iris dement’s ‘sing the delta’

And we got the title cut (ID on piano) and more the other night at the Aladdin Theatre of Portland, a former Lucinda venue. I saw no reason not to lay out of the evening session of a paid business trip, the better to bus it from downtown to this cozy venue with GA seating. Hot on guitar was Neil Casals, he of short-lived Essence tour fame, replaced in fact by Mr. Pettibone in the late spring of ’01, if memory serves. Dave Jacques (Son Volt; Anne McCue) played a mighty bass back of Iris, though I didn’t catch the name of the NYC-based pedal steel guy. We got covers of Jimmie Rodgers, Merle Haggard, and Pieta Brown (“my stepdaughter: y’all should turn off the TV and see her next time she comes through your town”). Iris also opined that while she had only been gone on tour less than a week, “my husband has probably already written 8 or 9 songs since I left.” “The Way I Should” opened the festivities nicely, and things rolled from there. She seemed happy to be out with a full band for first time in awhile, also to have released an album of originals fairly recently. I chatted with her a bit after, in fact gave her a boot of her BB King Club NYC 2007 show, with Jacques and Jason Wilber aboard. She said she has “a little box” in which to keep such things. Perhaps it was even a friendly Forum member who mailed me that gem five or six years ago, can’t remember: I do tend to receive such, always nice.

The solo opener was Emily Dunn, perhaps known to Pac. NW fans as frontwoman for The Olive Grove. She’s also in an outfit called Great Wilderness, which played a tiny club next night. I bought her/Olive Grove’s 2009 record Here’s a Letter, mighty fine. Sera Cahoone-caliber in fact, Paul.

No shoe shopping in this town though, must draw the line somewhere.

We just got home from Athens, GA, where we saw “An Evening With Iris DeMent” at The Melting Point. Iris played & sang all by her lonesome; the first half or so of the main set she played a grand piano, followed by a few songs on acoustic guitar, then back again on the piano to finish up the main set. For her encore, she performed two more songs, again on piano. I didn’t take notes, but she played nearly all of the songs from Sing The Delta (highlights for me were “The Night I Learned How Not To Pray”, “There’s A Whole Lotta Heaven” & “Mama Was Always Tellin’ Her Truth” – the latter complete with an endearing “brain cramp” where she forgot what verse was next after a chorus – rather than restarting or aborting the song as a “false start”, she simply apologized & picked up the song again where she left off once she realized where that was). She also sang a cover of a Jimmie Rodgers’ classic, “For The Sake Of Days Gone By”. While on acoustic guitar, she played a favorite of punchdrunklove’s – “Our Town”, from her 1992 classic, Infamous Angel (also a highlight for me). And, she played the title track from My Life during her encore.

The show was sold-out – the first time I have seen this at The Melting Point (my two prior shows there, Kathleen Edwards & Justin Townes Earle, were not). Therefore, despite our arriving 45 minutes early, there was not an empty table remaining, nor a seat to be had among the folding chairs on the floor (also a first for me at this venue – the floor was left open for my previous two visits). Luckily, a nice couple (he a retired history professor from the University of Alaska, of all places, despite Athens being the home of the University of Georgia) at a four-top table on the second level just to the right of the sound board took pity on us & kindly offered us their table’s two unused chairs.

In the “what I learned new” department, Ms. DeMent, while chatting between songs, mentioned that her husband, the incredible songwriter & artist Greg Brown, actually has a film soundtrack on his résumé – a little indy film entitled Zandar: Cow From Hell. She claimed it received only one, short review at the time of its release which simply stated, “No market”. Given her droll delivery, it was hard to tell if she was being serious or not, but I suspect she was, given the film’s apparent subject matter… 😆

Tom