North Mississippi, Part Three: Afrissippi

You Tube is a fricking cabinet of wonders. In the last year, I’ve seen reruns of Nigerian sitcoms (thanks to the redoubtable Uchenna Chi at With Comb & Razor); Camarón, the Spanish feature-length biopic of Spanish flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla; more vintage footage of Puerto Rican and Cuban music than my eyes can stay focused for.

I’ve also seen this:

For folks who would rather skip ahead to the point of this post, the above video shows you a Fulani griot in traditional garb stalking an Italian stage with an acoustic guitar, while a handful of dudes in boubous kick up a loose and rollicking rhythm behind him. This was Afrissippi doing "Bafal" at last summer's Rootsway festival in Parma.

Afrissippi's goal, according to their guitarist Eric Deaton, is "preserving and promoting the West African-MS (Mississippi) continuum. Anything we do in the future will be built around that. I
wouldn't call it an 'experiment'. It's a natural fusion of musical traditions that remain powerfully
connected despite being isolated from each other for centuries." The band formed in Oxford, Miss., during the summer of 2003, when local club owner introduced Eric -- who had played bass and guitar for Hill Country blues stalwarts R.L. Burnside and Junior Kimbrough among others -- and Guelel Kumba, a singer-songwriter from Senegal, who played folk music on an acoustic guitar. As the story goes, Guelel played Eric a song called "Nduumandii" and Eric realized it was the spitting-sonic-image of "Keep Your Hands Off That Girl" by Junior Kimbrough. The band coalesced around Guelel, Eric and 60s iconoclast/poet/MC5 manager John Sinclair, who reportedly read poems about the African diaspora at early live shows. Since then they've been refining their sound (which rarely seems to include Sinclair's poetry), mapping out the similarities between West African scales and rhythms and those Eric learned in Northern Mississippi. This made for neat tricks on their first record, Fulani Journey, where Afrissippi performs "Nduumandii/Hands Off That Girl" (Guelel singing the former while the band plays the latter) and "Ngol Jimol," a similarly seamless fusion of Guelel's Fulani melody and R.L. Burnisde's evergreen "Jumper On The Line." The band has been touring over the last year and recently finished recording its second album. Things seem to be looking up for them.

If you've read the other entries in this blog, then none of this news, really, and I don't think I've said in black-and-white why you should care about this band. Some of you may be hooked already, and cheers. I'm one of you. Someone taps me on the shoulder and says, "I have an album by folks who think American folk music and African folk music have some shit in common..." and I'm begging for the privilege of buying said album, sound-unheard, before he even shows me the cover (which will straight-up sport a Photoshop album cover of a dude with a polo shirt, a synthesizer and a smile every single time -- Photoshop, you owe me a Christmas basket and a letter of apology). Others of you are perhaps more skeptical, and cheers. I'm working on becoming one of you, though I suspect I'm still several thousand dollars worth of cheesed-out Photoshop albums away from you yet. The beauty of this blog is that I've been there, I've purchased the Tajikistanian-wedding-music-on-Casio 2-fer and, like Minesweeper, I can tell you where it's safe to walk. Afrissippi is the real deal, so walk this way.

The funny thing about the blues is that people think it's funny at all. Cuz it ain't, cuz. I suppose it hasn't dated well. The stereotype is that it is either a) music about the incidental pain of being poor and unhappy, played by smiling men with expensive guitars, or b) the domain of double-jointed white guitar wizards who discuss minutely the fingerpicking techniques of black guitar wizards that were dead before their parents were born. None of this winds up sounding very soulful, or even accessible -- and attempts to pull it in either direction usually wind up sounding like novelty songs (which is how we gets blues about car payments.) When folks first started playing this music, it must have been something like calypso was in Trinidad -- a way to get the word out about events or people. By the time it made its way to record, it was something else, something wittier, meaner, more lonely; and it changed everything about the way we do music in this country. It gave us the harmonic structure for our popular music (the I-IV-V chord changes), pentatonic scales for our melodies and improvisations, gave us a way to sing about what's on our minds in our own voices. It did these things and more besides, but the key is that it became the first major U.S. American music, and it was at least half African. With its descending legato vocal melodies, vamping polyrhythmic shuffle and pentatonic instrumental runs, you could argue that it's African all the way -- except it's not. Not all of it anyway. The closest you get is in the work of John Lee Hooker, Robert Pete Williams (some would argue), and the good people of the Mississippi Hill Country. So this is where Afrissippi steps in.

Afrissippi's argument is that the blues is implicitly an African music. Afrissippi is literally a West African griot singing his songs while a group of blues musicians play music from deepest Mississippi and there are no glitches. Afrissippi says that there was enough of Africa encoded into the DNA of the Hill Country blues style that it could work as an actual African music for African songs with West African lyrics and melodies. They're a tight band with a genuine understanding of what they're doing, and their fusion is so seamless it's hard to tell where the African music stops and the blues begin. Which, I suppose, is the point. But even this is just an academic exercise if the fusion is boring. It's not. The appeal of the band is not just that they show how two supposedly unlike things are related, it's that they affect this fusion in order to play great music. Some of their songs are delicate, wherein Guelel's guitar is essentially a kora backing up his nimble falsetto, but others are piledrivers with huge, droning riffs and stinging solos.

Below are some links to live shows posted on www.archive.org. They don't include set lists, so here are the songs know. If anyone else can fill in the gaps your help would be appreciated.

Live at Martin's, Jackson, MS - September 15, 2006
1. ?
2. Bambangel
3. ?
4. Dono
5. Bafal
6. Nduumandii
7. Ngoppe Kam Mi Yaha

Live at the Thirsty Hippo, Hattiesburg, MS - March 22, 2007
[Set 1]
1. ?
2. Bafal
3. Ngoppe Kam Mi Yaha
4. Dono
5. ?
6. Njulli

[Set 2]
1. ?
2. Nduumandii
3. Ngol Jimol
4. Ayo Leele
5. Face Full of Frown
6. Gonna Be Trouble Here
7. What Do You Know About Love

North Mississippi, Part 2: Junior

Afrissippi guitarist Eric Deaton recalls wandering into Otha Turner’s backyard sometime in the late 1990s and seeing the man of the house flanked by Africans. Eric admits surprise at seeing this nonagenarian fife player going full blast in the midst of an African drum circle suddenly transported to the depths of rural north central Mississippi; but then the Hill Country, where the late Otha made his home, is a good place for surprises.

Remote and insular, the Hills are one of the few highlands areas in the U.S. where the population is predominantly African-American. As with any highlands area in the southeast, the topography of the Hills helps define the culture of its residents. After abolition (and, one hopes, before it) African-Americans took advantage of its inaccessibility to start lives off the plantations of the Delta and the rest of the state. There, farmers cropped their own land and enjoyed their own culture, which retained many African elements that are still prevalent that community. The most renowned of these is surely the fife-and-drum music of the old plantation days, a prominent feature of Otha Turner’s annual picnics, but the area is also famous for a particularly African strain of blues. This musical affinity with the Motherland doesn’t make it completely inconceivable that a troop of African musicians would materialize in the backyard of a Hill Country farmer, but Eric Deaton was still sufficiently impressed enough to turn to Luther Dickenson of the North Mississippi All Stars, who was also in attendance, and ask just what in the sweet bejeezus was up at Otha’s.

Luther broke things down for his fellow guitarist, and Eric later came to understand that he was actually walking in on a recording session for what became From Senegal to Senatobia (see last post). Luther played on the album and Eric did not, though Eric would later make an even more mind-boggling Motherland Connection with Afrissippi. But before we can talk about that, we need to talk about Junior Kimbrough.

Suffused as it is with such a sinister mystique and populated with such shadowy characters, the story of the blues in the 20th century almost collapses under the weight of its own mythology. With so little information about bluesmen of yore to go on, when discussing them as people we either reconstruct their personalities from mundane documents (birth certificates, death certificates, worm-eaten photographs) or we conjure images of them from their wicked awesome lyrics about pain and mojo. If the choice is between finding the truth and finding the legend, the blues fan will always find the legend. The blues is dark and mysterious and may have been the only music that could support a character like Junior who came of age in the era of jet engines and television, but whose mystique is just as impenetrable as the hoary old guys who only exist on 78s.

You can see Junior in his prime, before a debilitating stroke in the early 90s, on Robert Mugge’s Deep Blues, his fingers executing dreamy pentatonic runs on the treble strings while his eyes wander around the room like he’s scanning the sky for satellites. He’s performing “All Night Long” (listed on the soundtrack as “Jr.’s Blues”), the title track of his debut album just two years later. Drummer Calvin Jackson is playing in a style adapted from the martial funkiness of the local fife-and-drum corps and Junior, as he plays the melody, thumb-picks a drone on the bass strings of his guitar.

Junior and his longtime friend R.L. Burnside were the heirs to a decades-old blues tradition whose earliest known practitioners – Mississippi Fred McDowell, Ranie Burnette, Eli Green – established a droning and percussive style of blues that built complex grooves around single chords and punctuated melodies with slashing bottleneck glissandos. Hill Country blues largely ignores the 12-bar blues form or I-IV-V chord progressions that has defined blues composition since W.C. Handy started arranging the music in the 1910s. This tradition, with its thumping, gnarly approach to what is in 2007 considered lite beer music for finger-poppin’ white dudes, never sounds more African than in the hands of Junior or R.L., whose driving, buzzing 1969 recording of “Jumper On The Line” from My Black Name A-Ringin’ could have come from the southern borders of the Sahara.

Even to those who knew him, Junior was a deeply enigmatic man. Like other Hill Country musicians of his generation, Junior seems to have cut his teeth on the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker; but toward the end of the ’50s (according to a feature in SPIN that I dimly remember) he decided to do things his own way. The first example of his style is a cover of Lowell Fulsom’s “Tramp,” recorded as a 45 for the Holiday Inn label in the mid 1960s. Over the years he developed a unique repertoire of haunting and libidinous songs, all based on pentatonic melodies and one-chord riffs played in the rolling, darkly sonorous style that was his trademark. By the time he recorded his first full (known) session for High Water in the early 1980s, he had perfected a sound that seemed to owe no allegiance to any extant American music; everything seemed to be coming from inside his own head. He once told Eric Deaton, who played in his band the Soul Blues Boys as a young man in the mid 1990s, that his songs came to him in his dreams.

Adding to Junior’s mystique is that his style does seem to have antecedents, but they’re all West African. Eric Deaton hears similarities between the Malian blues of Ali Farka Toure, the folk songs of the Fulani and the night ritual suites of the Gnawa of Marrakesh (themselves West Africans in exile). Afrissippi, the band Eric plays guitar for, began when club owner and musician Chad Henson introduced Eric and Guelel Kumba, a musician from Senegal’s griot caste, in Oxford, MS. Guelel played Eric a Fulani folk song called “Nduumandii” and Eric realized it was essentially Junior’s “Keep Your Hands Off That Girl” originally recorded in 1982 in Holly Springs, MS, a long way from Dakar.

Junior played his own music in his own club, which, by all accounts, was an oasis of good vibes in the Hill Country. A small wooden building on a concrete foundation just off Highway 4 in Marshall County, MS, Larry Brown, writing in the liner notes for Junior’s sophomore effort Sad Days, Lonely Nights, described Junior’s club as looking “more like a shrine than anything else.” Almost as famous as the man who made it, Junior’s club burnt down under mysterious circumstances in the early 2000s. If you find yourself on Highway 4, you can still see its foundation just off the shoulder of the road. You’ll see a tree there that somehow escaped the fire, and its branches will be covered in bottles. A picture of the tree is at the beginning of this post.

Get a Junior Kimbrough mix here and here.

Get a Hill Country mix here and here.

Have a good Saturday night.