Jackson C. Frank :: Jackson C. Frank

In 1965, in a studio on New Bond Street, Jackson C. Frank would not sing until screens had been put up around him.

Paul Simon was producing. Art Garfunkel, by most accounts, was making the tea. Al Stewart had come in to add a second guitar to one song. Frank was twenty-two, lately arrived from upstate New York with an insurance settlement and a girlfriend. He was so afraid of being looked at that the album was made from inside that enclosure, in under three hours as he later told it.

What came out of it is guitar and voice and very little else. The fingerpicking keeps moving underneath, steady as someone walking, and the tenor rides a little above it, lighter than the material would lead you to expect. Every song on the album was sung to people he had arranged not to see.

The back of the sleeve carries the arrangement onto paper. Frank's own note disowns the songs before anyone has heard them. They live too close to the shadowed part of his mind, he writes, to be counted among his friends. Then he says what success would look like: if a song brings back something from the street you have just walked down, "you and I have met once more." Underneath, a writer signing himself C.G.J. goes through the ten tracks and explains each one, the way someone might read a friend's letter aloud at the breakfast table, pausing to say what was really meant.

Since then the record has acquired a third reader, and it has done most of the talking. There was the fire at Cleveland Hill Elementary in 1954, which killed fifteen children and left the eleven-year-old Frank badly burned, and the settlement that eventually paid his way to England. After that came the breakdowns and the hospitals, the years on the streets of New York, the pellet that took the sight of one eye, and his death in 1999. Played backwards from there, every song turns into testimony, and the album has one meaning only. Listen instead to who the songs are addressed to, and the room fills up with other people.

"Blues Run the Game" opens with a plan made out loud to a companion, a list of boats and countries and drinks, each departure bringing him back to where he started. It has since been asked to stand for the whole of Frank's life, a part it plays convincingly and never auditioned for. "Don't Look Back" speaks to a movement. It names Medgar Evers, shot in Mississippi in 1963, and calls up the bells of Selma. As a topical song in the Broadside manner it is a little thin, but it shows that the young man behind the screens was still reading the news from home. "Kimbie" borrows its voice from the Appalachian tradition, from a song long associated with Bascom Lamar Lunsford. On "Yellow Walls" Stewart's guitar comes in behind Frank's, and for three minutes there is someone else audible inside the enclosure.

Every song on the album was sung to people he had arranged not to see.

Side one ends with "Here Come the Blues," which answers the opener from the other direction. There Frank was forever packing to leave; here he stays put and the blues come to him. He remembered it plainly, as an attempt to write a blues, and he was pleased with the chord changes. It is worth keeping that craftsman's satisfaction in the ear alongside everything else.

"Milk and Honey" opens side two with a mistake. Frank meant to sing four seasons and sang three, and nobody went back for the fourth. Of all the songs this one is the most like a letter, with a word slipping and the envelope sealed anyway. "My Name Is Carnival" introduces itself, as its title promises, and lends its voice to the travelling show. "Dialogue (I Want to Be Alone)" carries its contradiction in its double title, a conversation whose only stated wish is to be over. C.G.J. hears the solitude as a choice that makes generosity possible. Decades later Frank called it his first attempt at a truly serious song, and admitted it now struck him as cabaret. The sleeve warns against taking "Just Like Anything" for a children's song. Frank's later verdict was that it was nonsense, put in for comic relief, and after "Dialogue" the side is glad of it.

"You Never Wanted Me" closes the record with the plainest statement on it, the end of a relationship said outright. Heard in order, the album moves from a journey proposed to a companion to an accusation of having been refused. What happens in between takes place among people, in rooms and on roads and at a fairground. None of the ten songs mentions the fire.

On the sleeve Frank asked his listeners to find something of their own street in what he sang, which leaves them a share of the songs. Sixty-odd years on we are on the far side of the screens, where he wanted us. The voice on the record goes on joking, inviting, withdrawing, complaining, and asking to be left alone, and it is still talking to someone.

"You Never Wanted Me" closes the record with the plainest statement on it, the end of a relationship said outright. Heard in order, the album moves from a journey proposed to a companion to an accusation of having been refused. What happens in between takes place among people, in rooms and on roads and at a fairground. None of the ten songs mentions the fire.

On the sleeve Frank asked his listeners to find something of their own street in what he sang, which leaves them a share of the songs. Sixty-odd years on we are on the far side of the screens, where he wanted us. The voice on the record goes on joking, inviting, withdrawing, complaining, and asking to be left alone, and it is still talking to someone.