Charlie Feathers - Tip Top Daddy (Norton)

Rockabilly isn’t a genre renowned for its restraint. Knocking em’ back and tearing shit up goes part and parcel with the pomade-slicked ducktails and creased-cuff dungarees. Charlie Feathers had the package down pat and in spades. Present at the early Sam Phillips Sun sessions and author of some of the label’s earliest hits, he started cutting his own platters comparatively late in the game. As one of the ghostwriters for Elvis he also enjoyed financial compensation for his tune-smithing, if not public notoriety. Still, his situation was a damn sight better than that of Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup who had his songs swindled wholesale by Sun. The stuff here, mostly solo acoustic demos from a fifteen-year span, lacks the punch of his more polished band sides. The swap is an even more persuasive pathos and often startling amount of musical integrity. Twenty-three tunes trot by in just over three quarters of an hour. Rudimentary guitar, frequently in the form of just a single strumming chord, brackets Feathers’ singing verses in a sparing laidback style. Topics trace a typical ‘tears and beers’ trajectory, but an underlying poetry permeates the lyrics. “Bottle to the Baby” wraps in just under a minute and the stark “Live and Let Live” finds Feathers audibly choking up with emotion during the plain spoken plea to his woman not to leave him. Not much in the way of gloss or frills, but it’s enough and the intimacy of his songs in this setting almost demands the Spartan delivery. Feathers’ voice was one of the most offbeat in all of ‘hillbilly’ music, his singing often imbued with a preternatural throat warble that drew on the crooning yodel of guys like Jimmie Rodgers and Cliff Carlisle and commingled it with the high lonesome cry of such hill country eremites as Roscoe Holcomb and Clarence Ashley. There’s also more than a hint of the minimalist esthetic of Feather’s boyhood friend Junior Kimbrough in the twangy embryonic riffing and a loose adherence to lyrical content. Revenant has a more comprehensive collection available that includes a handful of these tracks. But the overlap isn’t enough to preclude the purchase of this disc right along side it.