The singers who last blues bards, country music storytellers and true jazz vocalists tell stories of real life: loss, longing, fulfillment, and the irrepressible determination to keep on keeping on. They also have a saving wit, like in the venerable blues lyric: Im gonna lay my head on the railroad track and when the train comes, Im gonna yank it back.
Delbert McClinton embodies these qualities of what I call the life force of music as in this new session, Cost of Living, on which he wrote or co-wrote all of these songs of what he calls days in the life. (The one exception is Jimmy Reeds Ill Change My Style.
In a Wall Street Journal article I wrote about him years ago, Lone Star Troubadour, I told of the first time I heard him singing in a club, the blues, rhythm and blues, rock and honky-tonk country songs for nearly two hours without stopping and without repeating himself.
Its that infectious energy that courses through these songs and brings the listener back to his or her own memories and desires. And Delberts music reverberates with a life worth living, as in the song, I Had a Real Good Time with its subtext, You learn a lot more about life, from the things youre not supposed to do.
In Ill Change My Style and Your Memory Me and the Blues, there is what can be called soul music that transcends the color categories in the rainbow of music that is the American legacy of song.
Born in Lubbock, Texas and growing up in Fort Worth, Delbert, as Ive written in a profile of him, became immersed in a whirl of Western swing, blues, jazz, rock, and country sounds that abounded in dance halls and honky tonks there.
Hes not only not forgotten his multi-colored roots and rhythms, but he joyfully regenerates them on the road, including honky tonks. When I interviewed him for these notes, he told me, with prideful pleasure, of recently playing the oldest continuing honky tonk in Texas, Gruene Hall, located between Austin and San Antonio. He added: It was a great night; everybody was sweating.
The power of his stories from stomping celebrations of joyous self-surprise to the tenderest regrets of broken loves comes from his absorption of the interconnected streams of how the American experience is created through the richly idiomatic life stories of all the various racial, ethnic and religious pilgrims who have to echo Woody Guthrie, made this land their land.
In that Wall Street Journal article, Delbert told me how he got lucky when, in his early twenties, his was the only white band playing for a black promoter at Blue Monday nights in the Skyline Ballroom in Fort Worth:
It was the greatest education I could possibly have had playing behind my heroes. (Among them were such blues legends as Lightnin Hopkins, Joe Turner, Sonny Boy Williams, Jimmy Reed, B.B. King, and Bobby Blue Bland.)
When you get that depth and quality of what Delbert calls on-the-job training, it gives you the foundation for what continues to be an international career as a multi-dimensional Lone Star Troubadour.
In the 1989 Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, edited by Donald Clarke, there is a concise beginning of Delberts evolution to the prominence he enjoys now:
"A behind-the-scenes influence for 20 years who finally saw the charts in the 80s. Deeply influenced by the blues, picked up tips from black blues harp (harmonica) players, played in clubs from age 15 in many obscure bands; early records were among the first by white artists to be played on local black stationsIn the United Kingdom, taught harp to a young northern group, subsequently heard the fruits on the Beatles first single, Love Me Do Hell be back again and again; the musicians all know who he is.
So do listeners in many parts of the globe. What keeps Delbert coming back again and again is vividly illustrated in this set, Cost Of Living. He is, for instance, a master singer of forever missed fulfillment (Kiss Her Once for Me). And he describes scenes from last-chance neighborhoods and saloons like an unforgettable novelist as in Midnight Communion:
God knows its not the best place to lay my burden down, but someones always good for one more round.
And from a previous Delbert McClinton New West storybook, Nothing Personal, I cannot forget a classic song of an utterly shattered love affair, When Rita Leaves:
After Rita left, taking all her clothes, but one red dress, the one she knows I like best, Rita rode off into the night with her no longer lovers cherished 1964 sky blue ragtop Mustang, and having bought some gas and laid the top down, she burned that pony to the ground on the desert in New Mexico.
At the risk of making Delbert appear pretentious, which Delbert unmistakably is not, he is an authentic American poet of life as it is lived, from the bottom up like, from Nothing Personal, in the song, Squeeze Me In, Delbert McClinton speaks, from the heart, about a woman working overtime all the time, says the man on the outside: Whoever said its a mans world dont know what hes talkin about. You got me workin round the clock honey, tryin to figure you outYou got to make a little time for the good times. So honey can you squeeze me in.
A time capsule so that Americans way beyond us can know what these times were really like good and bad, exhilarating and deep-in-the-bottle frustrating that time capsule has got to include Delbert McClinton recordings, including Cost Of Living thats in your hands now.
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