Sally Timms
Jan. 21 at Backwoods Studios
Jan. 25 at Billy Block’s Western Beat Roots Revival
British chanteuse Sally Timms used to treat country music as a joke—literally. In the early ’80s, before she joined UK art-punk collective the Mekons, she sang with a band of women called the Shee-hees who did Billie Jo Spears covers and wrote campy country parodies. ”I used to sing in a fake American accent,“ Timms recalls. ”We used to write very sick lyrics about our husbands being in jail and about how we hoped they wouldn’t fall in love with other men while they were in there. It was pretty cheeky.“
Timms got serious about country music in a hurry, though. During the mid-’80s, she started singing with the Mekons, who were then entering their honky-tonk phase. She also recorded with British pub-rocker Brendan Croker, who suggested that they work up some country covers. The first flowering of that collaboration included haunting versions of the Lefty Frizzell hit ”The Long Black Veil“ and Dolly Parton’s ”Down from Dover,“ both of which originally appeared on Timms’ 1986 EP, The Butcher’s Boy Extended Player. These mournful mountain-derived ballads not only suited Timms’ languorous alto, they struck an emotional chord inside her as well. ”The natural choice for me is always sad material, and country is a deep vein in that respect,“ she explains.
Timms went on to cut a number of country tunes, the best being her torchy remake of Johnny Cash’s ”Cry Cry Cry“ and her stolid reading of John Anderson’s ”Wild and Blue,“ recorded with the Mekons. Yet despite her affinity with hillbilly music, Timms didn’t release her first country album until last November, when Bloodshot Records put out Cowboy Sally’s Twilight Laments for Lost Buckaroos.
Twilight Laments boasts songs and guest spots from Robbie Fulks, Jeff Tweedy, and coproducer (and fellow Mekon) Jon Langford, along with other members of the alt-country scene in Chicago, Timms’ adopted home. But what’s most striking about Timms’ LP is just how utterly she embraces country music’s hard-core verities. In the process, she also takes Music Row’s ethic of disposability to task. ”Now a barstool is all that he can ride/So he’s a dreaming cowboy,“ she sings at one point, mourning the death of both cowboy life and country music. Here, just as the Mekons did circa Fear and Whiskey, Timms functions as a musical De Tocqueville, an outsider who in effect says, ”You’re neglecting something that’s a crucial part of your culture.“
This isn’t to say that Timms’ take on twang is entirely a straight one. In fact, as her stage name ”Cowboy Sally“ attests, her approach to hillbilly music—what she dubs art-country—is at times rather oblique. ”I’m always doing gender-bending stuff,“ she says. For instance, she tends not to change the lyrics of songs written from a man’s perspective. More acutely, though, Timms’ wry cowboy moniker connects the dots between British punk’s war on conventional femininity and the protofeminist subtext of Patsy Montana’s 1935 million-seller ”I Wanna Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.“ By adopting a saddletramp persona, Timms taps the deeper meaning of Montana’s single—a song about being free to live a life that was at that time denied to most women.
The very notion of adopting a persona may seem foreign to those of us who expect our musical heroes to bare their souls. Yet Timms’ approach is little different from that of country interpreters who predated the singer-songwriter boom of the ’60s and ’70s—those singers who came to prominence before audiences began judging artists on the basis of whether they wrote their own material. And in some ways, Timms’ tack is also akin to that of today’s mainstream country acts, who rarely write their own stuff, but who, as Trisha Yearwood once put it, look for songs that function as ”little movies, little stories that you tell from a particular character’s perspective.“ Timms may go for more hillbilly- or Western-identified material, but her goal is the same: To connect with her audience by singing songs that speak to modern life.
Witness Timms’ soft spot for the oeuvre of the Handsome Family, a Chicago duo with a twisted but inspired take on country’s three chords and the truth. ”Sometimes I burn my arms with cigarettes just to pretend I won’t scream when I die,“ she deadpans on her funereal cover of the Handsomes’ ”Drunk by Noon.“
”Extremely sick lyrics, in a way,“ Timms observes. ”But who hasn’t had those thoughts? [The Handsome Family’s] lyrics say things that women think constantly. Sure, they come at country from an odd angle, but in some ways I think a far more purist angle than lots of people do now. They’re definitely repackaging [the tradition] in a way that makes sense to some kind of contemporary notion.“
The authority with which Timms renders doleful latter-day ballads like the Handsome Family’s ”Drunk by Noon“ and Dolly’s ”Down from Dover“ forges yet another crucial link to country’s past: The characteristically British reserve in her crystalline delivery reveals her intuitive grasp of the stoic resolve at the heart of Appalachia’s tragic songs of life. More importantly, it reminds us that the Anglo-Celtic wellspring of that tradition is Timms’ to begin with.
”To some people, it’s bizarre that I’m British and I sing country,“ she observes. ”But let’s face it, who really comes from a true country background anymore? I think I come at it from the fact that it was rooted in Scottish and English folk music. It’s not anything conscious on my part. It’s just that, somewhere in there, this is my culture“
