2nd Feb 2007, Lanfranchi's, Sydney, Australia (Mess and Noise review)
| C.W. Stoneking sings out of the side of his mouth, tongue firmly tucked away. Inside his cheek, I’d like to think, but somehow I doubt it, because it’s clear that he takes his wholesale appropriation of Mississippi Delta blues very seriously. He never slips out of character. When he sings, he sounds like a sharecropper; when he talks, like a toothless veteran propped up in the corner of an RSL club. It’s when he talks that the Australian accent creeps back in. When he talks he sounds white.
It’s Stoneking’s voice that disturbs me more and more as this evening’s (very long) set wears on. More than his note-perfect guitar playing, or the commendable enthusiasm of his three-person horn section, it’s his eerie Xerox of a black man’s voice that leaves me doubting the veracity and the much-lauded ‘authenticity’ of his blues revivalism. Taking on a voice the very timbre of which denotes isolated, rural, African-American poverty – everything that Stoneking is so patently not – does not make for ‘authenticity’ any more than would painting your face with boot polish. His shtick is within half a centimetre of a Black & White Minstrel Show. Judging by the genuine enthusiasm of the audience reaction – inside the overheated warehouse space women remember how to dance as if they were flappers from the Fabulous Twenties, pivoting on their heels, wrists turned upwards and out; men remember how to dance at all – many would argue that Stoneking is keeping the blues alive. Alive, perhaps, but on very borrowed terms. “This song I stole from Blind Willie McTell when he wasn’t lookin’,” says Stoneking, introducing a traditional “hokum” (his term) tune. Indeed. Dead men can’t raise a protest. Emmy Hennings - Mess and Noise |
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