The Crowned Eagle Ring

Charlie Poole wasn't a particularly brilliant banjo player (although his later three-finger-style picking would set the table for the advent of bluegrass banjo a couple of decades after his death), and he wasn't the world's greatest vocalist either, but he had a certain devil-may-care charisma that made him a superstar in the string band era of the 1920s. Poole's greatest talent – aside from an ability to go on long drinking sprees and to manage to be at the center of things even in his absence – was in his song adaptations, which drew from sources outside the standard Appalachian fiddle tunes and reels, including pop, ragtime, and blues. This extensive 96-track, four-disc box set from Britain's JSP Records collects the lion's share of his recordings on Columbia, Poole's label from 1925 until his death in 1931 at the age of 39. Also included are a handful of cuts Poole made under the table for Paramount (where his North Carolina Ramblers were called the Highlanders) and Brunswick (which saw the band disguised as the Allegheny Highlanders).

In the spring of 2021, Ring van Möbius was approached by performer and choreographer Harald Beharie to write the music for his next solo performance. This honorable task started a collaborative process involving various artists with different artistic expressions, culminating in January 2022 with the premiere of “Batty Bwoy” in Dansens Hus in Oslo, Norway. The project was soon nominated for the Norwegian Critics Association Prize 2022.

The album takes the listener on a guided tour of the rings of the city serving as the setting for the story of the Indigo Child. As is evident by the track titles, each ring houses an increasingly well-off subculture with the center being the tower of the ruler. While the lyrics do an excellent job of highlighting the societal issues of each area (more on this later), the music doesn’t always follow suit. The album has a very unified musical theme, which is almost synth-rock and disco. While it helps the album have a more cohesive feel, it doesn’t necessarily always turn out well. For this reviewer, possibly the most glaring examples of this problem lie in “Ring 4 – Patrol” and “Ring 2 – Nature.” The former discusses the faction of the society used to enforce oppression on the population and the power-hungry officers who abuse their privileges, but having Casey nearly scream about police abuse over a funky beat doesn’t quite sound right. The latter similarly did not seem to fit with the theme of the lyrics (on top of the fact that I couldn’t actually understand the society within “Ring 2” and admittedly need to re-listen to it).