This past week, I discovered
one of the remaining records on my wish list of almost impossible-to-find
music: Helen Merrill’s American Country
Songs, from 1959. My find wasn’t on vinyl, though, but that’s still fine by
me. I’ll take what I can get. Worn copies of this never re-issued LP have appeared
occasionally on eBay in the last decade, going for fifty bucks or more, and
I’ve never managed to come out on top of the bidding. I have found the occasional Helen Merrill disc at my local used record
store, but American Country Songs has
eluded me. (A few months ago, I came
across another one on my list, the triple-LP version of Keith Jarrett’s 1979 Concerts, so it’s been a pretty good
year for the collection.) Atco WEA-Japan put out American Country Songs on CD in mid-January, and iTunes followed
suit with a download. And there the music finally was, widely accessible again
after more than fifty years of relative obscurity.
This record’s a peculiar genre hybrid, and it’s certainly not
Helen Merrill’s best album. But its rarity has made it hugely alluring for me,
and anything, anything, by Helen Merrill is going to be revelatory, never short
of pretty much excellent, so I’m happy to have access to it, and to hear it.
Helen Merrill has defined herself for more than half a century as a
quintessential jazz singer, so country-and-western isn’t going to be her forte.
A few country-jazz hybrids were emerging at the turn of the sixties, notably guitarist
Hank Garland’s recordings
with Gary Burton; Sonny Rollins’s Way Out
West (with its famous William Claxton cover
photo and its versions of “Wagon Wheels” and Johnny Mercer’s “I’m an Old
Cowhand”) had appeared in 1957. But I’m not aware of any vocalists melding
idioms; Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight” had been a country-pop crossover
hit in 1957, and the arrangements for strings (by Chuck Sagle) on American Country Songs draw overtly on
contemporary country-pop style. Guitarist Mundell
Lowe, who had notable associations with Sarah Vaughan and recorded third-streamish
arrangements
of Alec Wilder, performs on the album, along with George DuVivier, Milt Hinton
and Jo Jones, lending the music an artful legitimacy, although there are no
searching improvisations; as the title suggests, the record aims
to link jazz and country as forms of Americana, styles rooted in the same
musical loam.
The
record starts off with a string-rich arrangement of “Maybe Tomorrow,” with
Merrill’s smoky lines overdubbed in stereo harmony. (“Devoted to You” gets a similar vocal duo treatment
later in the set, but with a small backing band – vibes, guitar, bass, drums
– instead) The effect is to draw a light but palpable resonance from Merrill’s
voice: a barely breathy, gently grained texture that had become a hallmark of
her own style. “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” stands out, with its half-speed
vocal (“when time goes crawlin’ by”) set against warbling electric guitar and a
double-time steam train shuffle, the drum-line falling somewhere between
Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” (no kidding) and a C&W version of “Cherokee.”
She works with and against time, threading it like tensile gold, attenuating
its viscosities like taffy. On the whole, the album sound is playful, the
arrangements mostly commercial and a little kitschy (“I’m Here to Get My Baby
Out of Jail” is plain goofy, but cute): a bouquet of late 50s MOR, mostly sweet
and lonely ballads swaddled in strings. But Helen Merrill’s
syllable-by-syllable melodic craft, feeling her way along the purr and pull of each
note, makes this music work.
The string section also gestures back (though not formally,
merely as a kind of auditory trope) to her more sophisticated Mercury albums,
particularly Helen Merrill With Strings
(1955) and her collaboration with Gil Evans, Dream of You (1956). The opening track on the 1955 record is “Lilac
Wine” – a song she was still performing when I saw her live in 1990 (which she
described as “unusual”) and which was the title track of her 2004 album (which,
unusually, also includes a cover of Radiohead’s “You”). The lyrics describe lilac wine as “sweet and heady, / like my love,” which also
suggests about the timbre of her voice, its veiled headiness, its honeyed
closeness. In an
interview with Marc Myers for his Jazz
Wax blog, in 2009, she recalls working with Gil Evans in July, 1956:
JW:
Your phrasing on that session sounds like the basis for Miles Davis' approach
with Gil a year later in 1957 on Miles Ahead.
HM: I
have no idea. Miles used to love my sound and always came to hear me sing. We
were dear friends. He told me he loved my whisper sounds. That's a technique I
used by getting up real close to the microphone. I'd sing almost in a
whisper, which created a very intimate sound. I developed this by listening to
my voice and trying different things with the mikes.
JW:
Do you think Miles learned from your whisper technique?
HM:
Miles learned from everyone. He was incredible. He took the best from everyone
and threw away the rest. He was brilliant. One of the things he told me he
loved about my voice was how I used space—both in music and between my voice
and the mike.
This is a pretty big claim,
and it seems a little suspicious to call Miles Davis a “dear friend.” But the
comparison of their articulations is also deeply apt; their ballad styles are
strikingly similar, with an attention to the delicate surges, the intimate
breath-pressures within each note. And while American Country Songs can’t achieve the layered depths of a Gil
Evans record (or of a Gil Evans-Helen Merrill record), the seductively undulant
sound-space that Helen Merrill can and does create makes it an album so worth hearing.
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