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June 28, 2010

Hamper McBee

Photograph by Blaine Dunlap.

Tomorrow, June 29, Drag City, who give us Joanna Newsom and Bill Callahan and Bonnie “Prince” Billy and their ilk, offer a re-release of The Good Old-Fashioned Way by Hamper McBee.

There are no words to describe my excitement about the third release on our Twos & Fews recording imprint, out June 29. Recorded by the late, peerless country music scholar Charles K. Wolfe and the filmmaker Sol Korine in late ’77 and early ’78, “The Good Old-Fashioned Way: Hamper McBee of Monteagle, Tennessee” may well be this year’s best record of unaccompanied singing and also its most inexhaustibly hilarious comedy album.

I had only heard of the moonshiner, carnival barker, singer and raconteur Hamper McBee (who was first recorded by Guy Carawan and ended up an impossibly scarce Prestige LP called “Cumberland Moonshiner” in 1965) in passing – just as a subject of one of Korine’s films I had never seen – until I met Sol himself through his filmmaking son Harmony. Knowing my interest in those folkloric films of his dad’s, made with Blaine Dunlap in the ’70s, Harmony had a screening of Sol and Blaine’s “Raw Mash” profile of Hamper in his Nashville home, and it rendered me speechless. There’s no other way to say it: Hamper was an absolute original. His clothes; his mustache and pompadour; his lusty dedication to booze, cigarettes, and light cussing (“goddamn” and “hell” being foremost in his lexicon); his keen intelligence and creative grace (sincerely) sharing space in his conversation and repertoire with hysterically bizarre, irreverent, and filthy songs and tales from a life spent on the carnival circuit, at the moonshine still, in the Wauhatchie railroad yards, in the back of Sheriff Bill Malone’s patrol car, and as Hamper McBee.

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