Ken Pomeroy took her sweet time following up her 2021 debut Christmas Lights in April. Raised in the tornado-stricken city of Moore in central Oklahoma, the Cherokee artist hustled to finish the tracks ‘Pareidolia’ and ‘Cicadas’ after sending in the raw demos to Sterlin Harjo, who used the songs in ‘Elora’s Dad’ the penultimate episode of Reservation Dogs which aired in September of 2023.
Those songs were released as singles by popular demand and Pomeroy used them as a springboard into a still burgeoning screen career. Together with Wilderado and James McAlister she recorded a cover of the Richard and Linda Thompson song ‘Wall of Death’ for the Twisters soundtrack, making a brief appearance mid-song within the film. And she now plays the recurring role of Pearl Washberg in Harjo’s latest project The Lowdown which has been renewed by FX for a second season.
In the meantime she headlined WoodyFest in the folk hero Woody Guthrie’s hometown of Okemah then soon after signed to Rounder Records. When her second full-length Cruel Joke finally arrived last year it established her as one of our most compelling young folk artists. Laying down some evocative fare as she trammelled the margins while making extended metaphors out of everything from wild canines to rodeo clowns to wolves in sheep’s clothing, the delivery on Cruel Joke was often warm and homespun or hand-me-down in a way both fond and solacing.
Yet at its best like on ‘Coyote’ – especially on a woodsy and spare field recording of that song for the roving video channel Western AF – there is something more stark and solitary about Ken Pomeroy’s music, which marries vintage folk and Americana stylings with the red dirt of her native soil and can sound hard yet spectral and awestruck like a good Denis Johnson story.
Pomeroy has opted to follow Cruel Joke with an extended play of cover songs that expound her interests and seem to really home in on her various strengths. Tonight’s News opens with a fine cover of the Gillian Welch song ‘Look at Miss Ohio’, about a woman who wants to do right ‘but not right now’ while the refrain ‘oh me, oh my oh’ plays off ‘Jambalaya (On the Bayou)’ the classic Hank Williams stew.
Welch has always had a penchant for lonesome character studies but she sought to make her album Soul Journey more sunny and upbeat. Still with its plodding and shiftless pace and quavering use of focalisation there is a real sense of waywardness and indeterminacy to ‘Miss Ohio’, whose title character keeps running around with her ragtop down in an apparent flouting of societal convention but makes one last bootless promise to ‘straighten it out somehow’.
As one contributor to the lyric site Genius half notes, the sentiment of ‘Miss Ohio’ stretches from the Confessions of Saint Augustine (‘Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet’) to ‘Can’t Tell Me Nothing’ by Kanye West (‘I had a dream I could buy my way to heaven / When I woke, I spent that on a necklace’). In her rendition of the song, Pomeroy sings with a felty softness that seems to entail a greater sympathy for this ‘Miss Ohio’, cosseting her figure while still making her sound wayward and defiant and forlorn. For its mellow but wilting country blues character Pomeroy’s version of ‘Miss Ohio’ reminds me of ‘Dead Flowers’ by The Rolling Stones.
The next track shifts from local titter or gossip to matters of greater social resonance though it still concerns in a certain sense society’s discards or outcasts or black sheep. ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)’ was penned by Woody Guthrie in 1948 following a plane crash in Fresno County, California which killed all 32 people on board. 28 of the dead were Mexican citizens who were being deported on the plane – chartered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service – upon the expiration of their bracero contracts or as undocumented farm workers.
Guthrie was struck that early reports identified only the flight crew and security guard by name as victims of the crash, while referring to the 28 dead Mexicans merely as ‘deportees’. He wrote a poem on the subject soon after the fatal crash, assigning symbolic names to the deceased. But it took a decade for the poem to become a protest anthem, with a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman setting the words to musical accompaniment before Pete Seeger popularised ‘Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)’, a song that would subsequently be performed by everyone from The Kingston Trio, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez to Dolly Parton, The Highwaymen and Bruce Springsteen.
The relevance of ‘Deportee’ today could hardly be more pronounced and there has therefore been a run on interpretations of the song, with the last year alone bringing forth renditions by Joe Ely and Ryan Bingham, Eilen Jewell, The Klezmatics and Sofia Rei, Margo Price together with Joan Baez and Memphis Mariachi plus most recently the duo of Mason Via and Lucinda Williams.
Pomeroy’s admiration for Guthrie stretches back to the eighth grade, when she wrote a nine-minute song about the artist and performed it in Washington, DC as part of a national history contest. So there is a sense of homage beyond her simply getting in on the act, though while Guthrie’s opening lines are almost sardonic as he gazes out over a landscape where ‘the peaches are rotting / The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps’ once again Pomeroy in her own take on ‘Deportee’ imbues the song with a tender, crackling warmth.
She personalises its themes and figures in a way that makes the second verse in particular all the more devastating, as the lyrics broach our commonality and interdependence but also the ways in which this gets perverted or neglected or simply goes awry. ‘My father’s own father, he waded that river / They took all the money he made in his life’ she sings with a lilting understanding, ‘My brothers and sisters they work in your orchard / They rode the big truck till they laid down and died’. Some artists add strings and new verses to the song but Pomeroy’s version is plainspoken, bracing and clear.
John Denver might seem like a mainstream or middlebrow choice for a cover project (I’m waiting for somebody to cover the great Jon Daker myself). Yet while his original rendition of ‘This Old Guitar’ with its tight vibrato and cheery vocalisations might sound a bit cloying, Pomeroy’s instead has a lovely flowing or babbling quality that seems to my ears to find a certain kinship between Denver and the minor gratitudes of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.
‘Bound to Rain (Loft Version)’ meanwhile offers a breathily intimate take on a song that appeared last year in The Lowdown. Like the live cut, this take repurposes the twining strings but loses the light slapping drums which carry the standard or original version of the composition. ‘Bound to Rain’ with its swift juxtaposition of brusque images is aptly described as a blend of ‘dark humor and quiet resignation’.
Then we’re right back into cover territory with a winning riff on the Jackson Browne song ‘Late for the Sky’. Red dirt music – which draws its name from the reddened soil of Oklahoma – might seem like a rough compendium of gestures and influences, rooted in folk music but with a bluesy or outlaw spirit and taking in everything from bluegrass, honky-tonk and Western swing to the northern Mexican genres of corrido and ranchera. Oklahoma natives like Woody Guthrie and Bob Childers or outlaw country figures from Merle Haggard to Waylon Jennings have been regarded as pioneers, but what perhaps defines red dirt music most of all is the way that it straddles or riles these various manners and forms with a certain angst and a penchant for narrative storytelling or bold imagery.
Ken Pomeroy’s rendition of ‘Late for the Sky’ has a real indie vibe that summons the rawness of Elliott Smith or say Waxahatchee on her debut album American Weekend rather than the seventies soft rock which was Browne’s custom. The song concerns a pair of lovers grasped and stranded in desperate isolation at the tail end of their relationship, all of their words now spoken yet ‘still we continued on through the night / Tracing our steps from the beginning / Until they vanished into the air / Trying to understand how our lives had led us there’. Shorn of physical touch, in this moment of anguish all their relationship is reduced to a shared charade or to wishful thinking.
This lid-rippled take on ‘Late for the Sky’ shows perhaps best of all the songs on Tonight’s News the artist’s capacity for inhabiting a piece of music. She sings with a huskier and raspier tone, then really stretches out the word and the sentiment of being awake and ‘alone’ before loosing all tethers by the last turn of the chorus, bruising and piercing the blackening aether.
Finally she closes Tonight’s News with an interpretation of ‘Sentimental Lady’ the Bob Welch signature. A silky-smooth romance written for his first wife, ‘Sentimental Lady’ was recorded first by Fleetwood Mac though the best-known version of the song is from Welch’s solo album French Kiss in 1977, whose jangling and twinkling guitars were layered and then manipulated by Lindsey Buckingham to resemble a music box or harpsichord.
Sometimes regarded as an example of yacht rock for its schmaltz or velvety softness (though the song has little to do with soul or R&B and is as much a pastiche of the baroque), here Pomeroy with her formidable partner Dakota McDaniel on the guitar swaps out in stirring fashion the elevator pitches and spritzer bubbles or sparkling propulsion of Welch’s version for a swaying country tread. It sounds like a different piece entirely, their first verse in particular revealing the underlying songwriting as worried and earthy before they enter into that gentle chorus and drift on a breeze of their own making.
