Milton Chesley Carroll
It’ll All Come Down In Time
1972
RCA

The rains have swollen the stream; brown water carries large sticks and branches. I watch a hat swish by. Leaves too and clumps of hay. The hat, of the kind given away to farmers, is red and white with a dark peak. A logo of some description on the front.

That’s what happens this time of year. Stuff goes by. Times gets quicker. Buds, lambs, new leaves, saplings. Things seem to converge. Come together in unexpected ways.

A few weeks ago my friend Andrew dropped in a stack of records. Might be something you like, he said. And there was – particularly this track by Milton Chesley Carroll. I knew Carroll’s name; at some point I’d owned a single he made called Hippie From Mississippi, a southern take on Merle Haggard’s Okie From Muskogee. I called my friend Tony in America to ask him about the album and before I could say anything he said, have you ever come across this record by Milton Chesley Carroll? So we talked for a while about spring and how things converge and how, on opposite sides of the world, we’d both found the same record. And then he told me about the stream outside his house and how it was swollen from the spring rains.

As Milton Chesley Carroll says: It’ll all come down in time. Streams, lambs, new buds, clumps of hay, floating hats and forgotten records.
Jeb Loy Nichols.
Jeb’s Jukebox archive.