by Malcolm Jones
Geoff Muldaur is a reluctant headliner. You’ll find his name as the leader of the Texas Sheiks on the spine of the CD case, but the front cover of the new album just says “Texas Sheiks.” Likewise, while he is far and away the best and most unique vocalist on the album—this is the man who inspired Richard Thompson to say, “There are only three white blues singers, and Geoff Muldaur is two of them”—he seems more than content to equally share vocal duties with the rest of the band. He’s made his share of solo records, in a career that stretches back to the '60s, but they are outnumbered by the collaborations he’s been part of—with the Jim Kweskin Jug Band (a band that inspired everyone from the Lovin’ Spoonful to the Grateful Dead); with his former wife, Maria Muldaur; with a Woodstock ensemble that included Paul Butterfield, Ronnie Barron, and Amos Garrett; and most recently as the arranger catalyst for a big-band recreation/reinterpretation of the music of '20s jazz great Bix Beiderbecke. Oh, and many year ago, his definitive version of the song “Brazil” inspired and sustained Terry Gilliam on his way to making the film of the same name. Muldaur gets around, he just doesn’t seem to like to stand out.
This is not coyness or false humility. Instead, it’s a true musician’s tip of the hat to the pleasures and benefits of collaboration in music making. He’s fully capable of holding a stage by himself, as you can see from the accompanying video. But he knows when not to hog the spotlight, too—the best time being, of course, when you’re lucky enough to have someone good to share it with. On Texas Sheiks, he got really lucky.
Hang around enough old-time musicians and sooner than later you’ll run into plenty who insist it ought to be played exactly one way (translation: exactly the way they heard it on some record cut in, say, 1925). Their goal is laudable: they want the spirit of the music preserved and respected. But oddly the opposite often results. The music is strangled before it gets a chance to breathe. At best, it sends you off to find the original recordings of old fiddle tunes and early jazz that inspired these control-freak folkies.
As I slipped Texas Sheiks into the player for a first listen, I feared something of the sort might be forthcoming. The 14 songs on the album were all old blues, country, jug band, medicine show, and early Texas swing numbers originally performed by luminaries and lesser known musicians from the '20s and '30s such as Big Bill Broonzy, Henry (Mule) Townsend, Skip James, and Robert Johnson. Even as I punched PLAY, I was thinking, This is bound to be one of those overly reverential exercises, recreation without inspiration. Maybe I should just cut out the middlemen and -women and play the old songs. But as soon as the fiddle and National slide guitar kicked off “The World Is Going Wrong,” I knew I wasn’t going anywhere for a while. The music on Texas Sheiks is no arid copy, no airless preservation of the past. Instead, it looks over its shoulder, tips its hat with all due respect and then proceeds to infuse this old material with brand-new life. The blend of competence and joy in these performances is enough to satisfy anyone for a long time.
Some of the performers made their reputations as early as Great Folk Scare of the '60s (Kweskin, Muldaur). Others (Cindy Cashdollar, Stephen Bruton, Johnny Nicholas, Suzy Thompson) have been mainstays of folk and old-time music scenes or accompanists behind musicians as varied as Bonnie Raitt and Asleep at the Wheel. Whatever their prior identities, they shed them here and fuse into the band at hand, Geoff Muldaur and the Texas Sheiks. A loose aggregation that gathered expressly to make this record, they somehow manage to sound like they’ve been playing together for years. You get the sense that each musician is listening to the others. Everyone stays out of everyone else’s way, and yet everyone makes a contribution, and just at the right time, too. The result is a sound that’s so light that it’s almost transparent. These singers and players sound happy and the feeling is completely contagious. The songs are old, several are familiar (“All by Myself,” “Blues in the Bottle”), but each one sounds like it’s being performed right there in your living room for the first time. Got the blues? Here’s the cure.
One final thought: I wouldn’t swear to it, but it sounds as though this music is recorded live in the studio without technical tweaks or overdubs. Like the songs on the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou?, each cut sounds like real people playing acoustic instruments in real time. In that sense, this album should more than satisfy the music police, because it so perfectly mirrors the originals first played decades ago. When you listen to old 78s, or their CD copies, you’re hearing music played as it was played in the street, on the porch, in churches and barrooms. Recording then was no more than a microphone in a room. The music recorded there was like a snapshot of music as it was played in normal life. The only accommodation was to keep each song to the three or four minutes that a 78 rpm disc could hold. That’s almost a lost art. Music of the caliber played on Texas Sheiks is what keeps the “almost” in that last sentence.
