I love “The Magnolia Sessions”. There’s something absolutely simple about the whole idea: take some of the best voices from underground America, put them outside in Tennessee, let the crickets do backing vocals, and record the thing as honestly as possible.
Simple, yes. Glorious, absolutely.
The latest wanderer to sit beneath the tree is Ramblin’ Ricky Tate, a folk and country singer from Birmingham, Alabama, who sounds like he’s been dragged through a hundred old songs and come out the other side with a few more of his own. He cut his teeth busking in New Orleans and around the country, formed a jug band, toured far and wide preserving pre-war tunes, and eventually shaped his own thing out of Southern Gothic folk, country storytelling, spiritual unease and those old tales where the devil is never quite as far behind you as you’d hope.
Which makes him perfect for this.
“Drifting” is gloriously relaxed and old school, proper troubadour stuff, floating down that river of whiskey as if time has loosened its grip. It is not dressed up. It is not polished until the life has gone out of it. That’s the joy of these sessions. There is something wonderfully raw about the whole series, something almost punk in the refusal to pretend. Just voice, song, air, and whatever ghosts happen to be hanging around.
“July June Bug” keeps that looseness, but there’s craft here too, the sort that never announces itself because that would rather miss the point. Tate’s delivery is conversational, but there’s weight in it, and when “Catch Some Hell” arrives with the line “I’m already in hell”, things get darker and more noir. The track feels like it has wandered down the wrong road and decided to keep going anyway.
Before “Tangled String”, Tate introduces it as being about having your heart ripped out and wrung like an old wash rag, and that pretty much tells you where we are. These are not songs for the faint of heart or the faint of attention. They ask you to lean in, and when you do, they reward you with something that feels bruised, lived-in and oddly beautiful.
“Devil’s Due” has a nightmarish quality that suits him perfectly. This is where the Southern Gothic side really sharpens its teeth, and Tate sounds utterly at home among the shadows. “Blood Or Wine” is more lugubrious, sifting through all “the dirt on your mind”, and again, the lack of clutter is the point. There’s nowhere for the songs to hide, so they don’t.
“The Witch” is storytelling in the grand tradition, the kind of thing that could have been passed from porch to porch and town to town, changing shape slightly every time. Then “Words You Can Say” closes things with the feel of those old bluesmen with “Blind” before their names, except don’t go looking for a happy ending. She “dies” before they can marry, and of course she does. On a record like this, love was never likely to get out alive.
That is the thing with Ramblin’ Ricky Tate’s “The Magnolia Sessions”. It rambles, sure. It wanders. It takes the long way round. But every step matters, and quite a few of them lead somewhere dark.
Still, what a glorious walk.
RATING 9/10
