Phil Cook (photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
The first song I heard from the hallowed stage of the Hayti Heritage Center was stripped down to its purest form. Phil Cook sat at the piano playing a simple melody, flanked by his Megafaun bandmates Brad Cook and Joe Westerlund, as they joined in three-part harmony to sing a sanctified tune: “I Want Jesus To Walk With Me.” Rendered on Alan Lomax’s Sounds Of The South collection by James Shorty & Mississippi Fred McDowell, the song is old-as-the-hills American-gothic gospel, and it was an ideal place to begin this Wednesday afternoon rehearsal session.
What began as tender and fragile became hale and hearty over the next hour, once Matt White and his seven bandmates in Fight The Big Bull took their places on the stage and started fleshing out the song’s skeletal frame. Drums, upright bass, and a six-piece horn section can recast a simple musical passage in an entirely different light, and White’s crew did just that throughout the afternoon, working out various elements of the performance and recording session they’ll unveil to the public Friday through Sunday at the Hayti.
Fight the Big Bull (photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
Yet to arrive for the rehearsals were Justin Vernon of Bon Iver (the Megafaun trio’s former bandmate in DeYarmond Edison) and Sharon Van Etten; their emotional, highly personal voices will add yet another revisionist layer. That’s a lot of elements to toss into one big melting-pot; what’s needed is a focal point, and the Lomax collection—compiled from recordings he made on a road trip across the South in 1959—plays that role here.
The musicians’ approach to rehearsing another McDowell number, “Drop Down Mama,” was the opposite of their approach to “I Want Jesus To Walk With Me.” This time, the workout began with the horns, who ran through what sounded like a dissonant and disjointed racket when rendered out-of-context with the song. In due time, though, the Cook brothers and White picked up guitars and stepped up to the vocal mics (Westerlund went behind the drums for this one), and gradually their hypnotic mantra—“My mama don’t like me, to fool around, fool around, fool around”—meshed with the horns’ calculated cacophony, until the rafters rattled and rang out with the sounds of the south at their most unruly.
- “Drop Down Mama” (photo by Jeremy M. Lange)
And yet there will certainly be moments this weekend when they circle back around to that most minimal, magical quantity of the human voice, judging from a demo recording which fuses together passages from two haunting tracks by Almeda Riddle, “Go Tell Aunt Nancy” and “Chick-A-Li-Lee-Lo.” The melodies of these you’ll recognize, but the vocal arrangements breathe new life into old forms. The end result is music that simultaneously preserves the past and creates the future, mirroring the continual process by which the South and the nation as a whole are continually renewed.
