More than a rhymin’ Simon-style lark, Cuyama Mama is a nom de plume based on a true story, if with poetic liberties taken. Said “mama” is Jan Smith, a gifted country-folk singer-songwriter based in Cuyama, in the far corner of Santa Barbara County, for many years. And her band Cuyama Mama & the Hot Flashes is one of the most original and ear-grabbing members of the rich and loamy unplugged folk ‘n’ country scene in the region.
For evidence of this claim, proceed directly to the band’s impressive debut album Betty Arlene and/or catch one of their live shows around town — including a higher profile show at SOhO this Sunday. Betty Arlene is an album of strong and sometimes lo-fi character, built around a centering character, a tough, hardscrabble, and resilient woman in the title’s spotlight.
This may qualify as a concept album of sorts, done up in a loose and roots-hugging fashion: Cuyama style? Smith explains that she launched into her Betty Arlene song cycle casually, but when her friend and sometimes creative collaborator artist Betty Seaman recognized the character’s similarity to her own life path, Smith dove into the Betty cycle with all due fervor.
We first meet our protagonist with the opening track “betty,” as we also musically meet the fine and flexible bandmates in the Hot Flashes — bassist Tristan Cole-Falek, Santa Barbara’s cardboard box percussion master Jody Eulitz, and multi-instrument man Josh Jenkins on mandolin, dobro, and fiddle. Smith herself supplies the anchoring force of her sure and nuanced storytelling voice as singer-songwriter, with guitar and banjo in tow. The band was born in 2014 and lives, roughly speaking, on the outskirts of the Americana world.
As part of the 12-song design of the sequence, full-bodied songs are freely interspersed with short woodsy and chant-like tracks — sometimes featuring the Smith-led and Cuyama-based Muddy Daughters vocal project. The first sounds we hear on the album are softly chirping birds, a train whistle, a child’s running feet, and a creaking screen door, as if welcoming us into the music parlor where songs and stories are about to unfold. In the infectious and tale-driven opener, we quickly learn about the album’s hero and her rogue’s tale: “Betty didn’t have a dollar in her pocket/didn’t have a dollar but she didn’t let that stop her.”
Betty’s saga, involving riding rails, getting in and out of trouble, and intersecting fates with a man, Tautacho, continues in songs such as “red truck” and “fig mountain”— a tip of the hat to our county’s beloved Figueroa Mountain (“when you need to hear a story you know where to go/way up on the mountain called the Figueroa”).
“dreamboat” is a fetching ballad, playing up the idea of the title as a vessel of dream of desires and perhaps creative expressions (“I play my fiddle to the ocean, and on the waves of music there I roam/where do you roam … ”). On the Southern grit of two other Betty songs — “the well” and “ofelia’s song” — Jenkins supplies some tasty swamp sauce on dobro. (Jenkins can also be heard as one of the many of folk musicians in the Santa Barbara Folk Orchestra.)
“moonlight” heads off in its own direction, as an a cappella canon for multiple female voices, with a nocturnal bed of cricket song and an occasional owl’s hoot in the background, and a simple echoing lyric: “Just in case you’re wondering/duct tape cardboard and a length of string/moonlight and remembering, Betty’s barn has everything.”
The album goes to bed with another earworm-in-training, the lilting “goodnight betty.” She still has “trouble to the left of me and trouble to the right,” and in the first line she explains, “got me a daughter and she rides the rails/got me a son and he’s a teller of tales/got me a handsome man and I can’t afford his bail.” But by song’s end, after wending through a hypnotic, harmonized wordless melodic fragment and fiddle riff caulking, there is resolution in sight: “I’ve got friends to the left of me and friends to the right/I got clear road up ahead of me, I got sweet dreams in the night.”
Betty Arlene qualifies as a genuinely locavore music project of a quality and distinctive twang deserving to be heard far beyond the 805. We heard it here first.
To hear and purchase Betty Arlene, Bandcamp link here. CMHF website here.
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