“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.

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.”)

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.

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.

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.

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.

There’s nothing I like better than a woman who can really make some noise, and without the benefit of artificial smoke or spandex. I got a double dose at the 2013 Rhythm and Roots Festival over the Labor Day weekend in Charleston, Rhode Island. It’s one of my favorite festivals, and I’d been away too long.

I minored in female vocalists at the College of Musical Knowledge, but I had never heard of Yvette Landry. I’m making up for that now. She opened up the Sunday festivities and, as the announcer said, the festival is all about cajun and crawfish, but Landry is a honky tonker.

In fact, she’s the whole package, a great singer, a great songwriter, and the leader of a band tighter than a drunk in a brewery. Of special note was fiddler Beau Thomas, who just locked into the groove and never let go. Landry, who is an educator and children’s book author, with two CDs out, is well worth checking out. She specializes in pungent done-me-wrong stories, and they really go down easily.

I needed a dose of Eilen Jewell, and she was on fire at Rhythm and Roots, even taking my request for Loretta Lynn’s “Fist City.” Starting out as a more conventional singer-songwriter, she met one of the rockingest bands in the known world, and now she’s a honky-tonker, too. Here she on my shaky video with “Rain Roll In,” a matter-of-fact way of looking at life (and especially it’s end):

I’m not the first guy to say this, but Jerry Miller, her guitarist, is simply one of the best in the world, able to distill 50 years of American roots tradition in a one-minute solo. He never over-plays. Eric Clapton needs to hear him–the effect will be similar to his first encounter with The Band. I totally enjoyed the workshop Miller (who has his own first album out) did later that night with two other splendid guitarists, Bill Kirchen and Albert Lee. Sure, they tried to outdo each other, but it was great, anyway, (And, no, he’s not the same Jerry Miller who was with Moby Grape.)

Rhythm and Roots boasts cheap food, strolling minstrels (like the brass band above) and even a swimming hole. If Rhode Island isn’t on the other side of the world, put it on the calendar for next year.

It has been a summer of live music, just the way I like it. Let me tell you of some memorable shows.

After the Clearwater Festival, which I wrote about here, the American Roots Festival at Caramoor was upon me, and it brought together a number of acts I’d been meaning to hear, especially the Stray Birds, Doug and Telisha and Spuyten Duyvil.

Remember you heard about the Stray Birds here first. The group of three sports three excellent players (especially Oliver Craven on guitars, mandolin, fiddle and voice) and a world-class songwriter in Maya de Vitry. Charles Muench is a great bassist and a strong singer also. Several Stray Birds songs could become standards of the Americana repertoire. With any justice, they will do exactly that. I heard the group do two sets, one of them free of all amplication under the stars in an absolutely gorgeous grove. They do covers too, and manage to avoid the clichés of the genre.

Doug and Telisha Williams (now going by The Wild Ponys) are a husband and wife team from Virginia. I love when partners in life can be partners in music, too, and both are strong singers and writers.  “Things That Used to Shine,” from their new album of that name under the Wild Ponys name is a keeper. I’ve talked to them on WPKN, but this was the first time seeing them, but I’ll see them again.

I managed somehow to miss two sets by Spuyten Duyvil, named after a creek between Manhattan and the Bronx. The group is from New York, too. I heard just enough to know that Beth Kaufman is a really strong singer.

Caramoor is an ideal setting for live music; there is periodic Americana throughout the year. The Milk Carton Kids, worth hearing, are October 12.

After Caramoor it was a road trip up to the Green River Festival, a never-miss in Greenfield, Massachusetts. Green River showcases, among others, artists on the also-Massachusetts-based Signature Sounds label. You can’t go wrong with Signature Sounds: Among its artists are Chris Smither, Miss Tess, Eilen Jewell (plus her best-in-the-world guitarist, Jerry Miller, as a solo artist), Rani Arbo and Daisy Mayhem, Crooked Still (now absent the incomparable Aiofe O’Donovan, I hear), Josh Ritter, Erin McKeown, and more.

Mostly it was other people this year, though Miss Tess put on a lovely show. A highlight for me was a reunion of Canada’s The Duhks, who have come back stronger than ever with personnel intact as far as I can tell. At acoustic rave-ups driven by mad fiddle player Tania Elizabeth, there is no band better. And they have an exceptionally charismatic and groove-friendly singer in Jessee Havey. Don’t believe me? Watch this video:

Caravan of Thieves were incredible, too, and the Duhks’ peers on guitars and fiddles, albeit with a jazzier sound. The band’s highly original songs are inspired by the sublime gypsy music of Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli. What other group that tears up the jam band circuit can claim that? And they’re from Bridgeport, Connecticut, right next to me. Fuzz (an incendiary guitarist) and Ben Dean (his equal on fiddle) have a I-can’t-believe-I-just-heard-that quality. Sometimes they trade off lines in a manner reminiscent of the best Indian music. Fuzz and Carrie, who sings, shakes things, and writes songs, are married. Did I mention a soft spot?

New to me at Green River was Poor Old Shine, newly signed to Signature Sounds. This is a very young band, with a lot of the energy of the Avett Brothers—and that’s a lot of energy. The Band are influences, and you can’t go wrong there. Soon after Green River the band played at the Bartlett Arboretum in Stamford, where the week before I’d seen the esteemed Red Molly. This is another fine music series in an incomparable setting.

Let’s not forget the Gathering of the Vibes, where I was a speaker on the Green Stage this year. I’m not huge on jam band music, but I love the event, because there is indeed inter-generational good, well, vibes. Here’s a look at that happy crowd:

The aforementioned Bridgeport has a worthy Thursday night music series, with shoes held in a park named after the industrial city’s onetime socialist mayor, Jasper McLevy. An Americana show featuring Cricket Tell the Weather and Ada Pasternak was moved inside to the city’s Two Boots Pizzeria. I’d have preferred to see this new group outside, but can you play a mandolin full of rain?

Something of a local supergroup, Cricket features multi-instrumentalist Dan Tressler from String Fingers, fiddler Andrea Asprelli from Five in the Chamber, and guitarist Jason Borisoff from Atlantic Flyway (a duo with Asprelli). Two Boots was very noisy, but this group has incredible potential, with three strong writers. Tressler played his ass off on mandolin, but he’s also a superior fiddle player and an even better singer.

Tonight I’m heading over to see Caravan of Thieves again, free, at the Levitt Pavilion in Westport. Such is the life of an Americana freak getting his fix this summer.

Several people emailed me that Toshi-Aline Ohta Seeger had died at 91. She was Pete Seeger’s right hand for decades, his collaborator in writing songs, and his emphatic partner in progressive politics.
In fact, Toshi embodied Seeger’s treasured internationalism, having been born in Munich to an American mother and Japanese father. The family moved to the U.S., and the pair met and married during the war in New York. Sue Leonard recounts Toshi’s early history from an interview. Pete Seeger married a Red Diaper baby:

As a young child, Toshi lived in Woodstock in a small, narrow house where her family grew vegetables and kept chickens. No one, Toshi said, ate the chickens, just their eggs, because they were pets (unless her Uncle Al visited and they cooked one for his dinner). Later they moved back to New York City. Her parents, being left-wing activists (her father was a Communist and her mother worked for the women’s movement) sent Toshi to The Little Red Schoolhouse then onto the High School of Music and Art where she played piano and was a member of the first graduating class.

For decades, they lived together in a small house in Beacon, New York overlooking their beloved Hudson. Toshi kept Pete going, and she made films—her 1966 “Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison” is in the archives of the Library of Congress. Pete and Toshi co-founded the Clearwater Festival, and saw it through to glorious fruition. Toshi was the one who actually knew how to sail, and that helped the Clearwater get established.

In mid June, I spent a blessed day at the Clearwater Festival in Croton, New York, and reveled in a late set by the incomparable Mavis Staples. When I saw her being helped up the steps to the stage, I wasn’t sure she’d be able to perform, and indeed the first few songs were largely carried by other singers. But then Mavis opened her mouth and a glorious sound came out. She’s still got it, and how.

As I was watching, I felt one of the festival’s ubiquitous golf carts pulling up in front of me on a small hillock overlooking the stage, and there, right next to me, were Pete and Toshi Seeger, come to see the glory of Mavis Staples. I took the photo above with my phone.

What went through the minds of these two old campaigners watching Mavis Staples? Via the Staples Singers, their association goes back to the 1950s. Can you imagine the countless Mississippi Summer evenings, church basement sing-alongs, pass-the-hat political rallies, and union fundraisers they must have shared?

Bob Dylan wrote “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He famously said he didn’t know if the world was going to survive, so he created a song made up of first lines he’d likely never get to take further. It’s a string of vivid images.

Nick Loss-Eaton did something like that in creating “VFW Hall” for his Brooklyn, New York-based band, Leland Sundries, which gets its video debut here. “The song was written partly in Brooklyn and partly in northern Vermont,” Loss-Eaton says. “The language and imagery came first, and later I figured out what it was ‘about. I finally realized that the main character is a veteran haunted by his memories of World War II.”

Hence lines about a “march into Stalingrad,” where our narrator “carved my name into the barricade. I liked the lines about “restarting the furnace” and having a “mouth full of drywall” that “tastes like volcanic ash.” And then the chorus, “For half a buck I’d shut it down.” We don’t know what’s getting shut down, but this isn’t a need-to-know kind of song. It’s about a feeling, and it mixes images from memory and the present to call forth a complicated life.

Loss-Eaton tells me the video was filmed in Bushwick, Brooklyn in 2011, with Micah Friedman (guitar), Shane Kerwin (drums), and Mike Taco (bass). “Micah and Mike are no longer in the band, though Micah and I toured together last year as a duo in the west,” Loss Eaton says. “Sonically, we tried to introduce some noise, including an element of fog at the start with Micah tapping on the guitar strings with a drum stick and a guitar freakout at the end.”

The video was edited by Scott Variano and mixed by Jon Hildenstein.

Leland Sundries will be on an acoustic tour of the Northwest in September, and will have festival dates in the fall, when it’s also putting out a full-band live EP. The group records a full-length CD in October or November, to be released in 2014.

Loss-Eaton, by the way, is a music publicist who has turned me on to a lot of great stuff, including a new album from ace Irish folk expatriate Susan McKeown—just another New Yorker now.

My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary in Rhode Island last month. We got a bed-and-breakfast just a block or two from Misquamicut Beach in Westerly. We happened to be there during the Misquamicut Spring Fest, which was unfortunately largely rained out. Boy, did that immobile Ferris wheel look forlorn on the windswept beach. So would the performers actually, you know, perform?

The headliner Saturday night was “Marty Balin of Jefferson Airplane & Jefferson Starship.” Now, I’ve only seen Balin perform once, at the (now reopened) Capitol Theatre in Portchester, New York, circa 1970—shortly after their great Volunteers album was released. They did most of that album with great authority, and I really did think the revolution had arrived. But I am a multi-decade fan of the quiet ballads Balin wrote, particularly for Surrealistic Pillow.

So I went, with wind blowing water in sheets across the sidewalk. The tents were sopping wet, underlaid with sucking mud. In the background, we could hear music from the nearby blues and beer event. But there on stage, with maybe 30 people in the audience, was Marty Balin. Older, yes—he’s 71! On the whole, though, he looked good—perhaps a testament to the drugs he didn’t take back in the golden era.

Here’s Balin on what life was like in the Airplane, from an interview with Crawdaddy:

That was a crazy time. I left [Jefferson Airplane in 1970] and came back [to Jefferson Starship in 1975], and it was the same old bullshit—a bunch of cocaine and everyone thought they were god’s gift to the world. You couldn’t talk to anybody; everyone had their own entourages. It was boring, everyone was so full of themselves, you know? I don’t really care for that. Once you get that famous they want to do “Their Thing,” and I don’t believe in that. I believe in doing “The Thing.” I hate that; it happens every time. Even the roadies are on coke, and you can’t talk to them. And me, I’m a student of yoga, and I’m meditating and in a calm place. I just… oh well.

He doesn’t appear to miss the old gang, if the quote “I wouldn’t let Grace Slick blow me” is accurate.

So what would Balin do on a rainy night in Rhode Island, not much at stake, 30 people in the audience, and not one of them an important record executive (do those even exist anymore?).

I’m happy to report that Balin was a trouper. That’s right, he came on, did his show, and played a bunch of Starship songs with undiminished enthusiasm. He also tried out many new ones (he’s a prolific writer), and one Airplane gem, “Come Up the Years,” from the very first, eponymous, album. Backing his strummed guitar was a fine second guitarist and a drummer, low key but effective.

Balin told jokes, said that the mud reminded him of Woodstock, sniffed the “doobie” in the audience and asked if it could be passed forward. He was personable. He introduced “Come Up the Years” as an “oldie.”

I should have stayed and talked to him, but I was freezing and wet, and my wife was back at the B&B. So I’ll leave it at that. A nice encounter, coming up the years. Balin seems to be doing well, spending time in Florida, painting (portraits of Jerry Garcia and French flatulist Le Petomane, among others). I know the 60s were supposed to be about peace and love, but it’s rare when someone immersed in that era survives intact.

You can read the whole Crawdaddy interview here. And here’s a great video of the Airplane performing Fred Neil’s “Other Side of This Life” at Altamount, where an angry Balin–who had jumped into the crowd–was knocked unconscious by the Hells Angels. All of that’s in the video:

This is Joni Mitchell talking about a friend of hers:

Debbie Green and I have become really good friends over the years. She was from Detroit, a friend of Chuck Mitchell [where I get my Mitchell moniker]. Debbie Green was a folk singer. In Berkley she taught Joan Baez how to sing and play the guitar. So Joan Baez, when she sings, she plays Debbie Green. She’s not herself onstage.She has taken Debbie’s persona. Debbie in her passive way gave up and let Joan have it. Joan kind of stole her soul and impersonated it.

This is not the only place this charge surfaces. I’m re-reading the wonderful Baby, Let Me Follow You Down, by Jim Rooney and Eric Von Schmidt, and there’s a great deal of Debbie Green talking about Baez appropriating her identify in that book. When they met as freshmen at Boston University, as the folk boom was getting underway, Green says Baez knew “two chords.”

There’s a picture in the book of the two of them on the beach (with Baez’ sister Mimi, who later married Richard Farina) and Baez is intensely following Green’s hands. The way the book tells it, Baez was ambitious and Green wasn’t. One took of into stardom, and the other watched her repertoire and her arrangements get hijacked.

“Joanie had taken my whole trip,” Green says in the book, “and by her second record I was a Joan Baez imitator. I hadn’t naturally evolved to a place that was more distinctive than that.”

According to the Green Man, “Green had the misfortune to be sick for a couple of months and when she reappeared in the Boston folk clubs, she found that Joan had copied her repertoire down to the last nuance. Baez, when confronted, said, ‘I didn’t hurt her. I only helped myself.'”

Don’t that beat all? Green then married folksinger Eric Andersen, and that proved disastrous for her career, too, because he was jealous and “didn’t like it when I played guitar.” The only recorded evidence that Debbie Green even exists as a musician is a few tunes on Andersen’s early albums in which she plays second guitar. Her name is frequently misspelled, and there’s not much of a trail on the Internet (though she reportedly lives in California now).

This story maybe says something about pre-feminist America. I’m still amazed that the Geoff and Maria Muldaur (to name two other Cambridge folk graduates) record Sweet Potatoes has only two vocals from Maria, one of the finest singers on the planet. But the sexist assumptions of the era didn’t seem to slow Baez down much.

Maybe it says more about ambition or the lack of it. Green may have been overshadowed anyway; as Mitchell notes, she’s a “passive” person. Bob Dylan got his material from everybody and everywhere, including Eric Von Schmidt (the aforementioned “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down”).  Some people are tough, and others aren’t. Can you imagine anyone stealing Joni Mitchell’s identity?

I for one would love to hear a Debbie Green (Andersen) record. Why doesn’t she make one now?

For more on the whole Cambridge folk years, check out another ace book, David Hadju’s Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, published in 2001. The Rooney/Von Schmidt book is harder to find these days, but you can get it on Amazon.