Music Reviews
By The Con Curmudgeon
Who Fears the Devil? Still, in all my time of playing half-assed, left-handed, upside down way, I have heard only two musicians who have made me want to take my instruments into the backyard and smack them against a tree, or at least use them for toy boats in my jacuzzi.
Those two people are Doc Watson and Joe Bethancourt.
If you don't know who Doc Watson is, shame on you. And if you haven't heard Joe Bethancourt, either at one of his many public appearances around Phoenix, or at various science fiction conventions and SCA doings, then you don't have an excuse anymore.
Who Fears the Devil? is so much fun and so full of wonderfully mysterious lyrics and kick-ass finger picking, I played the thing ten times in a row without getting tired of any of it. And it turned me on to a writer I'd never known about.
Most of the songs here are based on short stories (ghostly and otherwise) by one Manly Wade Wellman, who felt compelled to write stories and songs about Appalachian legends, which were rapidly being forgotten by the close of World War II.
As a kid, Bethancourt read these stories, and being from Appalachia, he knew the songs around which Wellman's lyrics were based. He decided, as he says in the liner notes, "that if I ever made it as a musician, I'd record (the songs)."
Sometimes, Bethancourt adds extra verses to Wellman's, but if you didn't know which ones they were, I'd dare anyone to pick them out.
He compliments the Wellman tunes with similar songs of the region; "Mole in the Ground" and "Pretty Polly" are standouts. But hell, the whole tape is amazing, and over way too soon.
If you like traditional country and bluegrass music, you're gonna love this tape. If you don't you should buy it anyway because it will convert you. Order it now! Oh, and don't miss Joe's incredible new Web page -
Now, if you'll excuse me, there's a cricket I need to smash with my guitar...
Joe Bethancourt Previously available only on cassette, "Who Fears the Devil" makes a grand
entrance into the digital age.
A concept album of sorts, "Devil" is based on the stories of Manly Wade
Wellman, who wrote genuinely frightening tales based on Appalachian folk legends.
One of the characters he invented, "Silver John," was a traveling musician
who played a silver-stringed guitar and served as a narrator to the stories.
It is this persona that Joe Bethancourt assumes as he leads the listener into
the Appalachian foothills of his own youth. As a child, Bethancourt read the
Wellman stories and immediately recognized many of the songs sung by Silver
John, as well as the tunes Wellman clearly based other songs upon.
There’s a goodly number of creepy characters in these songs. Appalachian
tunes, by their very nature, tend to be about tougher ne’er-do-wells, and the
impending doom awaiting those who deal with them. "Little Black Train" (about a
man facing death right in the face) and "Old Devlins" are perfect examples.
There’s even a bad woman on this CD - poor old "Becky Til Hoppard," who, at
the start of the song, is already hanged, dead and buried. (Since they didn’t
hang women all that often, she must have been one tough customer.)
Perhaps the moodiest song on the CD is "Hark Mountain," which Bethancourt
performs with all the loneliness of the character it describes. You can damn
near see what this guy looks like.
The CD version of "Who Fears the Devil" has been nicely cleaned up for the
digital age and sounds better than the cassette ever did. And, since this is
the 21st Century, the CD comes with extras: An entire BOOK called "The Long Lost
Friend" by John George Hohman (which Wellman mentions a lot in the Silver
John Stories) and a Wellman short story, "Shiver in the Pines," which will send
a shiver up your spine. Or your pine. And that’s fine.
Oh, it pretty much goes without saying that from a performance standpoint,
this is prime Joe Bethancourt. He clearly loves these songs and plays his ass
off performing them. There are moments of banjo playing on this album that are
truly breathtaking, on a "how the heck is he doing that?" scale.
Definitely pick this up.
- Tom Tuerff
Joe Bethancourt
Friends, your good old Uncle Mudge has been plunking on guitars and other stringed things for nearly 25 years now. Thing is, I learned how to play left-handed, using a right-handed guitar. Which means I play everything upside down, and I sound like it.
And record them he has. This tape took a few years and about as many recording situations to make, but the feel of the tape is like one fantastic jam session, where Joe has cloned himself into a band, walked into your house, tuned up his sizable instrument collection, lit up a smoke, and said, "Let's blow the roof off this dump."
"Who Fears the Devil? (The Songs of Silver John) "
Deluxe CD Edition ****
