“Voice of the Bayou” (1963) – Anita Carter * Written by Robert L. (Bob) Johnson * Produced by Shelby Singleton * LP: Anita Carter Sings Folk Songs Old and New * Label: Mercury
Anita Carter, who sang with the Carter Sisters and Mother Maybelle, released this folk album, which is haunted by both heaven and hell, in December 1962. In the grooves, her voice carries on echoey winds, and on the cover, she looks like Loretta Lynn’s sister in the middle of her guitar lesson. The record’s especially notable for containing the first recorded version of her actual sister June’s “Ring of Fire,” listed on the album as “Love’s Ring of Fire.” (More on this in a future post.)
Among the album’s most haunting tracks (which is saying something, seeing that it closes with Danny Dill’s “Satan’s Child”) is a voodoo number called “Voice of the Bayou.” Written by Bob “Bobby Region” Johnson, a banjo player for the Lonesome Drifters, Bill Monroe and Norman Blake (that nickname of his is a trad folk accolade), the song tells of a “voodoo queen” who’s “waitin’ all alone… on her throne” to claim Anita’s man. Anita, though, will be making her own doll to stick “full of pins,” and “when the moon is dark as blood [the voodoo queen’s] troubles will begin.
Among the song’s enchantments is, in fact, a chant that Carter sings throughout. Lyric references spell it out as “um-a-pa palesu-va.” Bob Johnson is no longer with us, but I’m guessing that if he were asked about it, he would say he was merely trying to approximate a regional sounding incantation. I found assertions elsewhere on the Internet that Anita is singing ancient Hebrew words (“uma-pavel-azamah,” or, perhaps, “glory of the humble flame God has helped”).
Even in a Bible belt context, this feels like a stretch for a story about a voodoo fight. A more feasible translation, considering that Anita is singing recognizable French words and pronunciation in a Creole setting, is “où ne m’a pas parlé, je vas,” which means “where no one has spoken to me, I go.” But I’m still betting that Johnson just concocted something.
Producer Shelby Singleton, incidentally, must have given this track some local juju of his own, having grown up in Shreveport.