Australian Juke Joint Hokum Blues
Grant Britt
Posted On June 6, 2016
He looks like a ’50s-era milkman, but what C.W. Stoneking delivers on his latest, Gon’ Boogaloo (out June 3 on King Hokum Records), is stark, crusty blues that sounds like it was wrung out of the floorboards in some backwater Delta juke joint. The voice that comes out of this pale-faced Australian bends the mind. There had to be some hoo-doo involved somewhere along the line — a mojo hand, dug up and traded in at some God-forsaken crossroads at midnight — for Stoneking to sound like this.
He warmed to the task with his 20o6 debut, King Hokum, followed by 2008’s Jungle Blues. Both were focused on hokum that grew out of minstrel shows in the mid-1800s. The music’s heyday was in the late ’20s and early ’30s, and relied heavily on double entendre, with acts like Butterbeans and Susie’s “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll.”
Most of the selections here are of the bluesy persuasion, but the rattly, jive-talkin’ jitterbug vehicle “Get on the Floor” reverts to Stoneking’s earlier hokum efforts.
“How Long” introduces the album with what sounds like an electric diddley bow before Stoneking comes in sounding like some backslid preacher who’s slunk off on a Saturday night to toss off some moonshine and throw down some raunchy badness, before he has to stand bleary-eyed in the pulpit Sunday morning and serve his other master.
“The Zombie” sounds like Tom Waits impersonating Screamin’ jay Hawkins.
But Stoneking isn’t content to keep his hoo-doo in one place. For “That Thing I Done,” he takes the melody to Jamaica, sounding like Screamin’ Jay in the throes of a reggae nightmare — an image he reinforces by commenting that the song “conjures an image of someone moving quickly across a flat desolate plain, with these gigantic black abstract shapes falling from the sky into the landscape.”
For yet another stop in his eclectic travelogue, Stoneking drops in some Hawaiian slack key guitar, for “On a Desert Isle.” But just so’s you don’t get too laidback and tropical, he tosses in a Jimmy Rodgers yodel in the middle to rattle your coconuts.
Stoneking’s idea of boogaloo on “We Gon’ Boogaloo” is swampy boogie-wooogie narrated by his Louis Prima impersonation. It’s a cross-cultural mashup with wife Kirsty Fraser yelping enthusiastically in the background, like some possessed parishioner escapee running amuck in the juke joint.
Stoneking’s stuff is like moonshine. The contents are liable to eat though any container you put it in, and no label’s gonna stick to it. Best to just pass it around gingerly and enjoy the burn.
