The past month has seen the unexpected return to activity of Dorothy Moskowitz, as in The United States of America, with a new album titled Under the Endless Sky and credited to Dorothy Moskowitz and The United States of Alchemy.
Moskowitz is one of the original perpetrators of "That Voice", a topic that some of the more elderly readers of this blog cluster may remember getting chewed over collectively before.
A quick recap: That Voice is a style of pure-toned and piercing female singing that dates to the late 1960s; a mode that owes almost nothing to blues or soul, does owe something to folk, but perhaps owes more to show tunes. That Voice is belting, but the belt is psychedelicized. Often there's a witchy aura. Think Grace Slick, above all in "White Rabbit" and "Somebody To Love"; think the unseen singer Lynn Carey on the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls soundtrack; think Mariska Veeres of Shocking Blue for at least the duration of "Love Buzz"; think (less witchy than ethereal) Michal Shapiro of Elephant's Memory for at least the duration of "Old Man Willow". Not forgetting Edna Bejarano of The Rattles, who actually had a hit with a song called "The Witch". Latterday exponents would include poor dear Trish Keenan of Broadcast. And possibly Jane Weaver.
Moskowitz's definitive That Voice showcase is "The Garden of Earthly Delights" off the one-and-only United States of America album. For that tune alone I am rather intrigued to hear the new record.
However what I am really here for today is someone I never got to round to dealing with properly in the previous bloggeration about That Voice.
Judy Henske!
The baleful black bob! The mouth belting at full blast!
She is most renowned of course for 1969's Farewell Aldebaran, her collaboration with Jerry Yester.
Henske's singing has that pure-toned, cuts-right-through-you-like-a-lance quality.
Crime writer Andrew Vachss was a fan and in one of his books wrote: "If Linda Ronstadt's a torch singer, Henske's a flame thrower."
But to my mind, the effect is less fiery and more ice queeny - steely and imperious.
This one, "Rapture", is almost proto-Siouxsie, with a touch of flange or phase on the vocal adding to the astringent stridency.
Lyrics to the album written by Henske in a state of high fever, apparently - hence the torrid, imagistic quality.
"Three Ravens" got a lot of play on John Peel's Top Gear, it is said.
The title track and album closer is full-blown synthedelia, with Moog (Paul Beaver is among the cast involved)and there's electronic processing of the voice, although this song actually has Yester singing the lead vocal, I believe.
Thing is, all well and good in theory (and I've friends who are total Aldebaran cultists). But in truth that tune is pretty unpleasant to listen to. Grating and overbearing. A tinfoil-on-the-teeth effect on the old cochlea.
"Rapture" aside, I'm not digging much of the album.
Then there's her earlier solo career.
That one is sort of Janis Joplin meets Ethel Merman
Whereas the above sort of combines the give-me-fever dramatics of a Peggy Lee with Cher's deep-voiced, oddly wooden quality (meaning not so much inflexible and inexpressive but that it sounds like the voice is literally made out of wood).
Love That Look, not so keen on That Voice, or at least This Iteration of That Voice
Is it me, or is Dorothy Moskowitz's accent on The Garden of Earthly delights a bit of a Transatlantic one? If so, would this have been a combination of being a middle class New Yorker born in 1940, and a particular tentacle of the British Invasion's influence?
ReplyDeleteThat Voice: isn't the greatest post-60s exponent Kristin Hersh?
ReplyDeleteStevie Nicks is a marginal case, as you say. I don't know if you know the recording on YouTube of Fritz, the band she was in while she was in college, performing Born to be Wild. Lindsey Buckingham on bass. They are just a conventionally rambunctious group of college punks, until Nicks comes soaring in on 29 seconds with "Like a true nature's child..." and the song is transformed. It is spine-tingling.
https://youtu.be/tp7RRNHDDCs
Another singer who I think of as using That Voice is Nina Simone. On songs like Brecht/Weill's Pirate Jenny, or her own Four Women, or the live performance captured in the Summer of Soul documentary, she certainly has that forbidding, imperious quality.
That is a good spot to identify its roots in Broadway, which was certainly a big influence on Simone. And presumably it goes back before that to Weill and Gershwin and then to Stravinsky and Richard Strauss and the European Classical tradition.
The other thing I hear a bit of, though, is Irish and other European folk music. As you say, not so much the Anne Briggs / Shirley Collins style of English folk, but someone like Sorcha Ni Ghuairim from Galway, recorded by Folkways in 1957. Or maybe some Flamenco singers, too, and through them to Arabic and Indian music.
In The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh uses the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir. It works, even though they are a long way from Ireland, because there is some affinity there. And their singing also seems related to That Voice.
Which brings me full circle, because the first time I heard the choir was on the 4AD album Mystere des Voix Bulgares. And doesn't Liz Fraser have a bit of That Voice about her? Especially around the Head Over Heels era, on Pearly Dewdrops' Drops and Sugar Hiccup?
Those are some good ideas of possible sources for the sytle.
DeleteNina Simone is a good thought - there is something cold and remote in her voice often. And there are black exponents even though it seems largely a white female thing. Marsha Hunt's "Walk of Gilded Splinters". From that same moment (but going back to white) Julie Driscoll on "This Wheel's On Fire" is in the mode.
Don't know either that early Nicks performance or the Sorcha Ni Ghuarim.
I feel like Liz Frazer is a little too dreamy and fairy-tale. Early on when still under the spell of Siouxsie, there's still a bit of the forbidding quality - tracks like 'In the Gold Dust Rush" and 'in our angelhood' - but then by 'Pearly Dewdrops' and Treasure, it's all milky sweetness and spangly enchantment. The voice has this vaseline-on-the-lens, soft focus, hidden behind frosted glass quality - without the hard edges and stringent diction of the quasi-genre of singers I'm positing here.
Yes that's a good idea about Kristin Hersh - definitely could do things with her voice that were transfixing, making the listener feel like a moth being pinned.
DeleteOn the other, there's less sense of that ice queen feeling of her being commanding and imperious, it comes more from inner turbulence - harrowed as much as much as harrowing.
I don't know - maybe it's a showbiz tinge, you know that kind of elocution / refined / vaguely British patina that mid-century American entertainers adopted.
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps because psychedelia at that point is largely English - Beatles, Barrett, etc. (Okay there's Byrds and Love - who have a kind of prissy folky vocalisation at times. And Doors, which is something else together).
I think the song is trying to conjure this Eternal Feminine / Nature as Femme Fatale vibe so maybe that plays into the vocality.
I have to say, I find the term "that voice" not especially illustrative, for what I think are understandable reasons (although the "that" has impact). I'm reminded of a Francophone friend who often rebukes me when I talk of the genre chanson, with him asserting that "chanson" just means "song" in French; when I've asked him what the French call Brel, Brassens et al., he offers "singer-songwriter", in a comparable mould to Dylan and Joni Mitchell.
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I'm not sure what is included and excluded. I just listened to the Shangri-Las' Remember (Walking in the Sand). Are the early 60s girl groups examples, precursors, or unrelated? I've not a Scooby Doo.
It's not meant to be illustrative, it's just a short hand I came up with when first chit-chatting about it on my blog, and I've decided to perpetutate it. The extent to which crops up in different places and moments kind of agitates against pinning it to a genre, although 'psychedelia' is near enough. 'Psychedelic Female Singing' isn't any more exact or revealing than 'That Voice' really. 'Ice Queen' might be the closest but I don't think the singer in Elephant's Memory is an ice queen persona. Same with the voices in the White Noise album An Electric Storm which is in this vicinity (and is another 50 percent of Broadcast's DNA)
ReplyDeleteNever thought of the girl groups as related, although I suppose there is something baleful and 'huge' about the vocals in that particular song.
'Minatory' is a word that springs to mind - thinking of the sort of tone (baleful, shades of judgement or gloating vindictiveness) in 'White Rabbit', 'Garden of Earthly Delights'.
It's a placeholder term that never got replaced!
ReplyDeleteIf I was to single a defining attribute alongside the purity of timbre, it would be the long held note - like the long piercing "said"'s and "head"'s in the closing stretch of "White Rabbit". "The Garden of Earthly Delights" also has a lot of long-held notes. It's an aura of forbidding power achieved by lung power as much as the commanding tone.
ReplyDelete