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Home > Austin Music Source > Archives > 2009 > October > 20 > Entry
Loudon dives heart first into Poole project
To tell you the truth, I had not known much about Charlie Poole, the 1920s singing banjo player from North Carolina, except that the Lost City Ramblers and the Holy Modal Rounders of the early ‘60s Greenwich Village folk boom championed him and covered the songs he saved. I got his boxed set “You Ain’t Talkin’ To Me” in the mail a few years ago and treasured it more for the R. Crumb cover drawing than the music inside. Just not that into old timey, skillet-licking music.
But after hearing Loudon Wainwright III’s “High Wide and Handsome- the Charlie Poole Project,” I want to know everything about the itinerant musician who drank himself to death in 1931 at age 39, but not before recording the signature versions of such songs as “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down,” “If I Lose,” “Old and Only in the Way” and “White House Blues.” He didn’t write the songs, he righted them. And lived them. The double disc, which preceeds Wainwright’s performance at the Cactus Cafe November 7, mixes original tunes, such as the title track and “Rowena,” based on Wainwright’s maternal grandmother, with Poole-shaped standards. Every Wainwright song here sounds like Poole could’ve recorded it pre-Depression, especially “No Knees,” a too-late repentance that could be a companion to Poole’s “Goodbye Booze.”
As explained in the extensive, but not burdening, liner notes, Wainwright and producer Dick Connette approached the project as if they were making a film on Poole’s life and times, with Loudon the Third in the lead role. The whole family gets in on it, with the kids Rufus, Martha and Lucy guesting on vocals here and there. Charlie Poole is, after all, their musical grandfather.
The backing is spare, just as when Poole led a three-piece string band, allowing the fun to shine through. The singer doesn’t forget that much of this was dance music.
Wainwright’s mild obsession with Poole, who influenced country music pioneers Bill Monroe, Hank Williams and the Carter Family- let that sink in- began in the early ‘70s when a fellow musician played a Poole song that made them both laugh out loud. Poole’s North Carolina Ramblers recorded nearly 100 songs from 1925- 1930 and Wainwright studied every one and even learned songs, such as “HW&H” standout “Beautiful,” that Poole never recorded, but was said to play live often.
This project works because Wainwright and Poole are kindred spirits, right down to the directness of their voices and their smart aleck attitudes. The guy who wrote “Dead Skunk” was originally attracted to Poole’s sense of humor, but as he got deeper into the body of work he could better feel the swing of a life lived in a hard world.
Greil Marcus writes of Wainwright “putting on the dead man’s clothes to tell his story” and that’s what “High Wide & Handsome sounds like. Charlie Poole would be proud, God bless him.
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