuitively channels the spirit of ‘old, weird America’ through turns both radical and reflective.
“Take this hammer and carry it to my captain, tell him I’m gone”, sweetly intones Amidon on opener Spike Driver Blues. With its work song roots, it references the hero of American folklore, John Henry. Henry was a railroad worker who famously went toe-to-toe with his company’s new steam-powered drill. The dynamo outpaced the machine, but died shortly after. The Library of Congress features recordings of The Ballad of John Henry (such as that of Harold Hazelhurst) where we can hear the singers driving railroad spikes to keep pace as they grind, chant and sweat. William Grimes recently noted the significance of this tale:
“Any worker facing the new world of mechanized labour understood the John Henry story. For coal miners he was a miner; for railroad workers he was a trackman; for Communist organizers he was “the hero of the greatest proletarian epic ever created. Civil rights workers saw him as an emblem of black oppression and defiance”
Amidon unpieces Country bluesman, Mississippi John Hurt’s ragtime wrap-around, taking some extra inspiration from a favourite Taj Mahal live take along the way. Hurt’s unhurried delivery and lyrics state plainly, he’s not looking to suffer the same fate as Henry. The scuttle and sigh of Ismaily’s brush and shaker work, plus Amidon’s plaintive drag, seem to mimic this reluctance. They lean back even further, tempo slacking, harmonised electric lines unshackled and wandering.
Title-track Fatal Flower Garden follows. Nelstone’s Hawaiians’ original is a microcosmic oddity (heavy on the cosmic) in and of itself; as a standalone offering, it represents the ambiguous, occasionally cabalistic underside of the Anthology. With ties to the sinister Child ballad Sir Hugh / The Jew’s Daughter, the song gives a peculiar Brothers Grimm impression. Yet, underneath a sedimentary layer of tape hiss, with the queasy accompanying slide and an upper-harmony barely hanging in there, Nelstone’s Hawaiians deliver it with an almost jarringly detached air. Robin Purves described it as:
“(It) sounds like a nursery rhyme compared with the many unaccompanied and more ‘authentic’ recordings of older textual variants. It is decidedly shorter and less bloody than other versions and yet somehow more chilling and more memorable… when we listen to this song, we are listening also, somehow, to what we are not hearing”
Amidon teases out the uncanny sadness behind their two-stroke strum. After an ominous intro and first verse, Fatal Flower Garden opens up, notes scattering like spilling salt. A curious melancholia creeps in. Ill omens seem to circle, as the song’s gruesome history of kidnapping, racist undertones and ritual sacrifice is brought to our attention.
Borrowing from Bascom Lamar Lunsford and Social Music, the second volume of the Anthology, Dry Bones In The Valley sees Amidon create a wash of meditative acoustic and pedal-heavy keys recalling Tallest Man on Earth, around There’s No Leaving Now. With a soft utterance of, “I saw the light from heaven shining all around. I saw the light come shining, I saw the light come down” his voice cuts through the persisting cloud-cover, revealing a more sedated singer/songwriter side, more in line with Sufjan and Sam Beam. It glides by, a considerably easier ride than Roswell Rudd & Sonic Youth’s abstract pile-up for the Harry Smith Project.
However, Amidon’s just been waiting for his moment. His take on J.P. Nestor & Norman S. Edmonds clawhammer scramble, Train on the Island immediately de-rails (hear it on the latest Folk Radio UK Lost in Transmission show). Making knots of their flailing fiddle groove, his belching groan trails out to a heavy automated backbeat, as strained snippets of vocals duck and fall away. More reflective of his frenetic live performances, it proves how pliable and essential Smith’s songbook really is. Archivist Rory Crutchfield cited another Anthology authority, Robert Cantwell when he observed:
“Cantwell promotes the idea that the Anthology can be viewed as a vehicle for transformation, and that Smith not only transforms a collection of 78 rpm records into a ‘memory theatre’, but also transforms many disparate types of songs, performers and performance contexts, into something that can be called folk music”
On Fatal Flower Garden we hear Amidon step into the mystic’s “memory theatre” as he draws from the collection’s complex, revolutionary and endlessly fascinating songs and subject matter. Like the Anthology itself, what he produces roughly translates as folk music; the boundaries seem profoundly blurred as he traces the outline of an arcane America. Expansive and eccentric in equal measure, it just goes to show there’s plenty more digging worth doing, out on the hallowed plains of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.
Watch: Sam Amidon presents ‘The Anthology of American Folk Music’ Live at AB – Ancienne Belgique
For live dates, including shows with Xylouris White in New York, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania visit here.