Author: T. Edward & Prince Asbo

Perhaps her parents’ literary joke was just too tempting for the Fates, but in christening their daughter Francis, thereby making her full name a near homophone of the title character in a particularly tragic Ernest Hemingway short story, they effectively cursed her short, unhappy life. Nonetheless, Francis McCombe’s music remains ripe for discovery by the greater public, but not before her gossamer legacy, a trove of rough demos, has been sifted through, thoroughly re-mixed, and tenderly edited.

Her parents, Glenn and Marta McCombe, were both Anthropology professors at North Carolina State, who also happened to be folk musicians with a penchant for over-indulgence in whiskey and marijuana. They sang Bolivian Folk Songs to her while she was in the crib.  “Puedes Ser Qualquier Cosa” (You Can Be Anything), an inspirational tune about a coffee farmer who longed for life as a sailor even though he lived in a land locked country, was a particular favorite. Much later she would sing it in public, at parties or guitar pulls, giving her an air of international intrigue, even thought she had never been father south than Tallahassee.

At least initially, there was a lot of fun around the McCombe’s house, but also, perhaps not coincidentally, a lot of alcoholism. Glenn and Marta hot-housed Francis with what they assumed was a well-rounded education, but in reality left her under-socialized and over-medicated. Her folks split up when she was seventeen, amid bitter recriminations and mutual allegations of domestic violence and substance abuse.  In the divorce settlement, McCombe somehow ended up with her father’s precious 1962 Gibson Hummingbird. She named the guitar ‘Emmylou’ and in all the desperate, tragic times that followed, Francis never allowed anything to come between her and Emmylou; alas, the guitar represented the only part of herself she allowed herself to treasure. And so Emmylou was always polished, always set up properly, always in tune, always kept safe in its hard shell case, and, remarkably, never pawned.

She attended North Carolina State shortly after but soon dropped out, the pull of Nashville, a geographical magnet for the budding musician. McCombe worked a job at Five Points Pizza for a season and did a stint as a bartender Robert’s Western World. She soon took to spiralling in and out of doomed relationships, and then, as she followed her parents footpath, in an out of rehab. She simply could not stay sober, however dire her circumstances became, wracking up two DUIs in one year. Eventually, Musicares refused to offer her a bed at one of the dozen or so clinics within a few hours of Nashville and she resorted to couch surfing. Despite her obvious talent, club owners barred McCombe from their tribute nights on account of her habit of draining all the bottles backstage. She lived like a lost cause.

Francis McCombe had the terrible misfortune to grow up beautiful. Her long, lank dirty blond hair, sun bleached freckles, and eccentric thrift store fashion choices caught the eyes of the men and women all across town. Married to this tragic beauty was a sharp tongue and a contagious laugh (nearly masking her smoker’s cough) that drew in just the wrong sort of co-dependent type looking for someone to ‘complete’ them. Many an East Side musician considered that maybe, just maybe, he was the one who had what it took to capture her and her songs, to arrest her untamed spirit. This proved impossible. Her sad and lonesome eyes entranced dozens, but they all abandoned her. Time spent with Francis McCombe was nothing to write home about, even as it was something to write a song about.   

In fact, the “Carolina Cobra” (a nickname she earned on account of her ability to wrap her lips around a full can of beer, kick her head back, and proceed to empty it in one go) was a prepossessing songwriter, especially considering her tender age, with a knack for lyrical inventiveness and memorable choruses.  However, she often struggled to resolve a story line, so for all their insight and emotion, many remain more impressionistic, narcotic snapshots of relationships than fully realized songs. She was certainly able to bend a few ears at local open mic nights and ‘In The Rounds’ around town. However, McCombe spine curled when it came to ambition, direction, or gumption.

After numerous false starts with countless “producers”, i.e. fellow struggling singer-songwriters with semi-professional rigs in their cramped East Nashville apartments, McCombe had amassed dozens of recordings on a variety of formats (analogue tape, Pro-Tools, Logic, Radar, Garageband, iPhone voice messages—so many thumb drives in her purse) in various stages of completion. Though only a few of her recordings were blessed with truly finished vocals, and several feature scratch takes replete with sheepish apologies and audio verité groans and sighs, it would take a hard-hearted critic to deny that these demos captured something special, however inchoate. Unfortunately, McCombe would usually chain smoke marijuana during her recording sessions, making it difficult for her to retain focus and trying the patience of both musicians and engineers. By the end, she simply exhausted, in one way and another, each of the benefactors who attempted to help her assemble an album in some form.

A chance encounter with the locally infamous Americana scenester Junebug Jonez, who was deep into a warm and merciless heroin abyss, left her strung out within weeks. He also got her pregnant. Unable to get clean herself and sensing that an end was near, Francis set to rescuing as many fellow addicts as she could, lecturing them, pleading with them, citing herself as an example, and even, at great personal peril, flushing one dealer’s considerable stash down the toilet. At least three users credit McCombe with saving their lives. Less than a month after walking out of yet another rehabilitation facility, Francis took herself out of the game by doing two “Gram Bongs” (a shot of tequila followed by an arm full of morphine) within a 12-hour period. That she was now a member of the ’27 Club’ became a talking point, and no one was certain if her death was intentional or not.

For a short time after she died, a few of her local devotees would attempt to sing “Dark Alleys,” McCombe’s most popular song and the only one released in her lifetime*. Performing it around backyard campfires and living rooms, the opening line, “Bang me big hammer like it’s the first day of the war,” always provoked nervous laughter among those gathered.

Her mother, with whom she had remained close throughout all the ups and mostly downs, had her body cremated and scattered over a beach outside Cape Fear, a favorite place from childhood.  

*On the NPR compilation album Folkscene (2015); it actually received a few spins on WMOT, garnering a small cult of admirers.

Not merely painfully soft-spoken, but painfully soft-sung, Jonathan Castain didn’t so much burst on the Americana scene as he murmured quietly into its folky, shell-like ear. Remarkably for a live performer, Castain’s vocals were virtually inaudible when employed in the wrong setting, e.g. a bar, tavern, inn, public house, club, or any place that had a stage and/or served alcohol.  He fared better with small, captured audiences.

Some admirers claimed Castain had a magnetic quality about him. Certainly he was good-looking enough, very tall and thin with flowing, should-length sandy brown hair and piercing, hazel eyes.  And the murmuring thing lent him an air of mystery. But in fact, unbeknownst to his fans, he was literally magnetic. An experimental treatment for chronic iron deficiency during his adolescence left Castain with a permanent five o’clock shadow made of random metal filings attracted to his face and neck. This was all well and good for a folk-singer in his 20s, when such affectations gave him a grizzled, care-worn air, but looked distinctly odd on an 8-year old with buckteeth and a cowlick. It may, however, explain the man’s latter-day vocal indistinction.           

“The Mumbler,” as he was known to more than one bartender in East Nashville, stood out amongst all the hats and beards in that part of town—due in part to his hatlessness, but also because, as a gentleman, he could drink a substantial amount of whiskey and remain relatively coherent, even if you had to stand right next to him, lean in and shush everyone in the room to hear him.

A house concert staple (almost always uninvited) and unallied Folk Alliance mainstay throughout his mid- to late-twenties, Castain also taught at folk school potlucks, where led workshops on his uncanny knack for off-off-rhyme and meter, as witnessed in a touching ode to close friend Cowboy Jack Clement, to whom he was personally unacquainted, called “Me and Jack and His Old, Old Lady.”  

            Ol’ Jack and me wanted to get drunk one night,

But his ol’ lady wouldn’t let him and so we got stoned instead.

            There were parrots talking circles around the moon,

            And we discovered we were through with justice.

Castain regularly haunted the hallowed hallways of Nashville’s Thirty Tigers Records, spreading gentle gloom among the Tigers’ lugubrious in-house management team, its bean-counters in distro, the vengeful legal department, and the 48 or so desperate, over-caffeinated interns. After months of non-stop sotto voce badgering, the company accidentally signed the ever-so-quiet singer during a particularly heavily refreshed impromptu house concert, the location of which remains lost in a fug of inebriation. Perhaps it was a Shoney’s.

Castain was assigned to high-flying A&R representative Angie Bradshaw, as she was on vacation at the time. In a company famous for artists who broke even, Bradshaw had already known no little success having ‘discovered’ at least three performers who had yet to lose Thirty Tigers money, including a Mac Davis lookee-likee.  Alas, Castain was all too quick to second-, third- and even fourth-guess his rep’s decisions, thereby rendering her useless as a champion of his subtle oeuvre.

A week before Thirty Tigers was to release his début, The Wild Wind And The Deaf, Castain went rogue. And probably fugue. He fired Bradshaw by fax, got very drunk indeed, and, in a fit of pique at what he called his “artistic manacling”, defecated profoundly in the front lobby of Thirty Tigers’ office building. Unfortunately, TT’s office building also housed the headquarters of WXNA, the only radio station in the world that might have possibly played his records. 

All signs were pointing to a Wild Wind ‘abort’ when Castain scored a lifeline in the form of a sweet opening gig for The Missing Children and the record was back on. The Children were at the peak of their short-lived fame having just released the notorious album, Have You Seen Us Since We Died? (Bludinstule Records, 2013), that year’s ‘hot biscuit’ for every pasty, lank-haired record store clerk in the continental United States. Castain was one of only twelve acts The Children had met at a recent Folk Alliance event at which they’d mistakenly appeared to whom who they’d promised a support slot. When every one of those other acts proved unavailable, Castain got the job. But it was a job he nearly lost on the tour’s very first night in Nashville after an obscene Cannery Ballroom dressing room incident involving personal lube and the Children’s lead singer’s Adam R. A. Kane’s electric toothbrush. With the mighty weight of Thirty Tigers behind him, everyone was instructed to chalk it up to opening night jitters. He managed to last a few days on the tour before blowing it in Pittsburgh at a party celebrating his first DUI by performing a Mumford and Sons parody that was better than Mumford and Sons. Castain was unceremoniously booted off the tour and retreated to his couch fort in East Nashville. 

Despite the setbacks, it was a hopeful time for Castain, for his almost comically hushed vocalizing seemed to genuinely relax people, if not put them to sleep entirely. Featuring cameo appearances by some of Nashville’s best, cheapest new crop of session players, plus some other friends that would work for food, Castain had been able to put together a satisfactorily workmanlike début. The sounds were solid enough and the lyrics were reasonably well observed, but critics simply weren’t buying the whispered vocals shtick. Of all the harsh reviews, Pitchfork was perhaps the harshest, critic P. ‘Pee’ Donnellson writing that Castain’s singing reminded him of “a blue whale’s death rattle” and prayed that “when his career inevitably fails, he never, under any circumstances, takes a job as a network continuity announcer, carnival barker, or Brian Blessed impersonator.”

To compound Castain’s bad luck, the Wild Wind record release party in was cancelled on the day of its issue due to an unlikely PA snafu at Nashville’s Five Spot. Late that afternoon, during one of the Happy Hour residencies, the Five Spot sound system power overloaded leading to what the Nashville Times described as a “seismic polarity incident” which caused Guru and J Dilla beats to be broadcast at punishing volume. The resultant party left the club packed for the next three weeks. Forced to re-schedule, the hapless Castain pledged to a date two months later, but ended up canceling that show due to a potential scheduling conflict that turned out not to conflict with anybody’s schedule whatsoever.   

With no management, no booking agent, no lawyer, no champion nor even a close personal friend to support it (and with Thirty Tigers just biding its time in the unlikely event that it broke even), Wild Wind finally dropped only to find a permanent home on the shelves of The Groove, Found Object, and Grimey’s New And Preloved Records, as if super-glued to the racks.  A last-gasp Record Store Day ‘hipster bait’ ruse to characterize the Lp as some sort of limited edition lost masterpiece, replete with newly-printed hype stickers pointing out that it sold no copies when issued earlier that year, failed to fool anyone. The entire run of albums were eventually returned to Thirty Tigers, who at least finally broke even by melting and molding the vinyl records into potpourri bowls and selling them at craft fairs.

Within a half a year of what should have been his triumphant début album’s release, Jonathan Castain celebrated his second DUI. But he would celebrate it alone, there would be no party this time and he accepted a gig at Cumberland Heights Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Center. There he found God, just behind the groundskeeper’s shed in front of the compost storage unit.

Clean and sober at last, Castain moved back to Rhode Island, enrolled in a real estate course at Quahog Polytechnic and, less than two years later, was a practicing realtor back on home turf. His firm, Keegan, Kline & Ripley, mostly relegated him to office work, since his on-site sales patter was too faint for anyone standing more than two feet away.