What Would You Give?: Fresh Ears on "Feast Here Tonight"

Nearly 20 years ago I was music director and composer for an L.A. production dubbed An Appalachian Twelfth Night, in which director Susan Lambert's conception was that audiences were watching what could have been a 1930s-era WPA production of Shakespeare's romantic comedy, smeared with coal dust and haunted by poverty. For the music I sat in with a live band and set "O Mistress Mine" to the tune of "Wayfaring Stranger" (I'm pretty sure this was someone else's idea, but I'm glad to claim credit), turned "Come Away Death" into a blues, and surrounded and interpolated the show with a number of authentic old-time songs mixed with original compositions: "Good Old Mountain Dew," the indispensable Uncle Dave Macon banger "Way Down the Old Plank Road," and in place of "The rain it raineth every day," "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." I must credit the late great producer (and the production's impish Sir Toby), Robert Williams, with some great source music CDs, including one he simply labeled "The Music of Kentucky," which gave me hours of listening pleasure.

But when I was looking for an Act Two opener, a song to shoo audiences at West Hollywood's Globe Playhouse back into their seats, I turned to a hair-raising number from Feast Here Tonight, a double-LP collection of songs Bill and Charlie Monroe recorded in the mid-'30s, before Bill formed a band called the Blue Grass Boys and literally invented one of the great American musical genres. The song, "He Will Set Your Fields on Fire," is typical of this companionable collection, a bouncy, benign-sounding hoedown you may find yourself tapping your toe along to before you realize, Wait, what are they singing about? In that case, it's a straight-up hellfire apocalypse for the unrepentant, concluding with a promise that on the "last great day" is when God "sets the world on fire." Cool cool cool. On the album's next track, it's a more immediate threat: "The time's a-comin' when the sinner must die." You might be nodding along to "Darling Corey," and think, Hang on, why are they digging a hole, and for whom? On a less sinister note, you may wonder along with the singer of "Where Is My Sailor Boy?," "Oh, what does the deep sea say?" And you're not human if you're not stopped in your tracks by this line from the cheery "All the Good Times Are Past and Gone": "I wish to the Lord I'd never been born/Or died when I was young."

This is music of the so-called "old, weird America" of Griel Marcus's dubious formulation, rendered so serenely, so matter-of-factly, it doesn't feel weird, or even especially old, just familiar. Monroe's mandolin suggests the spinning of a loom, a handcranked contraption weaving a thread of sound, hardy if not too colorful, and the Monroes' blended voices often have the comforting in-and-out breath of a harmonium as they rock back and forth between the I and the V—when their voices aren't suggesting the whoop of birdcalls, the whistle of trains, the whine of wolves. Occasionally the tempo does edge into the manic, suggesting the places Bill would soon travel with Flatt and Scruggs, as on "Katie Kline" or "Pearly Gates."

But by and large this is placidly churning music with restless or disturbing things on its mind. The songs are divided more or less evenly among gospel songs of varying brimstone quotient, love ballads happy or heartsick, and odes to home and family that flicker between these two themes, faith and love. There are fine renditions here of classics Monroe and others would make famous in more raucous recordings: "Nine-Pound Hammer," with the intentional wobble in its harmony, the woozy "Drifting Too Far From the Shore," the deep-dish melancholy of "Weeping Willow Tree," the jamming "On Some Foggy Mountain Top." Probably my favorite, "Fields on Fire" aside, is the Tom T. Hall-worthy affirmation, rendered in simple call and response, of "A Beautiful Life":

Each day I'll do (each day I'll do)

A golden deed (a golden deed)

By helping those (by helping those)

Who are in need (who are in need)

My life on earth (my life on earth)

Is but a span (is but a span)

And so I'll do (and so I'll do the best I can)

Obviously that hopeful theology is easier to embrace than behave-or-there's-hell-to-pay of "Fields on Fire" and "Sinner Must Die." But while I don't necessarily believe that you can't conceive of a heaven without a hell, I for one can't conceive of the Monroe Brothers—or music worth listening to, for that matter—without both sin and redemption, murder ballads and love songs, blood and harmony.