Features Disc of the day
Chris Smither
Don’t It Drag On
(Tomato, 1971)
26-year-old Crescent City native decamps to Woodstock for growly folk-blues radiance.
Raised in New Orleans on Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi John Hurt and schooled in the Boston and Cambridge coffee shops of the ’60s, Chris Smither stands outside of the mass of late ’60s white boys questing for American authenticity. On his early recordings for Kevin Eggers’ Tomato label he possesses a sweetly reassuring vocal rumble (David Ackles without all that oompah vaudeville) and a hanging-back Cajun approach to harmony weirdly redolent of the despondent coming-down harmonies of Big Star. Recorded in Albert Grossman’s new Bearsville Studio in Woodstock in 1970 Don’t It Drag On is a heartbreakingly carefree work, possessing a dangerously trippy air of seductive melancholia, caught half way between long summer holidays and a lifetime of homelessness.
Andrew Male
Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 16/06/2008
Further Listening
David Ackles – David Ackles (Elektra, 1968)
Teenage Fanclub – Songs From Northern Britain (Columbia, 1997)
Big Star – Radio City (Ardent, 1974)
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