The Histories (Old Black Joe)

The Histories (Old Black Joe) is a new 45 from Van Dyke Parks, released by the Chicago gallery Corbett vs. Dempsey.

Side A is an adaptation/arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Black Joe,” written for The Histories (Old Black Joe), a 2020 installation by the artist David Hartt. Parks’s reimagining of Foster’s plaintive tune is an amazing piece of musique concrète, with orchestra, slide guitar, barking dogs, cracking whips, an antique voice singing fragments of Foster’s lyrics, and a bit of the Esso Trinidad Steel Band playing “Stars and Stripes Forever.” And there’s more. This production recalls Parks’s music for Datsun and Ice Capades, and it challenges his Song Cycle for sheer audacious invention.

Side B is an adaptation/arrangement of Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Souvenir de la Havane,” the third Gottschalk piece Parks has recorded. With strings, piano, accordion, and mandolin, it’s elegant music for a salon of the imagination.

It’s easy to imagine how Hartt found his way to Parks: a 2019 Hartt installation, The Histories (Le Mancenillier), included Gottschalk’s music. A gallery page about The Histories (Old Black Joe) makes clear Hartt’s interest in the relation of the Caribbean to “the broader Americas.” That relation runs through Parks’ music and was the stuff of his second album, Discover America.

The music on sides A and B dates from 1860, 1859, 2021, and the future. The recording, with sleeve art by Hartt, is available from Corbett vs. Demspey and Forced Exposure.

Related reading
All OCA VDP posts (Pinboard)

[Parks produced the Esso Trinidad Steel Band’s eponymous 1971 album for Warner Bros.]