Swamp Dogg: Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street - Spectrum Culture (2024)

“This ain’t a country album,” Beyonce insisted in an Instagram post in advance of the release of Cowboy Carter, feeling it necessary to explain herself in a way that genre-crossing white musicians rarely do. (That is what white privilege is.) Beyonce took country’s sounds, signifiers and tropes, and worked with some of its greatest exemplars to “bend and blend genres,” as she put it. Cowboy Carter reclaimed a musical idiom that couldn’t exist without Black Americans yet over time has been programmatically co-opted, narrowed and segregationally coded by white musicians and their industry to keep Blacks from reentry.

In this context, and by the sheer force of Cowboy Carter’s almost instant appearance on the top of the country charts—not to mention its epic scale—it is the album of the year to date and an achievement possibly equal to Ray Charles’ 1962 landmark Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. Like Charles, Beyonce possesses the fame and cultural capital—and just plain capital—to reach so many ears and make so great an impact; but for every Beyonce, or, thinking back, acts like Living Colour when they broke into metal in the late 1980s, there’s an unknown quantity of Black artists trying to get into spaces from which they’ve been systemically barred, and finding the gate still locked. It’s the silence of the music we aren’t getting to hear that’s deafening.

Thank god we get to hear Swamp Dogg’s Blackgrass: From West Virginia to 125th Street. “Not a lot of people talk about the true origins of bluegrass music, but it came from Black people,” the 81-year-old legend said recently. “The banjo, the washtub, all that stuff started with African Americans. We were playing [bluegrass] before it even had a name.” As the playwright August Wilson put it, “There’s no idea in the world that is not contained by Black life.”

It might be tempting to say that we owe the availability of Blackgrass to the way-paving of Cowboy Carter, but Swamp Dogg—Jerry Williams Jr. on his driver’s license—has been making and releasing whatever kind of music he’s wanted to for a long time now. The title of his 2000 album The Reinvention of Swamp Dogg could apply to almost anything this restless weird bird and deep cat has recorded since then. There’s everything from the delightfully bizarre Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune (2018), which somehow manages to be pretty much exactly what the title says it is, to 2022’s Sorry You Couldn’t Make It, an album Williams called “pseudo-country.”

He could just as appropriately call Blackgrass pseudo-bluegrass, although it takes a while for the pseudo to kick in. The album’s first track, “Mess Under that Dress,” follows the received (white) sound and style except in its decidedly randy lyrics (let’s just say that what’s under that dress is smoking hot mess and leave it at that). The second, “Ugly Man’s Wife,” also observes conventional musical codes while counseling the listener to marry an unsightly husband because he’ll dote on you and work two jobs to keep you living the high life. There may also be unexpected, non-aesthetic benefits: “Don’t lose your composure, ‘cause he’s hung like a T-bone/ Your man can lick his eyebrows and that’s enough to keep you home.”

The lighthearted PG-13 comedy of this opening pair of tracks is followed by a turn to heartbreak and lovesickness with “Curtains on the Window” and “Have a Good Time” (the latter written by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant of “Rocky Top” and “Love Hurts” fame). Then Margo Price steps in to take lead vocals on “To the Other Woman,” co-written by Williams and Gary U.S. Bonds, and originally recorded by Doris Duke in 1969. At first listen, it might seem odd to bring in a white lead singer on Blackgrass, especially given the greatness of Duke’s vocal performance; but two tracks later, when another white woman, Jenny Lewis, does the same honors on “Count the Days,” an old 1960s chestnut written by Williams’ wife, Yvonne Williams (who died in 2003), with Brooks O’Dell, it starts to become clear that an integral part of the album’s reclamation project is in the way it pays its own idiosyncratic homage to the past.

Given that “Count the Days” is really nothing like a traditional bluegrass tune—it calls something like Dusty in Memphis to mind—its inclusion suggests that the nominal genre here is a pretext, not a prescription. The “bending and blending” Beyonce alluded to in describing Cowboy Carter is likewise part of Williams’ purpose, including his unpretentiously assembled interracial (indeed, mostly white) personnel for Blackgrass. Swamp Dogg’s main dawg for several projects in a row, starting with Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune, has been producer Ryan Olson, of Bon Iver, with bandmate Justin Vernon also a recent and significant contributor. Despite its title, Blackgrass is no racial polemic.

It is overtly political, though. The album’s sixth track, “Songs to Sing,” an anthem Williams wrote more than half a century ago, is more apropos than ever: “I’ll sing about a war completely unjust/ I’ll sing about a nation the world could no longer trust/ I’ll sing about the riots that you see on TV/ And how after five hundred years people are still not free.” Swamp Dogg’s unusually high voice, now cracked with age, pleads and practically bleeds with a plain but powerful vulnerability that it’s hard to imagine many other singers achieving: they’d be likely to sound strained or schmaltzy. Yet, in the extended coda—which features a French horn, that utterly non-bluegrass instrument—he turns aside to deliver a spoken-word apostrophe to “my best friend” Charlie Whitehead, who originally recorded “Songs to Sing” more than 50 years ago and “sung the hell out of it,” Williams remembers. Whitehead had a short and fraught recording career in the 1970s, and he was long absent from public view when he died in 2015. “I dedicate this song to you,” Williams tells him. “I’ll always love you, I miss you, I’m sorry you left so soon.” Like the cover of his late wife’s song, it’s another homage to a mourned past.

It takes Blackgrass some time to recover from the gravity and feeling of “Songs to Sing. The second half of the album works its way through a couple more covers and a few additional heartbreak tunes (none of these are especially affecting) before arriving at “Rise Up,” which returns to the brisk tempo and bright mood of “Mess Under that Dress.” The two-word title is also the full lyric set, a rousing exhortation sung repeatedly by Swamp Dogg in multitracked chorus with himself—it’s almost a spiritual—over a jaunty hoedown backing track that features wonderful lead turns on acoustic guitar and fiddle by Kenny Vaughan and Billy Contreras, respectively. These set the stage for none other than Living Colour’s Vernon Reid, whose out-of-nowhere electric guitar solo takes up the song’s final minute, turning almost loony as it progresses, like a machine on the fritz, eventually echoing the screech of an old dial-up modem trying to connect to the internet.

“Rise Up” would provide a vigorous and even inspiring finale for Blackgrass—but it isn’t the finale. It’s followed by “Murder Ballad,” the album’s longest song as well as its conclusion. “Murder Ballad” is firmly in the minor-key tradition of its titular genre, told by a man in the moments before his execution after a serial murder spree. The character is a psychopath who kills for the sake of killing, and for the twisted glory of public notoriety: “I’m finally famous.” He is evidently not Black—“My father used to teach me; ‘Boy, us and Blacks ain’t alike’”—and he does not divulge the colors of the strangers he has killed. Yet that brief invocation of racial difference makes it almost impossible to not hear “Murder Ballad” outside the unignorable context of mass incarceration: virtually the only white institution to which Black Americans have always been programmatically invited, with enthusiasm and without limit, our modern iteration of slavery. Nearly all the song’s lyrics are tinged by that context, from the killer’s longing to join his mother in the afterlife (she is one of his victims, along with his father), to “I’m sitting in this chair, wearing stripes—black and white.” His confessional over, he demands that they “pull the lever, pull the lever.” The song, and the album, then abruptly ends in a quiet but eerie high-pitched whine of electric-chair voltage, leaving us to contemplate the album we have just heard in a state of breathless shock.