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| Short Sharp Shocked | Chaos U.K.'s Short Sharp Shock LP | Chaos U.K.'s The Chipping Sodbury Bonfire Tapes CD |
From WCVF, New York, interview by Tom Bingham, December 1986
TB: Would you say that your lifestyle and your experiences along the way are very important to your lyrics?
MS: Sure, it's the old tradition of the troubadour that carry the news from one place to another. I write songs about where I live and what I see and then when I move on to the next place I share those experiences with people who wouldn't get that news otherwise because news like that just doesn't spread.
Commenting on her Captain Swing album probably as part of a promo release by Mercury Records, c. Oct 1989
MS: I've now been, I guess, for two years off the streets, almost three years, as a professional folk-singer, which has always been a contradiction in terms to my mind, then raises the question are you still able to feel like you're in touch, that you can write about the people that you see. That's probably got to be one of the deepest questions for a songwriter that I can think of 'cause what you're really questioning is the creative process. I've been very conscious that this whole decision to take the opportunity to make records, to kind of take me out of my natural habitat, so to speak, and put me in this very artificial world of studios and interviews and so forth, it means all the less time that I spend around the people that I love to observe and write about. I feel I've made certain choices in the way I live my life that hasn't effected that very much.
I guess, another question, that when people are trying to be very realistic when I go into my rap about my commitment to politics, is to do with the money. I guess it's for this reason I've seen some way of keeping my feet on the ground. It's almost like I regard money... I keep it as far away from me as possible because it makes it possible for me to keep a lifestyle that I think is, as usual, creative. That seems to me to be the similarity between my life now and in the past. Was not that I didn't have money and I have money now but that I always made the effort to live in as creative a way as possible so that when I'm playing you my 'homeless trilogy' and I'm expressing to you the times that I spent in squats and so forth... well, I've also lived in the basement of a church that was owned by an alchemist, I've lived in the Western Section of a book store, I've lived in a stairwell, I've lived in a loft of a radical group in New York, used to be called the Yippies. I've always put myself in environments that have stimulated. When I came to London, you know I was quite well known by this time, my decision was to get a houseboat and live in a houseboat and I was able to observe, for example, this old guy Fred that lives in an ambulance right down the way from me. And now I've moved to Los Angeles and I live in a part of town not known to most white folks -- very ethnic neighbourhood.
From the ABC's (Australia) "Out On Wednesday" radio program, 1991.
MS: I am nothing more or less than part of a tradition that's gone on long before me and there's been efforts to make comparisons that I don't feel are appropriate. For example, Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan are much less of an information for the tradition that I come from than say, Leadbelly or more recently people like Guy Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker.
MS: I think I'm also part of a school. There's some peers out there that I could refer to -- Steve Earl, Lyle Lovett, Nanci Griffith. All these people I consider my peers in some ways although in other ways I have my strongest roots planted firmly in a much more traditional music which is sometimes called bluegrass, but in my case more appropriately, fiddle tunes or traditional music. That was because I had the happy fortune of my father, at thirty-five, taking me to festivals and so I was influenced by a lot of traditional music by osmosis. And what's remarkable to me about this particular story is that there was no history in my family, up until this point, of music. There's no evidence that there was music or musical talent in my family. It's been my primary inspiration, through all of this, to know that my father at thirty-five, for the first time, picked up a musical instrument and taught himself to play and I've tried, as best I can, to stay closest to those sorts of roots. The roots that suggest that all it takes is three chords and something to say.
From postcard sent out to promote Arkansas Traveler album, c. 1992.
MS: Some folks think I keep changing styles. Naw. I've tried to show where my musical sources come from -- Texas songwriters like Guy Clark, uptempo blues/swing like Bob Wills and Louie Jordan and homemade jam like I grew up playing with my dad and brother. I don't know where this road goes from here. I've just tried to explain how I got here.
From unknown Dutch radio program hosted by Hubert van Hoof, ? May 1992
MS: The more I see the needs of the music business, the music industry, expressing itself on me rather than through me. They need to find a format or a category or a definition. "What kind of music does Michelle Shocked play? Is it swing, is it country, is it blues, is it folk, is it jazz, is it R&B. What is it?" That is the best reason I can think to say, "Hey, style doesn't matter." What's important is what I'm trying to communicate and underneath all of it is this feeling of swing. For me swing is the truth of the human heart. When you're happy or excited it beats fast and when you're sad or melancholy it beats slow. That's something that music can communicate that words, stories, language can't ever really tell, can't ever really share.
From The Irish Times article by Kevin Courtney, 9 April 1994.
MS: I'm not happy with the popular description of me as a folk musician. I think when you label a woman a folk musician, it suddenly becomes a very narrow category. A man who starts as a folk musician is allowed far greater scope to develop and change, and he is more easily granted the title of great artist, whereas women who start as folk singers are invariably pigeonholed as either Joni Mitchell types or Melanie types. I reject the title 'folk musician'.
From article titled "The Education of Michelle Shocked" by Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer, 25 April 1996
It never occurred to writers that Shocked's two personas clashed like stripes and polka dots, and they rarely tried to find the real woman inside the overalls. She was either the screaming woman depicted on the cover of Short, Sharp, Shocked in that now-famous photo of her getting dragged away kicking and screaming by the San Francisco cops outside the 1984 Democratic National Convention, or she was the chick hick from the sticks. You couldn't be both, no damned way.
"I contributed to that early on, and some of it was because I was naive, but some of it was savvy," she says now. "Being a student both of Marshall McLuen and Abbie Hoffman, I had a pretty strong understanding that first impressions last, and so, on the cover of Short, Sharp, Shocked, to use a photo like that -- which you know Courtney Love would die for -- for the type of material on that record was a paradox. It was incongruous.
"But I ended up feeling like, if people are going to end up remembering me for an image, I would rather it be something rebellious and kind of gritty than some me-holding-an-acoustic-guitar-with-warm-wooden-tones album cover with me looking sensitively down at my shoes. I was willing to accept that on one level, but fighting against it in the meantime has not been something I've proven very adept at. I've had to rely on Bart [Bull] a lot for that, I suppose."
From "Time Off" magazine, by Matt Connors, 8 April 1998
MC: Is there anything you wouldn't write about?
MS: I'd be really surprised. I seem to have no shame. I don't know what it would take.
From article titled "Bound To Be Glorious: The Long Hard Road Of Michelle Shocked" by Emmett Williams , Music Manic, 17 May 2000.
MS: When it comes to it I confess I'm not that committed to the medium of making albums. It's a nice means, but it's not the end as far as I'm concerned. If it gets people to the live shows where I can spit my two cents worth of politics, it's done the job.
From performance on the E-Town radio show, Telluride Conference Center, Telluride CO, 12 March 2002.
MS: Well, we've just started our own label, my husband and I in a partnership. And I'm not that gung-ho about runnin' a record label. I think it's kind of got challenges.
From performance on the Morning Becomes Eclectic radio show, KCRW, Los Angeles CA, 3 April 2002 hosted by Nic Harcourt.
MS: Yeah, I'll tell ya about my label. It's called Mighty Sound and I took a good long time to decide to make this move because I'd seen a lot of artists out there start their own label but they became almost vanity projects, you know. For the greater glory of them. And my idea of a label always was that it was a home -- a place for creativity to be nurtured and sustained and developed. So I really didn't want to start a label until I felt like I had the confidence and strength of my vision to bring a collective group of artists together. That's sort of like starting a family, you know. It's one thing to raise yourself up right but when you start to bring children into this world -- and some of my band members know this 'cause they got children -- there's a lot of responsibilities and you're bound to make mistakes. You do the best you can. And that's how I felt about a label. I really didn't want to take on that challenge until I felt confident that if I made mistakes they wouldn't be fatal ones [laughs]. Cause I know I'm gonna make some mistakes.
NH: Well, it's part of life really isn't it?
MS: Yeah, but that's the spirit behind Mighty Sound is just to have it be a home for artists... I've got some folks that I've, over the years of travellin' and playin', had my eye on all along. And some of my band members, the great talent that they have, I'd love to feature that as well. And I've got my catalogue which is probably the most remarkable aspect of Mighty Sound.
From article titled "Going Deeper", Blues Revue Extra, May 2002.
BR: Do you plan to release material by other artists on Mighty Sound? If so, is it too early to name some names?
MS: Since I'm talking to a blues publication, I think you should be aware of Phoenix, Arizona's Hans Olson. I think you should know about this man. He's 48 and of the Brownie McGhee school. What an amazing path this guy's life has taken -- and he hasn't even started it yet. He's played bars for 30 years, and he's become so finely polished. He's big in France. I'd really like to have the privilege of introducing more people to Hans. Ask Tom Waits about Hans Olson -- he'll tell you.
From the album liner notes by Producer, Pete Lawrence, September 1986.
PL: Finally I plucked up courage to ask her to record a few songs on my walkman and she agreed. We retreated to a far corner of the site with only the crickets and the distant rumble of passing trucks for company. She filled a whole tape around the dying embers of the fire with her charming vignettes.
From article titled "The Education of Michelle Shocked" by Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer, 25 April 1996
No one ever bothered to ask if Shocked got any money from the record [The Texas Campfire Tapes], or if the label had her permission to release the tapes in the first place. It's part of her untold story that she had to sue Lawrence for the rights to her songs, and it was only the first arduous and painful legal battle she would endure during the course of her relatively short career. Now, Shocked refers to Texas Campfire Tapes as "The Texas Campfire Thefts," and though she owns the rights, she'd rather they not remain in print.
"It was a lawsuit that caused this very bitter attitude on my part, which is where I picked up the term 'Texas Campfire Thefts,'" she says. "That was settled out of court eventually, but I went through a real seven-year English, powdered-wig, m'lord-m'lady kind of legal battle, and it was hard. Now, it feels like a tremendous opportunity to rewrite this history of exploitation. It's like reclaiming history for those who have been exploited, and it's a real victory, but it was draining."
From interview by Rita Houston on Words And Music From Studio A radio show, 90.7FM WFUV, Fordham University, New York NY, ~9 March 2001.
RH: And I understand that you fixed 'em up. You fixed The Tapes up and they're gonna be released?
MS: Yeah, that's, I guess, my most immediate short-term vision for getting the stuff out there is that I own all of my rights -- catalogues, copyrights -- so my first hope would be... I've got The Campfire Tapes mastered at the proper speed. I'd like to release it properly with liner notes that I feel like don't patronize or... [laughs] you know, that waif and that naive thing. Actually, you listen to that and I actually kinda had a clue about a few things -- my ideas about blues and swing. So I think I would present myself a little bit more forthrightly. There was some, umm, what do they call it... not deception, but dissembling about who I was at that time. I don't know if you get that impression but when I read those liner notes that's what I feel about 'em.
From interview by David Dye on World Cafe radio show, WXPN, Philadelphia PA, 10 July 2003.
MS: ...on the second disc of the re-issue is the complete unedited session so you can hear songs that were edited out and, I'll tell you the truth, I think some of those songs were edited out because it didn't really conform to what -- the guy making the recording -- what his perception of what a East Texas hillbilly should sound like, think like, play. I was quite caught up in what was going on at the time in Texas was this kind of swing... this swing sensibility. Not... yeah OK a few years later came the great swing scare but we doin' this kinda jazz swing, jump swing, blues thing. A Sleep At The Wheel probably got it over more than anybody but it was just something that was really natural for a lot of Texas musicians to get involved with. That's what I thought I was and I felt like the edit that he did on the original session was more like the ballads, the storytelling, kind of the things that just kind of played into the... you know, what they ended up marketing me as was like Woody Guthrie's long lost daughter.
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| Short Sharp Shocked | Chaos U.K.'s Short Sharp Shock LP | Chaos U.K.'s The Chipping Sodbury Bonfire Tapes CD |
This album created a minor stir when it was released in 1988. Apparently the punk band Chaos U.K. weren't too pleased about the similarity of both the title and cover art with their own 1984 album, Short Sharp Shock. An uncanny coincidence or a 'nod' to Chaos U.K.? Probably the latter since it's more than likely Michelle was aware of the band's album through her interest in the 80's punk scene.
In 1989 Chaos U.K. released their first album since 1986 and had a little jab at Michelle by called it The Chipping Sodbury Bonfire Tapes.
Short Sharp Shock - The earliest reference to this phrase would seem to be in Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado (1885): "To sit in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, / In a pestilential prison, with a life-long lock, / Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock, / From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block!".
The term was used by Home Secretary Willie Whitelaw, at the Tory Party Conference in 1979, to refer to the Thatcher government's new juvenile crime policy: juveniles convicted of a first misdemeanour would be sentenced to a brief period in jail for a 'short-sharp-shock'. The intention being to scare them from re-offending. The initiative failed and was eventually scrapped.
Perhaps of more significance to Michelle (since she wasn't in England any earlier than 1985 and probably not until 1986) was the use of the phrase in Billy Bragg's song, It Says Here (1984): "And it says here that we can only stop the rot / With a large dose of Law and Order / And a touch of the short sharp shock". Michelle toured extensively with Billy from about April 1988 (4 months before the release of Short Sharp Shocked).
From interview for (BBC?) radio, Redcar, England, 29 October 1987.
INTERVIEWER: I read that your next album's gonna be sought of catching up on your more recent songs and after that you were thinking of doing an album of swing music.
MS: My, how does this get out!
INTERVIEWER: I read the relevant stuff. Is that right?
MS: Yeah. It's exactly what I'd like to do... is establish for myself and people who might be interested in buying the albums just what my roots are.
From performance at Berklee Performance Center, Berklee College Of Music, Boston MA, 31 March 1989.
MS: Funny thing happened when I was in San Francisco early on in this tour. The fella who's arresting me on the cover of my album -- well he's a policeman, you know -- he came to the show. Came back stage. We shook hands and talked about the good old days. Truth is stranger than fiction. And there was a photographer there and the officer actually let me put my hands around his throat for the picture. Kinda strange!
From the ABC's (Australia) "Out On Wednesday" radio program, 1991.
MS: Short Sharp Shocked was very autobiographical. It was not only autobiographical...
From "The Other Side" radio program, 1992.
MS: So, the song [Memories of East Texas] I started out with is from Short Sharp Shocked and I finished with a song [Come A Long Way] from my new release, The Arkansas Traveler. My reason for doing it that way was to introduce you to the idea that this new release represents the completion of a trilogy that began with Short Sharp Shocked. My intention at the time was to create three albums that very distinctly outlined my musical influences and background and so with Short Sharp Shocked the feature was on the songwriting influences such as Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt. The middle of the trilogy [Captain Swing] was an effort to outline my musical influences that came from the likes of Bob Wills or Louis Jordan -- swing influences which at the root of it, I suppose, is blues but my approach to blues is always try and give it an up beat or a lift to the spirit. Finally with the completion of the trilogy I have The Arkansas Traveler and this is the music that I grew up playing with my father and my brother.
From interview by Brian Wise, 3RRR radio, Melbourne, Australia, Nov. or Dec. 1992.
BW: I've read that you planned to do the three albums, Short Sharp Shocked, Captain SwingArkansas Traveler as a sought of a trilogy summing up your musical predilections even before you started recording the first album.
MS: That's true and I think if I hadn't gotten a piece of that advice by my second manager -- and I've now been through a trilogy of managers as well -- their feeling was that I shouldn't reveal my agenda. That it would spoil people's anticipation of my music or something. So for example on Captain Swing when people were quite dismayed that I was no longer like this 'folk waif'. The best they could figure is that I had pretentions to being some kind of blues singer or something. I was like chompin' at the bit to say, "No, no, you can't tell the whole story yet. You haven't seen the whole story." But the management advice I was getting at the time was just to slow down, take one record at a time. And then I realized later that most people plan their records based on record sales and so many times they would have said, "Well you know, Captain Swing didn't really sell as well as Short Sharp Shocked. You need to go back now and make Short Sharp Shocked 2." And I got a lot of that and of course I ignored it all and said, "No, no, the trilogy is only two thirds complete." But yeah, I had planned it from the beginning.
From article titled "The Education of Michelle Shocked" by Robert Wilonsky, Dallas Observer, 25 April 1996
It never occurred to writers that Shocked's two personas clashed like stripes and polka dots, and they rarely tried to find the real woman inside the overalls. She was either the screaming woman depicted on the cover of Short, Sharp, Shocked in that now-famous photo of her getting dragged away kicking and screaming by the San Francisco cops outside the 1984 Democratic National Convention, or she was the chick hick from the sticks. You couldn't be both, no damned way.
"I contributed to that early on, and some of it was because I was naive, but some of it was savvy," she says now. "Being a student both of Marshall McLuen and Abbie Hoffman, I had a pretty strong understanding that first impressions last, and so, on the cover of Short, Sharp, Shocked, to use a photo like that -- which you know Courtney Love would die for -- for the type of material on that record was a paradox. It was incongruous.
From interview for (BBC?) radio, Redcar, England, 29 October 1987.
INTERVIEWER: I read that your next album's gonna be sought of catching up on your more recent songs and after that you were thinking of doing an album of swing music.
MS: My, how does this get out!
INTERVIEWER: I read the relevant stuff. Is that right?
MS: Yeah. It's exactly what I'd like to do... is establish for myself and people who might be interested in buying the albums just what my roots are.
From Washington Post article by Richard Harrington, 15 March 1989.
RH: Shocked is already putting together her next album which has a working title of "The Swing Vote."
MS: I've chosen a strategy which could be called entertaining the troops as opposed to preaching to the converted. There will be a whole spectrum of swing styles because I want to put forth the argument that swing is a feeling and that everything else is just style. I'm hoping that will give the strength to carry on this argument about a pan-cultural movement based around roots music, because it's the swing feeling in music that attracts us. That's why I can love hard core and rap and blues and folk. It's also what makes music go beyond just lyrics.
Commenting on her Captain Swing album probably as part of a promo release by Mercury Records, c. Oct 1989
MS: And that song's from my new album, Captain Swing which is quite different in emphasis from the last album, Short Sharp Shocked which, while we're on the subject, was quite different from the album before that, The Texas Campfire Tapes. In some respects this album bridges the gap between The Campfire Tapes which was so austere in production to this one which has full horns on five of the ten tracks.
I'm very conscious of a process where I am putting an emphasis in one place or another. So that the last album had much more of the emphasis on stories and lyrics and intimacy. On this album I'm concerned to point out that another emphasis I have is that music is much more than just the lyrics, of course. It's the feeling behind the songs. I hope that in spite of the diversity in styles, which this next track will show you God Is A Real Estate Developer, I've actually managed to keep a unity to the album by the swing feeling that holds it all together.
MS: The arrangement on this, of course, is remarkably different from the previous album [Short Sharp Shocked] which had one or two additional instruments at most whereas this has got a full band and four-piece horn arrangement as well. That I would like to credit, in a large part, to the collaboration with Pete Anderson. On the previous album I was very nervous about working in a studio. I really didn't know what to expect. Whether they were intent on making me into something I was not. I came out of that experience very confident in his taste and judgement and I think that Captain Swing reflects my confidence so when he suggests to me that we give this song... an Otis Rush treatment I think is what he called it, I pretty much let him run with it. It's a kind of Memphis Horns sound that you hear there which I'm not as familiar with, I have to admit, as I mentioned the mambo influence or, as in the next track [Silent Ways], one of the loves very close to my heart is Texas swing music.
From an article titled "From Racism To Rape, Songs To Shock You" by Elisabeth Lopez, The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 15 December 1989.
That fits in neatly with the album's title, primarily a paean to the leader of a South England laborers' revolt who encouraged arson attacks on farms. She found out about Captain Swing, folk hero, through a close friend, Billy Bragg.
Captain Swing - What would later become known as the "Swing Riots" began in the English county of Kent during August, 1830 when a threshing machine was destroyed by disgruntled farm labourers. Subsequent months saw similar acts of unrest in other counties. Labourers demanding a living wage and an end to rural unemployment (partially brought about by the growing use of threshing machines) marched from farm to farm sometimes carrying out acts of arson, destruction, robbery and assault. Another form of protest included the writing of threatening letters signed by the mythical figure, "Captain Swing". No doubt this name was adopted to instil fear into the recipient by its overtones of hanging. The movement was eventually suppressed but not before 1,976 people were brought to trial where 800 were eventually acquitted.
From the ABC's (Australia) "Out On Wednesday" radio program, 1991.
MS: ...I think that Captain Swing reflects a lot more of the diversity of my skills as a songwriter...
From "The Other Side" radio program, 1992.
MS: So, the song [Memories of East Texas] I started out with is from Short Sharp Shocked and I finished with a song [Come A Long Way] from my new release, The Arkansas Traveler. My reason for doing it that way was to introduce you to the idea that this new release represents the completion of a trilogy that began with Short Sharp Shocked. My intention at the time was to create three albums that very distinctly outlined my musical influences and background and so with Short Sharp Shocked the feature was on the songwriting influences such as Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt. The middle of the trilogy [Captain Swing] was an effort to outline my musical influences that came from the likes of Bob Wills or Louie Jordan -- swing influences which at the root of it, I suppose, is blues but my approach to blues is always try and give it an up beat or a lift to the spirit. Finally with the completion of the trilogy I have The Arkansas Traveler and this is the music that I grew up playing with my father and my brother.
From unknown Dutch radio program hosted by Hubert van Hoof, ? May 1992
MS: The more I see the needs of the music business, the music industry, expressing itself on me rather than through me. They need to find a format or a category or a definition. "What kind of music does Michelle Shocked play? Is it swing, is it country, is it blues, is it folk, is it jazz, is it R&B. What is it?" That is the best reason I can think to say, "Hey, style doesn't matter." What's important is what I'm trying to communicate and underneath all of it is this feeling of swing. For me swing is the truth of the human heart. When you're happy or excited it beats fast and when you're sad or melancholy it beats slow. That's something that music can communicate that words, stories, language can't ever really tell, can't ever really share.
From interview by Brian Wise, 3RRR radio, Melbourne, Australia, Nov. or Dec. 1992.
BW: I've read that you planned to do the three albums, Short Sharp Shocked, Captain SwingArkansas Traveler as a sought of a trilogy summing up your musical predilections even before you started recording the first album.
MS: That's true and I think if I hadn't gotten a piece of that advice by my second manager -- and I've now been through a trilogy of managers as well -- their feeling was that I shouldn't reveal my agenda. That it would spoil people's anticipation of my music or something. So for example on Captain Swing when people were quite dismayed that I was no longer like this 'folk waif'. The best they could figure is that I had pretentions to being some kind of blues singer or something. I was like chompin' at the bit to say, "No, no, you can't tell the whole story yet. You haven't seen the whole story." But the management advice I was getting at the time was just to slow down, take one record at a time. And then I realized later that most people plan their records based on record sales and so many times they would have said, "Well you know, Captain Swing didn't really sell as well as Short Sharp Shocked. You need to go back now and make Short Sharp Shocked 2." And I got a lot of that and of course I ignored it all and said, "No, no, the trilogy is only two thirds complete." But yeah, I had planned it from the beginning.
From the ABC's (Australia) "Out On Wednesday" radio program, 1991.
MS: ...it was very satisfying as a songwriter because I decided in advance what direction I wanted to go in with the songwriting and very little of it, by the way, is autobiographical. I was still very much concerned with themes -- what were worthwhile themes, what were appropriate themes to be addressing but in that case I had the enormous power and inspiration of traditional music and in many cases I just had to not get in the way of that force. In short, what my next emphasis is on will be the fiddle tunes that I grew up playing with my father and in many cases putting original lyrics to those songs...
From postcard sent out to promote Arkansas Traveler album, c. 1992.
MS: My dad tells it different, but if you ask me what happened, this record started when I took him on his first ever hitch-hiking trip. We set out from Dallas to visit my friend Crow who lives up in the Ozarks. The first ride took us all the way to the foothills. The second ride involved a high speed chase with a white Chevy pickup and a couple of 360 donuts that let us out a mile back from where we got in. The third ride was a neighbour delivering some puppy chow straight to Crow herself. We got cabin fever after a few days and my dad convinced a man with a riverboat in Memphis to give us a ride all the way to Baton Rouge. We made ourselves welcome in the wheelhouse playing tunes on our mandolins and that's when I got the idea how to make this record.
I recorded songs, fiddle tunes mostly, that I put my own words to, with my all time heroes and respected contemporaries. To name some, Doc Watson and Gatemouth Brown, Alison Krauss and Taj Mahal, Uncle Tupelo, the Hothouse Flowers, Norman and Nancy Blake, Levon Helm and Garth Hudson. We recorded on a riverboat, in an antique store, in a barn and a doctor's office. We recorded in Chicago, Dublin, Memphis, Sydney and L.A. But what I want you to know most of all is, this record completes a trilogy that started with Short Sharp Shocked on thru Captain Swing and with the Arkansas Traveler the entire project rests.
From the album liner notes, 1992
MS: My early intention was to present this record with a cover photo of myself wearing blackface. Aside from providing controversy for hatemongers or offending the delicate sensibilities of the politically correct, my sincere intention was that it would provide a genuine focus on the real "roots" of many of the tunes included; blackface minstrelsy. It's my contention that a blackface tradition is alive and well hidden behind a modern mask. I believe that "blacking up" should be done correctly; as an exploration for the source of that hollow ring we mistakenly believe was immaculately conceived in Las Vegas, and in a context of true respect for the cultures we ape.
From "The Other Side" radio program, 1992.
MS: So, the song [Memories of East Texas] I started out with is from Short Sharp Shocked and I finished with a song [Come A Long Way] from my new release, The Arkansas Traveler. My reason for doing it that way was to introduce you to the idea that this new release represents the completion of a trilogy that began with Short Sharp Shocked. My intention at the time was to create three albums that very distinctly outlined my musical influences and background and so with Short Sharp Shocked the feature was on the songwriting influences such as Guy Clark or Townes Van Zandt. The middle of the trilogy [Captain Swing] was an effort to outline my musical influences that came from the likes of Bob Wills or Louie Jordan -- swing influences which at the root of it, I suppose, is blues but my approach to blues is always try and give it an up beat or a lift to the spirit. Finally with the completion of the trilogy I have The Arkansas Traveler and this is the music that I grew up playing with my father and my brother.
MS: The theme to the album, of course, is travelling. The Arkansas Traveler is in fact an old folklore. It tells the story of a man travelling through Arkansas. He was lost and so he was asking directions. The answers to the questions that he asked were not always the ones that he expected but I think in the long run worked better than the answers that he was looking for. That's certainly been the experience in my travels and in the making of this album.
MS: Well, I recorded this album with a lot of different people. The idea was inspired, I guess, from a hitch-hiking trip I took with my father a couple of years back. We hitch-hike up to the Ozarks to visit my friend, Crow, who lives up there and then we convince this fella that had a riverboat in Memphis that I was writing a book about riverboats and somehow needed to do research on his boat. So, he offered to let us ride on this boat all the way down to Baton Rouge and we would go up into the wheelhouse and play our mandolins for the pilot. Most of the songs that I'm playing on this album are melodies introduced to me by my father that I put my own lyrics to.
MS: Not only did we record the album with a lot of different people we recorded in a lot of different places and to do this we flew down to Kingston, Jamaica the day that the bombing began in Iraq. We went down to inspect this recording truck that we were thinking of using that was at the time being used by Ziggy Marley at his fathers studio. We decided to do it this way. We took this truck -- 48 track digital state of the art recording studio built into an 18-wheeler -- around the country recording with various people in interesting locations. One of the first places we recorded was in St Louis on a riverboat, and we recorded in a barn in Arkansas, and recorded in a dentists office in Mineola, Texas, and we recorded in an antique store in Georgia.
From unknown Dutch radio program hosted by Hubert van Hoof, ? May 1992
MS: You know that on the cover of this album [The Arkansas Traveler] I was thinking to appear in blackface for this reason: The music is thought to be very traditional, white, or European 'roots' to the music but it's not. It's based on a very popular form of entertainment from the 1800's called blackface minstrelsy. It's called bluegrass but my instinct says it's the living tradition of blackface minstrelsy.
MS: It would be very simple to understand the tradition of blackface minstrelsy as an American tradition but you know what? It was very, very popular in Europe. As a matter of fact some of the earliest entertainers of blackface minstrelsy were European. They would go to America and encounter, for the first time, black people and they would come back to Europe and they would present their interpretation of this black culture that they saw for the first time. And in a very simple way that is blackface minstrelsy -- a person with a European perspective, and I say an American also has a European perspective, for the first time meeting up with Afro-centric culture, meeting up with black culture and they say, "Oh, I like this. I can do this. I have rhythm. I'm funky. I've got soul." And this has been the history of popular culture ever since.
HvH: Why did they paint their faces black?
MS: I think it was the very time honoured ritual of wearing a mask. When you put on a mask you can be something other than what you are. I don't believe that anyone really believed when they saw this person with black paint that they were black. I don't believe that. I think it was respecting the tradition of wearing a mask and once you're in that mask you become a different character. You become a soul singer!
HvH: Now days one is tempted to consider the tradition as a form of racism.
MS: That's exactly the controversy of this history and why in dealing with the issue I've tried to be delicate but firm because it's not racist. Our understanding of it is racist but the history is a fact. It existed and the fact that we've tried to sweep it under the carpet, deny that it ever existed, rip it out of the history books, that's racist and I'll tell you why. If you can't understand your own racism of the past you can't go forward. You can't take out the part that is unpleasant. You must accept it and admit this but it's not racist. If anything it's appreciation of a culture that has something very valuable to give. The fact is that Euro-centric culture is very box-like. It's very structured and African culture, Afro-centric culture, is much more about integrating things. Putting all kinds of dance and music and rhythm and poly-rhythms all together. And we love this. It's wonderful. There's nothing wrong with Europeans appreciating African culture. We have a very curious way of appreciating it but we obviously love it. It's never gonna go away. It's a very strong culture.
MS: The fact is that blackface minstrelsy... one of the very controversial aspects of that history is that it was not only the white entertainers who would paint themselves black and perform this material. When blacks were allowed on stage for the first time it was during this era and they also had to put black paint on their own black skin. And because many of these rolls, these characters, are broad, very stereotypical, you know, either of someone from the country who's kinda like duuhh, or someone from the city who's like 'too cool', you know. Because those stereotypes were so broad, when black entertainers also played these rolls they became seen as maybe collaborators with the enemy. Like keeping the racial stereotypes alive. And that's a lot of where our negative idea of this history is. We don't want to figure out this contradiction -- how could a black person play these rolls? I know how, I know how they could. It was a roll that white audiences understood and so they were safe. It was at a time, after the Civil War, because they were no longer slaves, because they were no longer property, they were killed as if their life had no value at all. So by entertaining in this way and introducing their culture...
HvH: They survived.
MS: ...it was safe passage, exactly. It was survival. I can't honestly tell you that all of these songs were written by black musicians and adopted by white musicians. I can tell you that country music which is thought to be the whitest music of all time comes from so much Afro-centric tradition.
HvH: And European.
MS: Ah, a mix, sometimes. But usually they leave the Afro-centric tradition out of it. They say that Bill Monroe, for example, is the father of bluegrass and they never tell you that aside from his Uncle Pen, who taught him music Arnold Schultz was a friend who played fiddle...
HvH: And he was a black man.
MS: ...black man, yeah. They also don't mention that all of the stars of country music from Jimmy Rogers, to Gene Autry, to Bob Wills, Hank Williams, all performed at one time or another in their career in blackface. They don't tell you this.
HvH: On Arkansas Traveler you play with four generations of musicians from different musical areas. What's the connection between all those musicians?
MS: The connection between all these areas for me is blackface minstrelsy. That each of these musicians were chosen not only for the way that they reflect the tradition being passed from generation to generation but also, and more importantly, the way that they innovated. The way that they changed the tradition and made it unique or in most cases just found their own way into the tradition. It wasn't something that they inherited from their father or their grandfather it was something that they came to love and found their own way into the tradition.
From "MTV Most Wanted", interview by Steve Earle, 19 May 1992
SE: And the album that you're currently promoting, Arkansas Traveler, was one that he [Michelle's father] helped you with because you traveled around the country with him actually meeting musicians and working with a variety of people, a great variety of people. How did you actually come up with those people? Were they heroes of yours or just people you passed on the way...?
MS: A lot of 'em were people that I had been introduced to through my father taking me to this very large underground culture in America. It's not rock underground but it's underground nevertheless. It's called bluegrass music but it's not really bluegrass music. It's also thought of as traditional music or whatever. But what I found at these festivals he took me to were people playing the same tunes. You could travel all over the country and people would be playing these same traditional tunes. People like Doc Watson, and Norman & Nancy Blake, and David Grisman. And it's called bluegrass music and that's sort of what inspired me, who I wanted to record with. Then I added other bands.
SE: And one of the other bands that you added was, in fact, the Hothouse Flowers. Why them?
MS: I think that they are the best example I could come up with for what is about the blending of European culture -- the fact that they're Irish and they bring that whole Celtic tradition to their music. But the fact is that at the heart of it -- I don't know if they would consider themselves a soul band but I think that their music is very soulful and so it's also blending of what I would call Afro-centric cultural values, and soforth. And that was very important to me to take this traditional music, not for the sake of it being traditional, but to talk about it in a way that addresses the fact that nothing's pure. There's no such thing as pure traditional music. Afro-centric values have really mixed in and I thought they made a great example of that.
From interview by Brian Wise, 3RRR radio, Melbourne, Australia, Nov. or Dec. 1992.
BW: I've read that you planned to do the three albums, Short Sharp Shocked, Captain SwingArkansas Traveler as a sought of a trilogy summing up your musical predilections even before you started recording the first album.
MS: That's true and I think if I hadn't gotten a piece of that advice by my second manager -- and I've now been through a trilogy of managers as well -- their feeling was that I shouldn't reveal my agenda. That it would spoil people's anticipation of my music or something. So for example on Captain Swing when people were quite dismayed that I was no longer like this 'folk waif'. The best they could figure is that I had pretentions to being some kind of blues singer or something. I was like chompin' at the bit to say, "No, no, you can't tell the whole story yet. You haven't seen the whole story." But the management advice I was getting at the time was just to slow down, take one record at a time. And then I realized later that most people plan their records based on record sales and so many times they would have said, "Well you know, Captain Swing didn't really sell as well as Short Sharp Shocked. You need to go back now and make Short Sharp Shocked 2." And I got a lot of that and of course I ignored it all and said, "No, no, the trilogy is only two thirds complete." But yeah, I had planned it from the beginning.
From interview by Brian Wise, 3RRR radio, Melbourne, Australia, Nov. or Dec. 1992.
BW: You say in the liner notes that originally you wanted to present the album with a cover photo of yourself with a blackface and you write about black minstrelsy, as you call it. Did that music make an impression on you when you were young because to us it's really only peripheral...
MS: You know what? It was peripheral to me as well. What happened was that I met and subsequently fell in love with my husband who's a historian and he writes about music and has done over ten years of research on the subject. You know how it is in a relationship you talk a lot and you share your interests and soforth and quite honestly by the end of it I knew much more about this subject then I ever wanted to. And more importantly I saw how blackface minstrelsy related directly to my music and what I was trying to share with my audience which was the influences on my music. So I felt perfectly justified in incorporating that into the trilogy even though it was not my intention.
The way it actually went Brian was I told my husband, "Yeah, I'm making this third album and it's called Arkansas Traveler" and he said, "Oh, the old fiddle tune." I said, "Yes," He said, "Well did you know that that was a very popular song that was performed on the blackface minstrel stage." And my response was, "Huh." I didn't even know what... he kept using the word 'minstrelsy' and I kept thinking isn't it supposed to be 'minstrelry' or 'minstrelsry'. I'd never even really come across it at all. But once I knew I felt very confirmed that I should, you know... I think one of the failings of this project, the Arkansas Traveler has been to really develop and make that information accessible to people who are interested. The booklet [mentioned in the album liner notes] kind of got halfway off the ground and we did a self-publishing version of it but it's hard to get access to it. That was the reason for not doing the photo on the cover -- I wanted to get the information out there first before using a controversial image.
From article titled "A Conversation with Michelle Shocked" by Frank Goodman, Puremusic, May 2002.
MS: I would place Arkansas Traveler as mindful of Will the Circle be Unbroken, as certain people did at the time. Although I wasn't conscious of it as a big influence at the time, apparently it was a big influence on my dad to become a hippie going to bluegrass festivals, and hanging out with the old timers. And Arkansas Traveler was a tribute to those times hanging out with my dad and brother going to Bluegrass festivals.
From interview with Mark Radcliffe on BBC Radio 1, Manchester, England, 29? March 1994.
MR: The songs off the new album, weren't they sort of developed originally for some kind of music and dance presentation or somethin'?
MS: Yeah, have you ever heard of this group, The Mark Morris Dance Group?
MR: I haven't actually. I'm bein' honest. I could have bluffed me way through that.
MS: Mark Morris is, in my opinion, the great modern dance choreographer of our age and I had the opportunity to work with him. We presented at the Edinburgh Festival these songs in a piece called Home and it was great to see your songs set to dance. Well, modern dance particularly 'cause it ends up having a more peculiar interpretation than I think probably Paula Abdul would have given it.
From performance at Club Soda, Montreal, Quebec, 7 August 1994.
MS: Anyways, the CD is called Kind Hearted Woman and it comes from a story I heard. It goes like this: Back in the days when hobos used to ride the rails they had a shared vocabulary of symbols that would let each other know what to expect when you come to a strange town. For example, if you came to a house and outside of that house on the fence or the pavement was a scrawled picture of a smilin' cat, why you knew a kind hearted woman lived in that house and she could be counted on for a warm meal. Maybe a little work for money. Who knows, maybe a place to sleep for the night. I told this story to my husband. He said, "Bullshit!" He said, "That's not what that means if hobos was doin' the writin'." He said, "It means in that house you could get pussy." So I think you see this story is open to interpretation. And I personally believe that the interpretation you choose says a lot about yourself.
MS: I wrote these songs last winter and I recorded them in March... late March. Well, put it this way. I recorded it on Monday and by Friday I was in England selling the CD and singing the songs. It was that fast, the turn-around. Originally it was just supposed to be a project that lasted about three or four weeks for an English tour.
MS: But, what you need to understand (I'm trying to say this, it took me a long time to get to it) is these are winter songs. So it's gonna seem a little strange in late summer but just bear with me. Life is long and winter will come around again.
From FM101.9 "Music Hall", Los Angeles, interview by Nicole Sandler, 17 August 1994
NS: Now this album, Kind Hearted Woman, how long has it been out?
MS: Well, I recorded it on a Monday and it was out on a Friday. That was in March sometime. I don't know what the official release date was.
NS: But it's available only at your shows?
MS: Yeah, it is.
From performance at SO 36, Berlin, Germany, 2 July 1995
MS: The reason that so many of these songs on this album are quite so bitter -- aside from the obvious reasons -- is the fact that my grandmother died last year.
From the album liner notes, 1996
MS: About the smiling cat: Back in the days when hobos used to ride the rails they had a vocabulary of symbols that let each other know what to expect when they came to a strange town. For example, [circle with crooked arrow through it] meant a 'squat' or abandoned building. A cat with a smile and a heart chalked on a fencepost or pavement meant in that house lived a kind hearted woman who might offer a warm meal, an odd job, a place to sleep for the night.
From "Salon Magazine", by Cynthia Joyce, 14 October 1996
CJ: Where does Kind Hearted Woman fit in with the rest of your work?
MS: Well, I heard Bruce Springsteen say recently that he would use shows as confessionals because he didn't realize that there were therapists that you could pay good money to, and that's what this album is. I've been playing these songs live for over three years now. They still bring up unpleasant, painful connections to my psyche. I have been missing my grandmother desperately. And even my saying that, probably means I'll go home and miss my grandmother. Trying to get distance from that pain is difficult with these songs. They are such a brilliant presentation of the pain in the moment of experiencing it, that I end up going into that place more times than I care to. But the album is not about pain, it's about redemption. It's the very real pain that brings us to that weak moment when we surrender our weakness, and in doing so, find our strength.
You can talk about redemption in theory, but to portray it... One of the great things about music is the onomatopoeia of melody and sound, that you can go very heavy and intense and dark with just a guitar and a lot of reverb, and by the end, the strum of an acoustic guitar, and a pulsing bass, and just a light, side ride on the snare will make you feel lighter. So you can describe redemption, sonically, with music, in a way that a preacher doesn't even get a chance to.
From article titled "20 Questions - Michelle Shocked" by Neil Gladstone, Philadelphia citypaper.net, 7-14 November 1996.
NG: The songs on this album sprouted from a collaboration with choreographer Mark Morris. Who approached whom?
MS: Mark Morris approached me about working together with him and bassist Rob Wasserman. Morris gave us free reign. We were introduced to his work quite extensively, which I was ignorant of before we began.
I kind of took my cue from his biography. A lot of his early dance experience was with a folk ensemble out of Seattle. I decided to just try and be myself rather than approach the project theoretically and I was very happy with the results.
NG: What's your favorite song on Kind Hearted Woman?
MS: "A Child Like Grace." I like its play on the notion that in order to return to the kingdom of heaven, you must find a childlike grace. I took that concept and then told a story about a parent who is burying her child.
From performance at Cat's Cradle, Carrboro NC, 15 November 1996.
MS: Course, you're thinkin' to yourself, "I've heard these songs somewhere before." Coz I was through here about a year and a half ago wasn't I? Selling my songs. Selling my little CD out in the back. Thanks to you and your support I was able to raise enough money to go into the studio and make the version that I would have made had I received the support that I had been committed to by the label [Mercury Records]. And so now it's [Kind Hearted Woman] been released on a label out of L.A. called Private Music. I just went in and told 'em, "I need one thing from you and that's respect." They said, "OK. You sure you don't want any money?" I said, "OK, well, maybe that to."
MS: And this particular set of songs [on Kind Hearted Woman] -- very sad songs. I'm sure it's easy to understand why. If you've ever had a dream deferred you know what I'm talkin' about.
From "SLAMM Magazine", by Ed Decker, 20 November 1996.
MS: When my grandma died of cancer, this album dropped out of me like a dead baby.
From article titled "Q & A With Michelle Shocked" by Aidin Vaziri, The San Francisco Chronicle, 15 March 1998.
"Q: What are you saying with the stories that make up "Kind Hearted Woman"?
A: Death is a transformation, in a nutshell. That's a faithful, believing statement to make. People fall into different points of view on the subject, but mine is certainly that it's a transformation, not an ending."
From article titled "Shocked Treatment" by Alan Sculley, The Sonoma County Independent, 8-14 June 2000.
MS: What I've been experiencing is that on a superficial listen, the material does end up being perceived as very... someone used the word barebones.
From article titled "Into The Light" by Stewart Oksenhorn, Aspen Times, 13 July 2001.
It [Kimd Hearted Woman] wasn’t the comforting music that Shocked’s previous albums had been, and reviewers were divided down the middle about its merits. Shocked, for one, believes the album was a success in reflecting her emotions at the time.
"It does the job, but the job it does is not a pretty one," said Shocked of "Kind Hearted Woman." "That was the darkness, the valley of the shadow of death. It’s very intimate, very intense. And if you’re in the right mood, it can be downright depressing."
From "Salon Magazine", by Cynthia Joyce, 14 October 1996
CJ: The compilation that's being released on Mercury is called Mercury Poise -- a play on Graham Parker's album titled Mercury Poisoning, and a title Mercury's new president has agreed to even though it's obviously a poke at your whole experience with them. That seems like a pretty big concession for him to make.
MS: Naming that album Mercury Poise is no different than Prince changing his name. It is like saying, "Do not treat me like a brand or a product to be bought and sold." The prudent thing to do is to let the new president seem like a hero. But he's a hero by default. He's a hero because he did not say no. He didn't say yes, he just didn't say no.
CL: You've said you would have preferred to put out your own retrospective in a few years -- do you have mixed feelings about the sales of this one?
MS: When the vice president of business affairs says to me, point blank, "We're never going to promote your records because you cut too good a deal for yourself," I can't invest that much concern in how well it does.
I can still love the songs. But this compilation is a product, and a very cynical one. It is simply a way of squeezing the last drop of blood out of a corpse.
From "Time Off" magazine, by Matt Connors, 8 April 1998
MS: An album is a bit of an exaggeration. It's a demo; a glorified demo and limited edition at that. I've only printed 2500 copies and when they're gone, they're gone -- it's only available at shows. I decided not to go the route of starting my own independent label because I believe that I've got a lot of great work ahead of me that deserves all the resources that a major can bring to bear but it's just a matter of patiently waiting for the right label to realise this. By the end of the year I realised that I very much wanted to do this work, but I just needed to do it with a peace of mind that can't really be afforded if I'm chasing after the tails of (record) labels and so forth. Instead I've done the very patient and proper thing of an artist and let them come to me. As a result, now there's about 10 or 11 dogs hounding my trail.
From interview by Rita Houston on Words And Music From Studio A radio show, 90.7FM WFUV, Fordham University, New York NY, ~9 March 2001.
RH: You have a kind of dual thing going with Deep Natural and Dub Natural. A Michelle Shocked dub album?
MS: You explain it!
RH: Well, it goes like this. It goes like this: you take a bunch of
your songs and you groove 'em out [MS: Very good.] and the focus of it
is the groove not necessarily the vocals.
From interview by Rita Houston on Words And Music From Studio A radio show, 90.7FM WFUV, Fordham University, New York NY, ~9 March 2001.
MS: It [Dub Natural] opened not only the world of non-lyric based stuff but of all the fun things that you can do in the studio. I've always kind of dealt with the studio as this oppressive medium that was, like,
determined to capture me and trap me and hold me down forever. And to see just how playful it can be and how, in a way, thowaway. You know, everyone's got there own take on what dub can be or should be and I'm the only one who's got the master tracks to play with it.
From article titled "'Natural' Progression" by Larry Katz, Boston Herald, 8 May 2002.
"Doing that dub disc was my co-producers' idea," Shocked says. One producer is her husband and manager, Bart Bull. The other is ex-Hothouse Flowers guitarist Fiachna O'Braonain, who with the other members of her tour band, Perverse Allstars, back Shocked tomorrow at the Middle East.
"The dub idea was to emphasize my musical development," she says. She's speaking from a phone booth at the Circle Bar Truck Corral in Ozona, Texas, a pit stop between the previous night's gig and her home in New Orleans. "With the lyrics being so prominent in the perception of what I do, the development I've had as a musician has been pushed to the back. So the dub stuff says, 'Check out this woman's grooves!' "
From article titled "Disenchanted As Ever", Chronogram, May 2002.
MS: Dub was born in Jamaica as a way of putting an emphasis on the rhythms and the grooves beneath the tracks. It's an enhancement of Deep Natural and a way of further understanding my music without so much of the focus on the lyrics or the songwriting. I discovered for myself that sometimes you can't listen to an entire album of singer-songwriter material and the words kind of get in the way of your own thought process. The dub versions allow you to be in touch with the musical statements that are being made but to have your own thoughts.
From interview by John Platt on City Folk Sunday Breakfast, Fordham University, WFUV, New York NY, 30 June 2002.
Fiachna O'Braonain: Well, the idea actually came from Bart, Michelle's husband, and we were listening to Lee Perry and we're all big reggae fans anyway. I think Bob Marley was probably one of the inspirations behind all of our music. But anyway, we were in Dublin and we came up with the idea of creating this sort of 'impression' of the album. And it kind of worked as sort of a precursor to the release of the album as well -- that we took around and brought to the audience at the shows. It gave us an opportunity to get the 'paint box' out and strip away some of the vocals and then spin some of either the melodic motifs and some of the vocal into echo and just create this sort of impression of Deep Natural.
From interview by Rita Houston on Words And Music From Studio A radio show, 90.7FM WFUV, Fordham University, New York NY, ~9 March 2001.
RH: So there's Dub Natural and then there's Deep Natural which we played something from a little earlier. What's the plan for that?
MS: Got no plans, 'Stan'. I'm really at a good point in my career and in my life where I can take enough time to figure out what the best plan is. I'm sure you got lots of qualified listeners who can send in 5-year plans, market proposals... [both laugh]. Someone even had a helpful suggestion the other night at the show. They thought Napster was my... [laughs] they thought I should put this out on Napster [laughs].
From performance on the Morning Becomes Eclectic radio show, KCRW, Los Angeles CA, 3 April 2002.
MS: Well, there's Deep Natural which is what probably people know me best for is my lyrics and just singing songs. We recorded in Austin and Dublin, yeah, New Orleans and also Los Angeles. A lot of the tracks were recorded at Dave Pearlman's studio, Rotund Rascal. Dave's gonna give the address now [laughs]. Be that as it may, we had so much fun recording the tracks that it took us a long, long time to mix and master and in the meantime we got creative with it and decided to dub-out a lot of the songs. So that's why there's a second disc, Dub Natural.
From article titled "Disenchanted As Ever", Chronogram, May 2002.
It is with these uncompromising beliefs that she recently formed Mighty Sound, her own label. Her first release is an album that she proposed to Mercury over 10 years ago. "So here it is 10 years later and what I have made, for all intents and purposes, is that gospel album. It took 10 years but I finally got it out. Everything between Arkansas Traveler and Deep Natural has this painful experience attached to it. What a joy it is to give birth to this album which I feel is fully alive. And although it might have taken 10 years, it doesn't matter. If anything, the essence of a Gospel album always gets fuller, deeper, and more realized with challenges."
From interview by John Platt on City Folk Sunday Breakfast, Fordham University, WFUV, New York NY, 30 June 2002.
JP: Why do you call it Deep Natural?
MS: My husband coined that phrase but it was kinda accidental. He's quite the gregarious and over-zealous fan of my music and he was tellin' someone, I guess it was a journalist -- he was describing me to her -- sayin' that people don't really recognize this about me but I'm a hillbilly. I didn't even know this -- it took him to point it out. You know, if you're a hillbilly you don't know you're a hillbilly. And so he was sayin' that I was a hillbilly but because I had lived this life of travelling around I had been exposed to so many different insights and influences and stuff like that. He was sayin', "Michelle is the worldliest hillbilly you'll ever meet. She's a 'deep natural'."
Now I wouldn't say that about myself cause I'm just bein' myself but this is the point of view from someone who's studied music and learned and listened to a lot and lot of music. I just liked that phrase 'deep natural' and the imagery from my first visit to the Grand Canyon kinda resonated with me to. You wanna talk about a 'deep natural'...
From interview by Jenni Murray on Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 4, 9 Oct 2002.
MS: There's a strong element of blues [on Deep Natural]. We call it 'new dub blues' because a lot of it's been treated with a studio technique called dub. And there's also a very strong element of Gospel but because I'm not from the Gospel tradition -- I'm not African-American -- we kinda lighten it and call it 'Gospel birdsong'.
From article titled "Joy And Faith" by Eric van Domburg Scorpio, Heaven, Jan/Feb 2003.
EvDS: One of the things I like best about Deep Natural is its lively sound. Was it recorded live?
MS: Yeah, and that's a rare thing nowadays. Drums, bass, organ and guitars have all been recorded in one go. To that we later added trumpet, pedal steel and my vocals. It's dead simple actually.
EvDS: Is there a theme at the basis of the record?
MS: For me the basis of the album is to express Joy. And not in a superficial way. With joy I don't just mean happiness, but a sense of calm, of inner peace from which you draw faith, in such a way that even if you encounter a disappointment tomorrow you can still experience joy. It's not positivism, or optimism, but faith, a belief that you are being protected. And not only if things go the way you wanted them to go, but also when they turn out different from what you had anticipated. It gives you a perspective that is broader than your own.
From the liner notes of The Facts And The Fiction promo CD, 1992.
MS: This song has 7 words in it that if the FCC knew were in there, couldn't be played on the radio.
MS: For good measure, I've included the words "censorship" and "obscene". The first 100 people to identify all 9 words receive a free voter registration form, courtesy of Rock the Vote, 345 N. Maple Dr, Beverly Hills, CA 90210.
From "The Other Side" radio program, 1992.
MS: This next song I recorded with Pops Staples in Chicago, interestingly enough, in a recording studio. It's inspired by Pops actually who asked me to write him a gospel song and having no experience with it really I kind of put this together with my own twist.
From performance at Prince Of Wales, Melbourne, Australia, 23 April 1998
MS: I'm gonna explain myself. The point bein' of course never ever but never mess with a songwriter. I took all these words that you're not supposed to say and I put 'em in this song in such a manner as you don't know they're in there unless I tell ya they're in there... and they're in there. So we're gonna sing it again except this time I'll make myself a little bit more plain. Ready?
(Consecrate your soul y'all)
COCKSUCK-ate your soul
Or there's gonna be hell to pay
(You got them where they live)
You GODDAMN where they live
CUM the Judgement Day
Father, forgive our sins
(Mother, forgive us too)
MOTHERFUCKER-give us too
FUCK-give but don't FUCK-get
They never meant to hurt you
Ah they never meant to hurt you now
(And just to let you know that my hearts in the right place...)
She's doin' the widow walk
CENSORSHIP went down
OBSCENE her with a pretty boy
On the CUNT-ry side of town
(I'm feelin' purile. Bad, bad songwriter.)
Her captain is lost at sea
Her SHIT-PISS-FUCK-gotten too
SHIT admit she'd been singing
The hellfire brimstone blues
Isabel Ringing in my head
From performance at Redcar (Folk Festival), England, 29 October 1987
MS: One of the dangers of travelling around on your own was that time-to-time I was picked up by the police. Taken to the local psychiatric hospital. Branded a psychotic for this "crime" of being homeless. So I left for New York City. I knew there were too many people there. They couldn't bother with one little old skinny folk singer. When I got there I met this psychiatry woman named Isabel Pierce. She'd see me once a week and I'd try to teach her the guitar. It was hopeless... for both of us I suppose. But this is what she told me. She said, "'Chelle, you ain't crazy, you're just poor." Like I say her name was Isabel Pierce but I liked to call her Isabel Ringing. I have this thing about last names I suppose.
Isabel Ringing in my head
From performance at the Paradiso, Amsterdam, 15 December 1988
MS: One of the dangers of travelling around on your own, and I think particularly if you're a woman, is that from time-to-time it's likely that you'll be picked up by the police. Taken to the local psychiatric hospital. Branded a psychotic. All this for the "crime" of being homeless. So I left for New York City. When I got there I met this psychiatry woman. Her name was Isabel Pierce and she told me, "'Chelle, you ain't crazy, you're just poor." Like I say her name was Isabel Pierce but I used to call her Isabel Ringing. I used to think about her a lot when I left America and came to live here in Amsterdam.
From performance at The Palace, Hollywood CA, 21 November 1994
MS: Here's a song I wrote in another town I spent a lot of homeless hours in...
From performance at Club Soda, Montreal, Canada, 7 August 1994.
MS: And I think this next song is my very first and a very good effort at what I think gospel music can be. I'm not telling you it's conventional but it is a gospel song. I don't know if you ever played this game when you were a kid but we used to take a dandelion and put our thumb right there, where the head joins the stem, and we'd say this little poem. We'd say, "Mary had a baby and his head popped off."
From performance at SO 36, Berlin, Germany, 2 July 1995
MS: It's inspired by a game we used to play when we were children. We would take a dandelion and we would... [makes squashing action with hands]. We would take a dandelion and put it between our fingers just so and say this poem. We'd say, "Mary had a baby and his head popped off."
From article titled "20 Questions - Michelle Shocked" by Neil Gladstone, Philadelphia citypaper.net, 7-14 November 1996.
NG: What's your favorite song on Kind Hearted Woman?
MS: "A Child Like Grace." I like its play on the notion that in order to return to the kingdom of heaven, you must find a childlike grace. I took that concept and then told a story about a parent who is burying her child.
From performance at (Rivoli Tavern, Toronto, Canada)?, 10 May 1988.
MS: This is one of my very favourite songs that I wrote. I wish I could write some more like this.
From appearance on Coca Crystal's Manhattan Cable Show "If I Can't Dance..." broadcast 1 January 1985.
MS: I've been pretty busy. Now that I've been in New York, I've written a new song I'd like to play.
From CBC (Canada) radio's "Hot Ticket" program broadcast 29 November 1992.
MS: I had quite a bit of success with one of my songs called Anchorage. The story about my friend who lives up in Anchorage. I went up there and I made a video and all that and then I lost touch with her again. And then two months ago [July] I had a wedding in Los Angeles and nobody could find her in Anchorage. So I called my friends at MTV and I asked them would they just announce on MTV that I was looking for Kelli or Leroy Bingham. Please call me. Leroy has a friend in Philadelphia who saw the plea and sent Leroy a fax. So they called me and they drove and they made it down to the wedding. So for me it was like things came full circle, you know.
From performance at the Borealis Theatre, Alaska State Fair, Anchorage AK, 27 August 2002.
MS: He [Leroy] told her they were comin' to Alaska to take a little vacation. Do you know what he did? He had already gotten a job lined up when he brought her up here. I found this out later. My friend Kelli, she loves that man!
Take me back to the days of the foreign telegrams
And the all-night rock 'n rollin'
From appearance on "The Inside Track" TV show, hosted by Graham Nash, 1990
MS: This songs called Anchorage but I wrote it in New York City. It's about a time I spent in Dallas reading telegrams that came from overseas. I was working in a room with about forty women... and one male supervisor. I made friends with this one woman. She was raising up her young son by herself so sometimes after work we'd take him over to her mothers so that we could go out dancin' to rock 'n' roll.
What was the name of that love song you played?
From performance at the Livid Festival, Brisbane, Australia, 12 December 1992
MS: I got married not too long ago myself, and I tried to find my friend, Kelli, up in Anchorage. I wanted to invite her down to the wedding but I lost her number again. So, I called Information but they didn't have ger listed neither. So I tried one more thing -- I called my friends at MTV. I said, "Would you help me please? I'm trying to find my friend up at Anchorage." So that night on the news they ran this little report. They said, "Kelli, Michelle's getting married in Los Angeles and she wants you to call her." And then they gave everybody my home phone number! So, I get the phone call, like, one day before the wedding and she comes down, her and Leroy. My friend, Sophia [Ramos?], was at the wedding and she sang at my wedding the song that I sang at Kelli's wedding. And it went like this... [sings Waters Wide]
From the liner notes of the album, The Civil War Collection by Jim Taylor, ©1995
Bell Irvin Wiley in his book, The Life of Johnny Reb, lists several fiddle tunes that were popular favorites with the soldiers in Confederate camps during the war, including Arkansas Traveler. This tune is a little different in that it comes complete with a humorous dialogue interspersed with short snatches of the tune played on the fiddle. This popular skit from the minstrel stage was first printed in 1847, although the tune itself was likely in existence long before that. No clear British antecedent exists for Arkansas Traveler, giving rise to the theory that the tune is an American original.
The dialogue which accompanies the tune is between an old Arkansas farmer and a "city-slicker." The scene is the farmer's cabin which sits along the road to Little Rock. The farmer sits in the doorway of the cabin playing his fiddle while the city-slicker, thoroughly lost, stops to ask directions.
From the book, The Originals by Arnold Rypens, 1996
The Arkansas Traveller (and Ruckinsack Waltz)
Unknown composer, first recorded by Len Spencer (1900) for Columbia, rerecorded in 1902 for Victor (the best sold record before 1905). A kind of humour that's clearly of all ages. Len Spencer was one of the first 'recording artists', gaining his reputation mainly through records (songs like Ta Ra Ra Boom De Ay, The Old Folks at Home and Carry Me Back to the Ole Virginny). Other famous recordings are by Fiddlin' John Carson (1934), Speedy West & Jimmy Bryant (1950s), Chet Atkins (1950s), Hobart Smith (1959) and Albert Lee (1986). Michelle Shocked's lead singer for this song, Jimmy Driftwood, is actually from Arkansas and wrote The Battle of New Orleans.
The melody was first published in 1847 as an anonymous piece, arranged by William Cumming. The famous dialogue between the local farmer and the traveller is sometimes attributed to Mose Case, sometimes to Col. S.C. Faulkner. The latter claimed to be the original Arkansas Traveller himself, only recalling what happened to him in 1840.
From WCVF, New York, interview by Tom Bingham, December 1986
TB: Is that a story that someone told you or something that you made up or someone you came across in your travels?
MS: Aww, I made that one up. That's my own but I tell ya, he [Texas Campfire Tapes' Producer Pete Lawrence] chose to put that on the album and I sing it from time-to-time but it's kind of one of those early efforts. I don't really think... It's a good story and all, I'll play it if you like. But I think it's kinda corny myself.
From performance at Ben & Jerry's Newport Folk Festival, 1990.
MS: This song I borrowed from a fellow from Chicago named Steve Goodman. I'm sure some of you have heard of him. Steve died a few years ago of leukaemia. I'm real proud to be singing this song.
From article by Nicole Pensiero in the "Courier-Post", 12 April 1992
MS: I would love it if a song like "Blackberry Blossom" would be, in 20 years or so, considered a great American traditional tune. There's a song I hope is beautiful for the sake of being beautiful.
From performance at The East Coast Blues & Roots Festival, Byron Bay, Australia, 11 April 1998
MS: I wrote a song last night. I was playing it for The [Annointed] Earls in the van on the way over. I don't even know what key it's in but we're gonna do it right here in living colour.
MS: It's a mean womans song. Now everybody knows that women aren't mean, but they get treated bad and that can make 'em hostile [laughs]. Everybody knows that. There ain't no such thing as a mean woman, just one that's been treated bad.
From performance at HMV Records, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 24 Feb 1987
MS: It's about these evangelical types that used to come to my campus there in Austin. Every spring they'd show up and they'd practice the word of God in front of all of us and we'd promptly proceed to make fools of 'em. So when I get to the part that says "straight to hell" you just join in there. I didn't know that they travelled around. I thought that they were just a unique part of Texas that made it what it is. Then I started travelling. I saw 'em in California and Wisconsin and all these places that used to have hippie colleges in the '60s. That's when I realized that those campus crusader types, they have a circuit just like us folk-singer types. You say your piece and then you get the hell outta town. Anyway, their names was Brother Jed and Sister Cindy and this is their story.
From performance at Redcar (Folk Festival), England, 29 October 1987
MS: The first tune we'd like to play for you was inspired by a friend of mine, Doug, who works with a group in New York called the Homeless Union. What it was was a lot of the folks that live in the shelters there got together and started a union and then there were some of us squatting on the Lower East Side that tried to say, "Well hey, you don't gotta ask the Government for no homes. Just come on down and we'll show you how to... we'll set you right up." Well, I don't know, it didn't work so well but we tried. This is a song for them.
From performance at the Hackney Empire, London, 15 April 1989
MS: This next tune takes me back to New York City where I was livin' right before ol' Pete Lawrence recorded that Texas Campfire Tape business. I had a squat on 9th Street and the roof wasn't too good - this is what I remember about it -- the roof wasn't good so we'd stretch this plastic across the ceiling. The rain would fall in and collect in little pools in the middle of the plastic and it kinda became like an oasis for these rats which would walk across the plastic and go drink from the pools of water. They'd walk across the plastic and they'd be looking down at me. I was laying on my matress looking up at them.
From Captain Swing songbook (Wise Publications ©1989)
MS: This tune is best played on a rainy night in a dark alley somewhere south of Houston and north of Canal, around Spring or Broome. I recognise it when I see it. [The streets mentioned here are all in New York City.]
From appearance on "New Visions" TV show, 1990
MS: The Cement Lament is part of what I call my "homeless trilogy" on the new album as well. I guess the other two would be God Is A Real Estate Developer and Streetcorner Ambassador. So the three of those make up a trilogy. Kind of sets the mood for my own experiences or the experiences of people around me. Just kinda down and out and on the streets. I was hoping, pretty much, the title says it all -- the cement lament.
From performance at the Kerrville Folk Festival, Texas, 1986
MS: This is an old, old, old one.
Also known, in its various forms, as Change The Name Of Arkansas? or Senator Johnson's Great Speech this fictitious (for a search of official archives has been unable to find any record of such an oration or a Senator Cassius M. Johnson) tale has probably existed since at least 1881. It was then that the State Legislature formally established the pronunciation of Arkansas as 'ARKansaw' rather than 'ArKANsas.
The version included on Arkansas Traveler is delivered by John A. Lomax Jr. and recorded in Houston in 1959. From the clicks and pops one can assume that it was taken directly from the record, The Unexpurgated Folk Songs Of Men, a 1960 compilation put together by Mack McCormick and decribed as "an informal song-swapping session with a group of Texans, New Yorkers and Englishmen exchanging bawdy songs and lore, presented without expurgation."
From performance at Cat's Cradle, Carrboro N.C., 15 November 1996
MS: How many of y'all have actually ever been to New Orleans? My goodness! Well, it's no secret that it is a tourist town. But, what you may not realize is they have a word for tourists. It don't matter where you come from. They call you all the same thing: Clevelands! And they run all these street hussles and I'm gonna tell you about a couple of em.
From performance at Club Soda, Montreal, Quebec, 7 August 1994.
MS: This is a song I wrote for a friend of mine who's mother was killed by a drunk driver. And this is in the state of Oklahoma where the maximum sentence for this crime is a one year prison term. And there are days when I think I know what it's like to live with frustration. But I have to admit that it's not the kind of frustration that my friend Russ McKinnon -- perhaps you've heard of him, he's a wonderful drummer in a great band, Tower of Power -- has to live daily with the fact that the driver who killed his mother had only been released from prison less than a month earlier after having served a one year term for killing someone while driving drunk.
From performance at SO 36, Berlin, Germany, 2 July 1995
MS: A friend of mine had his mother killed, a couple of years ago, by a drunk driver.
From performance (early show) at Stephen Talkhouse, Miami, 28 May 1993.
MS: I said that that song was about Los Angeles but let me tell you what it actually is, is having found a city big enough to contain the metaphor for the experience that I personally had of falling in love. First of all, I wasn't looking to fall in love, ok, so it kind of hit me over the head like a brick. And then secondly, when it happened to me I had to go through a lot of changes and I was terrified of losing my identity. That's the honest truth, I thought this guy wanted to change me. So I fought it really hard. What I'm really talking about in that song is how when you're really scared you act like you're really angry, and you're not, you're really scared. I was glad to find a city that could be a metaphor for that. 'Cause it's true, Los Angeles is big enough to talk about fear and anger and there's room for a lot more beyond that.
Pescado mojado me encontre
From performance at The Metro, Sydney, Australia, 18 April 1995
MS: It's the Mexican equivalent of saying, "I came in like a wet fish", which is what they call themselves if they cross the Rio Grande without a visa -- a wet fish. And we have another charming term for it -- the gringos call 'em "wetbacks", but you get the idea.
From performance at Metropol, Vienna, Austria, 12 June 1996
MS: When I wrote this song I was tryin' to find a way of expressing the fear that we all have at a certain point in our lives -- we're no longer young but we're not quite old. And what does that make us? [From the audience: Middle-aged!] Middle-aged doesn't quite cover it. [From the audience: Crisis!] No, no, no not crisis. Just fear, just fear. Because it's like outgrowing your favourite shirt. You don't really want to grow up, is what I'm sayin'. But you know that it is inevitable and so you learn to face the fear but not very gracefully. Usually you have big fights with the people closest to you. The ones that love you the most. And all I was doin' was tryin' to find an example of something big enough for me to grow into. And for lack of a better idea I thought of the city of Los Angeles...
From performance (late show) at the Commercial Tavern, Mary Hill, Ontario, August 1992
MS: Alright, we're gonna play you another fiddle tune since you like it so much. This is my version of Cripple Creek.
From a Guy Clark interview by Bill DeYoung, "Goldmine" magazine Issue 435, 28 March 1997
BDY: Desperados Waiting for a Train is probably your best-known song. That was written about a friend of your grandmother's in Monahans [Clark's hometown in West Texas]. On Keepers [Clark's live acoustic album], you say he told you how to whittle, spit and cuss, and drive a car, and sit up straight.
GC: Jack Prigg worked for Gulf Oil Company all his life. Drilled the first oil wells in Venezuela, and in the Middle East, Iran, Iraq. That song is as true as I can make it. We used to go to the Gulf Days picnic in Odessa, in his '38 Packard Coupe, and he'd drink beer all day. I drove the car home. I was nine or 10, driving back at 30 miles an hour. He was just like part of the family. He had a room there at the hotel [Clark's grandmother's], he didn't pay rent, and he'd pay the water bill and fix the air conditioner, stuff like that. He was there before I was born. Red River Valley was his favorite song. He'd sit there and wring his hands. And he was bald. That's "run his fingers through 70 years of living." He'd pass his hand over his bald head. I think real life is much more interesting. The ones that are really dead-on true are the best songs.
From interview for (BBC?) radio, Redcar, England, 29 October 1987.
INTERVIEWER: With Disoriented, which is a track I particularly like on the new 12 inch single you've got out, it seems to be very much more serious than the feel [of The Texas Campfire Tapes]. Is that a new direction or is that just an experiment or what? 'Specially with the string quartet which really enhances it I think.
MS: It was completely an experiment. I hate to... I'm quite embarrassed about this whole affair because what happened...
INTERVIEWER: That song in particular or its recording?
MS: Yeah. I went into the studio without, well, basically without much respect for the medium. I didn't know what I was dealing with and it was the first time I'd really ever been in a studio. And I went in hoping, really, nothing more than to make a subtle joke, or a piss-take even, on the tendency of singer-songwriters to be so introspective, to be so anaemic even, you know. And so, I thought, "I'm gonna write this song that sounds so self-centred and then I'm gonna put this over the top production on it." You know, (INTERVIEWER: I like it [laughs]) if you've ever seen this Paul Simon movie One Trick Pony you know the problems that you have with overproduction.
But the problem was I was still on an indie label working with an indie budget and I didn't have any bigwig producers saying, "Right, this single's gonna make or break your career." I just went in and thought, "Ha! This'll be a lark. I could do a million things. I guess I'll do this one." I feel quite bad about that, you know. But the problem really comes down to the fact that there was nothing in the world that was motivating me to make a single at that time. It was more just that the record company thought it would be a good idea. Whereas the case now is there's a few things I've come to thinkin' about as a result of what's happened for me since January that I really would like to express it and a single might be a real effective way to do it.
INTERVIEWER: "Lament for the trust territories" -- sounds as if it's to do with the American indians?
MS: No, the trust territories I'm referring to are the ones in the Pacific.
From performance at The Junction, Cambridge, England, 30 May 1996
MS: Take this groove I wrote for this song [plays electric guitar]. ?????? mambo here. And then I put a whole bunch of new songs to it. Remember this one? [sings & plays first verse and chorus of On The Greener Side] Alright, so that's the basic unit. And here's what I've been doin' with it lately. A song called Don't Tell Wizard.
From performance at Docks, Hamburg, Germany, 26 May 1992
MS: I would like to present to you -- you've been so wonderful tonight -- a new song actually that I haven't recorded. And the reason I would like to present this new song is that it's in fact the follow-up on a previous song called V.F.D. which is a story 'bout me and my friends setting this field on fire. It was a small town I come from and there wasn't very much to do so for entertainment we would light a match, throw it in the grass and wait for it to get kind of big and then we would stomp it out. Though we would wait till it got kind of big or it wasn't fun. And, in fact one time we weren't fast enough. We lit the whole field on fire. This story, people always come up to me and say, "Michelle, is this true, is this true. Did you really light this field on fire." And I always say, "It's a fine line between a good story and a bold-faced lie." But in this particular case it's a lie and here's the truth: I didn't do it and my friend didn't do it but this boy named Eddie was helping his father bring the cows home from the pasture and suddenly a storm came up and a bolt of lightning killed his father. It's a true story. He was twelve years old and he saw his father killed by lightning. Ever since then he became an arsonist and I know the reason why and so I'll tell it to you in this song.
And just one other small coincidence. Eddie's last name is Bone-break, Bonebreak, you see. If you're a songwriter you can't pass up this opportunity. One problem is I've never figured out how to play it on the guitar so I just clap and you can clap as well if you want to.
From performance at the Livid Festival, Brisbane, Australia, 12 December 1992
MS: I hate to be the one to break it to you but, you know this story I just told you [V.F.D.] 'bout me and my friend setting this field on fire. Well, it's a lie. I never set a field on fire and my friend never set a field on fire. This boy named Eddie did it! Eddie Bonebreak was twelve years old and one day he was helping his father bring the cows in from the pasture. Suddenly this thunderstorm came up out of nowhere and this big ol' bolt of lightning came down out of the sky and it struck his father dead right there in front of his eyes. This is true, now. Twelve years old he was. And ever since that day Eddie had this burning desire, I guess you could call it, to go around town setting everything on fire. And I know the reason why he did it and I'm gonna explain it to you in this song I wrote, which is a true story. Not to be confused with the story I just told you, which was a lie.
From performance at Club Soda, Montreal, Quebec, 7 August 1994.
MS: It's the story of another death. A death that happened about three weeks before I recorded this album. The death of my grandmother. Died of cancer. Lymphoma, it's cancer of the bone marrow but usually it's because your blood flows through your bone marrow and picks up the cancer and carries it through your body and invades organs that are a lot softer than your bones. And in her case it was her lower intestine. She was a nurse by trade and so she knew every stage of the dying. She knew that it would eventually grow larger and larger and block her intestine to the point where she couldn't eat a meal and when that day came she drove herself to the hospital. Very opinionated lady, my grandmother. She used to have this saying. She used to say, "Live until you're dead." I think it was her opinions that gave her such a zest for life because she just felt there weren't enough hours in a day for her to share her opinions with you and you so much needed to know them. I went to her retirement party where she was so loved and respected by her colleagues that for her retirement they gave her a witches hat and a broom.
Well, the doctors gave her three days to try this experimental type of steroid that might work... but it didn't. So after three days they sent her to the hospice to wait to die. A lot of times what happens in a hospice is that you don't die of the disease that you went in there for. The doctors administer such large doses of pain killers, like morphine, that it's very typical that you die of a disease that we sometimes call 'lack of a will to live'. But not my grandmother. She decided to do things a little differently and took the smallest possible amount of morphine and she struggled with the most pain that she could so that she could remain conscious and aware of her own death. And I appreciate this courage very much. Well, not only was she an inspiration to the nurses who were now looking after her but, for my own selfish reason because... I got the phone call. I was in Los Angeles and they said, "Your grandmother's in the hospital dying." And I was able to fly to Dallas and to sit at her bedside and to say those very important words that you want to know for sure someone understands before you lose 'em forever. Those words of course are, "I love you." I was able to tell my grandmother, "I love you." I told her, "There was a time in my life when I was so troubled, so confused, that you were the only person who I knew loved me." And I tell you how I knew -- she said I made her ulcer act up. She tried to say I gave it to her but I know my father did that. They say the reason grandparents get along so well with grandchildren is because they have a common enemy. She told me, "I needed you as much as you needed me." And she didn't have to say that but in doing so she gave me one of the most precious gifts I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
My story would have a typical ending, an inevitable ending, except that a woman walked into the hospital room at this moment. This woman was my mother who I had not seen or spoken to for over ten years, ever since she had committed me, against my will, to the psychiatric ward of the hospital that I was now sitting in with my grandmother. I hadn't spoken to her in over ten years... and I want you to understand something, ok. This was not her mother who was dying. This was my fathers mother... who she had divorced when I was three years old. So I really feel she had no business being there and she walked into the hospital room at just this moment and she asked me this question: "Would you like some coco?" And I was so angry, I felt so betrayed, so violated, that I left the hospital. I never saw my grandmother again. And it occured to me as I was flying home that life is like a fever, and the temperature rises but there comes that inevitable day when the fever breaks.
From performance at SO 36, Berlin, Germany, 2 July 1995
MS: The reason that so many of these songs on this album [Kind Hearted Woman] are quite so bitter -- aside from the obvious reasons -- is the fact that my grandmother died last year. And I wrote this song just before I recorded the album.
From performance at WCVF, New York, December 1986.
MS: This here tune's called Fogtown. Another word for San Francisco. Situated there on the coast the fog rolls in in the morning, clears up for a few hours in the afternoon and then just like clockwork it comes in again at night. I was living out there as a squatter in an old abandoned warehouse right off of 6th Street. I think every town's got a 6th Street where all the pawn-shops and wine stores and hookers and pimps and hustlers and cheaters are. And right around the corner is the big shiny business district of San Francisco.
From performance at Palmer Auditorium, Connecticut College, New London CT, 21 April 1988.
MS: San Francisco, up there on the northern coast of California, has always got this fog. Comes in every morning. Goes away for a couple of hours in the afternoon but it comes in again at night. I was living in an old abandoned building down on Folsom Street when I wrote this song. That's right off of 6th Street. Ahhh, that's right off of Market Street. The only reason I mention this is 'cause every city has got one of those Market Street's. That's where all the business goes on every day. Every city's got a 6th Street too. The more I travel the more I come to know this. It's not always right around the corner like in this case but if you look hard enough you're gonna find it. That's where all the pimps are, all the hores, all the junkies, all the liquor stores, all the places where you buy guitars like this one... I'm talking pawn-shops. And like I say, we was right around the corner engaged in a activity that sounds kinda crude but it's called squattin'. Which means that all these people livin' thousands of miles away from the city have bought these buildings. They don't even know they own 'em sometimes. Meanwhile you're out living on the streets and eatin' in soup-kitchens -- you need a place to live... so you take it. You squat it.
From performance at the Lone Star Cafe Roadhouse, New York NY, 15 January 1989.
MS: This is a song I wrote (a couple)? of months ago. It's called Fred's Winter Song. It's about this guy that lives in Tottenham, where I live, near where my boat is moored.
From performance at the UCSD Mandeville Auditorium, San Diego, 5 March 1989.
MS: It's about this old guy that lives near where my houseboat is [in London]. When I first met him he lived in a little pickup truck but then one night these boys came and smashed in the windows of what was his house. So all of us at the mooring got together and we pushed this old ambulance ??????????. Fred, he's what they call a traveller in England. That's another name for a homeless person. I don't know why they call him that 'cause there's not an engine in the thing -- he ain't going nowhere. Well anyways, he took to planting himself a garden next to the ambulance and that's what this song's about.
From performance at Redcar (Folk Festival), England, 29 October 1987.
MS: It's about growing up in a small town in a dry county. A dry county is a county where if you want to buy alcohol you gotta drive to a wet county to buy it. It was a basic invention 'cause Texas is in the Bible Belt. That's what they call it down there -- the Bible Belt. The buckle of the Bible Belt. So what they decided is that each county could vote on whether they'd sell alcohol or not. So what happens sometimes, late at night, is that folks from the moral county drive to the immoral county to buy their alcohol.
From performance at (Rivoli Tavern, Toronto, Canada)?, 10 May 1988.
MS: Now we come to an important crossroads in this little vignette 'cause I don't know whether to sing for you the song... You see I've got this 'East Texas trilogy' which is three songs about East Texas. Well I already played two of 'em [Yamboree Queen & Memories Of East Texas]. Then I went and wrote another song about the place so I have four songs. I can't figure out which of these two songs is better for the trilogy. I'll tell you which ones they're called. One's called Making Trouble For The V.F.D.. That's the Volunteer Fire Department. The other one's called Making The Run To Gladewater which is about growing up in a small town what's in a 'dry' county.
From performance at Redcar (Folk Festival), England, 29 October 1987
MS: This tune we got for you here is called God... [giggles] or The Mechanistic Universe Stomp... or Tootin' Newton's Horn. I'm still working on a title [grins].
Commenting on her Captain Swing album probably as part of a promo release by Mercury Records, c. Oct 1989
MS: That song is basically me having a little bit of fun at theologies expense. There's all these old theories that have been passed down in philosophy back to the enlightenment era. I think a theory that the nature of the universe... this was one of the questions that they were obsessed by was the nature... it was the idea that the universe had been created by an intelligent being, a God, but he had in fact created it and then moved on. This was the absentee landlord theory. There was also the argument, I think it was in Newton's time, about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. And I'm quick to point out that I see that it all comes down to speculation really [laughs].
As did the second angle on this song with the aspect of the real estate development. For several years now, I guess not as recently, but in my past I've been involved in the movement of squatting and around the issue of housing and affordable housing. I think this song was inspired from the time I spent in New York City. The times have kind of held true for what I'm trying to point out. Here you have a very famous developer named Donald Trump -- he's a celebrity in his own right as a developer and he basically owns New York City at this point.
From Captain Swing songbook (Wise Publications ©1989)
MS: This one finds me having a little bit of fun at theology's expense. I believe that it's all down to speculation.
From appearance on "New Visions" TV show, 1990
MS: The Cement Lament is part of what I call my "homeless trilogy" on the new album as well. I guess the other two would be God Is A Real Estate Developer and Streetcorner Ambassador. So the three of those make up a trilogy. Kind of sets the mood for my own experiences or the experiences of people around me. Just kinda down and out and on the streets.
From article titled "Shocked But Unfazed" by Chris Beck, The Age, Melbourne, Australia, 21 April 2003.
MS: People shout out for God is a Real Estate Developer and I'm a bit like Sinead O'Connor, like, 'I, ah, um, I don't sing that song any more'.
From performance at CBGB's, New York NY, 18 March 1998
MS: That was obviously the song I was tellin' you about called "Good News" inspired by -- I will never forget it -- when I visited Convent [in Louisiana] the woman who's working with Cheryl [Adams] in the St. James Coalition For Jobs And The Environment, she's driving me around and she's driving past the sugar cane field where they want to build a PVC plant -- a corporation called Shintech. And she holds her right hand out just like so and says, "Shintech, you will not build on this site! I take authority in the name of Jesus!"
From performance at Prince Of Wales, Melbourne, Australia, 22 April 1998
MS: This song was commissioned by the group called Greenpeace for a documentary video that they shot about an hour north of my present hometown of New Orleans. A little town called Convent, Louisiana. It's a very small town. Predominately African-American. Predominately poor. We're not talking rich people here. But what these people are rich in is these very heavy-industry toxic plants -- manufacturing plants, petrochemical and, in this particular case, a plant that manufactures a type of cheap plastic called PVC. This area has so much heavy industry in it that it's been renamed 'cancer alley' because of the very high rate of cancer -- the long term health effects that this industry's had on its citizens. I'm sure y'all can read between the lines of American politics but it's no coincidence that these corporations have actively sought and located in these particular types of communities. The issue is called environmental racism.
So they asked me to write this song. They thought I might be interested and I was. This is a song we wrote called "Good News" coz the bad news, of course, is that they're going in there or that they're building these plants anywhere. PVC has got to go. At the point of building it or making it and also at the point of trying to dispose of it. It's just bad news. But the good news is that the people in this community haven't really been part of the environmental movement heretofore which has been a predominately white and middle-class movement.
From performance at 9:30 Club, Washington DC, 26 August 2001
MS: About five years ago it was -- I think five, six years ago -- I was approached by some activists from Greenpeace -- matter of fact one is here tonight, Mr. Bill Walsh...
From performance at the Festival des Politischen Liedes, Berlin, East Germany, early 1989
MS: There comes times in a performers life -- and they can never predict when this happens -- that they can no longer accept to just go along with the program. And they must play how they feel even if how they feel is not very happy. I hope you don't mind if I do just that and play the blues.
From appearance on "The Inside Track" TV show, hosted by Graham Nash, 1990
MS: When I first got to New York City, it was in 1984 I guess, and I saw this graffiti on the Lower East Side. It said, "Remember Michael Stewart". Like you [Graham Nash] I didn't know who he was.
From performance at The Junction, Cambridge, England, 30 May 1996
MS: I wrote this song back in 1985 for a young black man named Michael Stewart.
From performance at (Rivoli Tavern, Toronto, Canada)?, 10 May 1988.
MS: I play ya a new song I wrote 'bout four or five months ago.
From performance at the Hackney Empire, London, 15 April 1989
MS: This next tune is about a fella that I met when I was hitch-hiking in Ireland. He was hitch-hiking 'round all my shows and sleeping in the train stations at night. I talked to him after the show one night. He told me he was off to join the US army. Now you see, my stepfather who I grew up with, he was in the army to so I knew a little bit about the situation that he was about to find himself in so I tried tellin' him this. I said, "You know kid, that's the welfare system over there. They don't have the dole, they got the army. That's what people do." But he wouldn't believe me so there comes a time when all you can do is wish 'em well.
From performance at the Town and Country Club, London, 8 Mar 1987
MS: I used to walk around the streets of New York City. This is when I was a gnarly punk rocker. Well, I thought I was anyway. I had a mohawk and I was riding around on a skateboard. And these old wineos, they'd be sittin' on the stoopes. You know, I thought I was so 'bad'. I'd be cruising by, they'd go, "Hey, baby". I'd grab my skateboard. "I am not a baby!" Well, it takes all kinds and I guess hep cats are just as important to society as the rest of us.
From performance at (Rivoli Tavern, Toronto, Canada)?, 10 May 1988.
MS: It's actually an old country-blues song called The Ballad of Frankie & Johnny but I got my hands on it. Now it's called Hold Me Back. It's inspired by watchin' late night TV and there was this show on. A movie made after a book written by a man named Jack London.
MS: So, the story starts out where there's a writer. He's standing on the deck of this ferry that's going across the bay in San Francisco and he's commenting on what a lovely arrangement it is -- he can be the writer, doesn't have to worry about drivin' the boat, the pilot get's off work he can read his book that the writer's written. This is very convenient. And then the ferry, it wrecks in the fog and the writer's thrown overboard and he's washed out to sea. He's picked up by a captain of this ship, they call him the 'sea wolf'. This captain's gonna make a man out of him, right, 'cause he's just a wimpy old writer. He succeeds in doing this, so much so, that at the end of the book the captain of the ship is dyin' but he's determined to take everyone down with him, that's on the ship. The writer then -- I'm not takin' the piss but it does seem like it's a test of his manhood -- must decide whether he's gonna allow this to happen. Let everyone go down or kill the captain.
Well I was inspired by this 'cause I see it being a bit the socialist dilemma. This might be where ol' shit-for-brains Shocked is talkin' here. What you're dealing with is a situation where a lot of socialist thinking would have you spared from this sort of 'take us all down with the ship' mentality but the process by which you have to do that -- taking a human life -- is in fundamental opposition to what would want to make you do that in the first place. It's not too good.
From the book, The Originals by Arnold Rypens, 1996
Frankie and Albert or Frankie and Johnnie
Unknown composer, oldest recording goes back to 'Leavin' Home' by banjo player Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers, but it was sung a lot earlier, at least before 1890, according to Emerson Hough even before 1850. The oldest publication dates back to 1904, bearing the title 'He Done Me Wrong (The Death of Bill Bailey)'. In 1912 the title changed to 'Frankie and Johnny' and lyrics and music were claimed by the Leighton Brothers & Ren Shields. During the 1920s the opening line 'Frankie and Johnny were lovers ...' appeared, as did hunderds of versions. By 1934 John and Alan Lomax had gathered 300 different ones. Not one of them was exactly the same, each interpreter made the song his own. There are simply too many cover versions by famous artists to sum them up here. Just this: Sam Cooke recorded it in 1963, one year he was shot by a certain... Frankie. Michelle Shocked was the first one to stop Frankie from killing her unfaithful husband [That's not correct, he get's shot in Michelle's version as well -- Darren].
The unusual structure of the song, very different from other folk ballads or 12-bar blues, probably reveals an early 19th century Scottish origin. Funny is that not only the husband's name changed (Johnny, Albert), but also the other woman's name (Alice Fly, Alice Bly, Nellie Bly, Katie Fly, Ella Fly, Sara Siles, Alkali). The murder of Allen Britt by his wife Frankie Baker, while caught in adultry (described on 20 October 1899 in the St. Louis Post Dispatch) couldn't have been the source of all this endless inspiration, simply because the song goes back