Video of the Day: Ponyboy
Ponyboy in performance — country soul from New York that understands where it's coming from and where it might go.
Ponyboy is a New York-based project that sits at the intersection of country soul, Americana, and the kind of songwriting that takes the emotional specificity of the folk tradition seriously while not being historically bound to it.
The video of the day selection for December 30, 2011 — the last video of the day post of the year — is from a Ponyboy performance that captures what the project does well: the directness of the vocal, the arrangement that serves the song, the particular feeling of a performance where the people involved are genuinely present.
Country soul in New York
The country soul tradition is a real thing and an underappreciated one. The synthesis of country's melodic directness and structural clarity with soul music's approach to vocal expression and rhythm produced artists like Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham, and the Muscle Shoals session musicians, and records like Aretha Franklin's country covers, which reveal how much the two traditions have in common at the root.
Ponyboy approaches this synthesis from the New York side. The country influence is absorbed rather than performed. The result is music that doesn't announce its influences but carries them in its structure and its approach to melody.
What the performance shows
The Video of the Day entries at this site try to select performances that justify the attention required to watch them. The Ponyboy performance does what good performances do: it makes the case for the music directly, without mediation.
The song carries. The delivery is committed. The arrangement leaves enough room for the performance to happen rather than surrounding it with production that would protect the audience from the music.
This is the last video of the day post for 2011. The year had good music in it. This feels like the right note to end on.
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