Music Feedback
New This WeekAround TownMusicFilmArtTheaterNews & FeaturesFood & DrinkAstrology
  HOME
NEW THIS WEEK
EDITORS' PICKS
LISTINGS
NEWS & FEATURES
MUSIC
FILM
ART
BOOKS
THEATER
DANCE
TELEVISION
FOOD & DRINK
ARCHIVES
LETTERS
PERSONALS
CLASSIFIEDS
ADULT
ASTROLOGY
PHOENIX FORUM DOWNLOAD MP3s

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend
Poet games
The Midwestern folk of Greg Brown
BY JOSH KUN

In 1982, Greg Brown sang some songs for a roomful of strangers in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Twelve years later, he did the same in Traverse City, Michigan. He didn’t sing any of the same songs save for one, "Canned Goods," a song that turned his grandmother’s canned-fruit cellar into a metaphor for canning the memory of summers spent on her Iowa strawberry farm, preserving the sweetness and flavor of a life that had moved past him without warning and without mercy.

When he sang it in 1982 and it was recorded on One Night (Red House), it lasted four minutes and was as wistful and nostalgic as an old photograph buried in a family trunk. In 1994, on The Live One (Red House), the song was now 13 minutes long. Brown sang an octave lower, slowed his pacing to an off-meter crawl, ranted about his aunt’s bosom, quoted Pablo Neruda to explain the look on a chicken’s face, and pulled on his verses like they were taffy — the clarity of fondness slipped into the abstraction of reverie. The way he sang "tomato," it could have been "tomorrow" or "tornado."

That was also the year he released The Poet Game (Red House), the great earthquake of Brown’s career. It turned out that the drifter-hillbilly bard of bucolic Iowa, schooled on church hymns and country blues, who had been singing of frogs, creeks, and cold winds for eight albums (a ninth was Brown doing Blake poems) had another side waiting to be born — a Midwestern existentialist hobo with a quick-draw mouth, a bloodied heart, and bourbon on his breath, who pees in the dark beneath a laughing moon. The sawmills and oat stalks were still there, but now they had secrets and stories to tell.

The signs were there back in1990 on Down in There (Red House), when Brown sang about girls who become strippers after their stepfathers touch them funny, about husbands and wives who trade bottles for knives. But on The Poet Game, Brown’s eye for the vivid, gothic details of rural America shuttled masterfully between the acute and the epic. The past had to be reckoned with; the present was a footprint left before he even stepped in it. Brown’s father was an itinerant, holy-roller gospel preacher who spoke in tongues, and on Poet Brown invited God into "the rags and the bones and the dirt" of his heart, offered him whiskey, and then told him to leave.

Every album of Brown’s music since then — including his latest, his 17th, Milk of the Moon (Red House), and Going Driftless (Red House), a recent tribute to Brown by top female singer/songwriters like Lucinda Williams, Gillian Welch, and Shawn Colvin — has found him walking farther down that same road into the wry, scoured heart of corn-belt memory and corn-belt alienation. "Sorrow is hooves of rain," Brown sings in a crazy-man rumble of scraping gravel and thick mud at the beginning of Milk of the Moon: "Oh our lives are poor and plain." Milk of the Moon’s Iowa is the Iowa of "pheasant clucking, ice-cold dew, backseat shotgun, frosty slough, Chevy coughing," and an Iowa of small towns full of men and women struggling to learn how to make big love last. The album’s centerpiece, its title track, is a slide-guitar hallucination of the heart, a growling sensualist’s moan to the moon.

Like all the songs covered on Going Driftless, Milk of the Moon is born of the land that birthed it: the hills and woods of Southeastern Iowa where Brown was born. He now lives on his grandparents’ original homestead in the middle of the place that is his ground zero — Hacklebarney, a part of Iowa not drawn on maps and that is neither city nor town. "I got my song from a secret place," Brown sang on his 1997 song about his father, "Billy from the Hills," and his Hacklebarney is like a Midwestern Middle-earth, a place of everyday magic and everyday secrets where death and deliverance wade in the same river water, where ancient choirs hum in dusty red air. "I hear the voice of the ancient ones," he declared on 1996’s "Two Little Feet," "chanting words from a different time."

Families grow from land. The earth holds the memory of generations. Music is ground and body both, the sound of land and family making memory together. In that spirit, Brown wrote one of his earliest songs, "Ella Mae," about his grandmother. She is in her garden or she is looking out at the pond. There are pine-covered hills and there are redwing birds that come after the rain is done. Brown tells her that one day his daughter will fly with them too. On Going Driftless, all three of Brown’s daughters sing "Ella Mae." They sing it for their great-grandmother just like Brown did, but they also sing it for their father, who has returned to his family land and who grows songs from gardens of memory.

Issue Date: February 13 - 20, 2003
Back to the Music table of contents.

  E-Mail This Article to a Friend

home | feedback | about the phoenix | find the phoenix | advertising info | privacy policy | the masthead | work for us

 © 2003 Phoenix Media Communications Group