Last Of The Songs the Panther Burns Taught Us

It's almost a shame to separate these songs by genre, because part of the appeal of Panther Burns records is that Tav Falco's aesthetic includes music from around the world and throughout the 20th Century.

The first album alone included samba, country and rockabilly songs, and blues ranging from W.C. Handy to R.L. Burnside.  I can't forget Leadbelly's Bourgeois Blues (which Tav Falco first performed on a Memphis stage while destroying a guitar with a chainsaw).  

On my favorite Panther Burns album, The World We Knew, Tav Falco applies his unique vocal stylings to the title track (made famous by Frank Sinatra). He sings off key and off the beat on Pass The Hatchet and She's A Bad Motorcycle.  The mercurial Alex Chilton sounds like the happiest man alive shouting along with Do The Robot.  It's impossible to listen and be unaffected by Tav Falco's enthusiasm and his eclectic musical vision.

This last batch is a potluck of songs that can't be pigeonholed as blues, rockabilly, or R & B. It is the collection most representative of the Panther Burns' wide range of influences, in that French garage rockers The Dum Dum Boys sit alongside the jazz of Jimmy Witherspoon and the Merseybeat of The Honeycombs. Tav is equally conversant with Texas swing, Hill Country fife and drum, and Argentinian tango.

Perhaps the most significant figures here are Ray Charles (who erased the artificial boundaries between country and blues music), and Memphis musicians Sid Selvidge and Jim Dickinson (who were instrumental in Alex Chilton's solo career, and whose group Mudboy And The Neutrons was a predecessor to the blues-based performance art of the Panther Burns).