One man’s words on…
Bill Peeple’s CD Missing Mason
I have been fortunate enough to receive such a non-commercial music CDs entitled Missing Mason by Bill Peebles of Soutwestern Ohio. Bill is known these days for his popular stay-at-home-dad blog.
In the time since I received the CD, I have kept it as a regular part of my iPod library. With his straight forward, folksinger strumming and just a twinge of that dog-eared dialect from Suthern Ohia, Bill Peebles plays and sings his songs in a way that makes you feel they must have been around for ages. His themes will be recognized in many a listener’s life even if the details are all his own.
Bill has been through some ups and downs as his life has unfolded and he would be the first person to admit to taking more wrong turns, at times, than a character from a Kris Kristofferson song. That might explain why some of the tunes on his first CD of original compositions could easily be found on one of Kristofferson’s albums. Be they “partly truth and partly fiction,” the personae inhabiting Missing Mason are fully realized characters and the tales they weave, from tribulations to hard-earned silver linings, unfold with the folkie ease of a natural storyteller.
The autobiographical selections tend to have the 40-something perspective of “just where exactly did that long, hard life lead to?” But the fragrant sentimentality is sincere, never saccharine. Nowhere is this more present than in the opening, title track that deals with a trip back to the hometown after many years away, only to find that Progress has all but replaced it with something less wholesome or homespun.
I don’t know a soul who walks down her street
Nobody walks the streets of Mason
These yuppies just don’t know how to use their feet
I’m missin’ Mason”
I’m missin’ Mason
The place where I was raised up
The town I called my own
I’m missin’ Mason
Went away for fifteen years
Come back and she was gone
The listener may not share Peebles’ disappointment that Jack’s Auto Parts and the Whippy Dip aren’t in business anymore, but they can surely relate to the general lament for a society that seems to discard so much of value as it keeps getting bigger, louder and more impersonal with every passing season.
A series of childhood photos are pulled out and exhibited in Snapshots, a mid-life soul search where fond memories seen from a more sober perch results in the musical query:
I am the man that boy became
That little boy is me
I wonder if he’d look at me with pride and say
That’s the man I’ll be
It is a unique and tuneful take on a subject many people have contemplated. If I were to introduce this song at a gig by claiming it came from an old Jim Croce or Harry Chapin album few people would doubt it.
Even if the singer has accepted his unadorned fate for being what it is, there are still plenty of reasons to celebrate. In This Old Cracked Guitar we are treated to the vehicle with which he proposed to his wife. One of the only songs on the CD that is picked rather than strummed, this pretty declaration of romantic love should find its way to being covered by many a po’ boy hoping to win a girl’s hand without the leverage of material wealth and monetary fortune.
As revealing and rewarding as these tunes are, it is in his broader storytelling that Bill Peebles really shows his innate talent as a songwriter. In The Ballad of John and Paul we meet two down on their luck drifters in 1930s Louisiana. Here they encounter a revivalist preacher claiming to be the personification of Jesus Christ “walking to the beat of Gabriel’s band”. In the end, it turns out his miracles are staged, but his ability to resurrect the downtrodden spirit of his Depression era flock justifies his means.
Where Tears in Texas is a lyric and well-rendered strummer about Austin’s lonesome urban cowboys, worthy of pop country radio, the hard driven Ballad of Jane Doe is an unflinching account of substance abuse and recovery. The subject being a former debutant whose storybook upbringing and marriage to a doctor disintegrate from “too much gin and prescription dope.” After witnessing how it all went so wrong, we leave her as her optimistic parents enter her room at the sanitarium, never knowing for sure if she will make it back from the edge or not.
Themes of redemption and self-acceptance run throughout the album. The inhabitants of Missing Mason each travel a route with as many pitfalls as it has crests, not unlike the one Bill has been there and back on, himself. But whether they are the back roads leading to the temporary escape on Jimmy’s Farm, or the one on Butt Wigglin’ Song that runs down all the things he wishes he had, but can live without (that immediately made me think of the more lighthearted songs of Woody Guthrie and Burl Ives), there is an unbroken thread of weathered sentiment and romantic optimism that leaves one feeling it was well worth the journey.
Bill Peebles closes out his album of 13 original songs with Double Lines, an uplifting ode addressed to John Steinbeck and about U.S. Route 66. It was inspired by a recent adventure, when he made a solo journey along the full extent of that fabled highway. He is happy to report that the singular but always neighborly spirit he found missing in his old hometown hasn’t vanished entirely. It is not just found in memories or in the ghosts of Tom Jode and Woody Guthrie. Rather, it is still alive and well and discovered in the roads and rivers and people of the modern American landscape – even if he concedes that one has to look harder these days to find its springs and on-ramps.
Missing Mason is full of real songs, with infectious cadence, catchy choruses, and clever but effortless breaks. But whom might Peebles bring to your mind most readily? Kenny Logins, John Denver, Steve Goodman, Jimmy Buffet, Harry Chapin, Jim Croce? Of course he does not actually sound like any of them. Maybe they would have brought voices and imagery to the same songs in a different fashion. If anything, I would say his presentation makes me think most of John Prine’s first album. Perhaps his songs aren’t all the polished gems those guys road to fame and notoriety. But what you will find on Missing Mason are good, solid songs that have been chipped from the same American bedrock that gave sustenance to those other, more well-known writers. Culled from and inhabiting the same vistas, front porches and pathways, they provide much of the same satisfaction for the listener, only from the unique and very personal perspective of Bill Peebles and his old cracked guitar.
That instrument, by the way, is an early 70’s, auditorium size Alvarez. It is from the Golden Era of plywood guitars when makers like Fender, Harmony, Conn and Alvarez were producing affordable acoustic guitars of the highest quality obtainable with veneered woods. Only very recently have guitar companies come around to matching them. A few years back he had his restored by a local luthier at a cost exceeding what would have afforded him a nice, new one. But it would not have had that dried out ring or a quarter century worth of his own music embedded in the fibers. Bill Peebles and his audience are all the richer for it.