Mister Rufus Thomas
Listen/Download – Rufus Thomas – The Preacher and the Bear (Live)
Greetings all.
The tune I bring you this fine day is one of those lucky finds that manages to work on multiple levels.
First and foremost, it is undeniably funky, and I love few things more than stumbling upon a funk record that I haven’t heard before.
Second, it brings with it a very interesting story, in which our man Rufus Thomas gets to step inside a song – three quarters of a century old (when he recorded it) – and turn it inside out.
It was a short while back that I managed to find myself at the intersection of free time and a few extra dollars on the corner of look, record for sale.
There was another one of those record/garage sales at the Asbury Lanes, which have over time fluctuated between an embarrassment of riches (as far as vinyl is concerned) and occasionally yielding what folks have since time immemorial referred to simply as jack shit.
I didn’t have much green lining my pockets this time out, which didn’t matter since the first box I flipped through yielded a half dozen very nice 45s, all in the one or two dollar range, and the next table I hit coughed up a couple of cool LPs, one of which gave up the track you see before you.
With that, the bank was broken and I decamped for a fish sang-weech and the ride home.
Now, when I picked up the ‘Rufus Thomas Live Doing the Push and Pull at PJs’ album, and finished staggering through the very lengthy and awkward title, I decided to grab it because it contained live versions of a couple of his favorites, which I surmised might be very cool.
What I did not suspect, is that there would be a track that would good and truly blow my mind.
Rufus Thomas was a righteous dude, for a variety of reasons (all good, all having to do with music) and anyone that would waste your time arguing otherwise deserves little more than a kick in the shins.
He made some of the finest, funkiest records that Stax ever put out, many when he was well into middle age.
When I first dropped the needle on the live version of ‘The Preacher and the Bear’, I was grabbed by the spoken intro:
‘Here’s a song I understand is very popular out this way, out here on the coast.
Now, it is done differently in the club.’
But Rufus pronounces the last word ‘cluurrbb’ with an emphasis that implied that the live venue was something quite different from the studio*.
He wasn’t kidding.
What I didn’t know when I first heard the record and not until I sat down to research this piece, was that Rufus had recorded a studio version of ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ in 1970 (#42 R&B).
It has been reissued a few times (you can get it here), and it has to be said while the 45 version is lively, it is a radically different construct than what Rufus and his band laid down at PJs, and in comparison very weak broth indeed.
The title of the song was vaguely familiar, and when I listened to the lyrics they were similarly so (for good reason).
As it turns out, ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ had been around for ages. It was first published in 1903 and recorded a few years later by Arthur Collins (reportedly the first million selling recording).
It was, in it’s original form, what was known as a ‘coon song’, i.e. one that portrayed a racist image of blacks (in a wide variety of settings) often sung in what was supposed to pass for negro vernacular and often exaggerated accent.
The basic story – of a hypocritical preacher gone hunting on the Sabbath and getting treed by a bear for his sin – changed little over the years (aside from the removal of the overt racist context and the term ‘coon’).
‘The Preacher and the Bear’ was re-recorded/reinterpreted many times over the years, in a variety of musical settings, actually becoming a hit in versions by Phil Harris (1947) and Jerry Reed(1971).
Since Thomas was performing with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels in the mid 1930s , it’s possible that he had been hearing (if not actually performing) the song for decades.
The song was almost always delivered as a humorous tale with the preacher petitioning the lord to deliver him from the bear as he had delivered Daniel, Jonah and others in the bible from their travails.
While Rufus Thomas made humor and important component of his discography, what he does with ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ is something else entirely.
As he said in the intro, the song was indeed ‘done differently in the club’.
Where the studio version of the song is briskly paced, with an almost Chicago blues style to it, the live version is much funkier, with a guitar line that sounds like a not so distant cousin to Ike and Tina Turner’s ‘Bold Soul Sister’.
Thomas and his band attack the song from an entirely new angle, using the hard edge of the music to add a touch of actual danger to the tale.
The lyrics of the song follow a familiar path until Thomas reaches the chorus where he makes some subtle but (very) important changes.
Earlier versions of the song generally reference Daniel, Jonah, and the “Hebrew children in the furnace” (aka Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego) all tales from the Old Testament where people were saved from certain death by the intercession of god.
Thomas replaces Noah with Samson and ends the chorus with a reference to David and Goliath, both stories where the heroes were endowed directly with supernatural strength that allowed them to triumph in their time of troubles.
When Thomas charges into the chorus there is fire in his voice.
You remember Daniel from the lion’s den
Samson strong as a hundred men
The Hebrew children in the furnace of fire
David when he killed Goliath
The good book do declare!
It is as if he is no longer in the cluurrbb, but in chu’ch, which gets even clearer when the band falls back and Rufus starts to preach, adding a whole new chapter to the tale, in which (in the midst of hand-to-claw combat) the preacher reminds god that he protected him from bombs, guns and shrapnel when he was over in Vietnam.
Rufus engages in a little back and forth with the audience that has momentarily been converted (transubstantiated?) into a de facto amen corner with the organist in the band playing as if he were adjacent not to the bar, but rather the choir loft.
When Rufus starts to invoke Vietnam he adds a layer of sadness to the song that was never really there before, and the listener is compelled to wonder if in fact the struggle with the bear hadn’t become (at least in this case) a metaphor for the black experience in the 1960s.
All of those old bible stories told people that if they were faithful and followed the commandments that the good lord would be there for them in their time of need.
When I listen to Rufus drop down into the ‘Vietnam’ section of the song it sounds like he’s relating the story of someone who feels that they’ve finally been forsaken.
Is it possible that the ‘World’s Oldest Teenager’ had reached back into the early years of the century to take an old “coon song” reconstruct it on an angry frame and shoot it back out into the ether?
I think it is.
I hope you dig it too.
Peace
Larry
*It should be noted that over the last century the music behind ‘The Preacher and the Bear’ has often changed drastically in different settings. I have heard a similar tune behind some of the country versions of the song from the 30s on, but the Rufus Thomas recordings of the song diverge from those (and each other)
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