General american folk revival thread

prompted by a request in the John Jacob Niles thread, but also due to my own interest. Fahey/Kottke/Koerner Ray and Glover/Basho/Baez/Renbourn/etc etc etc.

this stuff is amazing btw

oh yeah ian send me yer email again and i will finally fulfill my promises of (STUFF I TALKED TO YOU ABOUT BUT NEVER SENT THAT SHALL GO NAMELESS) that is finally digitized

ORLY, JJ!!!
dr.carl.sagan at gmail dotcom!

This is all really my bread & butter for the last few years. I love all of it.
I got really deep into some seventies folksingers like Mary McCaslin & Kate Wolf a lot in the last few months.
Are you a Richard & Mimi Farina fan, John? There are tons of other amazing things to search out on Vanguard too--Jerry Jeff Walker, Keith Sykes, Buffy St. Marie...
How do you feel about Fred Neil? Michael Hurley??

casting a wide net here huh?

a few years ago i was wondering where my tolerance for light-as-a-feather hippy-dippy post-revival stuff ends, and i discovered the answer: bonnie dobson.

Also, Renbourn of course... is not American.

haha yes, you are right re:renbourn. lazy first post syndrome.

Buffy St. Marie is fantastic. also i have been on a weird phil ochs kick for a while now.

oh and also ian chk yer email

Right on, my suggestion got turned into a thread. I feel like a big shot!

I love Buffy Saint-Marie and think she is underrated in the American music cannon. She's a good songwriter, although I'm not a big fan of the hit "Universal Soldier," Donovan notwithstanding.
She straddles the line between folk & country better than say, Joan Baez... her country album
"I'm Gonna Be a Country Girl Again" is basically full-on Nashville sound & it's pretty good.

Search: "Cripple Creek" "I'm Gonna Be A Country Girl Again"
"Codeine" (Gram Parsons did a terrific cover of this)

Here's the record I have, with the trademark Vanguard Records cover design. there are about a million of these old Vanguard LPs at the used record store where I live, thankfully

http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/b/buffy-sainte-marie/album-the-best-of-buffy-sainte-marie.jpg

http://images.uulyrics.com/cover/b/buffy-sainte-marie/album-the-best-of-buffy-sainte-marie.jpg

A friend of mine was a Spider John Koerner fan and organized a concert. At our high school. For ten people. (This was in St. Paul, MN, in 1996)

Also, this music actually has a pretty good presence on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3q79HFjhBg

On this channel called "peglegsam" there are tons of performances from Pete Seeger's 1960s New York public broadcasting show "Rainbow Quest." He has great guests- Mississippi John Hurt, Buffy, Judy Collins, Mike Seeger, Jack Elliot, Johnny & June Carter Cash, Donovan etc.

Typically they just sit around & tell stories & jam.

Also, here is a great BBC documentary on the american folk revival (split into 12 parts)
it's a good review, starts with Woody Guthrie & ends with the Band

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVa0HpB-I90&feature=related

I am currently listening to Leo Kottke 6- and 12-String Guitar and holy moses it is stunning, I love the texture of the guitars a lot

I have heard Kottke & Fahey called "new agey"

I am not familiar w/ new age music, so I guess I don't understand this criticism?

later kottke did get kinda new-agey, and he was on private music for a while. big thing with him is that theres a distinct shift in his playing style at a certain point thx to mongo right hand carpal tunnel problems, which removed a lot of the fire of his earlier stuff.

fahey and new age have a long and sordid history

The guy who subbed my last radio shift played a Dave Van Ronk song that totally ruled.

It's interesting how it tends to get ignored that the folk revival of the 60s was really a revival of another folk revival - the one of the Woodie Guthrie era - people tend to forget that that was a revival in itself, particularly because the graininess of old 78s tends to give the impression of "original" and "authentic" sources.

Yes that's true, I was thinking about this recently.

I used to think of Woody Guthrie & the Harry Smith Anthology as "year zero" of American folk music
& Guthrie, Seeger, The Almanac Singers etc as the "genuine article"
but of course these singers were revivalists themselves.

I guess "original" folk music artists were, uh, "the folks."

Or in other words, folk music is something you make for yourself.

I am currently listening to Leo Kottke 6- and 12-String Guitar and holy moses it is stunning, I love the texture of the guitars a lot

― lukevalentine, Monday, March 8, 2010 3:18 PM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yeah that's a hot one.

Also, there is the whole issue of authenticity.

Folk music is probably among the genres most associated with "realness" & "authenticity"
& yet the american folk revival that began in the 40's was an explicit attempt to re-purpose the proletariat's own melodies for communist propaganda purposes.

xp

Been listening to that Kottke, too. I've been listening to heaps of country stuff lately but have been crossing into folkier areas along the way. Fred Neil's kinda the greatest thing ever. Um I'm actually struggling atm to come up with other relevant stuff for this thread so I guess I'm just here to second the Fred Neil mention. Like really authoritatively with a gavel and shit.

Actually F it if JJW is being thrown on the table, and this probably doesn't belong in this thread, but I'm just going to take the opportunity to restate my opinion that Tom T. Hall is a king of kings.

there's a great sounding new pressing (nothing fancy just good sounding) of the first fred neil record around for really cheap. they must have repressed it recently.

i'm gonna try to play a lot of this kinda stuff on my radio show tomorrow. usually i lean heavier towards country-rock & old-timey, but will try to play more directly folk oriented material from the sixties & seventies.

anyone wanna recommend some new-age-y fahey?

O hey. Tim Hardin?

Gonna keep an eye open for this new Neil pressing.

i went through a BIG phase listening to stuff like this (fred neil, buffy, kottke, woody guthrie, anthology of american folk, etc,) like 10 years ago but since then have pretty much forgotten about it. maybe it's time to dig stuff out again. if you're looking for deep cuts there's such a thin line between this and the bad/corny side of windham hill.

the numero group guitar soli comp was pretty good, i thought. i wish they would do one of latin american guitar.

max--get one of the weird late ones like 'rainforests.' some of the earlier, more musique concrete-style stuff is pretty mindblowing but i wouldn't really call it new age--but in any event, Fahey bored with being Fahey--side two of Requia, or parts of Days Have Gone By.

Damn, musique concrete filtered through Fahey sounds so awesome.

that Narwhals and Coelacanths fahey album is p good

super good liner notes

that does sound good.

Requiem for Molly Parts 1-4
Barry Hansen in the liner notes to the Return of the Repressed: Speaking of Molly, I went to a party once with Molly and John. My musical judgment having been altered by gin and juice, I commandeered the living room piano for an unsteady rendition of My Blue Heaven. I thought nothing more of it until some time later when I got a call from John. “Barry,” he said, “I’m recording a new album and I want you to come to the studio, drink exactly the same amount of booze as you did at that party, and play My Blue Heaven. There’s a mercifully brief snippet of Heaven on John’s twenty-minute Requiem for Molly.
Parts 1-3 contain bits of Sun Gonna Shine In My Back Door Some Day Blues, and an old phonograph record – Circle Round the Moon by Charley Patton. [see note below]. Part 4’s melody is California Dreamin’, of all things, played really straight – a recent Top 40 hit for the Mamas and the Papas, who never returned the compliment. They could have managed a vocal version of Portland Cement Factory, maybe.
Other samplings come from a recording of Charles Ives’ 4th Symphony, 2nd Movement, Allegretto. The approximate times are: Requiem for Molly Part 1: 0:48 / 1:28 / 1:50 / 2:48 Requiem for Molly part 2: 4:44. The brass band snippet -- sampled twice in Parts 1 & 2 -- is At A Georgia Camp Meeting. The brief snippet of a hymn, played by a string quartet, is probably Watchman, Tell Us of the Night. [MK]

A Raga Called Pat Parts One and Two

The notes suggest that this piece (the guitar, that is) was recorded live at the Ash Grove folk club.

JF in 1968: “Sound effects come from a Folkways record entitled Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest and from another record which contains the sound of a steam engine train travelling from Jackson, Mississippi to Houston, Texas. I forget the name of the album. I borrowed both from Barry Hansen. The peculiar effects on part two are done by putting the turntable in neutral and running it backwards and forwards at variable speeds onto channel two (this was before I went stereo) when the music was already on channel one. I did this on the equipment in the Folklore and Mythology Department recording lab at UCLA while I was still going to school and working in the lab also.”

Editors’ note: we believe the techniques described here were also extensively utilised during the later Hip-Hop period of African-American music. Fahey’s “scratching” proved something of a dead end in folk music, however.

then you have those figures who straddle the informant/revivalist line, like bascom lamar lunsford or buell kazee or slim critchlow. lots of cowboys singers are like this because by the time they were recorded in the 1920s the music had already passed out of the oral traditions of many actual cowboys and there was definitely a strong sense that it was endangered and had to be preserved. hence a mounting self-consciousness in its presentation.

woody guthrie is an interesting figure in that he takes music he grew up around (whether from local tradition, general oral tradition, or 78s, or some combination of all three) and gave it a pronounced and very new political focus. although he is "of the folk" (in a way that say pete seeger is not) he is a revivalist because of the milieu in which and for which he made his music, and the purposes to which he put that music.

then you have someone like bob dylan and all the folks of that generation (and subsequent generations) we're writing about here who mix together interest in the "folks" who were recorded in the 20s and 30s and who don't have that interval that places them as "revivalists"-- and interest in people like guthrie. dylan was smart enough to know the difference but i think guthrie still impressed him as someone who repurposed a variety of traditions in a forceful and original way.

fred neil and most of the folks discussed on this thread are really sort of nth-generation "revivalists" if they can be considered to be part of that at all. i mean here a kind of self-consciously literary/poetic bent (think leonard cohen), beat influences, all that new york stuff is at least as important as anything along the lines of what harry smith put on his anthology. i mean when neil sings "didn't we shake sugaree" it's in (reverent) quotation marks in a way that would never be the case for even early bob dylan.

faux-kies like peter lafarge, cisco houston are sort of more interesting in terms of thinking this distinction through.

my fave kottke album by far is this one. though i haven't heard everything. first heard it stoned out of my mind on top of a mountain outside woodstock new york and i was very impressed. heard red hash for the first time that night too!

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/229/452516971_b89fb77a7d.jpg

the song that album title is taken from is amazing.

"put your arms around me baby like a circle 'round the sun"

(memphis jug band, countless others)

ian, found a copy of travelin' lady rides again tonight for four bucks. i want every rosalie album. i'll get them all eventually. i find at least one a year. i could buy them all on ebay, but i like having records to look forward to randomly.

My mind is racing too fast right now for me to make any kind of coherent contribution to this (v interesting) discussion of the distinctions between revivalists, archivists, entertainers & perhaps even axtual folks. I think I am just begining to dissolve these lines in my own listening habits. For a long time I ignored bluegrass bands of the fifties, sixties, seventies in favor of string bands of the 20s-30s, for no particular reason I guess. and until recently i never became interested in the more marginal figures of these movements--people like utah phillips, kate wolf, even people as well-known as john hartford and gordon lightfoot I ignored, favoring the usual gateway drugs for this sort of thing--dylan, johnny cash, fahey was a big one for me personally.

more later when i've chilled out a bit.

xp--there are lots of songs that reference that line! you're referring to stealin' stealin'? it's a great line, a beautiful image that isn't going to lose any resonance so long as humans have arms & the sun is still shining. i have a similar obsession with variations on "sometimes i wish i'd never been born / or had died when i was a young." a lot of country songs use those lines, or similar. often followed up with "then i'd never have seen your pretty blue eyes / nor heard your lying tongue.' the eyes change color of course. and so does the tongue; sometimes it flatters. i think i've written about this on ILX before.

i got a rosalie album today for $3! it's a good one too! "whatever happened to the girl who was."

every tim hardin album is worth owning. someone mentioned tim hardin. i love him. from beginning to end.

travelling lady rides again has some great stuff at the end of side two, starting with "feather ben." it took me selling & then re-buying that album for those to sink in.

i love whatever happened to...

that's a great album. her one major label album in the 70's too, i think.

Good post by amateurist.

I sometimes think about how weird it is that there were probably 60s folkies who heard Bascom Lamar Lunsford with no idea who he was and imagined they were getting some "genuine article" (I mean obviously we can question the idea of whether there was ever a genuine article or what the hell that means - the tradition of song-collecting traveling singers probably go back pretty far).

I remember a good passage in an essay somewhere about The Carter Family, about how their popularity really had to do with a romanticization of what was already being lost at that moment as society industrialized and urbanized. It's also interesting that the same new recording technology that allowed this "folk" music to spread was a symptom of the same thing that was wiping out those supposed folk traditions.

that cover is so sad...

can't find a big pic though

http://image.yes24.com/momo/TopCate73/MidCate05/7249008.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtwHpp42NrI

check the comments--so many people remembering her great cooking!!

lots of xposts:

at the time it was first recorded, old-time music was already being marketed as old-time music! put that in yer fiddle & smoke it imo.

The whole narrative of finding the "real thing" that came before the fake modern thing is also interesting. Like for me first it was Led Zeppelin in relation to say, STP, then it was Muddy Waters in relation to Led Zeppelin, then it was Robert Johnson in relation to Muddy Waters, then it was some Alan Lomax recording, and then I got all colleged up and realized nothing is authentic and whatnot.

my favorite kottkes are circle round the sun, 12-string blues, and mudlark, which is kind of like the funky pop-sellout cousin to sandy bull's 3rd and 4th records, e pluribus unum and demolition derby.

my favorite fahey LPs are voice of the turtle, hitomi, and fare forward voyagers, which roughly follow your new-age WAY OUT rubric from various points in his career...

my favorite basho stuff (disclaimer: i feel like im just recently immersing myself in all this, so id defer to ian or scott in a fight) is mid-period records like voice of the eagle and song of the stallion. zarthus is another killer, and i am stoked to track down rainbow thunder and visions of the country.

ive just never really gotten into buffy sainte-marie.

not sure if you're trying to go in the fugs/godz/holy modal rounders/hurley/etc direction, but that's fertile ground in my opinion, too...

at the time it was first recorded, old-time music was already being marketed as old-time music! put that in yer fiddle & smoke it imo.

― Joint Custody (ian), Monday, March 8, 2010 8:10 PM Bookmark

Yes. This totally blew my mind when I first realized it.

yeah. that was a big 'omg' moment for me.

i wish i hadn't sold my copy of basho's 'visions of the country.' it had piano on it! are there other basho records with piano? my copy was kinda scuffed up.

i love listening to hurley & counting the references to older musicians & songs.

ian, do you have this album:

http://www.alicestuart.com/art/good_times_cover.jpg

another good one that has ian written all over it:

http://www.wirz.de/music/biograph/grafik/60044.jpg

been digging these records lately:

http://www.wirz.de/music/nlcr/grafik/fa24914.jpg

"so id defer to ian or scott in a fight"

i'm no basho expert! or bull or fahey expert either. i've heard a lot of their stuff, and i like them, but, sadly i treat their records as currency for the most part. they are easy to sell. so, um, i mostly sell them.

big Dave Van Ronk fan. somebody mentioned him upthread. he never seems to get much love on ILM though. I know Scott said he didn't like him. But check out "Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again" from the LP 'No Dirty Names', that was my gateway drug when I heard Rich Warren play it on 'The Midnight Special' radio show. I think I have like 10 of DVR albums, he's another one of those guys where you can build a collection pretty cheaply.

what do people think of the Tom's -- Paxton and Rush?

i like some select paxton records. mostly 70's stuff. tom rush not so much.

i'm not a big fan of van ronk's voice. which is kind of a stumbling block for me.

my favorite kottkes are circle round the sun, 12-string blues, and mudlark, which is kind of like the funky pop-sellout cousin to sandy bull's 3rd and 4th records, e pluribus unum and demolition derby.

haha, if you are talking about 12-string blues: live at the scholar, i have a grand bias for that one - my dad recorded it and put it out on his (nearly instantly defunct) label! if you have a physical copy, keep a tight hold on it, only 1000 were ever pressed. also, the cover was pasted on by mom, which she still complains about having to do to this day.

like this album a lot. he put out two records on reprise in the early 70's and they are both really good.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_0n4tsTCaEoA/RdGvps5VcpI/AAAAAAAAADE/cqsrmlG0xYM/s320/Paxton_Sun_001.jpg

'12 String Blues' been on my want-list for ages. otherwise I've got everything up to 'My Feet Are Smiling'.

any plans for a reissue ever?

your dad have any sealed copies lying around ?

serious hipster bait courtesy of espers namechecks and probably illegal fallout reissue, but, man, i really got into these albums recently.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_uypEFQ3_Vu8/SnCINuCLmtI/AAAAAAAAErc/aBXwZcy41OM/s320/6L-00164.jpg

http://content.answers.com/main/content/img/amg/pop_albums/cov200/drj100/j123/j12310wio5k.jpg

but they are more "folky" than folk. singer-songwriter pot-smoking records. and as such, they are great.

one good record i picked up recently for a couple bucks and quite enjoy:

hedy west - old times and hard times

wiki:

She was born Hedwig Grace West in the mountains of northern Georgia in 1938. Her father, Don West, was a coal mine labor organizer in the 1930s; his bitter experiences included seeing a close friend machine-gunned on the street by company goons in the presence of a young daughter. Later, he operated the Appalachian South Folklife Center in Pipestem, West Virginia. Many of Hedy's songs, including the raw materials for "500 Miles", came from her paternal grandmother, Lily West, who passed on the songs she had learned as a child. [1]

Her family's politics were also a life-long influence. Her liner notes for 1967's "Old Times and Hard Times", written from self-imposed exile in London, are an eloquent personal statement on the corrosive effect of the Vietnam War, with the prescient insight, "We'll be controlled by manipulated fear". (See Folk-Legacy Records.) While living in Stony Brook, New York, in the late 1970s, she donated her time and talents in unforgettable benefit concerts for unfashionable causes - as did with her fellow Appalachian-on-Long-Island, Jean Ritchie.

Her songs were rarely if ever overt, topical protests. But her working-class mountain roots were in her voice and ran through everything she sang, giving life and meaning to her laments for beaten-down factory girls and knocked-up servant girls.

oh man i love jean ritchie

there never were any sealed copies (which always makes me amused when someone pops up with one on ebay, because i guess they have a shrinkwrap machine and no conscience). I think he still has 5 copies sitting around the house somewhere, but it might be hard to get him to part w/any of them.

The reissue thing is something ive been working on w/him - i dont want to derail this thread w/all the weirdness, but my dad recorded (w/permission) everyone who ever played at the scholar (which he owned) and the U of Minn Summer blues festival (which he booked and ran) so we have somewhere around 1000 reel to reels of unreleased live stuff by all sorts of 60s folkies and creaky old (well uh dead now i guess) blues dudes, so this whole project is daunting to say the least.

xpost to stormy

same here. she rules.

jean ritchie love x-post

have any of you read the shirley collins book "america over the water"? i am a total shameless shirley collins stan but even so, it's pretty good if you are interested in american folk music.

it's mostly about her experience with recording the sounds of the south stuff with alan lomax
i blame moby for ruining this for most people

you'd think you could get a grant to archive that stuff or something. people pay for stuff like that all the time. even the university there might do it.

x-post

at some point im going to need some untarnished ears to listen to this stuff, so if some of you dudes are interested (and do the super pinky swear not to pass it on to anybody), i might request some assistance.

oh man, jjjustin i would be so totally down with that

i'd love to hear anything. i love to hear lots of stuff. i have active ears.

that Rosalie stuff is good! dang

her voice reminds me a little of that Elyse record

interested peeps should send me yer email and i will store it for when i get around to all of this then i guess (which might be sooner if i actually have a reason to do so)? might do it as some weird deindexed ILX subboard or something idk.

stormy, the funny thing about this is this exchange with ned, who as always appears to be permanently right: Dad Rocks - The Album- : What Does Your Father Rock Out to?

ha, I appreciate the shout-out from Ned, I don't recall ever seeing that thread.

"never seen again oddities like Mozen, The New King David Jug Band, Dan Glass" ... stuff like this is what intrigues me the most! Does he have any Willie Murphy and the Bumblebees?? coincidentally I was just listening to the first Bonnie Raitt album over the weekend, which was recorded by Dave and Sylvia Ray up in a cottage on Lake Minnetonka. great liner notes that talk about them playing ping-pong and fishing with Junior Wells and A.C. Reed, who drove up from Chicago to play on the album

is kathy smith the kathy of kathy and carol? because that kathy and carol LP is lovely.

ok i swear to not turn this into a thread about me, but i grew up with willie and the bumblebees (they shared a warehouse space w/my dads tour company), and my dad was basically assigned by (insert record label here) to keep bonnie out of jail while she was recording that album (the cottage was actually an abandoned boy scout camp iirc). one of the tapes we have uncovered was a pre album live set she did at the first (?) summer blues performance.

that first album is great, the blender song is perfect dirty blues imo.

Why do so called New Weird America / indie folk / whatever bands always reference the Incredible String Band / Vashti Bunyan etc

i don't even know if that's right, but it's usually the whispier hippie dippie stuff never like Uncle Dave Macon, ha

hey guys i am playing records on the radio tonight between 10pm and midnight eastern time at eastvillageradio.com

am gonna play stuff like:
aunt molly jackson, tim hardin, utah phillips, michael hurley, maddy prior, pentangle, chris darrow, canned heat, karen dalton & other stuff that straddles the line between this thread & the country-rock thread. <3

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/04/30/susan-reed-folk-singer-dies-at-84/

I admit I have never heard her, but RIP