How about that new Joanna Newsom record, huh? Pretty great. But enough people are writing about her. Sonny Smith recently turned me onto this really incredible singer that I can’t stop listening to. “Earth Girl Helen Brown,” is her monkier. She had an sad, strange life, which explains the weirdo, fascinating music.
Earth Girl Helen Brown "Hit After Hit" (Side A); El Rincon Record Palace 002
Helen Brown was born in Vancouver, Canada, but raised in an Athens, Georgia-based religious cult, and was blinded in one eye from a childhood baseball injury. As an adult, she dropped out of Evergreen and traveled the country for a while as a nomadic psychedelic folksinger, before forming her first band One Eyed Tramps. For years, she lived alone in a mountaintop in southern Alaska, where she befriended a Cherokee Shaman (later revealed as a fake) who encouraged her to pursue a frustrating academic career. Rampant drug use, frequent fainting on stage, and occasional self-inflicted knife wounds on stage led to more interest in her stage antics than her music. However, a few sides did emerge in the late ’90s (recording dates unknown), which feature a unique mix of country, girl group, R&B, and ghoulishness. Crude and amateurish at best, these recordings are appreciated for their sincerity and intensity of feeling.
The record I’ve been listening to a lot lately is a 7″ (Shown above, great cover): “Hit After Hit,” on Side A and “So Long, Jerk” on Side B. The label is “El Rincon record Palace 002″ which I can’t find anything else about–maybe it was a home recording that was released after they were found in the ’90s. The recordings are barely audible but her anger and pain come through. The song titles break my heart a little bit. There’s something ironic in the title “Hit after Hit”: It’s like she is struggling with fame or acheivement–having “Hits”– but there’s this vulgarity and hardness to them that speaks of violence as well. Obviously, “So Long, Jerk” is about ending a romantic relationship, and it’s in this ’60s psych-folk style, but there’s something almost punk about it. It’s hard to think of this woman ever sitting behind a desk as an academic. There’s something truly wild in her voice.
Dreama Newborn (1930-1991) was born in Delaney, AR. Her 1962 recording of “Brilliance Blues” is often considered the first recording to bridge the gap between the popular bubblegum girl-group sound and the village folk revival. Devastated by the suicide of her first husband, a promising young writer, “Brilliance Blues” was a tribute to her dead lover. The song had at once the rustic guitar strum and autoharp accompaniment of the folk movement layered with lively doo-wop vocal stylings from her band ‘The Dreamies’. It was a hit and created an outraged stir amongst folk fanatics. When the British invasion hit a few years later, she mysteriously retired from the music business. She spent the rest of her life in Amarillo, TX with her husband, a saffron farmer and local ferrier. She died of pleurisy in 1991.
Like Bobbie Hawkins, Dreama Newborn cut her career off short, although not quite as short as he. Her sound was so unique and frankly, it’s strange that it didn’t catch on more than it did. Newport Festival met Motown in this record, so few copies exist that it’s practically impossible to hear “Brilliance Blues,” but its influence musically can be heard everywhere. Carole King’s “Tapestry” is a good example (although very watered down) of Dreama Newborn’s influence. The song reminds me of Richard Farina…he was also a young writer and musician who died young (although his was not a suicide) a fan of using the autoharp.
As often happens, Dreama Newborn was barely out of her teens when this record came out. Her band, The Dreamies, were mainly young session musicians who went on to join various 60s psychedelic rock bands.
Here’s a great little record, Bobbie Hawkins’ s “Minimum Wage.” A sad sort of bluesy song about the plight of the working man. Not your run-of-the-mill story though, as Hawkins really did get screwed by his employer. The story goes something like this:
Detroit 1972, an auto worker, Hawkins had a run in with a supervisor while working at Chrysler’s old Jefferson Avenue Assembly Plant. There was an argument and Hawkins was left blinded in one eye. Later that year he began recording his songs at a local Detroit Studio owned by his brother-in-law. Eerie, instrumental ballads with a signature falsetto hum in layers became a trademark sound.
A small Detroit label, Crucifix, billed Hawkins as a blues singer and set him up at a string of restaurants to play his songs. Attendance was poor and Hawkins gave up public performances forever.
The lyrics seem to fit with the times–the ’70s, a time of social change and whatnot, but something about Hawkins’s voice makes the song seem timeless. Reminds me of that old song, “Joe Hill,” which Joan Baez does a version of.
If you ever get your hands on this record, grab it right away. On side A, a track called “Wolf-Like Howls from the Bathhouse,” accompanied by the meandering but brilliant B-side, “O Cities, Infamous, Cruel, Undeserving.” Wild, earnest, and far-reaching recordings–halfway between songs and tundra wind.
The South East Land Otter Champs recorded for Tlinket Archives between 1963-1967. Led by Vernon Wright, an almost mythic adventurer of Tlinket and Russian descent, they toured throughout the Alaska region and into Northern Canada, often delivering food and medical supplies to hard-to-reach regions. An early photograph of his cargo showed toiletry supplies, medical crates, blankets, and record crates.
One of the performance posters described Wright as the “tobacco king of the south east,” most likely due to delivering cigarettes to the coastal fishing villages.
The S.E. Champs (commonly called) stopped recording in 1968, after which Wright and two others worked at an auto parts store in Funny River, Alabama. Re-contacted and reunited in 1987, they recorded a few more songs for the then-dwindling Tlinket Archives label, with Wright’s son Wesley on accordian.
It’d be great to see the footage from the reunion shows, but so far I haven’t been able to find anything.
