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Rating: I tend to feel somewhat racist, at least when it comes to music. And deeply conservative. There's no debate, Black people are better. They have music in their blood. And ideas ran out in the '70s. Things were better when they were worse. Indeed, if I think about the epochal impact of Black blues and jazz on pop music (and on contemporary composers) worldwide, and then I think of Grandpa Earl strumming his banjo on the porch... farts is the first word that comes to mind.
Yet every time I listen to this growth, I realize I completely ignore a genre that is the foundation of American music. I say this as an absolute layman, but the first thing that stands out is the fundamental difference between this album and a sterile 40-CD Classic-Gold-Country-Bluegrass collection you can buy from Mastrota. In '72, in the era of synthesizers, with Tangerine Dream arriving from Alpha Centauri, these guys, with fringes and spurs, dressed in American tradition and dusted off old songs. They were vintage when vintage wasn't even a thing yet. With a deep knowledge of this music, not encyclopedic, but grown gradually in the ears and the hearts of these Colorado boys. Now, granted that I care little for the fantastic sensations of vinyl, "Will the Circ...” was conceived and made as a triple LP, complete with a foldable cover, etc., and it loses a lot in CD form.
First, the sound: you lower the needle, and the crackling brings you back 35 years, even if you weren't there then. Actually, make it 60, since the middle-aged gentlemen with a bit of belly, sideburns, and cowboy shirts carefully gathered by “this group of West Coast hippies” (words of Roy Acuff) had already been around for several years and still represent the undisputed elite of the country and bluegrass of the southeastern United States. From what was still then a music of the whites and for the whites, the soundtrack for the outings of Conservative families from the South, crew cuts, God, and America. All together Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, “Mother” Maybelle Carter, Merle Travis, the fiddle of Vassar Clements and many others. With each listen, it's like opening an old box of junk or rummaging in the attic. Distant memories stretch and come back to life. A recording studio full of people, stifled laughs, a murmuring crowd. Some pieces are hastily presented, Acuff explaining to the N. G. D. B. guys his “secrets” for studio recording. And, above all, a veil of lightness, a family gathering, not too formal. Fingers whirl around the dobro, the banjos, the violin, but here there's everything except the desire to amaze or, worse, to dare, to try to venture out. Traditional country tracks, bluegrass rides, and old ballads. It would take a page just to list all the pieces. The instrumental "runs" are incredibly fast, at times astonishing, but the solos and the dizzying chase of the instruments serve only to launch the chorus, at most to earn a smile from those present before passing the ball, and they are still rigidly inserted in the elementary structure of the songs. Entertaining and amusing themselves, putting themselves to the test. This is enough. Or rather, this is the essence of this music. Don't be fooled by the recording year, and forget about California, the psychedelic country-rock of the Byrds, Grateful Dead, etc. Here counterculture, psychedelia, contaminations are meaningless words.
Second, the images: listening to this record from the tinny speakers of a PC, perhaps staring at the Windows screensaver, is too big of a disrespect... This album needs to be touched, leafed through, smelled. It smells of old stuff, and it's not just an impression. “Mother” Maybelle, co-founder of the first incarnation of the Carter Family in '27, was Johnny Cash's mother-in-law. It takes a double bed to open the entire LP. While the needle runs, you can fill your eyes with close-ups of old instruments worn by use, the sepia images of the recording studio, the old photos of an America that is (was) no more, the writings and drawings style late 19th century. Three LPs with 38 tracks including originals and traditionals, and an entire side of bluegrass instrumentals.
I can't even begin to think how much it could have cost back then. Beautiful, truly beautiful.
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