There are many trails, threads, & backroads that feed my adopted southern identity, but several travel through Georgia. In early 1987, my nineteen-year-old self spent about 8-weeks in an urban intentional community seeking solidarity with our neighbors living on the street. Something about winter in Atlanta changed me.
By then, I was already an R.E.M. freak, & I was still a decade away from my first deep-dive into classic southern literature, which at first meant Faulkner, even though Flannery O’Connor always seems to be falling off the shelf & into my soul, much more recently in the Maya & Ethan Hawke biopic. But if I am transparent about my near-magnetic attraction to the rural south that had me settling down in Tennessee within a decade of that Atlanta stint, it wasn’t short stories & novels, as much as I love them. It was the civil rights movement's history, it was milder winters, it was mountain backroads, & it was outsider folk art like Howard Finster, & it was music like Guadalcanal Diary.
To say I was obsessed back then (& now) with Guadalcanal Diary’s punked-up ecstatic-mystic rendering of “Kumbaya” would be an understatement. They were one of many mid-80s bands that I simply fell for & hard & their version of Kumbaya was always central.
As the Diary’s front-person & primary songwriter, Murray Attaway mentioned in a podcast interview, that Kumbaya was then in-the-mid-80s an obscure campfire jam & not the common parlance pejorative jab that it has become. My response to the cynicism around “Kumbaya” as a concept has been to retort with earnest glee, “but have you tried it, have you really tried singing kumbaya?” Lotta of contempt-before-investigation going around about such an incredible song.
But none of the cheese-&-cringe scout-camp tape-loops that birthed the cynical cliche to wield like a rhetorical baseball bat against “Kumbaya,” none of the purveyors of this miserable recycled trope probably have any idea what kind of primal glory could be obtained by a jangle-punk version of this song, especially when just unapologetically jammed out by some 80s-alternative kids in a sweaty club.
That I could be returning to this “lord I want to be in that number” kind-of-moment some 40 years later is delicious, not nostalgia so much as homecoming & eternal return. I got to see & feel & sing along with the jangle punk Kumbaya in-person, with Murray's old Guadalcanal bandmate Rhett Crowe joining in (Rhett joined the ensemble on "Vista" as well). But I get ahead of myself, as that was the last-song of a two-song encore at the end of the two-date record-release Georgia tour for Murray Attaway’s first solo album in more than 30 years, almost 40 years since the fiery four-album-run of the Guadalcanal Diary canon & fierce touring years.
The already familiar eight songs on “Tense Music Plays” officially dropped on May 9th (get it on Bandcamp or order the physical album, only three singles are streaming). Were it not for my sibling podcaster & music obsessive friend Scott Greenberg telling me about the album on the April edition of the Music Nerds Record Club, I might not have known about it at all. A new Murray Attaway album just wasn’t on my radar, nope, not really at all. But thanks to Scott & advance listening available to radio folks, I was immediately in.
Then relistening addictively to all the old Guadalcanal Diary tracks on repeat for a few weeks & discovering Murray’s early-90s solo album “In Thrall” for the first time (which I somehow missed back then) & then seeking out every remote YouTube interview with Murray over the past decade or so, I was tossed into audio-mystical deep-dive sanctum of revelation & discovery. Insights & inspiration knocked me over.
See, the distinctly southern outsider-poet lyrics coupled with that guitar spangle jangle sparkle tangle is my spiritual musical sweet spot, so much. Both as Guadalcanal Diary & now as Murray Attaway, it’s swelling, hooky, earworms, making meaning & memories. Words & deeply religious sensibilities are simultaneously universal & specific & never dreary & dogmatic. Musically, they are so much a part of my lineage that returns in the 00s with Band of Horse & My Morning Jacket. Lately I have found that sweet spot with the likes of Florry & Fust.
But when I left I-75 to take the backroads through the north Georgia mountains to Athens on steamy Saturday in May, this is the soundtrack of kudzu climbing in clumps of tall trees & church-signs screaming holy ghost declarations. These are the sounds of places like this. I am grateful I sought this night like a desperate pilgrim. I had to shoehorn this amazing experience in-between two already-scheduled events & add lots of miles to my Toyota to make it happen. The Athens set that I caught included most of the new album & a wide selection of Guadalcanal Diary “hits” that had a gaggle of 50-&-60-somethings singing along & dancing like silly children.
While I have become much more the devourer of southern lit today in terms of poetry & novels than I was then, southern rock in all its complications & iterations is much more the mother tongue of what southern gothic & southern cultural identity mean to me. My friend Mark Kemp really developed a redemptive thesis about this & I would include Guadalcanal Diary in the bands that deliver the sounds that help redeem our complicated & conflicted southern souls.
Murray Attaway’s complete catalog is world-building & mood-inducing, always haunted by weird characters but also hopeful & harkening to Georgia as home base. I could scribble for days more about why we need music that is religiously informed & inspired without retching reactionary toxicity, but to find that in what is basically path-blazing southern indie-rock is just incredible.
Little Birds
Stars Behind The Moon
Michael Rockefeller
Trail of Tears
Breath
Old Christmas
Better Days
Under Jets
Never Far Away
You Were There
Litany
Allegory
Hole In The Ground
Always Saturday
Vista
Cattle Prod
Cattle Prod
Kumbaya (with Astronomy Domine by Pink Floyd snippet)
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