Album Review: Parlor James – Dreadful Sorry
Parlor James’ fronting duo of Amy Allison and Ryan Hedgecock take the traditional lineage of duet singing, a la the Stanley Brothers or Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris, straight through your heart on their debut EP. Allison, the daughter of jazz great Mose, and Hedgecock, a founding member of Lone Justice, have found the perfect complement in each other, in terms of both songwriting and vocal performance.
Allison’s voice is on a similar plane as those two Williams girls, Lucinda and Victoria, but she is completely capable of placing her own stamp on whatever she sings…
Album Review: Lone Justice: This Is Lone Justice: The Vaught Tapes, 1983
Two years before the country rock band released their debut album on Geffen Records in 1985, they recorded a dozen tracks to tape with engineer David Vaught in California. The band had blazed their way through a gaggle of sold out shows as music journalist Chris Morris outlines in the set’s accompanying notes. Their next step was to see if they could bottle that live lightning in a studio setting. Replacement drummer Don Heffington, whose previous work with the legendary Emmylou Harris was irrefutable, referred his friend David Vaught to the rest of the group, as founding member Ryan Hedgecock recalls. So the group retreated to his studio to record these dozen songs, nine of which are previously unreleased…
Album Review: Lone Justice Live at the Palomino, 1983
Be sure to handle Live at the Palomino, 1983 with care. A combustible document of one of Lone Justice’s lively summer performances at the cow-punk crazed Palomino Club in North Hollywood that year, unearthed by original member Ryan Hedgecock, this previously unissued concert set clocks in at just over 32 minutes and every song goes off like a lit pack of firecrackers in a hot, stuffy room.
Every one, that is, except the yearning opener “You Are the Light,” a Depression-era country ballad of unvarnished elegance, with sweet vocal harmonies and lonesome guitar off in the distance…
Parlor James – Heartbeats per Minute
Drove she ducklings through the water every morning just at nine
Stubbed her toe on a splinter, fell into the foaming brine.
Ruby lips above the water blowing bubbles soft and fine
But, alas, I was no swimmer so I lost my Clementine.
Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling, Clementine
You are lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry Clementine.
–Anonymous
When read aloud, these lines from the 19th-century ballad “Clementine” convey horror; they describe the tragic death of a miner’s daughter. And yet when heard in their usual contexts, as sung in nursery schools or in rowdy barrooms, they go in one ear and out the other. Stripped of its ability to move us, the over-familiar “Clementine”, much like the death-chant “Ring Around The Rosey”, is now a trifling ditty. Today it would be laughable for anyone to render it as anything but a light-hearted sing-along…