Kids today. They just don’t know how good they’ve got it. What with their cellular phones and flat screens and high speed internets. Why when I was their age, we didn’t even know what the internets were. [Editor’s note: Erskine Cherry knew what the internets were. The rest of us thought Erskine Cherry was more than a half-bubble off. Some kind of cross between Frank Zappa singing about the invention of AIDS in some subterranean lab in Leesburg and Weird Al frantically trying to figure out why Coolio hates him. But the Editor digresses.] The point is that our technology was limited to one phone at the end of the hall. When that phone would ring, whoever was closest would pick it up and yell down the corridor to whoever the phone was for. Occasionally, a sweet, thick voice would come over the line from Mobile Bay and ask for “Morgan.”
I did not know any “Morgan” and said so, but the voice was insistent that Morgan Geer did, in fact, live there. A picture started to come together, and I assured the caller that yes, indeed, Mr. Geer did keep a room in the building but that he was not in the area at the moment. He was actually far away and would be for a while. That was my understanding at least, since I was staying in his room at the time. Having been in his room for several days, I had not seen Chris. Or Morgan. Now I was getting confused.
Thing is, Chris Geer was a blues man. Even in his absence, people talked about his talent for laying down some mean 16 bar blues. For you kids, these were the days of the great grunge explosion, when all those sounds we had been slam dancing to in small clubs in seedy neighborhoods sprang into the mainstream. It was hard times for soul survivors, and the fact that Chris Geer was an actual survivor only added to the mythos. All I know is something about a Kharman Gia and an unexpected arboreal encounter, but the lingering evidence in the form of a facial scar only heightened my impression that Chris Geer operated in an atmosphere more rarified than the one I stumbled through.
The voice that called for Morgan, however, was a pretty familiar one to me. Mine called from the banks of the Harpeth River, but it was pretty much the same in all other respects. This was a voice beyond grunge and slide guitar. It’s a voice of home that is both more fundamental and more complicated than the ones we like to make up for ourselves. If you ask me, this is the voice that we will have to answer sooner or later if we want to know who we really are in this world. Deep stuff, for sure, and the kind of stuff that could drive a man to drink until he cries out in his drunkenness for some type of salvation.
Not that I find “Into the Missionfield,” the new album by Morgan Geer’s outfit Drunken Prayer to be some sort of desperate cry from the dark night of the soul. It is more of a set of character studies of people who will, are, or maybe should have called across the void in the way of John Hiatt (with whom Geer shares a pernicious growl and the ability to turn a phrase) to ask “Is anybody there?” in ways that heighten the ambiguity of whether the “anybody” need be divine or simply sublime. Take the first track, “Brazil,” for instance. First of all, it defied my expectation of either hard rock or rockin’ blues as Geer’s shot out of the gate. Instead it’s a slow rocking entreaty for a love that is, again defying all expectation, requited. It is, in fact, a sweet tune without being saccharine.
Anyone looking to Drunken Prayer for a shot of blues served neat does not have to wait very long. The very next track, “Ain’t No Grave,” has more than enough raw power to get even the most barbecue-laden drunkard to get up and shake his ass. That’s kind of the point, I suppose, but this also serves as an introduction to those things of the spirit which appear readily enough to make you wonder if Morgan is looking to get elected a deacon. [Editor’s note: Since Geer is clearly working from a Baptist rather than an Episcopal idiom, he’d be elected rather than appointed.] And clearly, too, this is a shoutin’ church. Not because Geer is shouting all the time, but he is more often than not straightforward in addressing his subjects.
This is how it is done up in the mountains, but it can scare the Lowlanders and maybe that’s why the music on “Into the Missionfield” so often softens into the steamy nights of the deep south. It’s enough to make a man wonder if Geer did not dig up Jim Dickenson and set him in the corner of the studio for the duration of the recording session. Hear the fiddle, piano, acoustic guitar, and pedal steel come together around the lyrics of “Maryjane” in a low country boil that doesn’t quite make the potatoes fall apart, but certainly softens them up.
Softened up for what, though? Why are we getting all this nourishment? Well, my friends, mission work is hard work. Out there in the mission field, there is one soul harder to save than all the rest. If we are really going to answer that call, if we are going to walk to the end of the hall and harken to that voice, we have to be fed. By the time we reach “The Missionfield” we have been soothed and moved, prayed up and dressed down, and it’s time to finally face the storm.
And we make it through. Hallelujah! And if we faced that storm and made it through, where can’t we go? While we are on our way, why not stride, strut, and give it a little bit of a shuffle? If songs that immediately follow “The Missionfield” don’t have you doing all of the above, I would recommend either new speakers or a trip to the therapist, because you ain’t right. Not that we all can be right or stay right all the time. As Delilah knows, combing the beach in her way, just because you are looking does not mean you will be found.