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Southern states
Gretchen Wilson, Angel Dean and Sue Garner, Chris Stamey
BY FRANKLIN BRUNO

The pejorative term "redneck" is also ambiguous: depending on your dictionary, it refers to white, economically disenfranchised Southerners either exclusively or just "especially." Gretchen Wilson’s "Redneck Woman," a single currently in heavy rotation at country radio, is similarly cagy about whether it reclaims the term in the name of class or geographical solidarity. Its oppositions between upscale and down-home largely concern lifestyle, which is to say consumption: Victoria’s Secret versus Wal-Mart, and — as in Garth Brooks’s "Friends in Low Places" — champagne versus beer. The song also incorporates Wilson’s real-life single-motherhood without blushing, or moralizing: "I’ll stand right here in my own front yard with a baby on my hip." Of course, solo parenting is hardly a regional phenomenon.

It’s the backing track’s Southern-rock touches that locate the protagonist, along with nods to the genre’s heroes. "I know all the words to every Charlie Daniels song," Wilson assures us; the same goes for Lynyrd Skynyrd, and "Ol’ Bocephus." (That’s Hank Williams Jr. to you, Yankee.) This Dixie flag waving might seem cynical once you learn that Wilson was born and raised in Illinois, but neither her Web site nor her Epic debut, Ready for the Party, aims to blur the facts. The autobiographical closing cut names her home town, of which she’s "Pocahontas Proud." (The Bakersfield-style "When It Rains" goes farther afield, even citing Dwight Yoakam.) In this context, "Redneck Woman" is additional evidence that "Southern" has become pop-cultural code for hard-working, unpretentious, and bent on "keepin’ it country" — wherever your bit of the country happens to be.

Actual Southerners are apt to celebrate their legacy less straightforwardly. Born in Kentucky and Georgia respectively, Angel Dean and Sue Garner first performed together as part of cow-wavers Last Roundup, in the noted honky-tonk capital of Hoboken. Dean, who now lives in Rhode Island, has released very little since; long-time New Yorker Garner’s output, both in various bands (V-Effect, Run On) with percussionist husband Rick Brown and solo, has been far too varied to be tagged alterna-country. On Pot Liquor (Diesel Only), they reunite, harmonizing sweetly but not slickly, recalling the Shams, Garner’s early-’90s trio with Amy Rigby and Amanda Uprichard. The back cover glosses the title’s soul-food reference: "The savory juice left in the pot after you’ve cooked up a mess of greens, or whatever it is you choose to boil."

That last phrase is key: Garner and co-producer JD Foster use whatever ingredients are handy, swirling all manner of instrumental contributions — from Brown, accordionist Ted Reichman, and Mofungo’s Phil Dray, among others — into two-guitar, two-voice arrangements, genre markings be damned. "Rose of the Desert" tucks bass harmonica and fiddle into a throb of boxy percussion, as though the Carter Family had picked up a backing band at the Knitting Factory. "Quarry Pond" and "Old Graveyard in the Woods," with lyrics by horror writer John Thomas (he’s also Dean’s husband), create a mood closer to Flannery O’Connor’s fiction (or R.E.M.’s early cover art) than to a NASCAR telecast. This may be a vanishing or even an imaginary South, but it’s Dean & Garner’s to cook up, even if their kitchen is a hard drive in a Brooklyn studio.

Chris Stamey’s Travels in the South also negotiates between home and the wider world, much like its maker (see Brett Milano’s interview with Stamey, on page 18). Before indie rock, there was something called college rock, and Stamey helped invent it, first in Winston-Salem’s Sneakers (with R.E.M. producer Mitch Easter) and later in the dB’s (with Peter Holsapple, R.E.M.’s fifth man for a time), who ruled the Hoboken power-pop roost in the early ’80s. These groove-challenged bands are now deeply unfashionable, but Stamey’s best songs ("Amplifier," "Something Came over Me") stand up, as does his bizarrely produced 1982 solo effort It’s A Wonderful Life. Eventually, he gravitated back to Chapel Hill to concentrate on production. Every Tarheel in rock drops into his Modern Recording it seems: Ben Folds, Ryan Adams, and Superchunk’s Jon Wurster all show up on Travels, alongside unheralded locals.

The disc also reveals the downside of unlimited studio time. Several songs are overdubbed into airlessness, with pristine stacks of guitar tones becoming an end in themselves. Yet one, even more studio-bound, is a masterstroke. "In Spanish Harlem" re-creates production elements of the Phil Spector/Jerry Lieber/Ben E. King "Spanish Harlem" to match the story of new arrivals in Manhattan seeking out the very streets they’ve heard about in the song. It doesn’t have a lick to do with the American South, but the song reinforces something implicit in Dean & Garner’s music — and, in its way, Wilson’s: having roots doesn’t always mean getting stuck.


Issue Date: July 23 - 29, 2004
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