Monday, February 14, 2022

Knowing Where She's Going As Sure As Where She's Been: The Much Needed Vision of Miko Marks

 


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.”

Miko Marks has displayed the heart of her vision since her remarkable debut “Freeway Bound” and its follow up (now almost fifteen years ago) “It Feels Good.” Marks has a big vision that ties generations together with a possibility found through compassion. For new listeners, her March 2021 album “Our Country” and (6 months later) EP “Race Records” serve as sublime introductions to what came before.  

"Kickin' Back," Freeway Bound

“Ancestors” opens “Our Country” establishing a sense of purpose, certainly as a Black woman (even further, as part of a movement) working within a tradition often associated with whiteness. The emphasis on primal drums and percussion keeping the singer “walking the weary road” calls on the entirety of the tradition touched by the African diaspora, from freedom songs to country to rock and soul. Marks takes a perspective she’s had since her first album, looking back to gauge her way forward and offers a rare sense of clarity—“I know where we’re going sure as I know where we’ve been.” Ancestors video

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