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Mar
12
Richard Buckner: The Hill
Filed Under Updates
Edgar Lee Masters published his Spoon River Anthology in 1915, a collection of over 200 free-form poems spoken from the point of view of the town’s dead, buried in the cemetery on the hill, who, with nothing now holding them back, pour out an unvarnished picture of the town and the complicated tangle of adulterous affairs, murders, illegitimate children, drunkenness, rivalries, and the passions and conflicts and tragedies that brought these people to their deaths. Spoon River immediately gripped the reading public at the time of its release.
Some 80 years later, Richard Buckner, as he puts it, “drove east from Bakersfield and ended up near the mouth of Death Valley at a place called The Ranch Olancha Motel . . . traveling with a guitar, a four-track recorder and a copy of Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology.” He “spent the week doodling with the poems onto a cassette” and then stuck the tape into his glove compartment, forgetting about it for several years until he came across the cassette during a bout with writer’s block. “After listening to it again, [I] thought that maybe it was the distraction I was looking for . . . a few months later I drove back to Tucson to re-record about half of the songs in a real recording studio with Joey Burns and Johnny Convertino [of Calexico] . . . the result was The Hill. I originally released it in 2000 as a one-track recording of eighteen songs smeared into one another.”
The Hill wasn’t a massive commercial success — “half-hour song cycles based on 100-year-old poems generally don’t breach the top 40 niche” — but it was nonetheless an excellent record. Buckner’s voice and instrumentation give 18 of Masters’ epitaphs stirring and compelling settings, his longtime steeping in American folk music and his own innate personal restlessness bringing the song(s) across with a deeply sensitive and understanding performance. Half of Buckner’s selections are wordless — we hear of “Emily Sparks,” the lonely and pining schoolteacher, through an instrumental passage of guitar, fiddle, and cello; the drunken “Oscar Hummel” and the cuckolded “Tom Merritt,” on the other hand, speak to us through Buckner’s emotive and dusty baritone, his voice investing longing and desperation in the cries that brought both men to their deaths. The Hill doesn’t just find Buckner singing someone else’s poetry; this is a record of someone going deep into his source material and unearthing a new way to understand it.
The Hill has been out-of-print for many years, but Merge Records has just digitally re-issued it, with two of Buckner’s other records (1994’s Bloomed and 2002’s Impasse). Merge has made them available as high-quality (320 kbps) MP3 downloads, and at about $9 apiece, they’re more than worth the money. Speaking of worth the money, Richard Buckner is coming to Moscow touring in support of the re-issues, playing a set at Mikey’s on April 28th, 8PM.
Brendan occasionally guests on Stereopathic Sessions with Larson and Josh, and is staggered at how inarticulate his words are about the things he loves the most. He doesn’t blog, and doesn’t want to.
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[...] Rather than read me prattle on about The Hill, go read my review from last March. [...]