featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
August 20, 2024
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
Pony Bradshaw draws a line between his own story and those of the raconteurs who populate his records. Thus Spoke the Fool (Black Mountain) completes the trilogy begun with 2021's Calico Jim and continued in last year's North Georgia Rounder. Bradshaw notes: It's something I think is important and worthwhile in this strange world. Place and community, and sticking around seem important. History does, too. Telling the story of North Georgia seems important. A resident of the area for two decades, there's a sense that the songwriter has not so much removed himself from the mythology as he has dissolved himself, scattered himself across the rivers, the mounds, into the history and the legend of North Georgia.
Like those first two albums, Thus Spoke the Fool names names, populating his songs with geographical features, flora, and historical figures that are likely to resonate with his neighbors. Names carry power, Bradshaw declares in the bluegrass number "Housebroke". Rachel Baiman's fiddle conjures musical magic, conducting Philippe Bronchtein's pedal steel and Mark Howard's mandolin through the song's stops and starts: Eating cold boudin / In my motel room / Staring at the holes in my socks. "Hiwassee Lament" adds Matthew Pendrick's electric guitar, evoking Scarecrow on the hill / Field of white ghost pumpkins / Choked in the black-blue like a hundred skulls scattered. Narrators survey the landscape, literal and literary, as Bradshaw shares their stories. He speaks the language.
"Ginseng Daddy" introduces one of the collection's narrators, perhaps unreliable, halfway gone / On that foxfire again. Where Calico Jim skewed more acoustic, and Rounder relied more on downtempo ballads and blues, Fool emphasizes Pony Bradshaw's brawny band of accompanists, boasting fuller, more uptempo arrangements. "Ginseng Daddy" buzzes with electricity, two-stepping percussion and roiling banjo, the trickster confident in his visions, safe in the arms of vernacular, cloaked in the protections of myth. "By Jeremiah's Vision" showcases the singer's masterful delivery, a voice we've likened to the young Lyle Lovett or Slaid Cleaves. Rachel Baiman's fiddle is like the clear, sparkling river running throughout the album, essential in supporting all that surrounds it. The song centers around the travails of a bartender at a Legion hall: Three nights a week she walks two miles into town / To back down drunks she went to high school with.
One of the wonders of Bradshaw's trilogy lies in how the tracks slide so effortlessly between the everyday and the all-the-time, traveling the border between the here and now and the deeper, more abiding truths. Featuring Bronchtein's dobro, "Long Man" channels a native American story of the soul of a river: My kin they built those mounds / Before Desoto came to town / Before the Civil War turned these fields / Into a blood-stained killing floor. Soon after, the midtempo "Young Eudora" is immersed in our perennial carnal desires: Let me paint you in your birthday suit / Holding a paper plate full of barbecue / Naked as the day we came / Sam Cooke on the FM wave. Deftly, artistically navigating these timelines to the soundtrack of country, folk, bluegrass, and gospel, Bradshaw has largely drawn his own map describing the frontiers of americana music.
In 2019, Pony Bradshaw debuted with Sudden Opera, an accomplished collection that favored a more contemporary expression, providing the songwriter with some traction and notoriety before he disappeared into the stories and sounds of his North Georgia home. Having apparently completed his planned trilogy, the question becomes where next. "Rebel", the closing cut from Thus Spoke the Fool, possibly points the direction, an extended number with an ambitious outro: Bill walks into a Mississippi bar / God is dead, he screams, God is dead / But ain't nobody listening to the little Southern man. In the wake of the impressive scope of his North Georgia trilogy, in light of Pony Bradshaw's success as a visionary writer and a capable bandleader, the future is his own territory to chart.
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