Who The Heck Is The Back Porch Majority?
06.14.08 By Collin DavidOver the past year, I’ve bonded a little with a patron at the library, where I spend too much time telling people not to lick the computer keyboards. I guess there’s three points that this patron and I ultimately connect on; we’ve both been art teachers, we both have LP collections, and we both agree that I’m a handsome devil. With this knowledge, she occasionally pays visits to drop off stacks of records for me. While many aren’t in the genres that I’m currently exploring (as many are opera or musical theatre), there are always a few strange gems mixed in. During her last visit, she left a smart little stack of folk albums - Joan Baez, the notable Allan Sherman folk-parody album ‘My Son, The Folk Singer’, and a whole collection of albums by The New Christy Minstrels and The Back Porch Majority, whom I’d never heard of before.
I was attracted despite my ignorance, and I had the distinct feeling that THIS genre of music, and these ‘large folk ensembles’, were exactly what the excellent mockumentary ‘A Mighty Wind’ was parodying. I explored deeper, because anything worth a good loving mock is worth learning more about, especially if it was alarmingly antiseptic and delightful as the album covers implied. These guys were gonna MAKE me delighted, whether I liked it or not - and the masochist in me was going to like it either way.
I consulted an older generation than myself, and the mere mention of ‘The New Christy Minstrels’ brought a few looks of disdain and fear. Indeed, their practice of forcing joy upon all who encountered them had left a few scars, carved into the skin of their victims like little smiles. ‘The Back Porch Majority’ wasn’t nearly as recognizable, and even the omniscient internet doesn’t offer up too much on their popularity - if it ever existed.
Both groups were organized (and sometimes performed in) by a man named Randy Sparks, and if The New Christy Minstrels were center stage, The Back Porch Majority were the opening act - something of a rehearsal space before moving on to The Minstrels, and many group members did transfer from one group to another. While the two groups were seen as competitors of one another, it seems that they traded members as sports teams might.
A number of things attracted me to the albums, beyond the ripe-for-parody musical genre. First off was the Jack Davis album cover on the Minstrels’ ‘Advance to the Rear’ album, thanks to Derek - but even MORE interesting to me was the progression of The Majority’s album covers.
The first 4 in the stack, and the first 4 sequentially released, are images of smiling, happy, waving youngsters, clearly excited about life and haircuts and soda pop and drive-ins and poofy dresses. Album number five, ‘The Willy Nilly Wonder of Illusion’ takes a sudden psychedelic turn, as a single male member of the band gets all grabby with three women at once, one of whom is making devil horns behind his head. Their bodies stretch strangely off of the album and into unknown spaces, though we can safely assume that they end up in a acid den somewhere. I mean, c’mon - the guy’s top button isn’t even buttoned! What kind of ne’er-do-wells have The Majority turned into? These are no longer ‘Riverboat Days’, and we’re suddenly covering Paul Simon songs about suicide.
I love it.
I wasn’t around to watch the music of the 1960s slowly devour a straight-laced society, and I never experienced the infectious plague of rock ‘n’ roll that destroyed our youth culture. By the time I came along, DEVO had already done their weird pseudo-sexual damage, and by the time I was conscious of it, Nirvana had already ripped holes in my jeans. From what I can tell, 1967’s ‘Willy Nilly’ was their last album, though given their rate of moral decay, one can only assume that their next musical output would be all about sacrificing goats and hailing their dark underlord. Play it backwards and the messages might even be offensive.
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Article Tags: folk music, lps, randy sparks, records, the back porch majority, the new christy minstrels================
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June 22nd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
These guys were more popular than you think. They performed at the White House(!) in 1965.
http://www.windowsmedia.com/Mediaguide/Templates/Biography.aspx?p_id=P%20%20%20%2024086
A mighty wind indeed!