Don’t Forget to Breathe.

Only ever two songs from the sea.

In this weekly blog, I share two tracks from my drive to and from the sea I swim in. For those who’d rather just dive into the full immersion playlist, you’ll find it here.

298. Don’t take your guns to town

God LOVE a rockabilly hayrick story song. And no one does them better than The Man in Black.

Johnny Cash’s back catalogue of tragic story songs is brimming with good old catastrophic lives lived in the dust bowls, mountain ranges and plains of cowboy lore and legend.

Some, like this one, are sweetly tragic songs, pure and simple. [Not that death is sweetly tragic, but the homespun metier of its telling softens the edges — rubs a little Vaseline on its lens.]

You can picture Billy Joe, a child mostly still, hair slicked, teasing the guns in the old oiled leather holstering. Correcting his bootlace tie and straightening his ill-fitting jacket. ‘Your Billy Joe’s a man now.’ Well, for a short while at least

Billy Joe is just another young man creating his own rite of passage where one did not otherwise exist. The tragedy is that you know from the get-go that life is about to be unkind to Billy Joe, but he walks into its shadows none the less.

People in cowboy country don’t just yodel about picket fence endings and flowery meadows. They sing of tragedy, fate’s cold bloody hand, lost souls, the devil’s herds, brutal lives lived, and ghost riders.

In this track, the outcome of Billy Joe’s first and last gun fight was already written, perhaps before he even entered the world. A sense of fated creatures seems to permeate these songs. They’re just made that way; born that way; it’s in their blood; born to die; like a dog; in the dust.

[Given his repeated use of ‘dog’ language regarding death, perhaps the big orange baby is a fan of the genre?]

These ‘folks’ were always going to come to a bad end, regardless of whether they were good or bad themselves. Tragedy is always lurking just around the corner, waiting to kick dirt up in your face and take your life even when you weren’t gifting it.

In some instances, the tragedy can seem overwhelming, but that’s the way they like it. Billy Connolly famously celebrated the ratcheting awfulness of many country and western songs when he wrote The Country & Western Supersong, into which he tipped every tragedy trope he could find to create a musical piece of biblical proportion.

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But back to the Man in Black. Don’t take your guns to town is just one of a fist of his songs that chart the rise and fall of almost mythical figures both known and unknown. The ‘Man with no name’ is more than just a Clint Eastwood nomer for a spaghetti westerns character. It captures the anonymity and mystery of these characters that criss-cross the lore of the ‘wild west, north south and east of America. But sometimes a name appears through the song sing mists.

*The ballad of Ira Hayes* is a cracker. Written by Peter LaFarge, it turns up on the 1964 Johnny Cash album, Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian — a story song about a special kind of patriot. It’s not shy of pointing the finger at the great wrongs wrought on the Native American peoples by the advancing settlers.

From the land of the Pima Indian A proud and noble band Who farmed the Phoenix valley in Arizona land Down the ditches for a thousand years The water grew Ira’s peoples’ crops Until the white man stole the water rights And the sparkling water stopped Now Ira’s folks were hungry And their land grew crops of weeds

When war came, Ira volunteered And forgot the white man’s greed

Its tragedy ratings are pretty high: a story of glory lost and trampled under the propaganda of war. Drunken Ira Hayes’ role in raising the flag on Iwo Jima hill was almost buried along with him.

And *The rebel- Jonny Yuma* even got his own film and series!

But with both Yuma and Hayes, at least there was eventual recognition, however late.

For characters like Billy Joe — a symbol of every naïve young boy who thought he was a man in a very violent and volatile world, ultimately paying the price for his folly, ‘Don’t take your guns to town’ is a cautionary tale.

# 299. Water

As immersion songs go, this new edge, old school P Funk-style collective can power up any house and raise any roof.

One of their tracks, *United Nations Stomp,* is a massive sprawling piece of audacious accomplished funk. There’s even a waft of Hendrix in the vocal style just to build out the retro atmospherics.

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But in this immersion track they take the elevator down to a sub level groove that owes gifts in every direction: The Meters, Parliament. Early Neville Brothers. There’s even some Black Pumas undertow just for good measure. The influences and inspirations list is long with a very sharp New Orleans edge.

To be fair, given that Ivan Neville, the founder of Dumpstaphunk is Aaron Neville’s son, and given that he pulled in his cousin Ian Neville on Guitar — the Neville Brothers refraction is well founded.

Dumpstaphunk has a modern crispness that some of the other Funk dispensers forego in search of an authentic valve messiness. Orgone’s *Sophisticated Honky *sits far deeper in the retro Schiffrin/Funkadelic soundscape.

Going. Going. Orgone.

And tracks like Orgone’s *Who Knows Who* feat. Fanny Franklin sets up a purer soul R&B crossover sound that teeters into Macy Gray land. But back to the dumpsta.

One critic had a LOT to say about Dumpstafunk post one of their New Orleans Jazz Fest appearances:

“Dumpstaphunk’s groove is a unique monster. It’s not the minimalist funk of The Meters and it’s not the relentless funk of James Brown, although it has that rhythmic drive. It’s not the psychedelic, over-the-top circus of Parliament Funkadelic, but it often has that political slant. It’s not the party funk of the Ohio Players, but it shares the high vocals that take the pressure off the bottom. Dumpstaphunk is a whole other school of funk. If you’re under 35, you think you’ve seen funk, but you haven’t. You missed the original Meters, James Brown when he wasn’t a parody, Parliament Funkadelic’s landing of the Mothership, Sly and the Family Stone before he went M.I.A and Booker T. and the M.G.s before the demise of Stax. Dumpstaphunk is as good as all that, and they’re in their prime now.”

Golden praise indeed given who he is citing in his comparisons to the greats.

When you watch them falling into any chosen groove, it’s clear to see that these people are not playing games. This is serious.

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But just in case we’re straying too far from the well of P Funk, it’s worth remembering how timeless, interchangeable, and fluid the PF scene is.

There’s even a crowd collective called the Big Ol’ Nasty Get Down where the modern purveyors of P Funk mix it up with the old masters — like one George Clinton just for the sheer joy of it.

So what better way to close out an homage to the club sandwich that is P Funk than with Big Ol Nasty Get Down featuring Mr Funkadelic himself.

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Funk deep. Dance hard. Sleep well.

The Author: Julian Borra is a creative writer and strategist, living in Lewes in the UK, with a life-long love of music. A sometime drummer, and percussionist in various bands, music is the sea he swims in when confined to dry land.

Julian’s commercial works can be found at thinairfactory.com or he can be found at linkedin.com/in/julianborra