First up are (is?) the Handsome Family, an American husband and wife team who began recording in 1993, and who compose and play a strange blend of country, bluegrass, folk music with a heavy narrative component. Rennie Sparks writes the words, while husband Brett does most of the music.
I first heard them about ten years ago when I came across the track “Weightless Again” on an Americana sampler CD. It’s undoubtedly one of the weirdest records ever recorded, a sort of sparsely-instrumented nasal dirge vaguely in the style of Native American music, dealing with, among other things, suicide (people overdosing on pills and jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge), Indians in the rain forest forced to drag burning logs around with them because they’ve forgotten how to make fire, and drinking gin and reading Moby Dick in a motel room.
You have, I guarantee, never heard anything like it – and, of course, you may never want to again.
John D. Loudermilk is a Nashville-based performer and songwriter whose compsition, “Sitting In The Balcony”, gave Eddie Cochran his first hit in 1957. It was the first of a steady stream of hits for other artists, including British singer Don Fardon’s 1967 hit, “Indian Reservation” (the title shortened from Loudermilk’s original “The Lament of the Cherokee Reservation Indian”, an extraordinarily sensitive treatment of a theme almost exclusively employed for comic effect in popular music until then), “This Little Bird” - a hit for Marianne Faithfull (1965) - his own “Language of Love” (a British hit under the alias “Johnny Dee” in 1961), the haunting Chet Atkins’ instrumental “Windy and Warm” and, the coolest one of all, “Tobacco Road”, a worldwide hit for the Nashville Teens in 1964, and one of pop music’s very first slices of social realism:
Despite producing albums with intriguingly hip titles – including the 1966 offering, A Bizarre Collection of the Most Unusual Songs, and the following year’sSuburban Attitudes in Country Verse – Loudermilk’s stage persona was very faux naïf folksy and laid-back troubador “kookie”, which can be hard to take. Nevertheless, he is a genuinely talented one-off, and his songs have generated some superb performances from other artists. There are several CD compilations of Loudermilk’s own versions of his songs:: It’s My Time contains some of his biggest hits.
Finally, the weirdest of the trio: Hank C, Burnette, a latter-day rockabilly artist the world became aware of in 1976 when his super-charged, semi-parodic instrumental, “Spinning Rock Boogie” reached the UK’s Top 10.
The really odd thing about this anachronistic hit was that “Hank” was actually a Swede called Sven-Ake Hogberg, and the record had been recorded in his own studio in Oxelosund, with Sven playing all the instruments. He has released a stream of albums over the years, two of which I own: Rockabilly Gaseroonie and Don’t Mess With My Ducktail.
Sven’s still out there, still making music and uploading it on the web – You Tube has a good selection of his latest tracks, and “Hank” is only too happy to chat to enthusiasts online.
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