Here’s an example of a controlling market share: When Charlie Poole’s recording of “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” was released in 1925, it sold 100,000 copies. At the time, there were only 600,000 purchased phonographs in the South.
“Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down” is featured as “The Deal” on Loudon Wainwright III’s High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project, which Wainwright will play with a live band for the second time this Friday, as a part of Duke Performances’ “Liars, Thieves & Big Shot Ramblers” series.
Wainwright and Poole have something in common regarding the song: neither of them wrote it. And with this work, a two-disk “sonic biopic of sorts,” as Wainwright refers to it in the liner notes, the singer-songwriter explores his and Poole’s shared lives as “traveling, rambling troubadours.”
In the 1920s, Charlie Poole was famous as a musician and performer in the mill towns of North Carolina and Virginia. Born in Spray, now Eden, North Carolina, Poole moved from town to town performing versions of American traditionals with his North Carolina Ramblers. Wainwright had been aware of Poole since the early 1970s, and had even toyed around with the idea of filming an actual biopic and starring as Poole himself.
“I have this friend in New York, a guy called Dick Connette, who worked with me on another record I did,” Wainwright said. “I was talking to him about Charlie Poole and he had this idea that we might just explore the world of Charlie Poole, not try to copy it or sound like his music particularly but just, you know, inhabit it by recording a lot of the material that he recorded and also writing some songs. It was Dick’s idea, really, and a year and a half later, the record came out.”
The product—which won the 2010 Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album—contains renditions of songs Poole played, as well as pieces written by Wainwright and Connette based on Poole’s life. To prepare, they went back and listened to You Ain’t Talkin’ to Me, a box set of Poole’s recordings.
“They were the popular songs of his day: parlor ballads and novelty songs and drinking songs and train, letter, mother songs,” Wainwright said. “We did write some songs, but we hopefully served the material.”
High Wide & Handsome doesn’t fit the traditional framework of a tribute album, as is clear from Wainwright and Connette’s contributions. Instead, it’s more like a concept album centered around another artist’s music; inspired and fixated on a particular topic but creations in their own right, music with life beyond the scope of its titular character.
“It’s a sort of radical step they took, which is a step you can probably only make with authority if you’re a musician as seasoned and bright and wry as Loudon Wainwright,” Director of Duke Performances Aaron Greenwald said.
On the same token, the project would never have come into being if it weren’t for the vibrancy and magnetism of its source material. Though Poole is largely forgotten now, he was an enormously colorful character, a physical performer with a troubled private life who died of alcoholism at 39. Wainwright mentioned this as another motivation for the project—to gain Poole some late but deserved recognition.
“While a great musician, probably there were many things about [Poole], that, if you or I were to run into him or to have day-to-day interaction [with him], we would find detestable,” Greenwald said. “A banjo-picking son of a bitch—I think that’s actually what he was described as at his funeral.”
But there’s no shortage of great art that stems from somewhat nefarious subjects, and Greenwald praised the way Wainwright spun these songs off of Poole’s story. Because of this, he’s excited to see High Wide & Handsome performed live, which has only happened once before—at the Highline in New York City just after its release.
“I thought the album was incredible and [had] more poignant, smart songs than I’ve heard on an album in a long time,” Greenwald said. “And it’s not what Loudon normally does. When Loudon tours, it’s generally him solo or him part of a double bill.... We asked, and he was willing to pull out all of that Poole material and put that band together for another live show.”
In addition to Wainwright and Connette, the Duke performance of High Wide & Handsome will also feature Chaim Tannenbaum, David Mansfield, Rob Moose, Tim Luntzel and Paul Asaro, multi-instrumentalists who played primary roles in the recording of the record. And the day after the show, Wainwright and Connette head to Eden, North Carolina, for a concert in Poole’s hometown.
High Wide & Handsome taps into another era, and to bring this music to life is to embody a very particular, classic banjo sound. The album, Wainwright’s 20th, granted him a fresh opportunity: to frame a style that Poole occupied throughout his entire life, a style that hasn’t really been seen again.
“The original pioneers, whether they’re Charlie Poole or Mississippi John Hurt or Reverend Gary Davis or Clarence Ashley, that was what was so great about them,” Wainwright said. “They were something from another time. A beautiful something from another time.”
High Wide & Handsome takes places September 24 at 8 p.m. in Reynolds Industries Theater. Tickets are $42 and $36 for the public, and $5 for Duke students.
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