May 25, 1957 Samm Bennett, Japan - Index to songs with lyrics by title: A-C
Though originally from Alabama, I do believe it can be said that the last thirty years of his creations and innovations have been inspired by his living in Japan. And not *Alabama.
*A is for an asterisk for Alabama
He comes from Alabama and way more than with a banjo on his knee, all the way to Japan with a new life in this new century but bringing with him both the avant-garde sensibilities of the eighties and his life long love and exploration of traditional deep south song stylings, Bob Dylan constructions, social awareness that never left the protest field and of course, the kind of wordiness that really, Taylor Shift should take note of if she wants to get out of her mega-bubble.
B is for Bennett
One original concept was that I wanted to close every substack with a Samm Bennett video, sort of a reward to those who scrolled all the way, but as it turns out I really had over a year’s worth of materials on the festival to fill one calendar. Luckily for my personal workload which gets more and more irrelevant as I approach the pensioner’s reward for having survived long enough to be a pensioner, NMA is kind of a finite project. So, now for the second year of these posts, I will bridge the worlds between NMA and my own personal explorations. And will have room to feature a lot of (or even all of if I can get there, why not?) Samm’s video accompaniments to his songs, which puts him in the musician-filmmaker category of Neil Young’s DIY movies.
C is for CHUNK!
Samm Bennett and I only cross paths by virtue of the fact that we were in the same city (New York) at the same time (NMA 1989) but it’s only through Facebook that I made his acquaintance and got to see his most recent evolutions. And as one dives into the world of Samm Bennett’s music (and if you’re facebook-fortunate enough, his photography of Japan), what should be the journalist’s dream becomes apparent: you can approach his oeuvre from many, many angles. As for the State of Bennett in 1989, this is how he presented himself for that festival. And there’s that asterisk again!
Roulette’s archives brings you back to those two sets in 1989: roulette.org/event/chunk/
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As someone who likes to bitch about lazy radio DJs, I am usually averse to the notion of “the music speaks for itself”. On the other hand, there is a bit of that - compelled by the basic length-limits of the substack form and the sheer amount of even recent material that Samm has created over the last decade - in my presenting this first of many “indexes” to the Bennett repertoire, primarily via his song lyrics:
This is essentially a copy and paste from the official polarity records website - polarityrecords.com - and his bandcamp site - sammbennett.bandcamp.com and is an index of his song lyrics (the underlined links), the bandcamp link where you can go and get your own personal copies (the boxes) and we’ll keep it to A to C. Many of the links also have video versions of the same, but we’ll get to that eventually, as it will probably take me a year to get through a proper display of the man-who-should-be-famous-by-seventy:
POLARITY RECORDS / SAMM BENNETT
LYRICS main page
Samm writes: The songs collected here represent thousands of hours of labor, mostly, of course, a labor of love. Hope you enjoy them, and, should my efforts in these area of songwriting strike you as worthy of support, please consider a patronly donation, easy to make at my PayPalMe link, HERE. Many thanks for your kind consideration.