Bryan Harvey and the New South Gothic

Yesterday, while giving you some personal thoughts about my loose connection to the Harvey family and what they meant to so many people, I tossed in a reference to "New South Gothic," the subgenre that some critics have used to label the House of Freaks' music. For those of you who are unfamiliar with his music (or perhaps know him only from Gutterball or other side projects), I wanted to provide some more links to their discography--especially a great site that gives liner notes by Bryan for many of the songs in their catalog--and also a photo gallery of shots by Oz Geier, but also to flesh out and explain what I think the NSG label means, and how it applies to House of Freaks and particularly Bryan's lyrics.

First of all, I confess that I've modified the more generic phrase "Southern Gothic," first to distinguish it from the literary reference to mid-century works by authors like Faulkner and O'Connor, and secondly to emphasize the ambivalence that "old"  southerners more generally may have lacked towards their heritage and mythology. There is a duality to the new presentation, to include the changing mores of the South since WWII that traditional Southern Gothic writers probably couldn't have perceived. JD Wilkes of Th' Legendary Shack Shakers tries to spell it out:

"It's different than Gothic. It's Flannery O'Connor and Harper Lee and Faulkner and all that. It's sort of the dark, seamy underbelly of the South, but there's a mystical quality too. It's not like the Jerry Springer, nasty, dysfunctional South that the media likes to paint the picture of. This is more of a Gothic, grandiose version of the grotesqueness of the South. It's all the cross-cultural dynamics of race and class and religion and all those things that cause trouble, but the beauty they reveal in art and life. So it's very much based in reality, whereas Gothic literature is a medieval fantasy. Southern Gothic is the reality around us down here in these parts. It's like the sideshow and the circus and all that. It's entertaining but there's something sick about it at the same time. It's where we're from, so it's what comes natural. We're trying to tell big stories, trying to portray something bigger than ourselves and more epic than ourselves."

Perhaps the most famous or well-heard example of NSG would be Fables of the Reconstruction, REM's third album. Songs like Driver 8, Can't Get There from Here, Wendell Gee and Good Advices share a sense of place and a storytelling lyricism divorced from typical boy-meets-girl pop pap. There are other examples:  Cat Power is often cited by other bands as a NSG influence, explained here by Verbena frontman Scott Bondy:

"She's from a storytelling tradition," he said. "There's just serious darkness, like, if you're brought up in the '40s or '50s in the South, your dad could go to work at the mill or on the farm and come home losing an arm. Those kind of stakes — there's just something so much more respectable about that way of life. I don't know, there's like a sense of honor, or whatever, like in a David Lynchian kind of way. There's also like a really large underside of the iceberg — the darkness of it."

Exploring that darkness in his songs, Bondy has created a timeless rock sound, a sound that he believes has a universal appeal. He said he turns to like-minded artists — such as Lynch, the Coen Brothers and the White Stripes — for inspiration. "Anything...that paints a portrait of [the] America that doesn't exist anymore...," he said. "It's almost like those things are timeless. They're telling stories that you don't know when they're set.

So that should give you a reasonable idea of what I'm talking about when I refer to House of Freaks as part of the New South Gothic. Probably the best unified example of the style in their catalog is the 2nd album, Tantilla. Themes of race, religion, hard labor and family abound, tied together by a spare but mostly thundering arrangement by producer John Leckie. (In the liner notes I linked to, Harvey declares the production result a disappointment, but as someone who grew to love the album without the benefit of that knowledge, I'm unswayed in keeping it as my favorite of theirs).

The two tracks that I think best express the duality in NSG themes are White Folks' Blood and Family Tree. Harvey is explicit about the dark side of the Southern legacy:

I was really getting into that suthern thang around this time. Being in L.A. made me acutely aware that I was from the south. My southern accent became even more pronounced. I was really trying to dig into all those things that make a person from the south what he is...you know, the lost cause, racial guilt and that sort of stuff. I think these lyrics are pretty good. I was particularly disturbed by an old photo from the 30's of a dead black man who had been lynched. He was tied to a tree, with his hands tied behind his back and had been tortured with a blow torch. I still can't get images like these out of my head. It makes me hate humanity sometimes, and confirms my feelings that we live in a godless world.

Here are the lyrics:

What mysteries flow through these white folks' blood?
What secrets do they hide within?
What sickbed words pass across their lips?
And what passions lie beneath their skin?
Are their fortunes made in their pool halls?
And their lives played out like children's games?
Under the summer sun with a knife and a gun
A festered wound never heals
On the back porch, in the pawn shops

Dusting off their fathers' guns
Words like worms crawl through their brains
Sermons fly from the preacher's mouth
But the auction block still remains
Gagged and tied to a tree trunk
After a fox hunt chase with dogs and chains
In a field of white in the broad daylight
The earth is black, black with blood
They were friends and they were brothers

Life goes on across the railroad tracks
A flood of tears has come and gone
Autumn comes, white folks settle down
And the preacher quotes from Luke and John
And there is peace and plenty in the country
And the way we are, we will remain
The world keeps spinning round and around
Just keep spinning around and around and around
Everything is still the same

Life goes on like before, on the streets, on the porches
In our homes, in our towns, what we see all around us.
Life goes on like before, while we sit by the doorway
All around, all our lives, all we do, no surprises

The irony of course is a white person hypothesizing on what exists inside the heads of white people, to behave as they do in the lyrics. That detachment persists for much of the song, suddenly shifting with the line that continues to give me chills each time I hear it: "and the way we are, we will remain." For anyone who has lived in Richmond at least, that line should ring harshly true. What HL Mencken once called a "happy dullness of intellect" seems to pervade Richmond--the sense that things are as they are, that tradition and familiarity trump progress and change, and that another 40 years of the same sounds pretty good, all in all. "All we do, no surprises." The shift from third- to first-person in midsong exemplifies the approach to NSG sentiment: the past is the past, and no one feels personally responsible for its horrors--but the baggage has made it for the train trip to the present, and here Harvey is keenly aware that they are his bags to pick up.

In Family Tree, however, there emerges a softer side--a sentimentality for the comfort of the very same familiarity and tradition that's viewed with suspicion in White Folks' Blood. As primarily expressed by Bryan, this more gentle view comes out in strong themes of ancestry and family connectedness. Sun Gone Down, another track from Tantilla, is obliquely about the death of Harvey's father, but in Family Tree the connections are explicit:

A wind is rising outside
the houses are trembling
the trees are shivering

out in the fields where we walked
the roots that support us
have built a fortress

well they grow with the breeze like a family tree
whose seeds were planted here
well they rise up tall in my memory
they do

Who were they, where are they now?
Just faces and photographs
letters and lithographs
drunkards and fathers they were
preachers and soldiers
upon their shoulders

well we grow with the breeze with a family tree
whose seeds were planted here
well they rise up tall in my memory
they do

their houses are crumbling
the wells dried up long ago
water stops flowing
this tree will always grow

the wind is rising outside
the branches are swaying
children are playing
between the earth and the sky
between we're the pages
they live through the ages

             well they grow with the breeze like a family tree
             whose seeds were planted here
             well they rise up tall in my memory
             they do...they grow with the family tree

Apart from admitting there might be a drunkard or two sitting in the Harvey family tree, there is a strong benevolence towards the past in this lyric. Note that as with White Folks' Blood, the view backwards is relatively detached-- a look through old letters and pictures, crumbling houses and dried up wells. But here, rather than being cowed by the sense of continuity and linkage, it's a source of strength and food for the future.

Clearly, these are not themes you'd find on a Britney Spears record, which is perhaps why House of Freaks never had more than one weak hit single. But that sophistication of thought and personal transparency that Bryan lent to his songs are much of why House of Freaks is still well regarded critically, and why a suprising cadre of Freak followers still exist today, coming out of the woodwork to offer tributes and express sorrow at the passing of an unknown legend (as Neil Young might say).

--TJ

Comments

[carla]

Wow...really attracting the best around here, eh TJ?

[Mark]

I suppose being politically correct is more important than facing the truth and dealing with the issues. When I tell my kids that they cannot drive my motorcar yet, because they are only twelve and thirteen years old, am I being derogatory, or guilty of discrimination, or am I doing it for the safety of my children and other road users?
It is time people learn to actually discern the difference between politics and reality, two totally different mindsets and value systems. Politics, as it is today, is purely for the benefit of politicians and to those with close ties to the ‘elected’. Politics has nothing to do with ‘for the good of the people or the nation’. Calling people racist because they point out differences is pathetic, politically motivated and totally against natural law. The reason why Africa cannot lift itself up out of the gutter has not been properly debated because it becomes a ‘racial’ issue. Years after the colonialists have left, even though the rest of the world have gone through major world wars, Bubonic Plague, Spanish Flu, and the list goes on, yet have rebuild those countries into wealthy economies and flourishing societies, Africa is still in the dark ages and dying of famine and common waterborne diseases. So much so that blacks are streaming to the milk and honey of the western world and then ending up by biting the hand that feeds them. Are whites and the western world perfect, not by a long shot, but we have learned through many more generations of evolution. If we were all equal would it not have been the same in Africa, with vast resources in mineral wealth and arable agricultural land? You can twist my use of phrases and language to suit your purpose but you cannot, and refuse to even try to explain, why there is such a gulf between Africa and the rest of the developed world. The reality is that forcible integration of races and cultures leads to clashes and animosity. The evidence is in France, Brittain, US, South Africa and everywhere that blacks are being politically integrated into more evolved societies. Politically fuelled racial clashes do not occur in China or Japan because of the absolute minority of blacks in those countries. Whoever decided to censor my letter have indicated that it is better to accept the subtle condoning of the killing of Bryan Harvey and his family rather than being ‘politically incorrect’ and debating the true differences between races. It is a shame, and unfortunately it will lead to a lot more suffering than facing the truth and accepting the fact that a few egos will be dented.

[torridjoe]

Mark, I censored your previous letter because it reflected dangerously uneducated material espousing pure hatred towards an entire race of people. I won't stand for it, and I will block your IP if you continue in that vein.

[Mark]

TorridJoe, there is no hatred in me for any person, group or race. It is sad that that it always appears to be the interpretation that politically minded people choose. As for dangerously uneducated material..., I am living in the real world. People get killed every day through all manner of events. If there is a recognisable trend then surely it is an issue that needs to be addressed. Yet, everyone is too afraid to face the truth. I have empathy for the uneducated black masses that have been thrown into the cauldron of western civilisation and are expected to perform equally. It is not going to happen in an instant, as is nine months of discomfort of labour not going to disappear...
Unfortunately these types of issues cannot be debated without looking at the roots of the problem and anyone that believes otherwise is in denial. The differences in races are being covered up by political agendas and innocent people on both sides are suffering the consequences. You criticize and condemn me for being direct and to the point but you are unwilling to recognise that there is a problem and debate the causes.
I’ll ask you directly then TorridJoe, what is it that caused or contributed to the failure of Africa to reach first world status? What has made every single black ruler in Africa to date turn into a dictator and mass murderer? Why is it that every single black economy in Africa has deteriorated to a state of total chaos and has to rely almost entirely on food and aid from the western world? …..unless you believe none of this has and is happening and that I’m a racist fabricating lies to espouse hatred.