Music
Cast King
Saw Mill Man (Locust Music)Playing 7 p.m. Feb. 3 at the Primitive Baptist Church, 4602 Indiana Ave.
Whether we’re talking about Bobby Bare Sr. or Loretta Lynn, Mavis Staples or Solomon Burke, it’s become something of a fashion for roots musicians in their sunset years to make comeback records that afford them renewed cachet, particularly among young, urban hipsters. Virtually unheard of, though, is a musician who emerges with his debut album on the eve of his 80th birthday. Yet this is just what Cast King, the singer, fiddler and guitar player from Old Sand Mountain, Ala., has done with Saw Mill Man, a set of bracing, unvarnished original material that sounds less like it came from any one historical era than from time out of time.
Staunchly rural even today, King’s corner of northeastern Alabama proved an especially fertile source of “hillbilly” music immediately before and after World War II. The area’s best-known exponents were the Louvin Brothers and the Delmore Brothers, but fellow Alabama native Hank Williams strode like a colossus through these parts as well. King, too, led a dance band of some renown there after serving in the Army overseas. During the latter half of the 1940s, the outfit billed as Cast King & the Country Drifters—an expansive ensemble that included piano, trumpet, fiddle, steel and a bevy of other guitarists—worked throughout the Southeast with everyone from Roy Acuff and Carl Story to Hank Locklin and Flatt & Scruggs.
The group’s only real shot at the brass ring, however, came after the turn of the decade, when Sam Phillips invited them to cut a number of sides for him at Sun Studios in Memphis. Nothing ever came of those eight sides, one of them made with a singing group called the Miller Sisters. At the time 35 years old and never particularly suited to the rambling life of a musician, King soon found religion and quit playing professionally. “He got faith and joined the church,” explains his wife Helen, who serves as something of an intermediary for her husband, who doesn’t hear well and apparently won’t wear a hearing aid. “He couldn’t go into those places—the nightclubs and dances; he couldn’t do that no more. He sung a lot at funerals. In church, too. And he played with the boys who’d come around here and wanted to learn.”
Meanwhile, three decades passed before the recordings that King made at Sun were reissued on LP by Germany’s Bear Family label—although not, according to King, the versions that he and the Drifters had cut for commercial release. “Practice tapes,” he calls them, outwardly chagrined. While King refers to the tracks on his new album as practice tapes as well, he also appreciates the fact that the album’s stripped-down sound—with 11 of the 12 songs featuring just King and second guitarist and engineer Matt Downer—is often what passes, however misguidedly, for authenticity today.
Homespun as they might be, the performances on Saw Mill Man reveal King to be a distinctive writer and singer. His voice is now craggy and limited in range, and maybe always has been. But his knack for phrasing and his innate sense of melody remain deeply affecting. Liquor, lean times and heartbreak figure prominently into his gritty narratives. Madness and murder, too, both of them turning up in “Under the Snow,” a chillingly dissociative confession from a condemned prisoner. Yet unlike some of today’s alt-country acts—for instance, the ones that record for Chicago’s irony-besotted Bloodshot label—King doesn’t fetishize dissolution or pass it off as fashion. The desperation and hardship of which he sings are all too real, harking back to the old Appalachian ballads that he heard—and the hardscrabble times he no doubt knew—growing up during the Great Depression. Indeed, the first band that King led as a sawmill-working teenager, the Alabama Pals, was a proto-bluegrass outfit steeped in the mountain sounds of the day.
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Musically, the pressing rhythms of the old-time stringbands and the bluegrass groups into which they morphed might be King’s point of departure as a composer. Formally, his songs reveal an affinity with everything from low-key rockabilly to gutbucket shuffles to crooner balladry. He admits to having picked up a few things on guitar from a local musician named Harris Smith (according to King’s wife, as gifted a picker as Chet Atkins), but King disavows any direct musical influences. The postwar honky-tonk of Hank Williams, Ray Price and Webb Pierce nevertheless is a touchstone for him, and very possibly a sound that he helped shape.
It’s also hard not to hear hints of the creaky folk raconteur Michael Hurley in King’s “Wino,” a song that, harmonically and otherwise, resembles Hurley’s immortal “Werewolf.” The sprung, neo-Appalachian cadences of Nashvillian Tom House likewise come to mind—and with them, the way that King peppers his penetrating lyrics with existential plain-speak like, “I feel numb as the knob on the door.” In places, a surreal cast colors King’s narratives, especially the eerie Western ballad “Outlaw” and the monologue of the convicted killer in “Under the Snow.”
It would be easy, and it’s certainly tempting, to hold up King and his rough-hewn music as some great lost link to the legacy of Hank Sr., or perhaps to that of someone like stringband pioneer Charlie Poole. Yet, if only due to the preponderance of such claims in today’s music press, a more modest assessment seems in order. More than anything else, Saw Mill Man presents King as an inspired avocational musician with a clear-eyed take on the human condition and a stolid, if slightly Gothic, streak that at times calls to mind the fiction of William Gay. He’s worth hearing, in any case, and not just on record, but also when he comes to town this week for an incredibly rare live performance. A potluck supper will be held prior to the show.