Out of everyone who’s passed through the Nashville record industry in one form or another, it’s Christine Kittrell I wonder about. She cut some sides for Republic; she had a nice voice. She seemed like she might be going somewhere.
Did she change her mind? What happened?
Shit, I’m going to quit my job and become a professional psychic, because, seriously, as much as I hate to say I told you so, I told you so.
Let us go back in time to February of this year in which I said the following:
If a fetus is a person, a legal person with a right to life, how can that NOT happen? The police will have to investigate every miscarriage to see if it was just “natural,” whatever that means, or if the woman did something, even inadvertently, that caused it.
Via Punkass Mark over at Punkass Blog I bring you Christine Hutchison–a woman being brought up on charges because she failed to report her miscarriage. As Mark says:
So what we’re left with is a woman who accidentally lost her child being brought up on charges because she didn’t tell Poppa Police or Daddy Doctor that her baby box broke. Apparently, all dudes, including those who didn’t have anything to do with getting the woman pregnant, have a right to full status reports on her ladyparts once any sperm’s gotten up in there.
Maybe the responsible thing to do would be to report the accident, but the only reason you’d try to criminalize the failure to do so would be to remind women that their rights are subordinate to their fetus (even if it’s dead) and the Male Right to Know.
Y’all, let me reiterate: this poor woman miscarried and is being charged with failure to report the death of a child. We all (women who are sexually active) will miscarry at some point in our lives. Most of us won’t even know we’re pregnant. We’ll just flush that “baby” down the toilet or set it out in the morning trash with the tampon or pad it’s collected on. You think keeping your “baby” in the freezer because you’re too depressed to deal with your loss is abhorrent, it’s got nothing on the disposal of a “baby” in the trash or down the toilet.
This is disgusting, charging a woman who has suffered a tragedy that she is obviously still grieving from, with a crime. Tell me, anti-abortionists, is this the world you have in mind? Where every sexually active woman is a potential criminal and our inability to carry a pregnancy to term indicative of a crime being committed?
I told you before and I’ll say it again, the war on abortion unjustly affects women who miscarry.
As I’ve said about a million times before, if you create a system in which one group’s needs must alway be deferred until another group has its needs met, you can’t really say that the first group is fully human/full participants in society. Punkass Mark also brings us the story of the story of a man in Arizona who received 16 years for killing a woman and 20 years for killing her fetus.
That’s right. It’s more wrong to kill a fetus than the woman who’s carrying it.
America, what do you make of that?
Hah, y’all, sincerely. Tiny Cat Pants is surely the place for reviews of music everyone else has heard before. I can’t help it, though, you know. I hear something and it moves me and I want you to hear it, too.
So, anyway, yes, Koko Taylor has the kind of voice that, if she were to lean out her back door in Chicago and holler, “Aunt B., dinner’s ready.” I would have heard her clear out to Coal City. It’s got a carrying rumble like distant thunder. And it’s got the promise of power behind it, so I would have damn straight stopped what I was doing and hightailed it north to eat.
In this song, the thing I like about her delivery is how at ease her delivery is. Listen to the way that the saxophone is keeping the base line moving ingeniously. Someone who knows more about music could explain how this works, but if I had to make my guess, I’d say that it seems like the song is based in four beats, but the sax part is taking place over six beats. So, every twelve beats, you have the sax part and the rest of the song resolving together, but for two repetitions of the sax part, you cannot help but pay attention to it. It seems out of sync. Do those first two bop ba notes start the phrase or finish it off?
And once you’ve asked that question, part of you is hurrying ahead to hear it again, just so you can make up your mind.
The sax is fairly smooth and the guitar is in sharp contrast to that. The guitar plinks in where necessary, like a sharp needle sewing together the insistant urge of the saxophone with Taylor’s laid-back delivery.
Ha, I know nothing about Taylor’s voice sounds laid back when you first hear it. But that’s why it behooves you to listen carefully to how she’s singing this song. When she hits “call” in “They call me the voodoo woman,” she delivers it like she’s got some gravel in her voice. But listen to the words around that, when a lesser singer might also be tempted to growl at the end of a phrase, too, or to hit “all” with all she’s got, Taylor doesn’t.
She’s not trying too hard. She’s just showing you all the things she can do with her voice. Words end before or after beats. Their delivery is based more on the poetry of the lyrics than on the demands of the melody.
And doesn’t it make you want to dance? To me, the way those three lines weave around each other is almost irresistable. You’ve got the repetative saxophone, which to me, suggests a way to move your feet–something simple that you can do without thinking too carefully about it and something that moves you close to someone else. The guitar seems like an invitation to throw a hip out here or a head toss there. And Taylor’s voice… well, doesn’t that make you want to just grab a hold of the person dancing across from you and make her or him all kinds of promises about just how powerful you are?
Tiny Cat Pants 