Simon Flory – Haul These Blues Away
Independent – 26 February 2021
Born in Indiana but now calling Forth Worth, Texas home, a former member of High Plains Jamboree alongside Brennen Leigh and Noel McKay, Simon Flory’s steeped in the sound of early country, conjuring thoughts of The Carter Family, Williams and their ilk. This is his fourth album, his third in as many years, kicking off with Peter Mack Built a Semi Truck, a cast firmly in Guthrie train-time rhythm mould (even if it does namecheck Hank Williams), the refrain providing the album title as in “All I need is little ol’ you standing’ next to me/To haul these blues away”.
Banjo in the mix, Learning How To Talk is about finding your own voice, even if no one’s listening, offering the received wisdom “Don’t hate the ones who take life from you/The wind will kick up and you’ll be gone for good” and aspiring to the things that really matter (“I don’t want whiskey off the top shelf/I want an unbroke heart and nothing else”).
He has an idiosyncratic way with imagery, as for example on Walking, a spoken intro, simply strummed, fiddle-coloured clinging to a relationship duet with Daisy O’Connor where he declares “I’m a walking stick/I used to have six legs… Now I’m down/To my last leg/Propped up against your door/But I’m still knockin’/Because I want you more”. Keeping to the dysfunctional relationship path (“there’s just one too many of us in this single wide 14 by 72 feet of lies”), a hillbilly blues stomp, The More You Talk (The Less I Hear) finds him complaining how “I got to work in the morning you stay in bed/I work them fingers to the bone and come home half dead/Then it’s cold beer for supper and what you wanna do/Fight on the front porch under an Ozark moon”, finally waking up to find her gone and that “There’s no one here but me so I fight with myself/And miss you like the devil misses you down in hell”.
Things don’t really pick up on Big Bad Lover either (“It’s Friday night I’m all alone/Thinking’ on her drinking at home/I don’t cry on her memory/Cause it’s been years since she’s been gone”), charting another butting of personalities (“I was big I was bad/She was big she was bad bad bad”) and again casting a poetic net across love and loss (“ Now the bottle’s dry and I’m haunted by/Shadows that cling to passers by/I’ve learned to climb from the darkness deep/To apparitions of reality”).
Returning to a dry, sparse banjo accompaniment, here with a clanking work song rhythm and mournful yeehawing, If My Mule Had Wings was apparently inspired by a fantasy of a beast of burden sprouting wings and singing while toiling away in the furrows of life, manifesting as a song of defiance in the face of oppression (“Don’t let them tell you how to live your life/As you cut the red clay following behind”).
A co-write with Zach Schmidt, riding a perky percussive guitar strum and frills, the playful bouncy talking blues Hogback Road draws on the tradition of encounters with the devil, where else but on Route 666, except here it’s about a partnership in a hard scrabble, god-forsaken Virginia farm (“He’s got a light for your smoke when you need a fix”) and going fishing together on the river Styx.
Simply fingerpicked, Atoka, a small town on the edge of the Choctaw Nation in Oklahoma and the home of Reba McEntire and bull rider Lane Frost (both of whom the lyrics reference along with a prison, coal mine, civil war museum and a dinosaur bone) is, in fact, a disarmingly touching driving home to you love song about the human condition (“Let’s drive until the maintenance ends we’ll sit on the hood and talk like friends/That’s one thing we ain’t done yet… Let’s do something different tonite, not get drunk and start to fight/Whisper my name I forget how it sounds”). Played three-finger banjo style, it ends with the slow and sparse traditional instrumental Spanish Fandango, but not before one more song of defiance against those who give you debt, lies, heartache and pain, Have Your Adventure taking its cue from his granny’s favourite saying about dealing with life, a reminder that “It’s never too late to make your hay while the sun shines” and “When hard times come and they’ll come for sure/You can fold your hands or drink down a cure”. An album steeped in hardships and hurt perhaps, but ultimately a hymn to finding contentment and your own way in the world.
Website: https://simonflory.com/
Photo Credit: Brook Burris