Reviews

Artist:Claudia Gibson
Album: The Fields Of Chazy
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 9
Website: https://www.claudiagibson.com/

Based in Austin, this is Gibson's second full length trad folk and Americana-shaded album following her 2016 debut and a 2019 EP, the fingerpicked title track opener a memory of her paternal grandfather born in the North Country hamlet on the shores of Lake Champlain in 1881, being widowed at 33, their only child also dying when she was 29, then planting apples for a decade before remarrying in 1925, Gibson visiting the trees he'd planted 100 years earlier.

Opening with pedal steel, the countrified 'Unbound' unfolds an emotional reboot with the narrator looking to regroup in their hometown, among familiar faces ("Sixteen hundred miles to go/Just a couple days or so/There's time to contemplate my sins/Headed back from where I came/Where everybody knows my name/Unbound and starting out again") after a relationship where "We just held each other down".

True tales of noted outlaws are a staple of folk and country song alike, and, set to a repeating fingerpicked pattern, 'Laura's Song' is sung in the voice of Laura Bullion, a female outlaw of the Old West who was a member of the infamous Wild Bunch and lover of Ben Kilpatrick, aka The Tall Texan, dying in Memphis in 1961 after decades living in obscurity as a seamstress, the song having her recounting her story to a young person who knows nothing of her previous life, schooled as a prostitute by San Antonio brothel owner Fannie Porter and hanging with Will Carver of Black Jack Ketchum's gang then taking up with Kilpatrick after his death before the pair where captured and jailed in St. Louis. She got early release while, after being reunited with Ben he reverted to his old ways and was killed while robbing a train.

Another real life figure was the inspiration for the twangy guitar and organ backed 'Rain', written after hearing of the death of troubled soulful singer Valerie Carter in 2017 ("Some people they just ain't made for living/ The spirit's too pure to be sustained"), the title coming from how, as she was processing the news, a black cloud literally appeared over her Texas hill country home and a downpour opened up.

A remark by Texas singer Bruce Robison that "You know, it's just not my world anymore" provided the spur for the fingerpicked reflections of 'The Days' when "It was our world, and it was our time/Made all our plans to leave the old behind" before the years and changing times got in the way ("it's not our world anymore/It's burning like a house on fire/Hard to keep up the way we did before") but love keeping them steadfast ("It's a new world, and these are new times/But still there's two hands, yours and mine").

Another of her family is the subject of the folksy fingerpicked 'Promised Land', sung in the voice of her grandmother Bessie Axelrod Levitt who, aged 14, after her father died emigrated from Polotsk (present day Belarus) to New York with her little sister, working in a factory "sewing ribbons on for 50 cents a day" and how, for all the trouble she endured maintained her accent, and spine of steel, clinging to faith and belief in Lady Liberty.

By way of a complete change of style, the longest track finds her tackling the traditional Scottish tune 'The Night Visiting Song', the tenor harmony provided by Austin-based Irish singer Pat Byrne, albeit the Celtic threads interwoven with Appalachian fabrics.

The feeling that those close to you who have passed somehow continue to watch over and send signs and messages is the backdrop to the wistful piano ballad 'Angels Fly' ("Your photo fell out from a book/An old one I had overlooked/I saw us in our younger days/With "True Love" on the title page/Now Willie's on the radio/He's singing what I asked to know/If somewhere you are still ok/Just traveling in a different way"), though it takes an unexpected dark turn in the lines "How hard it was to reconcile/The man I loved with one reviled/You were not then what you became/But now I know love's what remains". As such it ends aptly enough with the waltzing acoustic country/gospel campfire guitar and mandolin strum of 'Shine On', a song about the inevitability of death but how, after the burdens of life, "When our work here is done, we will fly to the sun/And shine on forever in light", taking leave of all sorrows and "together we'll cross this divide". A fine album that deserves to be unbound for glory.

Mike Davies

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