Spotlight Album Review: Reggie Garrett "York's Lament & Other Stories"
At a time when clearly Black Lives Matter so much, music also matters more than ever. Songwriters like Crys Matthews and Reggie Harris have found a voice to express what is happening. Now I’ve encountered another Reggie, Reggie Garrett, who makes a profound impression on his fifth album, York’s Lament & Other Stories.
The album’s title is a good indication of Reggie’s intention. A Williams College grad based in Seattle, Reggie shares stories about people, both historical figures and personal relations, who have endured the black experience in America. He does it with a wide musical palette using guitar, bass, violin, piano, and drums that encompasses acoustic folk, blues, gospel, jazz, Celtic, and Latin rhythms, in a blend he calls “urban acoustic Folk music.” And he sings in a mellifluous voice reminiscent of Bill Withers or Terry Callier that draws you into the song rather than putting you off.
The opening track, “Stagecoach Mary,” is an easy, swinging first person account of a tough Black woman making her way in the Old West. She never fears lynching or other perils, she just rides on “looking for a brighter day.” “York’s Lament (a Hell of a Thing)” is a ballad chronicling the journey of the enslaved personal servant of Captain William Clark during the Lewis & Clark Expedition. He is an equal member of the expedition, but when they return, instead of being set free, he’s returned to slavery. “Ballade de ‘Stace A’” is a semi-spoken allegory of Stacey Abrams, with upright bass and a drum solo that might recall an early Tom Waits song.
Several songs use first person narration to express the challenges Black folks have experienced then and now. The narrator of “A Woman’s Work (is Never Done),” like “Stagecoach Mary,” is willing to risk the dangers of the Great Migration North (“Heaven help the man who dares pull a gun/And points that death at me and all my loved ones”). The woman in “Can’t Get Satisfied” is also a woman on a journey, from Africa to the U.S., who finds the frustration of being Black in America. The “ghost boy” in “Mama’s Calling Me” (with its slow jazz chords) has been killed and knows that his family “will never know the man I’ll never grow to be.” Omnipresent gun violence also figures in the slow blues of “So Far Away” (“I can’t believe that you shot him down/So easily/Just trying to make his way back home”).
Other songs strike closer to home. “All That Bleeds” is an elegy to his brother, Kevin, who sank into addiction and took his own life. “Little Brother” is the name his grandmother gave him; an uptempo R&B tune bristling with an electric guitar, it recounts her advice to him (“Ain’t no use wondering why, oh, they never treat you right/Just when they call your number, boy, you better fight a good fight”). On a cautiously hopeful note, the lilting “Fly Away” is a song his niece asked him to compose in honor of her newborn son:
So let’s try something new
No matter your sway or hue
Fly away, and let’s find a way
To a world we can call our own
Fly away, and let’s find a way
To a world for us all…
“Newsman,” inspired by the reporting of a Seattle journalist, is also Reggie’s credo in the face of powerlessness and violence:
I write about the things I see
And the way things out to be…
I write to change the arc of time past history’s tyrannies
I write with all my heart and soul
For the change that can be
The album’s finale, “Street Scenes,” is a long, half-spoken account from the point of view of a bus driver who has seen it all – a “morality play” of people, young and old, confronting injustice, wise, but not too judgmental, and ultimately inclusive (“there’s always room for one more on this bus”).
The songs are expansive, taking the time to set a mood and tell the stories. They reveal harsh truths with power and poetry and an undeniable empathy. If Martin Luther King’s prediction that “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” is true, it may be that messengers like Reggie Garrett showed us the way.