When the blues took the backroads
Like a wind through a broken window, the flute flutters; just below, the engine starts, steady, dusty, boiling. Going Up the Country starts with just movement, no warnings. Smells like sweat on denim and motion it suggests. Though light, Alan Wilson’s falsetto settles with the weight of a thousand road trips, the kind where the sky goes forever and all the radio has is your own heart. Like an ancient pickup door slamming shut, the rhythm catches into place.
Wilson wasn’t a man of thunder. He got lost often, spoke through trees, and walked softly. He sought solace in backwoods walks and ancient blues music. The melody here derives from Henry Thomas, a Texan who 1920s recording on a wooden flute. Wilson raised it without irony, not over polishing it. He let it breathe, let it remain rusty. In doing so, he bridged front porch blues with backseat freedom.
The song floated across the summer of ’68 like a radio signal bouncing off every dry hill from San Francisco to Woodstock. Draft dodgers interpreted it as a hymn. Children at festivals adopted it as a mantra. It said everything without yelling. No towering flags, no huge slogans. Just a little yearning to move, to flee, to shake the dust off and vanish. The timing was not accidental; the roads felt like veins carrying blood away from the injury and the nation was burning.
Some consider it the unofficial anthem of 1969’s Woodstock gathering.
(Robin Lloyd, KNKX, 2012)
Canned Heat’s life was one of disorder. Their performances were sweat lodges. Wilson flew and Bob Hite growled. They pulled the blues across the desert with the amp still humming rather than dressing it up. Their performances were loose, frayed, wire. This track, however, is their most subdued fire. It doesn’t kick. It goes. Like the recollection of motion conveyed from hand to hands, it rolls like a wheel remembering wagon routes.
Still today it appears in open highways, movies, and commercials. Its strength rests in its light steps and how quickly it plants its flag in the stomach. It doesn’t need excitement or reverb. It offers the sound of America departing toward a calm, verdant, perhaps better destination. It unfolds like someone packing a bag silently, glancing at the map, then going off into the morning.
