The big stories are at the center. Meet Granddaddy Dick whose tales always seemed to tell more -- “They had a way of setting you to thinking. You find yourself inside the story, then the next thing you know you're adding stuff till it becomes real, and takes off down the road on its own, and you have to run to catch up or get left behind.” Let him tell you about “Moxley and Irene,” who’ve been off their swamp island but once and live on snakes, snapping turtle, possum and moonshine whiskey. Irene was a decent witch, but when she found that picture of an old woman in his pocket she threw it down and broke it. She’d never seen a mirror before.

From the front seat of the family car, watch Uncle “Jasper Joyce” hold services in a revival tent. Whitehead’s language soars with the St. Vitus dancers writhing to the tune of glossolalia -- “swoopers become hoppers,” and finally the snakes themselves are pulled out, rattlers and moccasins, and handled.

“The Coal Miner” is divided into two sections. In one, a hardscrabble man leaves us with his dream of finishing first or second in some kind of contest in his first week of vacation so he might take the family off to Panama City for his dream vacation the last week. Part two begins in the midst of a rocking chair contest, days measured by noon sirens, the Coal Miner following the “slow gravitational pull of his life.” Whitehead leaves a page turn in -- insistent anti-polish? Or his own rocking chair? Coal Miner’s children pop the wash cloth on his face and counsel, “Stay awake, Daddy.” The over-the-top ending is Whitehead’s only attempt at Southern Gothic.

Ron Whitehead is best known for his rants, and he gives us all the classics: “GIMME BACK MY WIG: The Hound Dog Taylor Blues,” “Tapping My Own Phone,” “The Shithouse Manifesto,” “San Francisco, May 1993” (a paean to Ferlinghetti), "Asheville" (which bridges Ginsberg's death and a generation of poetry slammers), and most especially the narrative rant of “MUSIC SAVED MY LIFE and JESUS SAVED MY SOUL.” But the stormy drang of it doesn’t translate as well to CD -- you miss the vision of Bone Man tension, and there’s only so much up on the CD range.

It’s the hilarity and rawboned realism of “Mama” as she takes the children out to shoot a Christmas tree that’s the true story of this CD’s power, or the beautiful litany cum echo of the simple “How Many More Times” that’ll stop you in your tracks. Ron leans into his angelic countertenor at times, and in “The Ending of Time” we find him fronting The Black Pig Liberation Front. There are a ton of tiny gems and surprises: a hallucinogenic trip with Burroughs (“Calling the Toads”), the hypermelodic “ah” in Buddha in the ethereal Louisville of “Listen.”

Bob Holman

For more about Ron Whitehead's work & how to find it, go on to Paul McDonald's reviews of Tapping My Own Phone and his book, The Beaver Dam Rocking Chair Marathon.