Norman Blake doesn’t make bad records, though if you’re not a connoisseur of the flatpicker’s art, you probably can’t tell them apart. With 1998’s Chattanooga Sugar Babe, however, Blake coupled historical mirth and arcane disasters via the central metaphors of locomotives and mines, handling every instrument himself.
His new disc is even more rugged, more bent on asserting the individuality of his American voice. All history and mirth are abandoned, and disaster has become bitterly personal. “All around this country, what do you think I see,” he sings on a new original; “Whiskey, dope and women done made a wreck of me/Whiskey deaf and whiskey blind.”
Blake hasn’t lost any agility, but he’s chosen to slow his right hand. Melodies are so elongated and unadorned that you might think for a moment, “I could do that.” You can’t, of course. Even the most Mel Bay of hammer-ons is played with a voicing and pressure as spare and potent as matchsticks meeting pine. Best of all are the six new original lyrics, each as memorable and discriminating as his classics “Billy Gray” and “Last Train From Poor Valley”, each as dark and aggrieved. Blake sounds like time is running out and he’s not about to let it, or anything else, off the hook.
“Cannot stand the government, cannot stand the law,” he sings, “Cannot stand the dark days a-comin’ on us all.” Hearing these new songs, one might think of Dylan’s recent work, and rightly so. Folk music has become the only solace, maybe the only truth, left for them: “Time won’t turn back this clock of life/And the hands keep moving along/Till the story is ended, the book it is closed/Just another faded love song.” Blake has never made a more poignant or arresting record.
