Review: Duane Eddy - Songs Of Our Heritage (1960)
Tracks: 1) Cripple Creek; 2) Riddle Song; 3) John Henry; 4) Streets Of Laredo; 5) Prisoner’s Song; 6) In The Pines; 7) Ole Joe Clark; 8) Wayfarin’ Stranger; 9) Top Of Old Smokey; 10) Mule Train; 11) Scarlet Ribbons; 12*) Kommotion; 13*) Theme For Moon Children; 14*) The Girl On Death Row; 15*) Words Mean Nothing; 16*) Pepe; 17*) Lost Friend.
REVIEW
1960 promised to be a good year for Eddy: although the very nature of his output usually prevented his recordings from top chart positions, demand and admiration for them in the era when soft and melodic rock’n’roll completely won over its rough and rowdy variant kept at a steady level. Thus, in December ’59, Duane jumped on the already crowded ‘My Bonnie’ bandwagon, releasing a spirited version of ‘Bonnie Came Back’ with a classy twang guitar / Jim Horn-powered sax duet, propelled by mini-drum solos; the song climbed all the way to #26 despite most of the population probably already knowing that melody by heart through countless versions (the most recent being Ray Charles’).
Next came a bit acting part in the teen-and-teacher drama Because They’re Young, a movie that was somewhat daring for its time for its mildly daring (for 1960, probably smashingly daring) depiction of sexual relations, especially when one considers that the main role was played by Dick Clark (then again, Dick Clark did have a fully conventional image, but was very well known for using it to his advantage while promoting all sorts of unconventional artists). The movie has preserved for us a very rare piece of footage of a young Duane Eddy playing his guitar on ‘Shazam!’, another minor hit from the tune smithery of Eddy and Hazlewood, though hardly original, as it is basically just another yakety-sax oriented country-rock dance tune without a particularly outstanding hook. Even more lucrative for Eddy was the title track to the movie, a lushly orchestrated pop ditty co-written by a bunch of guys including Aaron Schroeder (one of Elvis’ primary composers); I think that Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman later nicked both the main rhythm and the main twangy riff for their own ‘Little Sister’, which takes a little effort to notice because atmospherically, ‘Little Sister’ is gritty and «dangerous» (one of the very few cases where we get to see a post-Army Elvis actually bare his teeth), whereas ‘Because They’re Young’ has a celebratory atmosphere throughout, and Eddy merely acts here as the proverbial «first violin» within the defined limits of a symphonic orchestra. Stilted as it is, it goes without saying that Duane Eddy’s instrumental version of ‘Because They’re Young’ is far preferable to the milk-and-honey vocal version of James Darren from the same year (as featured in the movie), or the later UK cover by Helen Shapiro — yet at the same time, it is only with bitter irony that one might be allowed to react to the fact that ‘Because They’re Young’ became the biggest commercial hit of Duane Eddy’s entire career.
Although the next single, ‘Kommotion’, released in August 1960, only went to #78 where ‘Because They’re Young’ reached #4, I would insist that in a perfect world those numbers should be reversed — for one thing, the use of strings on this instrumental is nothing short of breathtaking, as opposed to the highly conventional orchestration of the movie tune. Here, the guitar is holding an actual dialog with the strings (trialog if you throw in the hyper-active saxophone, which simply refuses to shut up and go away even after it’s had its mid-section spotlight), and in between the three, they really create a busy atmosphere of hustlin’ and bustlin’, with the guitar as a fat old bumble-bee flying around its business on the lawn and the strings as a herd of dragonflies flanging the bumble-bee from all sides. It’s fast, fun, unpredictable, and creative as heck, easily the best song of the year to come out of the Eddy-Hazlewood workshop. The slower, bluesier ‘Theme For Moon Children’ on the B-side is also a somewhat weird combination of stinging blues-rock guitar and odd orchestration that regularly fluctuates between generic sentimental Hollywood and proto-psychedelic Eastern vibes — just wait past the deceptive quasi-Tchaikovsky opening and you’re in for another creative and puzzling arrangement.
All of this preludial information is important to understand just how serious a contrast all of that single-oriented activity makes with Duane Eddy’s fourth LP (and, temporarily, the last to be produced as a collaboration with Hazlewood). Fans were most likely expecting another collection of danceable twang-guitar instrumentals; but Duane and Lee had something completely different in store for them. Not only does Songs Of Our Heritage consist completely of «oldies», reimagined and rearranged in accordance with the artists’ more «contemporary» vision — but it also bypasses Eddy’s usual twangy formula, instead featuring the artist almost entirely switch to acoustic guitar and... uh, banjo? Really?
It is this initial impression, I suppose, that is responsible for the album being almost completely bypassed and disregarded in the (already seriously overlooked) Duane Eddy discography as a whole. As in, who would ever want to hear Duane Eddy raising banjo hell on ‘Cripple Creek’, or leading us in an ultra-slow, pensive, gently picked acoustic rendition of ‘On Top Of Old Smokey’? Isn’t that, like, Pete Seeger’s turf or something? We thought we were in Phoenix, Arizona; why are we in Greenwich Village all of a sudden? And why the hell are more than half of the songs featuring Jim Horn on flute rather than saxophone? ("Apparently flute is a big part of our heritage", cynically comments one of the mini-reviewers on RYM).
Needless to say, upon my first listen to the record I was tempted to dismiss it for good as one of those failed experiments in «broadening one’s horizons» that so frequently mar the careers of solid one-dimensional artists who are incapable of working outside an established formula, but occasionally try to do so just to confirm the rule. But then I thought, well, it is still a Lee Hazlewood production, and Lee Hazlewood is not really one of the guys with a generic and conventional approach to everything he does — surely there must be something special about these arrangements. And subsequent listens proved that there is indeed; you just have to let it sink in, soak up, and settle down. It doesn’t hurt, either, to actually pay attention to at least a few of the tracks instead of just letting them serve as background music for chores, which, I think, is precisely how most people who ever put this album on must have always treated them.
As a typical example, take Eddy’s and Hazlewood’s arrangement of the traditional ‘In The Pines’, which most of us probably know as Nirvana’s ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ prior to checking out Leadbelly’s version. It begins with a somber one-note bass riff and an equally ominous circular little melody played by the flute, before plunging into the main melody, lazily picked by Eddy on the banjo and echoed by a minimalistic vibraphone part, whose lightness complements the darkness of the bass. After one verse, the banjo melody is taken over by the flute, while the bass suddenly switches from slow one-note pinging to a frenzied circular run — echoing the flute opening of the song. Then, for the third verse, you have the main melody switching over to formerly silent acoustic guitar, while the banjo recedes into the background, the bass reverts to minimalistic pinging, and the flute reprises the circular waltzing (!). Finally, for the last verse it’s back to banjo, with the flute and vibraphone saying their own subtle goodbyes as well. And it’s all over in about two minutes.
It would probably be a bit of a stretch to call this a true masterpiece of creative arrangement, but the very fact that there is so much going on shows that Songs Of Our Heritage is not to be taken lightly. It may be so that people expect Duane Eddy to show his virtuoso technique of playing acoustic guitar (and banjo?), and leave disappointed when they find out he is not exactly Jimmy Page; but that is a mistaken way of assessing the LP, which should instead be held to the same type of standard as, say, Pet Sounds — a creative, wholesome product of musical reinterpretation and arrangement. All of Duane’s classic records should, in fact, be viewed as the product of collective rather than individual work, but Songs Of Our Heritage most of all — on here, the flute, the bass, the keyboards, and the string instruments are all equi-important parts of a single whole, masterminded by the quietly burgeoning genius of Mr. Hazlewood.
I shall not go into comparable details on the other songs, because Hazlewood’s formula of using banjo, acoustic guitar, vibraphone, flute, and melodic bass remains more or less consistent throughout, and he uses comparable tricks for most of these old chestnuts, be they fast or slow, playful or melancholic, technically challenging or minimalistic — but since there is enough mood variety between the tracks, the record never becomes boring once you’ve figured out the key to appreciating it. Extensive commentary on ‘Cripple Creek’ or ‘John Henry’ is simply not required, because the basic melodies remain the same — this is indeed a celebration of the heritage, not a deconstruction of it — but the way they are treated is creative and fresh, and in some departments, unique; at the very least, I would much rather listen to this for the rest of my life than The Kingston Trio or The Weavers, thank you very much.
The bottomline, though, is that Songs Of Our Heritage should rather be recommended for big fans of Lee Hazlewood rather than those of Duane Eddy — regardless of the humble liner notes by Lee and Lester Still, whose purpose almost seems to be to dissipate certain doubts that fans could have about the nature of the record ("we have been asked many times... ‘what is Duane Eddy really like?’... this album will perhaps answer part of the question... it shows the quiet... sometimes lonely... often beautiful... and most certainly talented touch... of this young man"). The one sentence from these notes that most definitely still holds true today the same way it held true back in 1960 is "This is the ‘Duane’ that less than a dozen people know". Here’s hoping that this review might go a little way toward rectifying this undeserved situation — even if I would be the first to admit that even the fully recognized prettiness and originality of these arrangements might not be enough to elevate them to any sort of awesome-cathartic status.
Note that the album has, in recent years, been finally re-released several times on CD; some versions include a bunch of alternate takes for some of the songs as bonus tracks, but there is also an excellent European release that includes some of the 1960 singles instead (e.g. ‘Kommotion’), and, most importantly, the hard-to-find single credited to Duane Eddy And His Orchestra and containing two songs written by Hazlewood for the poorly remembered and artistically insignificant (but socially relevant) low budget movie Why Must I Die?. Of these, ‘The Girl On Death Row’ is a particularly stunning highlight: because it is officially credited to Duane Eddy, there is some misinformation on the Web that it is a rare example of Eddy’s vocals, but, in fact, this is the earliest example of a vocal part as sung by Lee Hazlewood in person (and it quite expressly says so on top of the record itself!). Not only that, but it is clearly an important milestone in the development of what might be known as the «Gothic Western» style — Eddy’s brief twang in the intro and outro is downright threatening, Lee’s vocals are deeply mournful, the strings rise and fall in a deeply agitated manner, and the lyrics, reflecting the plot of the movie, are quite a bit chilling ("her eyes were once so full of dreams / her young heart filled with lover schemes / now every second she must borrow / they take her life tomorrow"). Quite a symbolic career beginning for the father of «cowboy psychedelia» — and a rather natural early predecessor for later moody masterpieces such as ‘Some Velvet Morning’.
Only Solitaire reviews: Duane Eddy