Furry Lewis – Fourth And Beale
What Furry Lewis gives us, and what many unnecessarily doctrinaire blues fans seem to find puzzling, is a style of performance that is quite obviously dramatic, even programmatic. Fourth And Beale, recorded in March 1969 at Lewis’ apartment at the Memphis corner of the same name, presents an endlessly amused singer and guitarist who entertains us with his elastic sense of time and simple but deeply weird guitar interjections, and who mostly ignores the conventions of so-called blues performance. Lewis is never refractory for its own sake; he breaks rules because he’s interested, as are many Memphis musicians, in playing the molecules instead of the notes.
On “Going To Brownsville”, Lewis imitates a train toward the end; the effect is audacious, gentle, and, above all, deeply humble. Yet that humility coexists with a sense of the monstrous reality of life, and of the blues, so that Lewis singing “Casey Jones” and its great lines — “Now if you want to go to heaven when you D-I-E/Put on your collar and your T-I-E/Want to scare a rabbit out a L-O-G/Just make a little stunt like a D-O-G” — comes across as one of the funniest and most liberating bits of poetry any American could feel proud of. This song (and something you’d think couldn’t give up any more meaning, like “When The Saints Go Marchin’ Home”) confounds category and expectation; this is blues that goes beyond blues, ignores blues, yet dares you to say that it isn’t blues.
Playing the molecules is more fun than playing the notes — that might well be the message of this music. Terry Manning’s recording is superb, and his liner notes offer a sobering account of the half-warm winter day when Lewis made these recordings.