Give Us This Day Our Daily Sauce

One of the best contemporary country groups!

Recorded in 1987 on Rounder Records, Last Roundup was one of the few roots-country groups playing at the time. Let’s just say they focused less on the hairspray-and-cow-print-chap presentation and more on the harmonious belting out of beautiful original country tunes. I went into some detail about them earlier, but here’s a snippet:

“Last Roundup is made up of Angel Dean singing lead vocals, Amy McMahon Rigby playing guitar and harmonizing, her brother Michael McMahon playing Guitar, Lap Steel and Fiddle, and Garth Powell. The songs were written by the McMahon siblings”

Angel Dean should have her voice registered as a fucking weapon. Of joy. If you like this group, try an even more contemporary gaggle of equally roots-based country loveliness, The Meat Purveyors. 

G’bye, yall!

—-Eddie

(That’s Angel Dean on the left. Also a cursory google of Angel Dean will lead you to depths of darkness too cruel for any mortal soul.)

Roger Miller Knew What’s Up

“I got sugar in my candy and sugar in my soup

I’m gettin’ fat from the candy and sick from the soup

An’ true love is sweet, but if it’s mishandled

A bitter wind blows and out goes your candle”

From the AV Club:

“[One of Roger Miller’s friends] recalls watching a particularly beautiful sunset with the singer-songwriter and having him reflect, ‘Wow. Imagine what God could have done if he’d had money.’ 

That was apparently a pretty representative one-liner from Miller. [People] often talk about how Miller would say something that appeared nonsensical on the surface, but made a peculiar sort of sense the more they thought about it.”

-Nick

Detroit’s Biggest Baddest Badass

Oh Nathaniel Mayer, is it you who will delay the bitter arrival of fall with your soulful boppin tunes? Can your unstoppable voice-cannon blast us a few more months of sunshine? I sure wish it would.

But seriously, if there was some perilous threat to the natural world that required a team of take-no-shit R&B super heroes, I’d want Andre Williams, Gino Washington and Nathaniel Mayer in the front row to save our asses.

—-Eddie

Just think how in death you will feel!

This track is ghostly good, from the crackly distorted hand-clapping that comes in on every chorus refrain to perhaps my favorite part of any dated gospel/choir singing - the solitary high-pitched voice screaming out in harmony above the rest. As soon as I heard this, I immediately set out to learn it on the banjolele since it sorta sounds like a uke in the background. This is such a great fucking sing-a-long song! I’d love to accompany the fast paced hand-clapping with some tambourines.

Heard this yesterday from an amazing compilation uploaded by ghostcapital. I went looking for other recordings of it on the web and only found that Curtis J. Williams is most associated with the tune. That and some very helpful lyrics.

—-Eddie

A True Tale of Turkish Psych and Missed Opportunities

In the summer of 2006,  Eddie and I were knee-deep in international psych-rock compilations. I was obsessed with this song, which I heard on the Turkish edition of “Love, Peace & Poetry.”

I distinctly remember listening to it in my car and thinking “someone should sample this for a rap song.”

Fast-forward three years: Mos Def does just that.

I knew I should have written that down. Fuck you and your dream-theft, marijuana.

Like many musicians living under oppressive regimes, Ms. Selda Bağcan jailed by Turkey’s military dictatorship in the 1980s for her lefty songs about class struggle. I can’t vouch for this, but I found an English translation of this song, which confirms what I’ve read that Bağcan’s songs were considered “calls to revolt”:

Why don’t you come and take a look at these roads swallowed in mire.
It is a shame that in this day and age we are still to live like this.
So this is the way things are, and this is how we feel
but please sir don’t get upset please

If the “sir” in the song refers to The Man, and these lyrics are accurate, what kind of revolutionary demand is it to politely ask a military junta not to get upset? Come on, ya commie!

-Nick

Johannesburg, 1938

This song is curious! Sounds like a ragtime piano invaded a South African choir session! I’m no expert, but I’d reckon some of the more western sounds coming out of this track are the group’s adapting to the recording studios’ intentions on selling some records abroad. Or maybe the group just liked it. After all, 1938 wasn’t exactly an internationally isolated time in S. Africa. Or maybe this is just how they sound. No matter how you roll it, this tune is shiny as fuck.

I plucked from this comp a couple of months ago and here’s a ton of info on it.

—-Eddie