1958: Leona Anderson - Music to Suffer By

Leona Anderson was 75 years old when she recorded her 1958 debut and only full-length, Music to Suffer By. In the succeeding half-century, the record has risen to cult status as a Plan 9-esque “worst record ever,” with one important difference: Unique Records’ executives were embarrassingly ‘in’ on the joke, and went overboard with self-deprecating promotional material. The executives had named the record and conceived the project long before Anderson was involved. Part of this lends itself to equally campy mythology — poor, dejected Leona Anderson, wandering down an empty Manhattan street in the twilight of her years, having worn through every vocal coach in Europe with her hoarsely inexact pipes, notices a soggy flyer in the gutter: “Calling For the Worst Voice In The World!” Delight spreads across her face. The story makes it sound like singing badly was the first thing Anderson was ever good at. Even if it wasn’t — there are scattered accounts of film, burlesque, vaudeville, radio and yes, legitimate singing in her past — it’s practically a reviewer’s duty to reinforce the same old myth. Because the overarching impression is ‘Grandma had a few too many glasses of scotch and is singing along to her vinyl collection,’ the album’s eminently fun to write about, and it’s no surprise that it has easily trumped any other name-recognition she might have attained.

How does the passage of time affect a joke as blatant as Music to Suffer By? The album’s rationale makes perfect sense in the context of 1958: “the youth of today think the previous generation and its music are ridiculous, so maybe we can reach them by playing up that ridiculousness.” More recent promotional material has given the album a weak push in the direction of ‘avant-pop,’ and to be sure, Music to Suffer By gives us an interesting glimpse into the genesis of marketing unusual music. But just like that kid in sixth grade who declared that some formative favorite of yours (a band like Radiohead, who didn’t deserve this) was “more into being weird than being good,” the record industry in the 1950s was stuck in a simplified middle school mindset. “Get this: some people actually listen to bad music on purpose! They like bad music!” It wasn’t a new idea at the time (Florence Foster Jenkins had long since died a legend) but because the dichotomy was in place from the beginning, and because, like most 1950s records, there were executives’ fingerprints all over the content, there was only so much depth anyone could listen for.

The “so bad that it’s good” and “weird at expense of good” paradigms have come so far since Music to Suffer By was recorded (Benjamin Pearson’s year-end TMT article “Whiskey and Popcorn: The Art of Watching Bad Movies” is required reading on the matter) that now seems like a perfect time to reassess it. But alas; last year’s Trunk reissue has been met by the same chortles and sneers. Leona Anderson’s wheezy approach is so consistent that the record comes off as a unified entity, a joke you either like or dislike. It’s easy, especially blinded by our current subgenre-dense culture, to mistake the selections for a relatively unadventurous set of easy listening 1950s standards specked with public-domain-copping originals. And yes, the first track kicks off with “La Marseillaise” (like “All You Need Is Love”) before drifting into the only slightly less recognizable “I Love Paris.” The joke, for a lot of these songs, occurs in the first few seconds when the pristine orchestra reminds you of a song or a type, and you’re just grimacing on the edge of your seat for the tune to enter Leona’s butcher-shop. It’s the middle school definition of experimental music — you have an ‘actual’ song at the heart of everything, and some elements are ‘wrong’ by varying degrees. In some cases, this totally works for Leona; the swoony jazz-blues brass of “Limburger Lover” really feels like it’s wafting from her breath.

Even though the songs tend to blur together in the contemporary ear, the value of the remaster is that the disparity between the record’s sources becomes a little more obvious — they wouldn’t have evoked a single generation’s taste at the time. In fact, it’s a shame that she didn’t make any more records, because Music to Suffer By tests many waters. There are two songs from Friml operas more than 30 years old at the time, and even an exotic habanera (“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle”) from Bizet’s 1873 opera Carmen. The orchestra is so steely and proficient with these complex pieces that Leona is virtually background, a lunatic wandered onto the stage. It doesn’t help when she’s singing in another language—you get the sense that her singing is full of flubs and phonetic approximations, but it doesn’t scald your brain like your own language. (That being said, the faux-German “Hep Cat” is a phonetic delight).

The intricate pieces are flush up against goofball originals, which range in quality. The flat-out humiliating “Tell Me a Tall Tale” kills whatever it had going for it with (someone else’s) cartoony falsetto — the sort of desperate nadir that comes when the project overcomes basic decency. Still, cartoony isn’t a bad way to think of the record’s best songs. When the orchestra isn’t killing itself to reproduce classical pieces, it actually has a nice Carl Stalling thing going, impulsive and witty. The only aesthetic precedent for the originals was Anderson’s 1955 single “Fish” (sadly not included for the reissue of such an otherwise deep-space album) which the record’s definitive personality-makers like the lurching “Rats in My Room” revamp in spirit. But “Chloe” is the album’s most successful song, mutating a broadly interpreted (Cal Tjader’s mambo would have been the most recent reference point) jazz standard into a spare, surreal piece. Leona Anderson’s titular wails into the lonely night get a mocking slide-trombone echo; bouncing brass sections alternate with dissonant descending strings. Had she made a career out of this, more loose interpretations of this sort would have been in order.

Of course, she didn’t make a career out of it, and she died in 1973, before her cult status could really catch up to her. But there’s something legendary about this solitary, fractured record she left behind in her stead. Like Charlie Chaplin (an early short of whose Anderson acted in), or even Moondog, Leona Anderson embedded herself so fully into her art that our contextualizing, intentionalist-rabid rituals for processing artifacts of culture get short-circuited. We have one quote — “opera singers just can’t kid themselves properly […] they can never let their voices go” — which is so brilliantly intractable that it may as well have come from Warhol. What makes Music to Suffer By so alien is that we’re info-starved into listening to the document itself, and even when we know Leona Anderson as well as we can from the comfort of our homes, our questions still aren’t answered. Damn straight the reissue’s necessary, if not just to protract one of music history’s shrugged-off footnotes, but to reinvigorate avuncular dinnertime pranks the nation over. Take your pick.

DeLorean

There’s a lot of good music out there, and it’s not all being released this year. With DeLorean, we aim to rediscover overlooked artists and genres, to listen to music historically and contextually, to underscore the fluidity of music. While we will cover reissues here, our focus will be on music that’s not being pushed by a PR firm.

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