When my friend David Cantwell played Miko Marks’s “Race Records” for me over the holidays, something in the sound of Marks’s voice (and her fine band, the Resurrectors) showed me what I’d all but left behind. In a world where pop music’s well into its third decade of being so micro-formatted that the concept of a Top 40 or any meaning to a Billboard album chart seems quaint, I find myself questioning why I do what I do.
But Miko Marks cannot be denied. To hear her singing Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Long as I Can See the
Light” transforms everything that came before into something improbably new and,
arguably, more powerful. Marks’s rallying cry here, her take on John Fogerty’s “Yeah!
Oh-Yeah,” sounds as sure-footed as the tree planted by the water in “We Shall
Not Be Moved,” the traditional that closed her most recent full-length, “Our Country.”
Her cover of Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times,” takes on
the complex legacy of America’s pop music for its central metaphor. Singing
through a thicket of cascading arpeggios with a bass line guiding her way,
Marks names “the song, the sigh of the weary,” tying the age-old field worker’s
struggle to the Flint water warriors of “We Are Here.” This music underscores what music, at its best, helps us do--find the
strength to fight and a unity that just might win. "Hard Times," on both albums, performance video
That strategy is there at play in the following raucous “Pour Another Glass of Wine, Jesus,” and it’s there when we’ve all but given up, as in the biting, elegiac ”Goodnight America.” Always, as on the gospel centerpiece “Mercy,” it’s drawing together the people to “raise up a nation,” to “move every mountain,” to keep on “fighting, fighting, fighting for better days.” By the end of that performance, the piano, organ and Marks’ voice and choral backing have built to a state near jubilation, an army of the meek not just inheriting but, potentially, saving this weary old Earth. Mercy lyric video
But the path from here to there is a hard one, and “Travel Light” tells of the fighter scrambling home to regroup. The strong narrative that runs through both these albums makes sure we hear the difference and the connection between that shaken traveler and the mothers, children, and unemployed workers in “We Are Here,” fighting for their lives at home. In one sense, they are every bit as defeated as one another, so they do what they have to do to (what they can) to survive, using music to “hold on to faith” and “cry, we are here.” "We Are Here"
Moving far from Marks's onetime home Flint to some place way down the
Mississippi, the ragtime “Water to Wine” follows, declaring the singer’s
conviction to “be planted by the water til that [potentially poisoned] water turns to
wine.” With that, she ushers in the closing traditional, “Not Be Moved.”
“Like a tree planted by the water,” this anthem roots not only the album but Miko
Marks’s vision. Shoulder to shoulder with all these frail souls, she warns
those in the way, “Boy, you are weak, and you won’t hold on much longer.” All
our ancestors are in this righteous choral refrain, burning with guitar,
smoldering with organ, and high-kicking with piano and percussion. Not Be Moved
The six covers (released six months later) that make up “Race Records” amplify the story told above by calling directly on the ancestors again and again. All songs made famous by white artists, they are also songs that would not exist without the African aesthetics, including call and response, that define American popular music. The title references both the genre label for any song cut by a Black artist for the first half of the 20th Century and the segregation of music marketing that generally remains to this day, vividly evident in Marks’s own beloved country music but also the historical dividing line between rock and R&B.
With the Stanley Brothers’ “Long Journey Home” we get
the weary traveler from so many songs before accompanied by harp and acoustic
guitar and haunted by that death that’s been waiting in the shadows since the
beginning of “Our Country.” It’s the threat that keeps these characters moving.
Coupled with the concept of home here, it’s also a place of life and inspiration,
a source of strength, the place of the ancestors. Long Journey Home video
Playing with Willie Nelson’s psychedelic blues take on
Johnny Bush, Marks revels in “Whiskey River,” a stubborn celebration in what seems
like the deepest darkness yet. As she bites down on “I’m drowning in a whiskey
river,” Marks delivers the metaphor as all but literal. Still, swaying as hard as “Water to Wine,” there’s life, even delight, in her ability to
sing it. Plunging into even more treacherous territory, her honky-tonk “Tennessee Waltz” recognizes the
music itself as capable of producing heartache. The important thing,
though, is the tragic-comic acceptance of this vocal—when Marks’s voice soars
in celebration of the “beautiful, wonderful, maaahvalous, glamorous” song that
took her baby away. Tennessee Waltz, Race Records
As she reiterates with the Carter Family’s “Foggy
Mountaintop,” the very power that can take her “all around this whole wide world”
is the same power that can leave her stranded and alone. It’s the bluegrass
strut bolstering her wide-open vocals that tells us she’ll be alright. Marks’s
voice is a wonder: with a light touch, she delivers grit and gravity, always
soothing where she cuts. Foggy Mountaintop, Race Records
The way she maintains that sound and vision renders
her absolutely convincing when she cries “I won’t, won’t be losing my way” on “Long
as I Can See the Light.” Over these sixteen songs released in the dark days of
2021, Miko Marks forges a coherent narrative out of the whole of the American music
story. She insists on the strength in our vulnerability, carrying us toward a
certain peace glimpsed just over the horizon. Long As I Can See the Light video
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