When Chastity Brown released Back-Road Highways last March, City Pages announced that she "belongs to no genre, because what she does is beyond folk, blues, soul, or any hyphenated combination of those categories." Then in August they named her Best Folk Artist because "at least the platform of folk is broad enough to hold her." In 2010 she had been "a rocker with gospel grounding." On her last album she snarled, would you like a definition? Two months ago CMT proposed "Americana Soul." Chastity suggested, Here's another colored woman with a guitar.
To me the problem with genre is less that it's a shortcut and more that it can keep us from listening. None of the classifications above are wrong, exactly. But three years ago Chastity Brown gave us a fantastic response to these attempts. You say you want to know me/that you'd like to understand/where exactly I came from/the type of person that I am. If you did, you only had to listen to the rest of "Bluegrassy Tune", her eight-minute autobiography from 2009's Sankofa. Or you could listen to its shorter incarnation as "Bound to Happen" on 2010's High Noon Teeth. And if you were really pressed for time you could skim her interview with Guante. There is more to this human experience than just one thing.
I first heard Chastity Brown after I had just finished reading If Beale Street Could Talk. She was playing with her band at the Clown Lounge in mid-July and I had been thinking about the part in Beale Street where Sharon goes on an impossible errand to some hip nightclub in Cuba. The band on stage is singing "My Lord and I."
That song is Birmingham, her father and her mother, the kitchens, and the mines. She may never, in fact, ever have particularly liked that particular song, but she knows about it, it is part of her. She slowly realizes that this is the song, which, to different words if words indeed there are, the young people on the bandstand are belting, or bolting out. And they know nothing at all about the song they are singing: which causes Sharon to wonder if they know anything about themselves at all.
Sharon should have come to the Clown Lounge. Chastity Brown sounds like she knows about the songs she is singing - play almost any track on Back-Road Highways next to "Go Up Moses" - but she also sounds like she knows about herself. She and her band can stretch "Leroy" or "Sunday Morning" or "Slowly" until the guitar bleeds like tears. Then they'll hit you with "After You", which is one of the most goddamned exuberant songs I have ever heard.
That night she closed with "Summertime" from Porgy & Bess. I had never particularly liked that particular song. I had never felt like I knew about that particular song. And that particular song had certainly never felt like it was a part of me. But then The Chastity Brown Band burned through their smoldering cover and Chastity speculated, I wonder what Gershwin would say if he heard this. He'd probably be like, what?
Maybe. But that response sounds like someone hung-up on genre, and that seems unlikely from the "Rhapsody in Blue" guy. It seems more likely that Gershwin would have heard "Bluegrassy Tune" or "Bound to Happen" and understood biography supplanting genre. Sometimes listening to people who know themselves helps us to know ourselves a little better. Gershwin would have appreciated the effort.
One of my favorite music quotes comes from Matthew Houck answering a question about the songs on his Willie Nelson tribute album. They were my earliest musical memories, though some of them I heard later on.
Chastity Brown made "Summertime" sound that way for me.
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