Abner Jay : 'One Man Band' £9.99 Notes taken from Suliminal Sounds.se	Back to SPIN
ABNER JAY - 'One Man Band' Did someone say "Outsider Music..."Real People"...well here's the ultimate release for these kinda´ sounds: The ultimate one-man-band wild man from the 1920-1960s Abner Jay was the most unusual music talent the world has ever seen and a true southerner. His original LPs are now sought after and very rare, making this CD reissue very welcome. There is a long line of social and musical experience which constitutes Jay´s tradition: blacks' domestic entertainment inspiring white imitations; in turn stimulating composed, sheet-music idioms for middle-class and professional performance, which then animated younger generations of black musicians. For forty two years Jay worked as a unique one man band where he played electric banjo and swamp guitar, drums, harmonica, and sang at the same time. Abner Jay was the first of the original black musicians and played the only electric six string banjo you'll ever hear. Jay was a native of Fitzgerald, Georgia and was once a travelling performer with the Silas Green Show, one of the last multifaceted road shows on record. Tastes and tolerances of what constitutes acceptable public entertainment are always changing and Ja ywas part of making idioms which may not in fact have received too much exposure in the daily pressure to captivate audiences by extrovert mannerisms. Singing songs on subjects ranging from LSD to "what's six inches long and has two nuts on the end" you got to hear it to believe it. A true glimpse at some real Americana compiling the best tracks from Abners original LPs. The ultimate in one man bands, outsider artists and swamp blues! NOW ITS BUCK DANCING TIME!
"Describing himself as "the last great Southern black minstrel show", Abner Jay was a travelling one-man band and revenant folk spirit who performed lugubrious versions of original blues, traditional American spirituals alongside his own material in a baritone several leagues below Johnny Cash. By slowing his source material to a laggard, awkward lollop, Jay rescued it from decades of blacked-up virtuoso mimicry, refocusing attention on its ragged edges, emotional depth and complex humanity. Jay joined Silas Greens Minstrels in 1932 on the back of a huge repertoire of banjo and old-time songs learnt from his grandfather, who had been a slave in Washington County, Georgia. He went on to lead the WMAZ Minstrels on Macon radio from 1946-56 before going solo and touring the country in his portable 'log cabin', complete with its own PA system, from where he would perform and sell cassettes and LPs, when not in residence at Tom Flynn's Plantation Restaurant in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Jay died in 1993 and since then his LPs have become almost impossible to track down. Anthony Braxton described Jay as an "American master" and his banjo, guitar and harmonica playing is every bit as idiosyncratic and unmediated by the tyranny of 'correct' technique as Braxton's own. And the tongues given voice to here are drawn from deep within the murk of centuries,"  David Keenan, Great Lost Recordings, The Wire, October 2003.
Various Reviews:
Time Out/UK: Billiant! A compilation of impossibly rare stuff from Americas's best ever long-necked, six-string electric banjo / swamp / guitar / hambone / harmonica / bass-drum and cymbal-playing traveling minstrel. Emerging from south Georgia some time back in the 1920s, shifty-eyed Jay proceeded to purvey a variously dirty and tender vaudevillian one-man band show right through to the '60s (which was when he was mostly recorded). One of the last minstrel musicians, he is assumed long dead, though no one seems to know for sure. Actually, not too much of anything is known about him. Original liner notes from a late ´50s album stated that "Abner is now enjoying his seventh wife, and he claims she is just about wore out too". Notes from the later "Swaunee Water And Cocaine Blues" elucidate a little more. "He was raised laying on his belly, drinkin' water from the old Swaunee River. Jay claims the secret for his good health and being the father of 16 young 'uns, and gonna git some more, is layin on his belly drinkin' water from that ol Swaunee River." And there's a picture of him on the sleeve doing just that. This is truly wonderful stuff. Even if some of the lewd spoken-humour has worn kinda thin in the intervening years, what can't be denied is the exaggerated sense of life and spark and fun and sheer holy drollery. A real loss and a find.  Ross Forune/Time Out	Dusted Magazine/USA Abner Jay's extensive bread-crumb trail of albums, disseminated via his own Brandie Records imprint, represents one of the most individual takeson traditional song form to have risen from the 20th century. Jay spent several decades (the 1930s through the 1950s) working in touring minstrel shows, resurrecting the spirit of his late grandfather through songs passed down through generations. But it was when Abner Jay started traveling and performing solo in a portable home fleshed out with a public address system that his work really started to elevate. Jay's take on traditional American musics - blues and spirituals - was accurately captured by writer and musician David Keenan in a recent issue of The Wire as "slowing (them) ... down to a laggard, awkward lollop". Jay plucked his banjo with an insistent gait while maintaining a ponderous rhythm on a bass drum and hi-hat combination powered by his feet. But it's the combination of Jay's harmonica playing, which shivers between the gaps offered up by his slowly unfurling blues phrases, and his deep and rich vocals, that gives One Man Band its affecting qualities. Jay's work continually encircles similar themes: sex and relationships, the everyday and the social, drugs and depression. Abner Jay's stories frame his songs in such a way that the heart-breaking melancholy of his singing can slip by. But it's in that see-sawing sense of emotional tension that Jay's music is at its most powerful. This is best exemplified by Jay's delivery near the end of "I'm So Depressed", where he unspools an aching vocal performance and then destabilizes the song's very title by offering a generous handful of rough laughter slipped between key phrases. The beautiful uncertainty in that performance can be found throughout One Man Band, humanizing the 13 songs collected here and exposing the generosity at the heart of Jay's music. His music seems to be saying, with its very fibre, the simplest and most universally relevant things: each experience has its opposite, and it is this dialectical relationship that energizes music which holds sympathy for humanity as its strongest suit./Jon Dale/Dusted Magazine
Exberliner/Germany
An itinerant musician who worked out of his car, signing banjo driven Stephen Foster songs interspersed with filthy jokes, he called himself the Last of the Minstrels - is that a triumphant sobriquet or a resigned one? At least he didn't have to paint his face,  although that might have extended the early Seventies allegory. Could you imagine stopping for gas along some Florida interstate in 1972 and have this guy drive up to you, open up the trunk of his car, pull out a banjo and a few autographed record albums, and then start singing "I'm So Depressed"? I mean, if Bongo Joe was considered louche back in the Sixties, imagine this guy. Jay also somehow became a hero to Anthony Braxton of all people, which underlines that life is not so much about those who can and those who try, as those who win and those who lose. To the victors the spoils, to the rest of us spoiled meat.  -- D. Strauss/Exberliner