Photograph by Kevin A. Roberts
"My whole home entertainment system is centered around the boombox,” says Jennifer McDaniel. “It’s got a microphone in it. It has a mixer. I use it for my tape sampling onstage. And I just have a bunch of cassettes. I have a record player, but not a CD player. I have a cassette player in my car. I have my Walkmans…”
McDaniel, who performs under the moniker Black James, once shared standard bills alongside Americana acts. Now, armed with a variety of electronics for both recording and live use, she’s flipped dramatically into a sound that’s almost indescribable, with beats and loops that veer into hip-hop territory. It’s a direction that now has her sharing bills with noise bands, rap groups, and other eclectic solo acts. Hip-hop groups were among the first to take notice of the new sound, with Damon Davis of The FarFetched Collective becoming a primary mentor and cheerleader.
Before, she says, “I was doing one-man banjo shows. I was still using effects on my vocals and banjos and stuff. But I wanted to do more. I wanted the audience more involved, to do dancier stuff. I made that 'Happy Birthday Little Jesus,' song for Pancake Productions, for the Bert Dax Christmas thing. Somehow, the guys from FarFetched heard that, guys like 18andCounting heard it. And all of a sudden, people are saying ‘Let’s do some stuff.’”
She arrived in St. Louis from her native Knoxville, Tenn., about 10 years ago; she also spent a lost year in Pensacola, Fla., and did a short stint in Iowa, where she found tremendous opportunity where none seemed to exist. That period resulted in the cassette release im A mirAcle.
“I wanted to go into the electronic version of Black James,” she says. “I was living in Iowa for half a year, in a town of 500 people, out in a cornfield. It was an island in the middle of nowhere: no stores, an hour away from Council Bluffs or Omaha. I had an insane amount of time away to do nothing. I felt like I should use the time while I had it… So I just focused on the album and made it happen.”
The tape is a remarkable blend of influences, with a sound self-described as “underwater, experimental, mystical, electronic, hillbilly, banjo, boombox, country, goth.” If that seems like a grandiose or flippant description, it’s neither. Released this past Halloween, the tape reflects each of those elements; it’s an album that really needs to be played in the traditional style of cassettes, each side a self-contained piece of work.
After her radical shift played out in recording, the next step was taking the act live, into new spaces. And that, too, came with a bit of curiosity.
“I had friends in St. Louis who wanted to book me for shows,” she remembers. “But I just had the record out and didn’t know how to play it live. I kind of had to reverse-engineer everything, putting all the songs into my machines to play it live. I didn’t want to just play MP3s like rappers do; that annoys me. I had to figure out how to play it, and all the samples. I have a nice machine; it does a lot of the work for me. But I still had to memorize where all the buttons are. I can mess up during a show. If I activate a wrong sample, I’ve made a remix.”
With buttons mastered and her trademark black hat pulled low, Black James has found her live mojo in the months since that initial trepidation. From clubs to coffeehouses to basements, she’s found a home—multiple homes, really—with multiple bands dying to share a bill.
There’s another cassette in the works, too, a Tejano-inspired, Spanish-language release that she assumes will result in an EP, set for release on Cinco de Mayo. And yeah, it’s going to be on cassette, a decision that had multiple influences, none greater than her boombox.
“To me, it makes the most sense. It’s kind of how my world works,” she says. “People recently think it’s a hipster move, but [cassettes are] cheap to make. I can buy a hundred tapes online. I make them and the quality’s OK; I try to get it as good as I can. It shouldn’t seem kitschy, and with the Internet, you can provide download codes. But a physical copy’s best.”
Pick up im A mirAcle at Apop Records, 2831 Cherokee, or listen to it and other Black James tracks at soundcloud.com/blackjamesmusic.
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