I’m not really a jam band guy. I love the concept of groups picking up where Jerry and crew left off, but not often the execution. The main issue, for me, is the lack of really memorable tunes. The usual formula is strong instrumental prowess, weak songwriting skills. Audiences are fairly undiscriminating, so it’s not like they’re paying much penalty for that deficit.
Fun with logos at the Gathering of the Vibes in Connecticut. (Jim Motavalli photo)
It was interesting to see Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s bassist, dissing jam bands in a recent Rolling Stone interview. He said, basically, that the rhythm sections repeat the same patterns as the soloist goes off into virtuosic flights, which is contrary to the Dead’s spirit of everyone working together—collective improvisation, he called it.
Donna guitarist/songwriter/singer Jeb Puryear in full flight. (Jim Motavalli photo)
That brings me to the most recent Gathering of the Vibes, held local to me in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I’ve been a speaker on the Green Stage for several years, and last weekend not only talked about the wonders of electric cars but introduced my favorite “jam” band, Ithaca, New York’s Donna the Buffalo. I put “jam” in quotes because co-founder (with Jeb Puryear) Tara Nevins objected to the term when I talked to her backstage, and rightly so.
Tara Nevins on fiddle at the Vibes. Her other “axe” is an accordion. (Jim Motavalli photo)
Donna, she says, is rooted in old-timey music, which lacks the soloist concept—that was the bluegrass innovation. (Bill Monroe obviously listened to jazz, the popular music of his day.) Donna isn’t about Puryear shredding on the guitar (or, in Tara’s case, the fiddle and accordion). It’s about furthering the groove!
But despite their slightly off-kilter conception, Donna is a hit with jam band audiences like those at the Vibes. They’ve got deeply felt and rootsy songs, which the purchase of any of the records in their large catalog will prove. And if you didn’t know, the group hosts a series of Grassroots Festivals, in upstate New York and North Carolina (the latter coming up in October). Watch this video I shot at the Vibes–with one of their longer group improvisations–and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
My all-time favorite summer music event is the Green River Festival in, appropriately enough, Greenfield, Massachusetts.
Not only is it chock-full of great artists, many of them from the peerless Signature Sounds collection, but it’s also extremely well run, with affordable and wide-ranging food (Aurora’s Gypsy Café food truck from Connecticut was a favorite), plentiful porta-potties and beautiful music with clear sound on three stages.
Dave Alvin tears it up on rootsy electric guitar. (Jim Motavalli photo)
It’s hard to pick favorites, but I’m a critic, right? In rough order, Dave and Phil Alvin with the Dirty Ones, Puss ‘N Boots, Hurray for the Riff Raff, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band, Parsonfield (formerly Poor Old Shine), Shinola Revue with Freedy Johnston and Syd Straw, James Hunter Six, Josh Ritter.
Duds: Trombone Shorty (going for the commercial gold), Lady Lamb the Beekeeper (getting her big break on the main stage, but ruining it with useless bombast), Heather Maloney (tunefully challenged), The Lone Bellow (Nashville country noise).
First, the good stuff. Dave and Phil were together in the Blasters in the 1980s, but haven’t played together much since. They’ve reunited on their shared passion for the Big Bill Broonzy catalog. That could result in something respectful and archival, but instead it was insanely exciting. I had no idea Dave Alvin was such an exciting live electric guitarist. And that drummer!
Lisa Pankratz of Dripping Springs, Texas works up a rootsy groove. (Jim Motavalli photo)
Lisa Pankratz, where have you been the rest of my life? Aside from looking cool, she was mammothly funky, and even rocked a drum solo. Pankratz was also part of Dave’s excellent “Guilty Women” project. Here’s the Green River group on video:
I’ve never seen Norah Jones or my fave Sasha Dobson live, so Puss ‘N Boots was a great place to start. As on their brand-new record, they take turns on the lead, and harmonize beautifully. They transform old warhorse material like Tom Paxton’s “Leaving London.” And who knew that Norah Jones (who never cracked a smile, as far as I could tell) could be such a fiery electric guitarist?
Alynda Lee Segarra of Hurray for the Riff Raff is a magnetic leader. (Jim Motavalli photo)
Hurrah for the Riff Raff got moved off the main stage because of scheduling problems, which turned out to be fine because they’re great in a smaller setting. Alyndra Lee Segarra is a magnetic performer, using the Americana tradition to tell new stories. “The Body Electric,” for instance, takes the hoary murder ballad and asks why all these gals get taken out by all these guys. No more! It stops here! Here they are on video:
The Shinola Revue brought back Syd Straw of the Golden Palaminos after a long absence, at least from my life. Boy, can she belt. A combination of Janis Joplin and Patti Smith, I’m thinking.
James Hunter is the consummate showman, and Josh Ritter is surprisingly jovial and cheery in concert—even when he’s introducing a pretty downbeat song. Parsonfield cross Band-like songcraft with huge amounts of youthful energy. The Dirty Dozen practically levitated the field, with some young members of Dirty Bourbon River Show respectfully sitting in. Trombone Shorty, listen and learn. It doesn’t have to be ear-piercing to rock the house.
And that brings us to the duds. A few too many groups at Green River can play and sing, but lack any memorable songs. These include the Deadly Gentlemen, the aforementioned Heather Maloney, that beekeeper woman and, alas, Girls, Guns and Glory, who were otherwise quite fine.
Let’s have a rule of thumb here: If you don’t got the tunes, perform covers. Or woodshed, study the greats, and come back when you’re really ready to go on stage. One of the problems is that audiences, particularly for jam bands, aren’t all that discriminating. But just because there’s wild applause, doesn’t mean the songs are connecting. They didn’t with me.
Bruce Molsky at Caramoor (with Michael Daves partially obscured). He’s also a threat on guitar and banjo. (Jim Motavalli photo)
I relished the chance to finally connect with Bruce Molsky at Caramoor. He was debuting a new trio with banjoist extraordinaire Tony Trischka and guitarist Michael Daves (whose new album is a duet with Chris Thile of Nickel Creek). This was only their second time playing live, but Bruce told me there’s been a lot of offers so expect them to pop up somewhere else.
Cricket Tell the Weather rips it up at Caramoor. (Jim Motavalli photo
I consider Bruce our finest solo old-time music guy, now that Mike Seeger’s passed, and it was wonderful to see him live, especially with such stellar company. He’s singing a lot, too, with “The Blackest Crow” and “Jawbone” my favorites. There’s a video of him singing that with Scottish singer Julie Fowlis.
Joe Crookston (left) in the sunken garden. (Jim Motavalli photo)
Highlights of Caramoor for me included seeing the new, slimmed-down Cricket Tell the Weather, a group that’s making giant leaps forward in material and stage presentation—with singer/fiddle player Andrea Asprelli out front. “Remington,” which they did early, is an award-winning Asprelli song about the days when gun manufacturing ruled the Connecticut economy.
Miss Tess at the hootenany, channeling her inner Pete Seeger. (Jim Motavalli photo)
Miss Tess and the Talkbacks aren’t folk exactly; more like a soul stew of Americana styles. Miss Tess has a swinging style that enlivens whatever genre. As I’ve pointed out, she’s also known to revive some forgotten gems.
Caramoor has a tradition in which all the performers gather in a beautiful grove and take turns getting everybody singing along to folk songs. Matt Turk, Miss Tess, Andrea Asprelli and Jason Borisoff of Cricket, Bruce Molsky and Mark Miller of Spuyten Duyvil all took turns in a set loosely based on Pete Seeger songs. In the waning light, it was magical.
Laura Cantrell: Country roots without Nashville glitz. (Jim Motavalli photo
In the evening, Rosanne Cash took us on trip through the South with the very strong (and strongly autobiographical) album The River and the Thread. Performing the album in its entirety (plus a few greatest hits), she exhibited the kind of major label, moving-right-along smoothness that mainly eludes the genial, laid-back performers earlier in the day. That’s not to criticize them at all—I like it relaxed.
Rufus Wainwright: Great, but consider the audience, man! (Jim Motavalli photo)
The only dud of the day was the Lone Bellow, a mainstream “country” act that put everything wrong with Nashville music on full display. It was telling that mandolin player Kanene Pipkin’s instrument was all but drowned out in the blare. They got the “bellow” part right.
Speaking of country, I loved hearing Laura Cantrell at Clearwater. She’s a keeper of the flame for classic country, and played deep tracks from Bakersfield and the Deep South in a radio career on WFMU. But she’s no purist–look to see her touring with pop band Camera Obscura this summer.
Richard Thompson: The world’s greatest one-man orchestra. (Jim Motavalli photo)
Richard Thompson was absolutely stunning as a solo act, because it brings his unrepeatable guitar playing to the fore. Like Jerry Miller of Eilen Jewell’s band (and the Sacred Shakers) he manages to distill every great Americana style into each note, but then adds Celtic flavoring as well. Rufus Wainwright was utterly distinctive, too, but seemed unaware that Clearwater has a rather different audience than cabaret night at a New York bar. With those parents, he’s got an inner folkie somewhere.
Guy Davis, who’d just lost his amazing mother, Ruby Dee, was great in several contexts. He’s one of our best blues guys. Kids should be following him around.
Guy Davis: A rootsy treat in several contexts. Here he is on the family stage. (Jim Motavalli photo)
At Clearwater, I stopped by the dance tent and was introduced to Jesse Lége and Bayou Brew. Jesse’s a veteran of 40 years of Louisiana dance halls, and it’s lucky for us he now lives in New Jersey. I don’t know the name of the song in this video, but bass player Evelyn Schneider told me Jesse’s got a huge repertoire and is apt to spring unknown songs on his band.
Catch these folks if you can, and maybe get a Cajun dance lesson as part of the experience.
We all hate fracking and nukes near cities, but are renewables ready for the prime time? (Jim Motavalli photo)
Finally, I love the anti-nuke and anti-fracking signs all over Clearwater. Yes, the stages are solar powered, but I’m not sure New York is really ready to unplug from both nuclear power (the nearby Indian Point) and fracked natural gas. New York Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins things we can, since the flyer I was handed calls for banning fracking, phasing out nukes and having 100 percent clean energy by 2030. I’m all for it, sure, but let’s see the actual blueprint for keeping the lights on with intermittent power.
I’m somewhat obsessed with how songs evolve. I was thinking of just that when listening to the latest album from the lovely Miss Tess, whose latest album with the Talkbacks is “The Love I Have for You.” She sings a Hank Williams tune called “The Alabama Waltz,” which is uncannily similar to the huge Pee Wee King/Redd Stewart hit “Tennessee Waltz” (recorded by Patti Page, Patsy Cline and many others).
Musical borrowing has gone on forever, of course. Bob Dylan cribbed freely from old Appalachian tunes and British ballads for tunes such as “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” “Percy’s Song” and “Paths of Victory,” among many others.
Miss Tess and the Talkbacks sing “Night Life” at Rockwood Music Hall March 20. (Jim Motavalli photo)
Williams’ mimicry was no coincidence. Miss Tess tells me, “Actually the ‘Alabama Waltz’ was written by Hank Williams to try and get a hit song, after the notable success of the ‘Tennessee Waltz.’ It was actually first recorded by Bill Monroe—and something of a hit from that recording I believe. There’s also a ‘Kentucky Waltz.’ There was a day when state waltzes were popular I guess!”
Definitely so. According to Colin Escott’s biography of Hank, the King of Country wrote and recorded the “Alabama Waltz,” to “stoke the ongoing craze for state waltzes.” Monroe—a tried and true Kentuckian—had earlier had his hit with “Kentucky Waltz,” but recognized Williams’ star power and also recorded “Alabama Waltz” in 1950. Williams may well have been at the session. Here’s Hank’s “Alabama Waltz.”
On the same album, Miss Tess does a slam-bang version of “Night Life,” a Willie Nelson tune whose chorus goes, “Oh, the night life/It ain’t no good life/But it’s my life.” I saw Miss Tess do a wonderful version of the song at a Rockwood Music Hall show in New York (with the incomparable Mike + Ruthy) last week.
That darned song reminds me heavily of another great classic, “Sporting Life,” as recorded by Brownie McGhee, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Clapton and tons more. The chorus of that one goes, “That old night life/That old sportin’ life’s/ Killing me.” Not identical, but to my mind closer than suing George Harrison for ripping of “She’s So Fine” for “My Sweet Lord.”
Judge for yourself. Here’s Willie Nelson doing “Night Life”:
Isn’t the “first album phenomenon” fascinating? How many fabulous artists do you know whose number one disc is also their greatest one? Two come to mind quickly, John Prine and Jackson Browne.
No, it’s not actually titled “Saturate Before Using.” Those were instructions for conditioning a burlap water bag.
I was reminded of the essential nature of the latter’s 1972 LP, commonly known as “Saturate Before Using,” when I heard a new tribute to this wonderful songwriter called “Looking Into You: A Tribute to Jackson Browne.”
I don’t think Browne was out of his teens when he wrote songs like “My Opening Farewell,” Jamaica Say You Will,” “Doctor, My Eyes” and “These Days.” The last one isn’t on the album (actually, it’s just “Jackson Browne”), but he’d already penned it. Before he could grow a proper mustache Browne had already a) had an affair with German chanteuse Nico, who may have been the first to record “These Days”; and b) given voice to some very adult emotions in songs that have sturdily endured for more than 40 years.
I’d say that was a good excuse for a tribute album, wouldn’t you? The album works as a whole, from Bonnie Raitt with David Lindley reggae-ifying “Everywhere I Go” to Lucinda Williams making “The Pretender” into a poignant ballad. These songs have good bones.
Don’t read that book about Laurel Canyon; it will sour you on all these LA dudes (especially, for me, J.D. Souther). But the music endures.
Browne got a bit didactic for me later on, but he never turned out a bad song. Long may he wave over Laurel Canyon or wherever he is now. Here’s Browne performing songs from “Satura…,” no, from “Jackson Browne”:
This post is borrowed with permission from Mother Nature Network, where I’ve been writing regularly about the environmental side of the car industry and other cool topics for the past six years:
It’s easy for me to relate to Andy Revkin’s twin passions — music and the environment — because I have the same pair. I satisfy the musical itch by doing a radio show and hosting live bands, and recently had Andy on playing songs from his new folk album, “A Very Fine Line.”
Andrew Revkin (right) with Pete Seeger and Steve Stanne (center) in Beacon, N.Y., in 2010. (Photo courtesy David Rothenberg)
Most likely you know Revkin’s work from the New York Times, where he served as an environmental and science news reporter from 1995 to 2009, and as a popular blogger (Dot Earth) from 2007 to now. He’s one of the great interpreters of often-difficult peer-reviewed science, and the blog has continued now that he’s left the Times for a position teaching at Pace University in Westchester County, New York.
I asked Revkin why he left the Times when the environment beat was hot and his timely stories on climate change were often making the front page. “Through the mid-2000s,” he said, “I became increasingly aware of the limits of what I could do in journalism, and I saw that ways of communicating outside of journalism were hugely expanding. So I looked ahead and asked myself if I wanted to spend the next 25 years writing valid articles about important issues, and I decided I didn’t.”
Andy Revkin (left) with his brother Jim in their younger days.
Revkin went in and talked about his plans with then-Executive Editor Bill Keller (who’s now leaving the Times himself), but kept it fairly vague. It’s lucky he did, because a day later the Times announced a generous buyout offer he wouldn’t have gotten had he already resigned.
The continuing mission of the Dot Earth blog, Revkin said, is, “How do we head into [the likely world population of] 9 billion people by mid-century with the fewest regrets.” Rather than focusing simply on goals — an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, for instance — he’s identified traits we’ll need to survive as a species.
“Resilience is a good trait; it’s overused but very real,” he said. “It means, for instance, not having a rigid approach to risk management. Flexibility is also a good trait, and so is transparency — maintaining the ability to clarify what is happening.” He sums up his approach as “Bend, stretch, reach, teach, reveal, reflect, rejoice, repeat.”
Revkin, author of “The Burning Season” (about Amazon activist Chico Mendes) and, for young readers, “The North Pole Was Here,” might have written the two books he talked about when he left the Times, but his plans were thrown into disarray by a life-changing event. In 2011, he had a potentially life-threatening “brain attack” stroke that among other things lost him the use of his right hand for weeks.
It led to a re-evaluation. Revkin promised himself he would:
Write a hard-hitting print article about stroke care.
Start working out.
Stop taking red-eye flights (to save his neck and carotid arteries).
Get serious about the guitar he’d been playing since he was 17 and start playing scales.
Well, much of that fell by the wayside, and he didn’t stick with the scales, but he did get more serious about music. “I’ve been writing and performing since the early 1990s, and played guitar since I was a teenager, but never got rigorous about recording,” Revkin said. “The stroke was a wake-up call. I wanted to put something on the public record.”
And that led to the album “A Very Fine Line,” recorded near his home in Beacon, N.Y. As you may know, Beacon was also the long-term home of Pete Seeger, and the two were friends. They played together now and then, and Seeger even helped him with lyrics for “Arlington,” a song about the growing space problem at our national cemetery. “I used some of the suggestions, not all of them,” Revkin said.
Other musician friends helping out on the album include singer/songwriter Dar Williams (another neighbor), mandolin virtuoso Mike Marshall and multi-instrumentalist Bruce Molsky, probably the best old-time interpreter around.
Andy Revkin performs a private concert at the Mother Nature Network office in Atlanta.
Revkin describes reporting and music as “a natural dual track, given that journalism and ballads have an intertwined history.” Indeed they do, and being a trained reporter also helps you in something most musicians are clueless about — record promotion. Revkin was recently in Atlanta for a climate change forum, and he didn’t waste the opportunity. He visited the offices of the site I write for, Mother Nature Network, and stopped by a local radio station and performed “Breakneck Ridge” (a song about the Hudson Highlands, “from Breakneck Ridge to the Bear Mountain Bridge.”)
The song (which I played on WPKN on Thursday afternoon) references “a billion years of time and toil” that are “etched in these old hills,” and Revkin told me he’d looked it up, to make sure that the “billion years” was accurate. Once a journalist, always a journalist. Here’s “Breakneck Ridge” on video:
“I’m not as optimistic as people think I am. I think we have a 50-50 chance of there being a human race in 100 years.” That was Pete Seeger, speaking to the Guardian newspaper in 2007.
Pete Seeger with the banjo he used to change the world. (Flickr/DoKwan)
It’s hard to think that there will be no more interviews, concerts, benefits and albums (he recorded more than 100) from the protean force known as Pete Seeger. Born in 1919, he was 94 when he died in Manhattan on Monday. It was only months after the death of his wife and close collaborator, Toshi.
Yes, folk music would be immeasurably different without him, and he was a prolific and deeply influential songwriter, but Seeger’s mission was primarily political. He wanted to change the world through music, and wielded his banjo in that cause.
“My job is to show folks there’s a lot of good music in this world, and if used right it may help to save the planet,” he said in 2009. Maybe he wasn’t the best performer of Spanish or African songs, but he made up for it in enthusiasm. His environmental work saving the Hudson River (he lived overlooking it in Beacon, New York) will prove perhaps his most enduring contribution.
Someone should write a book about the Seeger family. I tried, but my agent told me there was no money in it. Seeger’s half brother, Mike, was probably the foremost performer of and preserver of old-time country music, and his half-sister, Peggy, formed an enduring duo with husband Ewan McColl that was considerably influential on the British folk scene. His father, Charles Seeger, and his stepmother, Ruth Seeger, were both important musicologists.
Pete inspired a generation of protest singers, including Joan Baez and Phil Ochs. I always thought Steve Earle was most deserving of Seeger’s crown (not that he’d ever wear one), and in 2008 I tried to bring the two of them—both coming to New Haven, Connecticut for concerts—together for a joint interview.
Earle was eager, but Seeger, alas, wasn’t, conveying through his grandson, Tao-Rodriguez Seeger, that he thought everything worth saying had been said in his autobiography. Still, I asked Earle what Seeger meant to him. “Pete’s an example for everybody as a person, as an activist and as a musician,” he said. “I was lucky enough to record ‘Walking on Death Row’ for one of his Where Have All the Flowers Gone? anthologies.”
That’s the great thing about influential people. Even when they’re gone, they leave a whole lot of themselves behind.
The album Classic African-American Ballads, from Smithsonian Folkways, contains a track entitled “Duncan and Brady” by the late Dave Van Ronk, whose story is told in the new film Inside Llewelyn Davis. I found a copy at a tag sale recently, and “Duncan and Brady” made an impression, along with a really creative version of the ancient tune “Froggie Went a Courting” (here known as “Mouse on the Hill.”)
Was the shooting in 1880 or 1890? And why is Dave Van Ronk on this album?
Quite at random, I heard the song twice that day, the second time when my iPod brought up the version on Judy Henske‘s High Flying Bird album. The coincidence got me thinking about the origins of the song.
Aside from the fact that Van Ronk wasn’t African-American, and the song may or not be of African-American origin, I was struck by the opening lines,
“Twinkle, twinkle, little star/’Long comes Brady in his ‘lectric car.”
The reference to the electric car is in most of the versions I’ve heard of the song, including Bob Dylan’s. But it’s an anachronism in a song this old. The song commemorates an 1890 barroom brawl in St. Louis: James Brady was a cop with a reputation for bullying the local prostitutes–he wouldn’t let them dress in red. The bar in question was on the corner of Carondolet and North 11th Street, and it was lit up that night. Brady was shot in the melee, and several people were subsequently arrested. Harry Duncan, a black man, was hanged for the crime. Duncan’s appeal fingered bar owner Charles Starkes as the actual killer–some say Starkes confessed on his deathbed.
James Brady: He was just 30 when he died, and had been on the force four years.
Whether or not the song originated in the African-American community, it was certainly popular there–because of its anti-cop and implied racial message, minor riots broke out when it was performed in black bars in the city. Duncan’s appeal reached all the way to the Supreme Court, and his attorney Walter Moran Farmer, was the first African-American to be heard by that body. Duncan went to his reward in 1894.
An account from Old Hat Records differs in some details about all this: It claims that the incident happened in 1880, but that’s probably incorrect. It’s unlikely it would have taken 14 years to bring Duncan to his execution in those days, with or without the Supreme Court’s involvement.
Huber Wilmer Watts was the first to record “Duncan and Brady,” and it’s his version (with the ‘lectric car reference) that was preserved by history.
Who killed Brady is beside the point here: More important is that Brady could not have come along is his electric car, because they hadn’t been invented at that time. This is the folk process at work. The first known recording of the song is by Wilmer Watts and his Lonely Eagles in 1929. That was nearly 40 years after the murderous incident in St. Louis–and long after electric cars had become fixtures of American life. Watts’ lyrics include the ‘lectric car reference; listen to it here:
The heyday of electric cars, in their first go-round, was 1900 to 1925, so it was perhaps easy for Wilmer Watts (or some other anonymous contributor) to imagine Brady tooling around in one. But there’s another good explanation: The famously rich Diamond Jim Brady, the murdered man’s namesake, got quite a bit of publicity for his electric car driving some years after the shooting, and it’s quite possible the two got confused.
But The Delta Blues‘ account, aside from claiming the 1880 date, is illuminating; it offers some original opening lyrics:
Duncan, Duncan was tending the bar
In walked Brady with a shining star
And Brady says, “Duncan you are under arrest!”
And Duncan shot a hole in Brady’s breast
Now we’re getting somewhere! I bet somewhere along the way someone misheard “shining star” as “electric (or ‘lectric) car,” and the rest, as they say, is history. Since Watts was the first guy to record the song, his version is what comes down to us today. Someone else can address the question of whether it really was Duncan who “shot a hole in Brady’s breast.”
Finally, here’s one of Leadbelly’s versions of the song, and he’s voting for the “shining star” thing–no ‘lectric car for him. My guess is that Leadbelly (a/k/a Huddie Ledbetter) heard the song through the oral tradition, maybe in prison, and the sources predate recordings:
I’ve been a DJ on listener-supported WPKN for 40 years. Time enough for my show to have a name, but I’m still working on it. I love doing live music, and sometimes it just totally comes together. One such night was October 29, when I hosted two bands, Five in the Chamber (a really tight Connecticut bluegrass group) and The Littlest Birds, a unique cello and banjo duo from California that’s more in the old-time vein.
This is a story told in video. The highlight of the evening, for me, was when the two bands played together at my urging. They both knew “Hot Corn, Cold Corn,” so here they are ripping it up–half an hour after they met for the first time!
And here’s “Five” on their own, doing “Love ‘Em and Leave ‘Em.” For some odd reason, this is the first time I videotaped a group I had on the air. Bless the iPhone 5S:
And finally, the Littlest Birds stayed over, and I persuaded them to do this rousing number–about roadkill–in my living room. If there’s a tradition of cello in old-time music, I sure don’t know it, but it works wonderfully. Check out Bruce Hornsby playing piano with Ricky Skaggs and talking about “the long tradition of piano in bluegrass.” Not!
There’s no reason that folk music should remain stagnant–like all living forms, it needs to change, mutate, grow and cross-breed. Bill Monroe heard jazz and created bluegrass as a result. Bob Wills heard jazz and created country swing.
Last Forever is (from left) Dick Connette, Sonya Cohen and producer/engineer Scott Lehrer. (DickConnette.com)
Both are perfectly valid today, but who says that “Uncle Pen” or “Take Me Back to Tulsa” have to be played the same exact way every time? That’s why I love folk that pushes the boundaries. Bethany Yarrow, daughter of Peter, made an excellent album, “Rock Island,” that really puts the folk standards through some changes, including touches of electronica. I loved it.
A more subtle approach is taken by Dick Connette and Sonya Cohen on the two “Last Forever” albums they made in 1997 and 2000. I first heard “Hide and Seek” on a Starbucks sampler record I bought for 50 cents at a garage sale, and I almost crashed the car–it was that startling.
Sylvia is the daughter of John Cohen, a member of the pioneering New Lost City Ramblers (and a niece of Pete Seeger). She certainly has the folk gene, but also a really strong, warm voice, which perfectly suits the material.
Connette is a composer, and he’s applied magic to old folk standards, giving them an almost mystical gloss that still respects the old-time tradition. The songs, from “Diamond Joe” to “Louis Collins” and “Indian War Whoop,” get new and enthralling, almost luminous arrangements.
Connette told me that some folk authorities were distinctly cool to this project, preferring folk to be preserved in amber. Well, the same critics rebuffed Bob Dylan, hated Coltrane, told Ornette Coleman to go back to Texas and Eric Dolphy to hang up his horn.
Listen to Last Forever. It will change your mind about the possibilities of folk music, and that’s a good thing. See for yourself; there are some Last Forever videos here.
Territorial Imperatives 