God Less America # 1

In honour of 4th July, I thought it might be a good moment to instigate an occasional (weekly? monthly? whatever..) series, highlighting tracks from God Less America, an out of print compilation of morbidly unhinged novelty country records put together by Tim Warren of Crypt Records.

There have been dozens of similar collections over the years of course, and the sheer volume of warped novelty blather that’s been doing the rounds in the internet era has pretty much reached saturation point, but, as is the case with Crypt’s immortal ‘Back From The Grave’ series, no one has ever scraped quite the same barrels nor assembled their troubling findings with quite the same care as Mr. Warren, leaving us with a brief but extraordinary playlist that takes us to some very dark and curious places indeed, exhibiting a far, far higher potential for fascination and longevity than might usually be encountered with this sort of shtick.

Key to this I think is that, with a few exceptions, the tunes (well I say tunes, quite a few of them are just weird spoken word kinda things) on ‘God Less America’ are compelling and well-executed listens rather than one-play ‘snigger and move on’ kinda spins, and a few are just flat-out brilliant.

Beginning with one of the latter, here’s ‘Down & Out’, performed by Chuck Wells.

Taking the received wisdom that a good country song hinges on death and tragedy to its natural conclusion, ‘Down & Out’ is a masterpiece of narrative efficiency, working from the blueprint of a generic Johnny Cash-style ‘story song’ and cranking things up to a truly fevered degree, somehow managing to cram real estate fraud, gun-running, incarceration, true love, marriage, murder, despair, vengeance, more murder, drug addiction and more despair into three minutes and five seconds, still leaving room for choruses, instrumental breaks and a healthy dose of doom-stricken, Satan-based philosophising.

Songwriters: listen, learn and cry tears of awe. That’s all I’ve got to say on the matter.

BEST BIT:

After repeated listens, I’m very keen on the neat way the final verse is turned, but for sheer immediacy the “KILL KILL KILL” moment is hard to beat.

HISTORY:

My five whole minutes of research suggests that info regarding Mr. Wells is pretty scarce. Not to be confused with the Carolina soul singer of the same name, it seems likely that this Chuck Wells was the native of Jaspar, Alabama who recorded numerous sides between 1952 and 1954, sixteen of which (not including ‘Down & Out’) are collected on a CD entitled ‘The Complete Hillbilly Collection’, released in 2006 by UK label Cattle records. Though it would be a hair-raising number in any era, I couldn’t help thinking ‘Down and Out’ sounded a bit too modern for the early ‘50s, and indeed, this handy discography reveals that it was actually the B side of a one-off comeback single issued on the Rice label in 1965; the A-side is the promisingly titled ‘Good Morning Fool’.

Labels: Chuck Wells, country, God Less America