Tim Stafford and Thomm Jutz’s ‘Wall Dogs’ is an unfussy, downhome album…warmed by the fire of human connections, longings and lives lived.
Having already released collaborative albums with Tammy Rogers, Martin Simpson and Eric Brace within the past two years, Thom Jutz resumes his partnership with bluegrass player Stafford for a follow-up to the duo’s 2023 Lost Voices. Sharing vocals and guitar and joined by Mark Fain on upright bass, Rogers on fiddle, banjo maestro Ron Block and mandolinist Thomas Cassell, it’s again very much rooted in the genre, launching with the sprightly Everywhere A Mountain, a life’s an uphill struggle number (“No matter who you are or where you are, if you want to live a full life you have to climb a mountain/Every day, again and again”) and the resolution to “climb them one by one”.
The gently picked South Moon Under was inspired by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ 1933 novel of the same title, a story of a hard-scrabble life rooted in her move to the Big Scrub of Florida in 1928, with its pragmatic view that in “a world of danger and wonder” there “ain’t nothing worse than people and snakes/both of them come in all sizes and shapes/Gotta go kill ‘em off if that’s what it takes” and you need to “trust in a pistol instead of a plan”.
The title track is one of several inspired by true life history. Wall Dogs is the nickname given to the sign painters who would work from scaffolds, hanging off the side of buildings and painting advertisements by hand. As the song recounts, during the Depression, the mural division of the WPA Federal Art Project employed many such artists to create over 2500 murals, many of which still adorn post offices and other public buildings across America, their faded work an integral aspect of small-town America.
It’s not the only track to summon Woody Guthrie’s musical and lyrical spirit and his tributes to America’s ordinary working blue-collar Joes and Joans. The Last Spike is about the railway workers who laid down the tracks in the Old West, duly noting how “The barons made the dollars/And the workers paid the cost/They barely heard the warning/Before the blast of dynamite”, the song especially relating to the trans-Canadian railway and the hammering in of its last spike, the workers then “laid off and sent away”.
That’s followed directly by Banner Girls, the second song this year, following the recent While and Matthews album, to celebrate the Kalamazoo Girls, the female workforce who, from 1942 to 1945, staffed the Gibson Musical Instrument Company, building the guitars when they men where away at war, the title referring to famous “Banner” Gibson guitars adorned by a signature peghead flag reading “Only a Gibson is Good Enough”. Fittingly, it features Jutz playing his all-mahogany 1945 Gibson Banner J-45.
Again anchored in history, the dreamier Mona Lisa Of The Deep takes its title from one of 10 daguerreotype and ambrotype photographs recovered intact in 2014 from the wreck of the S.S. Central, which sank in a hurricane in 1857 off the North Carolina coast on the way from Panama to New York with the loss of 425 lives. Echoing the mystery of Van Gogh’s masterpiece, the duo have crafted an imagined love story, with the woman in the photo having died on her way to reunite with her lover (“The letters on his gravestone read/My Mona Lisa of the Deep/I mourned your death my whole life through/I wish I would have drowned with you”).
One of humanity’s most enduring symbols is the subject of The Cross, a number shaded by old Gospel songs as they note how “Opposites in each direction /birth, death and resurrection/All that’s won and all that’s lost/Come together in the cross”. In contrast, the musically expansive and moodier Anywhere Else is a simple (and perhaps existential) song of wanderlust (“Anywhere else, my destination/Not coming back, my aspiration/Just like this old tumbleweed/On my own, all I desire/Rolling along between wind and wire”).
With Jutz on banjo-guitar, Arnold’s Trip was inspired by Black American and guitarist Arnold Schultz, who, every year around the turn of the last century, would supposedly winter in New Orleans. The reality’s disputed, but that’s never been an obstacle to a good song as the pair imagine him “Walking down the streets of Rosine/Humming a little tune/Tipping his hat to the ladies/Knowing he’ll be playing soon/For a dance beneath the harvest moon”.
Sharing a similar idea with the opening track and equally jaunty, sparked by Stafford getting a speeding ticket and with the first verse about slaving way on a song only to find someone’s already used the same title or story (“There you stand with all your wisdom/Cut down an inch or two/Any way you slice it looking like a pure damn fool”) Laugh It’s Only Life is succinctly summed up in its final line “You can scream and cuss about it but what’s that gonna do?/Just roll down your window/Might as well enjoy the view”.
Social commentary about racial injustice makes a late appearance on the bluesily fingerpicked penultimate Sundown Town, an imaginary conversation between an African American who finds himself somewhere he dangerous and an old-time preacher who advises “I don’t know how you made it here/You must have missed the sign/But let me tell you now my friend/Some folks ‘round here ain’t kind …Best to grab your grip and go/Don’t take your time, don’t be slow/Don’t hang around a sundown town”.
It ends with Dale Ann Bradley on vocals for the folksy picked Tin Foil Star, a personal memory from Stafford about how, sung in his wife’s voice, every Christmas in Virginia, her late father would cut out a cardboard star wrapped in tinfoil to top the family tree, a lovely sensory metaphor for a simple life and making the best of what you have (“We never had a lot, but we always had enough/The house smelled like heaven, green beans and ham/Cinnamon and coffee, rolls and homemade jam”). Like its closing track, this is an unfussy, downhome album with its roots deep in the musicians’ personal and musical heritages, played with unshowy skills and warmed by the fire of human connections, longings and lives lived.
Wall Dogs (18th October 2024) Self Released
Order here: https://thommjutz.com/store