41 Thunderer – Interview with Tracy Grammer
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| Tracy Grammer (uncredited photo from her web site) |
This our second post this week on Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer’s “41 Thunderer.” Read the first post here.
Sometimes a pistol is just a pistol…
As I mentioned in the previous post introducing “41 Thunderer” and the “Implements of Destruction” series it kicks-off, I was fascinated by the strong themes of temptation and seduction contained in the imagery. The song characterizes the weapon with feminine imagery, addresses it as a “demon lover,” and in many ways attests to the power of this tool of death over the protagonist’s soul–and his better judgment.
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| Tracy Grammer (photo by Fred Ellert) |
As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know, I’m also very interested in the dynamics of performing a song for audiences–how the singer, the song, and the audience connect for a shared experience of something transcendent or aesthetically powerful. Given that I saw “41 Thunderer” as an outlier in tone and theme from much of the rest of Dave Carter’s work, I was particularly interested in how this song fit into the overall flow of a performance.
If I’m interviewing a songwriter, I’m reluctant to ask them what a song “really” means. I operate from the assumption that the song is the artist’s best attempt at communicating about that particular theme, and that the best songs “really” mean more than one thing.
Tracy Grammer has developed an impressive performance career of her own over the past decade plus, and was kind enough to agree to answer some questions about “41 Thunderer.” “Fire away!” she said (pun intended). Her comments, and those added by Carter’s sister, Elise Fischer, cover a good bit of the territory that most intrigued me about this song. As an added bonus, we’ll get to explore some related works performed by Grammer now, and wrap up with an epic Carter murder ballad, produced after his untimely passing.
With that introduction, and thanks to Grammer and Fischer, we’ll give one more listen to “41 Thunderer,” and go to the interview.
Murder Ballad Monday: What can you tell me about how the song came to be?
Tracy Grammer: Our friend Jim Cornelius from Sisters, Oregon runs the Sisters Folk Festival, and is a fine songwriter in his own right. After a show one night, we were all sitting around, Jim and Dave swapping songs, and Jim plays for Dave his newest tune about Billy the Kid. The song says Billy the Kid shot a Colt 45 and after he finishes singing, Jim is all apologies because he knows it isn’t accurate. “Billy the Kid actually shot a 41 Thunderer,” he says, “but you can’t put ’41 Thunderer’ in a song.”
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| Jim Cornelius |
You could see Dave light up just then, the proverbial gauntlet thrown. Just like the time somebody said, “There are no rhymes with ‘orange,'” and Dave wrote “The River, Where She Sleeps” in answer to that:
it looked a bit like agent orange
and when he leaves he slams the door
and just about that time she phones me up
Clever, no?
[Listen to Adam Hill’s cover of “The River, Where She Sleeps” on Spotify.]
Anyway, the song was finished by morning. And yeah, Jim was pretty impressed. Everyone was.
MBM: What do you know about Dave’s experience with firearms? Was this a song that drew from some personal acquaintance with or interest in guns?
TG: Well, he grew up in Texas and Oklahoma so I assume he shot some guns at some point in his life. He did not own a gun when I knew him. His daddy rode horses, mother too. His sister would know more.
MBM: I’m interested your experience of performing the song.
TG: The song was a highlight of our set list, but also one we felt a little nervous about, because it seemed very unlike us to be singing a romance about a gun. We summoned our darker sides to perform this song. However, we were very proud of the music and the arrangement, and as you know, the lyrics are stellar — even he thought so. So it was fun to play this for audiences.
I sang and played violin on this song for the duo version. Everything about the arrangement spoke to power and seduction. So much of our repertoire dealt with myth, mysticism, goddesses, nature — while I guess this could be elevated to the level of myth, it felt like a drastic departure for us. It was satisfying in a strange way.
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| Tracy Grammer (photo by Ben Barnhart) (I don’t know about you, but I suspect Grammer is capable of bringing the “bad-ass” when it’s called for.) |
MBM: I’ve read that you still perform the repertoire you shared with Dave. Do you still perform this song? Have you made any adjustments to it?
TG: I do not play this song. It’s too bad-ass for me to do solo.
[Grammer heads the Dave Carter Legacy Project–which seeks to preserve and develop Carter’s work for future generations of singers and listeners. Ed.]
TG: I agree. Very seductive, powerful, snake-y even.
MBM: There are also biblical symbols of temptation and images of demonic power.
TG: Dave was raised by a charistmatic Christian mother. Such images are commonplace in the work. Well — biblical references are. Not “demonic” images per se.
MBM: In earlier posts in our blog, we’ve addressed power of murder ballads to be helpful healers and catalysts for strong feelings in moments of grief. We’ve come to think that’s a big part of their power. Were you drawn to murder ballads after Dave’s loss?
TG: I was drawn to love songs in the wake of Dave’s death. I sang “Gentle Soldier of My Soul” at every show I gave that first year. Dave claimed to have written the song for God, but I sang it for my lost partner, to acknowledge the love we shared.
TG: I was [also] drawn to blues. I sang “Farewell to Saint Dolores” for Dave, specifically because I believed him to be the “ageless face that witnessed me for certain when my own could not be found.” There were lines like mantras that helped me through.
TG: I loved singing the murder ballad “Preston Miller” [see Coda below, ed.] after Dave died, but that wasn’t so much because the story helped me through any particular angle of my grief; I sang it because it was a newer, unrecorded Dave Carter song and it was (and is) my mission to share such material with our audiences as often as possible. We had two other murder ballads, “Cat-Eye Willie Claims His Lover” and “Seven Ball Circle of Red”; the former appeared on Tanglewood Tree and was quite popular at our concerts, while the latter was performed sporadically (when we felt we needed to be edgy) and never recorded.
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| Dave Carter |
“David was never much into guns. Our father took him hunting one time, and urged him to shoot a rabbit. He wouldn’t do it, and (as far as I know) that was the end of his hunting career.
He wouldn’t even kill bugs, opting instead to capture and put them outside. . . hmm, well, except roaches. During our college years we took a long road trip together, and when we returned to his house after several weeks there were lots of cockroaches. He went crazy, smashing them with a baseball bat. It was a pretty comical scene.
But he was not particularly interested in guns, and knew very little about them. He also wasn’t interested in Westerns, but was always dragging me to Bruce Lee movies when we were teenagers. I think his inspiration for “41 Thunderer” was probably more about the power of seduction, from admiration to touching, removing the gun from its holster (undressing) to the firing (ejaculation), as well as the inability to resist the seduction.”
I’m not sure there’s much to add after that. As I said, the best songs are often about more than one thing. We’ll pick up more of the strands of “41 Thunderer” in the weeks ahead, when I put it in conversation with a few other handgun songs. For now, before proceeding to the coda, I want to thank Tracy Grammer and Elise Fischer for sharing their recollections and thoughts about the song, and for illuminating our discussion so brilliantly.
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| “I am Robert Louis Stevenson, and I approved this message.” |
Coda — “Preston Miller”
“He seemed to pick the right word up on the point of his pen, like a man playing spillikins.”
—G.K. Chesterton on Robert Louis Stevenson
If Dave Carter at one point thought he might be channeling Townes Van Zandt in “Farewell to Saint Dolores,” there’s a large part of me that thinks that he had changed channels to Edgar Allen Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson for the writing of “Preston Miller.” Perhaps this is less from his specific writing style, although to my mind Carter also had a knack for picking up the right word on the point of his pen. But the themes and plot of “Preston Miller,” a tale of the dissipated bastard son of a minor aristocrat, his sad life and sadder death, draw right out of a Victorian Gothic short story. It’s more American than Stevenson and less Gothic than Poe, perhaps, but it is a well-crafted tale well told.
Tracy Grammer released the song on her 2005 album, The Flowers of Avalon, a collection of previously unrecorded Carter compositions. You can find the lyrics here.
Here’s a live performance of the song from Grammer at the Middle Earth Music Hall in Bradford, Vermont: