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Described by Hal Willner as a timeless album, Mary Lee Kortes’ stunning concept album, The Songs of Beulah Rowley, is grounded in themes and emotions that are both universal and deeply personal.
Beulah Rowley was born in 1917 in a small Michigan town; her parents moved to the Detroit area when she was still an infant. Using money from gambling, her father opened a small cinema in Greenville. Inspired by the idea of being in showbusiness, she began learning songs from musicals and, from there, started writing her own and singing them in the theatre, now run by her uncle after her father’s death. Taken under the wing of a local music teacher, she eventually recorded some of her songs, which were aired by a local disc jockey. Expanding her live performances and recordings, her songs drawing on the tragedy and dysfunction of her family, she began to make a name around the Midwest. Still, her promising career was cut short when a tornado caused a house lamp to set fire to her house, and she was killed aged just 21. However, stored in an iron piano bench, her compositions and diaries survived, eventually passing into the custody of Kortes’ family; Mary Lee Kortes is now bringing them back to life.
It’s a remarkable story. And not a word of it is true. Rowley’s story and songs are, in fact, entirely the creation of Kortes, who, along with Hal Willner (who provides commentary) in his last single-artist project, has, in the company of musicians that include Eric Ambel on electric guitar, Jon Graboff on pedal steel, Lenny Pickett on brass and woodwind and, Joe Jackson on piano and backing vocals, created The Songs of Beulah Rowley, a stunning concept album (its genesis predating Jackson’s album about Max Champion, an invented long-forgotten English Music Hall figure and given a UK release to coincide with their joint tour), which, while it may be fiction, is grounded in themes and emotions that are both universal and, she herself from Michigan, deeply personal.
“We only own what matters/What matters is our dreams” is the mantra for the brief Opening Montage, essentially the mission statement of the album, the first track proper being the lullabying gospel blues rhythm of the sparse, steady strummed God’s Heartbeat (Motherless Daughter), Rowley calling herself “this ball of passion and pain”, Kortes’s voice gathering power as she sings “Did I come out of nowhere/Did our fingers entwine/Was it more joy than you could stand” as it unfolds the mother’s death (“You couldn’t wait any longer/The strain was too strong/So you walked into that white light/Who was watching when God’s heartbeat left your hands/That night?”), in the fiction, this was the recording that first caught the attention of a local radio DJ.
Turning to banjo, shuffled drums, and a more Appalachian feel, the title of the equally spare Born A Happy Girl belies lyrics such as, “Tried to kill my only child/The devil drove me dark and wild/But she escaped, bold and beguiled…she was pretty she was fair/I deserved her every glare/While I kept her in my snare… she ran away from me/She knew best what best would be/And at last we both were free”.
A waltzing whirligig melody line opens Fingernail Moon before it shifts to a lolloping clarinet-coloured, rums clattering carney blues with a singalong chorus and a more upbeat perspective (“Fingernail moon is there to guide/Those who’ve strayed too far and wide/Lost their homes and lost their hearts/And might not even know it/They need the moon to show it/If you can put your hand in mine/We can make our own sunshine”). Fading away back into the carousel theme, it gives way to the banjo strummed, keys tinkling slow swayer The Old Piano Bench and a return to the theme of following dreams through music (“As I sit on my bench and play/And the world turns around/With the slightest of sounds/All the storms held and bound at bay/I can ride on my dreams”) with its mentions of numbers such as Toute de Suite, Ciao Bella and Auf Wiedersehen with which it shares its musical sensibility.
Striking a more robust musical note with chiming chords and further similar themes (“Every child wishes/Hopes and demands/The fortunes of others/Will fall in his hands”), Green Sands reminds us that, while purporting to be recreating songs from the 30s, these are often very much of a contemporary musical bent, here perhaps echoing Spector’s girl pop classics.
Three brief spoken extracts from a Kortes poem, Lost And Found, are scattered across the album, the first accompanied by a dreamlike backing akin to Danny Elfman, things proceeding through the simple, stripped-back acoustic How Many Times (“How many times have I/Tried to fly/And landed on the floor/How many times have I/Said I’d try just once more”), the spooked Appalachian blues A Rain’s Gonna Come (“Deep in the forest and deep in the hood/There’s a twice nightly battle ‘tween evil and good/Good’s wearing black and evil wears white/They spin round so fast that they look just alike”) and the simple campfire beauty of the slow marching anthemic Someplace We Can’t See (“Let the sun come down/Blind us by the night/Though we’re lost and torn/And too confused to fight/I will meet you where the sky is breaking/That’s where we begin”).
The album’s second half leads off with the rousing, if cynical gospel Well By The Water (“Papa was a preacher’s son/Said he never saved no one…Daddy served the daily drink/Watched everybody’s trouble sink/By the water in the well/Hide the heart and cut the thread/All the dreaded secrets dead”), a jazzy Waitsian vibe driving the loping, banjo-plucked Big Things (“I got wishes on my mind/A fire in my heart/A better plan there never was/Tomorrow I’ll be starting/Big big things”) with its juke joint piano solo, and the vintage show tune-styled, woodwind whispered Through A Cloudy Window With Clear Eyes (“Everybody takes a turn at wondering/Just what true love would be/Nobody ever learns the lesson pondering/The far off frilly sea”), a song you could hear Eddi Reader singing.
Gypsy jazz and cabaret colours paint the canvas of the album’s centrepiece statement and one of the several highlights, Music Got Me Here (“Everybody I met asked me/How’d you get so satisfied/And I said/The music got me here”) before, with echoing resonator guitar, French café accordion and strings, again nodding to the evergreen musicals of composers like Rodgers, Gershwin, Porter and Hart, the title track sounds the fear of being forgotten (“When my face is long gone from the mirror/Will my voice echo clear/Will the footsteps that I take leave a mark or disappear”), one within any artist’s heart, TS Eliot surely the spirit hovering over lines like “The evening visits like a friend/It tips its hat then goes away again”.
Ostensibly the last track, the semi-spoken, brushed snares, accordion, lightly retro shuffling ballroom jazz, scat-ending The Young Float Freely By has the carefree air its title suggests (“Lovers kiss, oblivious/To the rain and lookers on/Full of dreams and fiery trust… While the rest of the world watches and remembers/With a sweet tear in its eye”), again evocative of Reader, before, ending as it began, signing off with the brief instrumental Goodbye.
There are, though, two bonus tracks, the more Americana-sounding bluesy, drawled and angry economic depression-themed The Greater Good (“The morning bell rings 6:00/Black coffee percolates then stops/The local cripples wait once more/Outside the big white bank’s front door/They tell me that I must believe/These things serve a greater good…Hot southern town lived on one industry/Inside a lie it could not see/A thousand families’ futures gone/Another band of thieves moves on”) And, finally, with just voice, bass and guitar, a crooned rehearsal take on the title track that led to Willner to declare “Wow! That’s Sinatra”. It’s praise well-deserved. As she says in her poem, “What matters is our dreams”, and this is indeed the stuff that dreams are made on.
The Songs of Beulah Rowley (25th October 2024) Econe
