Classic Album Reviews

Angel Olson’s Country

Old Time, Strange Time, Big Time

“Hi,” I said to the man behind the lunch counter. “I’ll have the Arabian Fried Chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and the collard greens.”

You expect places like this in Walhalla, South Carolina: meat and three cafeterias, though occasionally I have to explain to some foreigner to this soil just what a “meat and three” is. I always thought it was self-explanatory and clear. I’m beginning to think, however, that nothing much is clear and self-explanatory in these days.

If Allen Ginsberg, in his 1950's poem “A Supermarket in California,” deemed that experience walking through the “lost America of Love,” just where are we walking/driving now?

The man behind the counter — gray, likely ten years older than me at least — smiled and in a displaced accent said to me,

“Hi? I wish I were.”

He laughed as he scooped those potatoes to accompany a breast of chicken about the size of a desk globe.

Does he say that to everyone, I wondered? Or maybe it was my Woodstock t-shirt that prompted him.

He’s originally from Lebanon or Syria, I’m told later, and down the road in Westminster, there’s another meat and three owned by another Middle Easterner whose name might be Ishmael or Yitzhak, but the place is real and I need to go there someday, I’m told, cause the squash casserole is beyond belief.

I had been told that, too, about the Arabian Fried Chicken three years ago, and I finally arrived, and it was excellent, and I’m also sure the mashed potatoes didn’t originate from an imported box.

The place is the Steakhouse Cafeteria, and the other thing about it is don’t go in there looking for steak. Pork Chops, yeah. Fried Flounder, sure. Even fried squash nuggets. Possibly meatloaf, but I didn’t notice because the chicken was all I wanted and needed. But I was told, clearly, again, and maybe self-evidently, that

“They don’t serve steak.”

Which, of course, is not the strangest or most incongruent experience you or I are likely to have in Walhalla, or on the way home.

Native St. Louis singer Angel Olson’s new album, Big Time, makes me think of all those country songs I grew up with, that is if I had been listening to them while high and maybe waiting in a cafeteria in Bessemer for Sunday lunch. It’s a quiet record, full of ballads and a certain lushness — not that countrypolitan lushness associated with Pop Nashville of the 70’s, but the haunting sort that might make you think of Hank Williams had he lived, or Patsy Cline had she done likewise.

For instance, listen to this track, “All the Flowers”:

“I’ll be gone so fast, I’ll fly across the midnight sky…”

It’s hard to select only a couple of songs on this gorgeous record to highlight. It’s a new sound for her, or at least for me regarding her, since the song I associate most with her is “Shut Up and Kiss Me,” from 2016’s My Woman.

As I flew home yesterday against a darkening stormy sky that felt like midnight, I heard my favorite track, “All the Good Times” sear across XMU, and I thought of another favorite country singer, Ray Price, and the Kris Kristofferson song he made his own: “For the Good Times.” Here are both:

“I can’t say that I’m sorry When I don’t feel so wrong anymore I can’t tell you I’m trying When there’s nothing left here to try for

And I don’t know how it happened We’ve both abandoned the reason we used to believe Was it love that we shared when we easily cared? Now it’s impossible to conceive…”

I can get behind this country (more on that in a sec).

Here’s Ray:

Such intimacy. I know country songs aren’t the only music genre to portray this sort of longing vulnerability, but when they do, how can anything else compare?

As I listened, though, to Angel, I meandered down highway 184 skating by Seneca and Salem and almost stopping at junk stores spread out amidst used parts stores and outboard motors shops, because the Oconee river is nearby, as is that nuclear power plant. Had my wife been with me, we would have stopped. But I was already too much alone, not so ready anymore for the country.

Maybe you could see it coming, as I did, but there are a few churches along this road, too, and one of these, somebody’s spiritual temple where JESUS IS KING proclaimed in bright red lags, also announces, T***p 2020, as if we had gone back in time, which I kind of sort of thought I had, because driving down this road, I could have been out in my former country, Alabama, maybe forty years ago, cruising to Joe’s or Freddy’s house where meadows and lakes and offshoot protestant churches are interchangeable.

For the good timed life of me, I don’t know what anyone thinks Jesus and T***p have in common. The Middle East establisher of Christian morality, and a guy who makes junk bond dealers feel holier than you or me.

This sort of confusion makes me wonder about conservative country music. Who from country’s golden era would be swinging banners for this louse?

Johnny Cash? No way.

Merle? Can’t see it, even the fightin’ side of him.

Yeah, maybe Loretta supported him but she was pretty scarred by the men in her life.

Is old country dead? Is our current country dying?

I thought, as I always do, about stopping and telling these guys that not so far back down that road is a place where they can get as much Arabian Fried Chicken as they want, and they don’t have to be high to be served but it might help.

And then I could play them the rest of Angel Olson’s new album and see what they thought, and if they could tell what year it came out, or if they had ever heard of the heartache of George or Tammy or even poor old Conway Twitty, artists from my time in a country that now feels so far far away across a midnight sky I don’t know how to reach anymore.

And one more song from an album that, if you purchase it on vinyl, be sure to play at 45 rpm.

The title cut:

Big times can be had in Walhalla…at least for now.

“I’m loving you big time…I’ve loved long before.”

“Needin’ this coffee…?”

You can find it at Mountain Mocha, also run by someone who came here from a faraway country.

🎸🎸🎸🎸

Hey, thanks for reading. Thanks to Kevin Alexander and The Riff. And to anyone who shares love and music; Jessica Lee McMillan, Paul Combs, Chris Zappa, Christopher Robin, David Acaster, KiKi Walter, Deb Groves Harman, Jill Ebstein, If Ever You’re Listening, Paul Walker, JP Timko, Sarah Paris, Karla Clifton, Eric Pierce, Pierce McIntyre, Cherie Cook, Nicole Brown, Jeffrey Harvey, Robert Gowty, Alex Markham, Kathryn Dillon, Steven Hale, Mike Butler, and Reuben Salsa.

And what about this one: