LISTENING TO MUSIC FROM MALI

ali farka toure

I thought maybe I could put some music on and not be dominated by it while writing you. I thought something largely instrumental with vocals in another language and picked Ali Farka Toure of Mali in northern Africa. Timbuktu is in Mali, though Ali Farka Toure is from Niafunke in Mali, a ways up the Niger river from Timbuktu. Immediately it pulled me in and won't let go. Won't even let me turn it off. This Malian music he plays has a lilting rhythm that flows with a camel's walk. I can see somebody riding a camel to his rhythms. Evidently, a camel rider must relax into the flow of the camel's back. I see them in films, the rider's body flowing with the rocking boat of the camel's back. I'd guess it would be a good exercise for the rider's spine. It couldn't be as bad for the back as driving a truck. This Malian music has a relaxed lope about it suggesting reggae. I find when I want to hear reggae it is only Burning Spear I want to hear. I have other albums by different reggae artists. Bob Marley feels a little too pop for my taste. Burning Spear thinks about things and his songs concern what he thinks about. I saw him at Ziggy's in Winston-Salem, 03. I don't know if he ever saw the audience. His eyes were closed the entire show. He only looked at the floor walking onstage. His singing felt very much like the words in his songs. His songs are meditative, full of thought, a world of intense poverty, racism, white man pushing black man down, looking to Africa as home land, holy; a rise-up black man spirit. The people in his band played beautiful music with no demonstration of emotion, no jumping up and down. They played like they were jamming at somebody's house. Spear gave the appearance of indifference to everything but the music, jumping rope in the rhythms with his voice. He flowed in the music; he and the music were one, the singer and the song. His was one of the great concerts of my life, close to seeing Thelonious Monk and Charlie Rouse from about ten feet away in 1963 on their Straight No Chaser tour. 

ali farka toure

I laugh at myself thinking I could hear Ali Farka Toure pick acoustic-electric guitar with fingernails instead of picks in his style that is sensational in its subtle artistry. To an ear that passes over details, it is simple, repetitive rhythm that repeats past what an American ear conditioned by pop music can listen to comfortably. It gets into a Philip Glass repetition that seems to stay the same, though changes continually. The changing notes in the repeating rhythm make a more abstract melodic line than we who live in the world of American pop music have any access to by way of experience. Which is to say, Ali Farka Toure was fresh and brand new first time I heard him in the late 1980s. By then I'd been hearing Philip Glass for several years. Glass has studied musics of Africa and South America, Asia, primitive peoples, the music of the world. What I'm hearing now could be Glass with vocals in another language or nonsense syllables. The Malian music is a good walking music. Its rhythm is a walking lope, not like walking in the mall, but walking for a hundred miles, a long walk through a desert region with no clouds in the sky. Ali Farka Toure's music is as much from the soul of Malian culture as Doc Watson's music came from Appalachian culture in America. Watson is as accomplished a guitar picker as Ali Farka Toure, just in a different style of music and ways of playing it. Ali Farka Toure was drawn to John Lee Hooker's music. As I hear Hooker in my head, I can hear why. Possibly in the particular place John Lee Hooker grew up in southern Mississippi, the place could possibly have had some Malians in the mix of western African peoples. It seems like Hooker had this music in his earliest years. The Bo Diddley beat came from a certain kind of very simple church in south Mississippi where rhythm was kept hitting the floor with a stick that looks like a long, straight walking stick. It keeps the Bo Diddley beat for the singing, the rocknroll sound that went from Bo Diddley through the Velvet Undergound into punk in the mid 1970s and ever since. 

kar kar and ali farka toure

Earlier in the week I saw a film that came from netflix, I'll Sing For You. It is a documentary in that it is non-scripted, camera visits different people and listens to them talk. The film featured a Malian musician named Kar Kar. The camera spent a period of time following him in his everyday life at home in what I took to be Timbuktu. If not there, then nearby. Kar Kar was a young Malian musician several years earlier. He recorded a few times. One of his songs about Mali was played on the radio every day for many years to come. Kar Kar went to Paris to get some paying work and live in a Malian hostel. He married the woman he adored. They had a good life then she died. Kar Kar returned to Mali with a broken heart in his later years. He played the same lilting rhythms Ali Farka Toure played, who appeared in the film a couple times accompanying Kar Kar on guitar. In one of the scenes they were walking while they played. Neither one looked at the strings, gaze straight ahead. I may have to see it again soon. The music inspired me to listen to my Malian music. Before putting on Ali Farka Toure, I listened to Afel Bocoum's album Alkibar. Both are from Niafunke, Mali, up the Niger river from Timbuktu. The music of these musicians and the people making music with them on instruments like a one-string violin, acoustic 6-string guitar and some other local instruments I can't name, is essentially what we call folk music. Ali Farka Toure made a good bit of money in North America and Europe from rising interest in African music. His music continues to sell well. His son is recording now. I've heard somewhere or read somewhere in recent past that he has given a large portion of his new wealth to the people of his region, making education available, improving health facilities, etc, making his world a better place. This adds something to his music I didn't hear before. Before, I heard a singer and guitar picker. Since learning what he's done with his wealth, I hear a remarkable human being. To an American it's odd to behold someone new-rich selfless with his money. Timbuktu is indeed a long ways from here.   

kar kar and ali farka toure

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DOC WATSON 1923-2012

doc watson 

It's time to honor Doc Watson. From this region of the mountains, it was Ralph Stanley and Doc Watson. Doc is gone now and Ralph may not be far behind. Doc Watson seemed, somehow, immortal, like the right man in the right place in the right time. He and Bob Dylan started in the same approximate time, and by now with Ralph Stanley, the three great voices of Americana music are of an age to be dropping off. Strange to think of what it would be like to be 20 and listening to Bob Dylan at 70. Probably it would be about like listening to Muddy Waters at 70 or John Lee Hooker at 70. Before this generation of rock musicians, white entertainers had no career after 30. Bob Hope and them did it for the comedians. And Lawrence Welk, music for grandparents. Now white people can rock at 70. I used to wonder why black musicians could go on into their 70s and 80s, Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, and many more, and white musicians were over at 30 or soon after, with some Vaudeville exceptions, Sophie Tucker, Jimmy Durante. I wonder if this period might be the beginning of white people being able to appreciate a writer or musician past 40. Bob Dylan played in NY coffee houses at the same time Doc Watson played in the NY coffee house scene too. Bob Dylan recorded his own version of Man of Constant Sorrow on his first album. He took Ralph Stanley's signature song and made it his own.



I've never been a Doc Watson groupie or fan club member or in the front row at a concert. I've listened to every period of his evolving musicianship and singing. Played him quite a bit on the radio show. Saw him at the Wayne Henderson fest in 08. He lived 50 miles down the road on the way to Boone. Jr Maxwell's first wife, Mary Magdeline Watson was Doc's cousin. Jr said the Watsons in Alleghany County are direct kin to the Watsons in Deep Gap. Arthel was going to blind school in Raleigh when they were married. A doctor in Winston-Salem who reads my pacemaker is a Deep Gap Watson, who grew up just down the street from Doc. I've put on my favorite Doc Watson album to listen to while I write. Mostly I don't listen to music while writing, because it takes over my attention and I start writing about it. I meant for it to happen this time. It is Doc Watson's first album, as far as I know, DOC WATSON AND CLARENCE ASHLEY 1960 through 1962. A 2cd Smithsonian Folkways album. Every song insists I listen to all the words. His delivery is such that he tells the words in subtle ways, emphases, that also reveal insight into meaning. Willard Gayheart is such a singer. More than once I've seen new insight into a song's meaning I never saw before Willard made it happen.



He just now finished John Brown's Dream, Doc accompanying his father-in-law who played the fiddle, Gaither Carlton. Field Recorders has a cd of Carlton. It is among the most beautiful albums of old-time music I know of. It is there with this one, Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley, in the zone where it is so good it is always new. I've heard this album a lot of times and it is still new every time I hear it. I always hear licks I never heard before and lines in songs. Clarence Ashley becomes more amazing to me with each hearing, as does fiddler Fred Price, who has a sensitive, smooth bow with strong feeling. Another old-time album perhaps the equal of this one is Tommy Jarrell's and Kyle Creed's June Apple. Clint Howard, who plays rhythm guitar, has played at Merlefest with Doc Watson almost every year. They have been friends since that time. Ashley, Price and Howard were from the Mountain City region of east Tennessee, close to the border with Ashe County, so it's one county over, so to speak. The story is that Ralph Rinzler, a folklorist from NY came down to NC, got up with Clarence Ashley at Union Grove fiddlers convention and asked him to get some people together for a tour of the college and big city circuit to ride the wave of the then "folk revival" of the late 50s and early 60s.

doc watson 

Clarence Ashley was from the days of minstrel shows that he left home to join in his teens and took up pre-Vaudeville banjo. He is said to have paid much attention to how the black musicians played it, it being, then, a black instrument. A truly Southern old-time musician. I say that because there wasn't so much racial interaction in the music up north. He was of the generation that was the first to record in the late 20s. In the time Rinzler talked to him, he was playing with Dock Walsh of Wilkes County in The Carolina Tar Heels. Ashley suggested the musicians he knew at Mountain City, Fred Price and Clint Howard, and he recommended Doc (then Arthel) Watson, who at that time played rockabilly electric guitar. Watson told Ashley he couldn't play an acoustic guitar. Ashley told him he could and took him along. I don't know how many shows they put on, but they travelled all over the country to university auditoriums and big cities where enough people could gather who want to hear old-time mountain music to make it pay. They appeared on Pete Seeger's folk music tv show in NY without Ashley. Knocked Pete's sox off. The recording of 3 songs performed on the show, as well as 2 songs and an interview with Clarence Ashley in that time, is on a Vestapol dvd Legends of Old Time Music, featuring, Tommy Jarrell, Clarence Ashley, Roscoe Holcomb, Doc Watson, Sam McGee and several others, Jean Ritchie one of them.


It was from this tour that Doc Watson was invited to play at NY coffee houses in the early 60s, the time of Beatniks, pre-hippies. One of Doc's albums from that time is at Gerdes Folk City, quite a good one. I've been told that when his brother Arnold went with him to play banjo with Doc, Arnold didn't last long. He couldn't look at those people any more. They made him feel like he'd died and went to hell. He went home. Doc couldn't see, so they were all beautiful people to him. In my personal preferences, I like his early music the best, though that's not as dramatic as it sounds: The Best. I prefer his early music and the more homey music, esp the Smithsonian album of his family members, The Doc Watson Family. As a gospel singer, he's among the very best. He can deliver a gospel song with the soul of Ralph and Carter Stanley. I read an article today crediting Doc with the phenomenon known as Americana music via Merlefest. I've not read many of the articles turning up on facebook, mainly because they all write of him as unreachable hero. He's known around here as a man, as a good man, a master guitar picker. The guitar pickers around here look to him as the Master, up there with Maybelle Carter, another picker of the Central Blue Ridge. He has been known all the way along as one open to his fans, will talk with people he'd never met and be friendly. He jammed with local musicians. He was one of them.


In his concerts he gets a love circle going with the audience. The audience projects love to him, he projects love to his audience, and through the course of the concert that love circle gets to going and it can be responsible for a big feeling in the heart with all that love energy in the air. That is what I found most notable about a Doc Watson concert, the love circle he gets going with the audience. I feel no problem that he has chosen this time to leave the body. If he'd survived the operations, he could afford to be taken care of at home, but better not to be taken care of. He went under his own power as long as he could do it. Singing a whole concert and picking serious guitar the whole time is exhausting for a man in his upper 80s. But he was right there. He was a man of these mountains. Throughout his career of countless recordings, concerts all over the world, the red carpet everywhere he goes, he likes his home in Deep Gap with his family the way they like to live, not the way they live in southern California. Throughout his period of fame and fortune he never strayed to any degree from who he, himself, was. He was a true man of these mountains. I've mixed past and present tense throughout this writing. I decided not to correct it because it is correct as it is. His spirit is so recently free from the body that he still feels present.

doc watson

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