Marion Williams, Ringo Starr, Joanna Connor, Evanescence

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday I got to play through the four CD’s I’d ordered from Amazon.com that arrived yesterday (I had actually opened the door for the Amazon delivery guy, and so I was able to thank him for the delivery personally): the gospel album Packin’ Up: The Best of Marion Williams (a record I’d been curious about since I saw the film Fried Green Tomatoes, and got to watch her sing “Didn’t It Rain?” on screen towards the end of the film; alas, this performance was not on the soundtrack CD I got, though two other Williams recordings heard in the film were), The Bitter Truth by Evanescence, 4801 South Indiana Avenue by white blues singer-guitarist Joanna Connor, and a five-song EP called Zoom In by Ringo Starr, whom I’ve been referring to rather dismissively of late as “the other surviving Beatle.”

Actually, of the three secular albums in yesterday’s package I liked Ringo’s best of all – and, perhaps heretically, I liked it better than Paul McCartney’s recent release, McCartney III, if only because Ringo didn’t seem to be taking himself as seriously as Paul did. Zoom In – a clever pun on the fact that under the iron rule of SARS-CoV-2 Ringo had to do the entire album via Zoom, with each artist and musician contributing their part in their own home studio and sending them to Ringo via the Internet – is a bright, infectious record and I only wish it had been a full-length album instead of an EP. I got the Evanescence CD because I saw the band perform the sixth song on the CD, “Wasted Girl,” on Stephen Colbert’s show, and both my husband Charles and I liked it. Alas, the whole album seemed good but disappointing, one of those releases that’s less interesting than it could be because all too many of the songs sound the same. The basic Evanescence sound is singer Amy Lee, who has a strikingly Grace Slick-esque voice, backed by a band that plays largely 1980’s synth-pop that mixes oddly but compellingly with her 1960’s-style voice. Lee herself said of the album, “t's dark and heavy. It’s also got moments of weird and sparse. Little bit of everything.” The Wikipedia page on the band says they started in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1995 but didn’t record until 2008, when their first album generated sales of 17 million copies on the strength of two hit singles, and they’ve been through so many personnel changes since (including at least two hiatuses – or should be haiti?) that none of their five studio albums have had the same band members. It’s a haunting sound and probably one I’ll get to like better the more I play the album.

Joanna Connor’s 4801 South Indiana Avenue is as album I bought because I got to see the video for its first song, “Destination,” and I was impressed both by her scorching vocal and her virtuoso guitar solo – but once again it was a problem of the songs sounding too much the same and not really offering any different listening experience, though as with the Evanescence album I suspect it will grow on me later as I listen to the album more and the songs begin to differentiate themselves from each other. That leaves the Marion Williams album, which definitely puts her as a full member of the holy trinity of African-American gospel singers alongside Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. (Actually there’s a fourth Black woman gospel singer who should be put in that group: Clara Ward, who gave Williams her first career break by hiring her for the Clara Ward Singers and letting her do “Packin’ Up” as a featured number.) The first time through the album I was a bit disappointed if only because Williams didn’t seem to have a great accompanist – someone to play behind her and rock her harder the way Mildred Falls did with Mahalia and Rosetta Tharpe did for herself), but there are some really dramatic and rocking songs on this album and it’s fascinating to hear Marion Williams do the “whooooo!” falsetto shriek Little Richard became famous for on one song after another. (Little Richard admitted he had been influenced by gospel singers, particularly the almost terminally obscure Arizona Dranes, whom he heard as a boy in her church pianist-choir director-singer job at a Black church in Little Richard’s home town, Macon, Georgia. Dranes’ records don’t sound like Little Richard vocally, but they’re full of those hammering piano triplets that were his instrumental trademark.)