***In The Time Of The Time Of An Outlaw Country Music Moment- The Belfast Cowboy Rides Again Van Morrison’s “Pay The Devil”

A YouTube film clip of Van Morrison performing his pre-Belfast Cowboy Into The Mystic.

CD Review


Seth Garth

Pay The Devil, Van Morrison, Exile Productions, 2006


[One of the enduring things about the older writers here, the ones who were “present at the creation” of this publication in its hard copy days back in the mid-1970s when there was still something of an afterglow alive, if not well, from their 1960s countercultural is their love of music. Mainly back in that self-same 1960s rock and roll which most of them were also “present at the creation” at although it was left to older brothers and sister to partake of the full “jail-break” as Sam Lowell liked to call the early uprising. Of course rock and roll has gone through many incarnations, has suffered as has my favored music, jazz, its share of blossom times and barren periods. When that has happened in jazz I tend to go back to the blues, or better rhythm and blues from which a lot of modern jazz had emerged from to break out again.       

When Seth Garth, who knows more about music, about the American songbook that all the rest of his old-time cohort combined hits a dry spot he looks, feverishly at times from this review, for some other nuggets from the songbook. I know because of later he has been humming and low-voice singing the lyrics from a bunch of Cole Porter songs. But back in the 1980s he was working his way through the great American go west young man, young cowboy to be myth and what it meant to some songwriters who were tired of what passed for such music and brought some vigor into the genre. Not so strangely to my mind as that was something of an off period for modern jazz as well I went back to the blues, went back to the old country blues from down in the Delta. On this beat unlike our “dispute” over the merits of film noir we have some agreement if not of kind then of spirit. Greg Green]     


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Apparently just now, although this time rather accidentally, I am on something of an outlaw country moment tear, again. I have mentioned on previously occasions when I have discussed county music, or rather more correctly outlaw country music, that I had a very short, but worthwhile period when I was immersed in this genre in the late 1970s. After tiring somewhat of Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other more well know country outlaws I gravitated toward the music, eerily beautiful and haunting music, of Townes Van Zandt whose Steve Earle tribute album Townes I have recently reviewed in this space. As I noted there, as well, while this outlaw country thing was short-lived and I scrambled back to my first loves, blues, rock and folk music I always had time to listen to Townes and is funny mix of blues, folk rock, rock folk, and just downright outlaw country.

And that brings us to the album under review, Pay The Devil, and another “outlaw” country music man, the Belfast cowboy Van Morrison. Wait a minute, Van Morrison? Belfast cowboy? Okay, let me take a few steps back. I first heard Van Morrison in his 1960s rock period when I flipped out over his Into The Mystic on his Moondance album. And when I later saw him doing some blues stuff highlighted by his appearance in Martin Scorsese PBS History of Blues series several years ago I also flipped out, and said yes, brother blues. But somewhere along the way he turned again on us and has “reinvented” himself as the “son”, the legitimate son, of Hank Williams. And hencethe Belfast cowboy.

If you do not believe me then just listen to him ante up on There Stands The Glass, a classic honky-tonk midnight sorrows tune; the Williams’ classic Your Cheatin’ Heart; the pathos of Back Street Affair; the title song Pay The Devil; and, something out of about 1952, and the number one example of his cowboyishness (whee!), Till I Gain Control Again. The Belfast cowboy, indeed, although I always thought that was in the North.