perfidy

Rockabilly weirdo Hasil Adkins is dead. I wish I had more to say about him, but all I have to go on are rumor, innuendo, and one indelible song I treasure as part of my collection. I always meant to see him play, always meant to buy a ticket if he ever came around, but now I can't. He lived in near total obscurity. He never had a hit, he never had radio play. What he did have was a fucked-up way of playing guitar and singing that sort of combined the berserk ravings of Screamin' Jay Hawkins with the unmedicated sincerity of Wesley Willis (rock over Chicago... Be A Pepper, Drink Dr. Pepper). He had perfect pitch, yet sung like he was on quaaludes and sometimes strung his guitar with fishing line. When he was a child, he heard Hank Williams on the radio and assumed in the way that children do that Hank was playing all those instruments himself, so li'l Hasil taught himself to play several instruments at once.

Fat Possum Records has a good one of his, that you can buy here, and Amazon seems to have available a compilation that contains his harrowing early '50s hit "She Said."

There's not much I can say that will convince people that they would get something out of music as strange and periodically unpleasant as Hasil Adkins, which is a shame. I have a Fat Possum compilation from the mid-1990s with Adkins' "Your Memories" on it, and I am periodically compelled to pull the disc out again and reaffirm my devotion to its wonders. "Your Memories" is a dirgelike piece in which Adkins chokes chords out of his guitar as he weeps, moans, and mutters a lovers' lament. Is she dead? Is she gone? Was "she" a pet? The whole performance seems like it should belong on some Smithsonian Folkways archive recording from the Harry Smith collection - here it is on a compact disc recorded with modern-ish equipment and converted to a series of finely-grained ones and zeroes, and yet it seems to seep out of the speakers like oil from some forgotten hollow in the West Virginia Hills. It's too real, too raw, too wierd in a high lonesome way, to really belong to the age of digital.

I have at home a collection of Irish folk music recorded for the Tradition label in the 1940s and 1950s before the Irish backcountry was really too tightly tied into the rest of the world. Some of the numbers are familiar enough; bodhrian drum, fiddle, pennywhistle, maybe a broadchested lad belting out threats against the Black and Tans. But others - others - are otherworldly experiences. You can imagine a middle-aged Irish lady with excellent Gaelic and only fair English standing in her chicken yard. She prepares to sing by clasping her hands behind her back like she was taught in school. She closes her eyes, turns her head so her mouth is as close as possible to the microphone. She begins to sing a song that sounds like it was handed down intact through the long years from before the coming of the Christian Monks. She sings in English but the words are unintelligible. She sings in key but the scale is wrong: flat where it should be natural, unsettled where it should resolve. The entire weight of Irish particularity; their pride, their strangeness, their history of glory, of murder, of revenge, of drowned children, of not enough to eat, of exiled lords and foreign wars on Irish soil hangs by this one thin thread of song.

West Virginian native Hasil Adkins kept spinning that thread right up until yesterday.