A Crooked Line

Collection Contents

#		Title	Length
1		California (Rutherford Hayes in the Morning)	4:17	Play
2		A Crooked Line	5:08	Play
3		Late For Dinner	4:04	Play
4		Bryant St	4:25	Play
5		There Oughtta Be A Highway	3:38	Play
6		Koreatown intro	2:34	Play
7		Koreatown	3:02	Play
8		The River, Where She Sleeps	4:21	Play
9		I Lost A Day To The Rain	2:48	Play
10		I Can Get There From Here	3:32	Play

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Description

Crooked Liner Notes

Darryl Purpose has never taken the high road, and were all the better for it. As a teenager, he carved out a distinguished and somewhat shadowed career as a professional blackjack player. In the mid-1980s, he joined a linear band of on-foot protesters called The Great Peace March, traversing the nations service roads in a mad effort to stop nuclear madness. But its in the past five years, as a full-time itinerant songster, that Purpose is fully realizing his calling. Like a long musical line before him and to follow, Purpose is a dramatist for the dispossessed, a chronicler of those Americans who, by choice or by chance, live on the hearts back streets, rising through the crooked lines like leaves of grass.

Purpose calls himself a "singer-songwriter." Thats a fairly new term that brings to mind luminaries (and obvious influences) such as Harry Chapin and Steve Goodman. Like these artists, Purpose tells stories to tell truths. But the school of singing-songwriting is really lodged in the roots of American folksong, in immigrant ballads sung in diverse languages by women and men in the kitchen and out behind the house. In such songs, historical memory carries through generations, with mood and feeling preserved along with names of anti-heroes like Blackjack Davey. These stories provided the seedbed for the modern singer-songwriter, and songs like "A Crooked Line," "Bryant Street" "Oughtta Be a Highway" and "California (Rutherford Hayes in the Morning)" spring fresh from this seedbed.

For writing workshops be damned, storytelling seems to mainly be something that involves a "knack." Purpose is one of the best, and he found his knack out of necessity, he says. "It emerged when I was doing a lot of live shows. I discovered that I could tell a gambling story, or a story about the Peace March, and people would react. Then, with a nudge from Robert Morgan Fisher, the stories started seeping into the songs."

"I realized Im not going to have mosh pits," Purpose adds. "Im not going to have people dancing wildly. So I can connect with people through the stories."

This albums opener, co-written by Paul Zollo, offers a prime example of Purposes craft. In a masterpiece of minimalist historic fiction, Purpose sets out against a melancholy guitar backdrop just a few sparse details about President Rutherford B. Hayes: his inaugural voyage to California, his receiving of Alexander Graham Bells new invention, his troubled position on the dawning of concurrent American frontiers. "Im not sure its a song about Rutherford Hayes," Purpose says. "Its about history and how history is not what happens, but whats remembered."

Perhaps. After all, how else could Purpose make us care so much about a president who was not too well liked even during his reign? (One wonders if Purpose might next take on the legacy of Millard Fillmore.) But the song also resonates because it evokes the sadness that occasions the birth of any new epoch. It speaks to the 21st century by reawakening the 19th.

The cast of largely nameless wanderers and fate-tempters introduced in Purposes previous albums now expands in A Crooked Line. Added to "Mr. Schwinn" and the sojourner of "You Must Go Home for Christmas" (from Same River Twice) are the narrators of "Late For Dinner" and "Crooked Line," people captured by Purpose as they are still en route to making their peace.

Other times, Purpose sheds the journeymans cloak altogether and offers what amounts to hobos lullabies, songs about the sheer joy of making music and rhymes. The playful "I Lost a Day to the Rain," is one of these. In it, Purpose recounts the only three characters of Western civilization who can be immediately associated with rainfall: Noah, Ben Franklin and Gene Kelly. Theres not a fourth. At least, Purpose reports, no audience member on a long string of concerts has been able to come up with one.

One more song bears mention here. "Bryant Street" is among the bravest and most starkly autobiographical of Purposes songs. It tells of the result of another wandering, this one a modern trip through genealogical tables and Internet search engines. At the end of the voyage was the discovery of a half-sister Purpose never met. I wont say more here; this story is best heard just as Purpose sings it.

In a recent profile in Dirty Linen magazine, Purpose explains his compositional talents: "I write a great half a song." Here, his partnerships with Fisher, Zollo, and Ellis Paul result in another collection of tunes that will stick around for a long while. Musical compatriots include long-time accompanist Daryl S, and the esteemed Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, stylers of "postmodern mythic American music" whose own musical paths have often intersected with Purposes.

And so a crooked line is blazed. The sources of this albums title are many: its a physical description of the border between California and Nevada (and the rest of the country). Its the path of constant touring upon which Purpose the musician has staked his claim. And its the sideways directions that songs like "California (Rutherford Hayes in the Morning)" find their way to their target, by appearing as one form and then revealing ten more. You have to be careful who you meet on the low roads: theres magic out there.

Michael Tisserand

Michael Tisserand is the editor of Gambit Weekly in New Orleans. His book The Kingdom of Zydeco received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for music writing in 1999.