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CD review: Geoff Muldaur and the Texas Sheiks
Geoff Muldaur and the Texas Sheiks
‘Texas Sheiks’
(Tradition and Moderne)
Grade: A
Apart from being a virtuosic and engaging survey of roots/oldtime/string band music featuring an assortment of musical heavyweights from the Austin and Woodstock acoustic music scenes, this album marks the next-to-last recordings of Austin guitarist Stephen Bruton.
Bruton died in May after a long, brave battle with cancer, mourned and celebrated by his fans, friends and musical peers. But before that untimely passing, a compadre named Roger Kasle put together a pair of recording sessions here in town. The idea was to give Bruton some respite from the pain and indignities of aggressive cancer treatment.
As therapy, the inspiration was ironclad: Bruton never seemed quite fully formed unless he was holding a guitar or a mandolin. And it works as music: Under the stewardship of acoustic music maestro Geoff Muldaur and co-producer Bruce Hughes (Bruton’s partner-in-crime in the Resentments), the Texas Sheiks offer a heartfelt survey of 1920s- and ’30s-era string band music, blues, jazz, swing and pop.
Borrowing from the songbooks of Robert Johnson, W.C. Handy, Big Bill Broonzy, Skip James, Bob Wills and lesser-known luminaries such as the Mississippi Sheiks and Buddy Woods and the Wampus Cats, the Texas Sheiks breathe fresh life into old-time music that lives at the crossroads of race, culture, era and spirit, in the heart of what author Greil Marcus called “the old, weird America.”
Besides Bruton (who plays but does not sing on the album), Hughes and Muldaur, the cast is rounded out by steel player Cindy Cashdollar, fiddler Suzy Thompson and boogie-woogie keyboardist Johnny Nicholas, along with a guest turn by jug band patriarch Jim Kweskin.
Nicholas turns in an eerie, doom-fraught falsetto vocal on “Hard Time Killin’ Floor.” By contrast, the jumping, all-hands-on-deck jam session spirit of “Don’t Sell It (Don’t Give It Away)” hints at how much fun the sessions must have been. The hallucinogenic, light-hearted imagery of “Under the Chicken Tree” and “Blues In the Bottle,” the loping, bluesy cover of “Fan It” and the sunny country string band groove of “Sweet To Mama” all breathe life into material that might seem otherwise consigned to sheet music and antique Victrolas.
At the end of the day, a warm and loving cover of W.C. Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues” provides the sort of bittersweet send-off we associate with New Orleans jazz funerals.
As for Stephen Bruton, let Robert Johnson (in the voice of Johnny Nicholas) in “Travelin’ Riverside Blues” have the last word. Johnson wrote of a woman, “She got a mortgage on my body/And a lien on my soul … ” That was precisely the passionate relationship between Bruton and his muse, a relationship the Texas Sheiks do their best to honor.
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