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Monday, June 29, 2009

Dillard Chandler (April 16, 1907 – January 1992)


Dillard Chandler (April 16, 1907 – January 1992) was an American Appalachian Folk singer from Madison County, North Carolina. He is chiefly known for his a cappella performances on compilation albums recorded by folklorist and musicologist John Cohen.

Chandler grew up in an old log cabin in the isolated mountain community of Sodom, North Carolina. This section of the North Carolina mountains is particularly rich in ballads, and noted folklorist Cecil Sharp transcribed several "Old World" ballads sung to him by several of Chandler's relatives in 1916. Chandler described the hills he lived in as being too rugged for a car to access. Often, his walk to school would be made impossible by footlogs being washed away by a creek. Chandler said that as soon as he became old enough, he left school to work in the logging industry. He was illiterate.


During the American folk music revival in the 1960's, John Cohen traveled to Western North Carolina to research and record traditional ballad singers.


The subject matter of the traditional songs is often dark; there are themes of murder, revenge, infidelity, and abandoned children. The origin of Chandler's songs range from 16th century Spanish ballads, to a tale of a hanging in nearby Burnsville, to a prison song from Gastonia.

Allmusic writes that Chandler sings with "deft precision, often with the song's strong sexual undercurrents intact."

Chandler knew hundreds of songs that were shared in the community and passed on through generations.



The first singing that I ever heard was old-timey meeting songs, and these old songs like I sing, and these frolics where they get together and pick and sing and drink a little. Maybe a "lassie makin'," or maybe a corn shuckin', maybe a gallon hid in the corn pile. They'd go ahead an' shuck into that—pick the banjo, have a dance. The only kind of music I know anything about is old ballads—just learning songs from somebody else that I've heard sing 'em.

Appalachian author and musician Sheila Kay Adams said of Chandler, "Dillard was kind of an anomaly; he was caught in between worlds. He was a wonderful singer. Now, his voice was odd, and I think that it was from Dillard that I learned that weird phrasing that is so common to these love songs, that sets them apart.”

Chandler's version of "I Wish My Baby Was Born" has been covered by Uncle Tupelo, Tim Eriksen, Riley Baugus and Tim O'Brien (for the Cold Mountain Soundtrack and joined here), and The Be Good Tanyas.

Even people in his native Madison County often described Chandler as a "mysterious man" who "didn't live in one specific place, but would just show up from time to time." Unlike many such folk singers discovered during the folk revival of 1960s, Chandler rarely performed at festivals or on radio. Travel arrangements were made for Chandler to play the 1967 Newport Folk Festival, but he didn't make the trip.

The 1967 University of Chicago Folk Festival saw Chandler's only visit outside the mountains. His performance was marked by his shy and eccentric mannerisms, as he rocked back and forth and sung facing the side of the stage.

Chandler spent time working in Asheville, and was "remembered as a man who loved to sing"





Here are the songs I gathered

01. The Carolina Lady
02. The Soldier Traveling From the North
03. The Sailor Being Tired
04. Gathering Flowers
05. Gastony Song
06. Cold Rain and Snow
07. Awake, Awake
08. Mathie Grove
09. Short Time Here, Long Time Gone
10. Drunken Driver
11. Jesus Says Go
12. Meeting Is Over
13. Little Farmer Boy
14. I Wish My Baby Was Born
15. Old Shep
16. Rain and Snow

17. Hicks Farewell

I also joined as a kind of bonus two songs by my friend Tim Eriksen of Cordelia’sDad. He is definitely one of the best singers in American roots music. He "connects the present and the ancient with an immediacy that will make your bones tremble." A songwriter of rare intensity and an inventive multi-instrumentalist, he redefines American tradition with a "northern roots" sound that encompasses old Massachusetts murder ballads, chilling shape-note harmonies and originals alongside southern Appalachian and Irish songs.







Listen and Learn

Posted by Joski at 10:43 AM | 3 comments  
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Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Woody Guthrie - His greatest songs




There are two reasons why calling this album "The Greatest Songs of Woody Guthrie" rather than some variation on the greatest hits idea makes sense.


First, Guthrie was out singing these songs before there ever were any Billboard charts to help defiine exactly what constituted a hit. Second, although this album starts with Guthrie himself singing "This Land Is Your Land," clearly his most famous and most popular song, the track shifts to the song being sung by the Weavers. Guthrie sings a few songs and few duets, but mostly his songs are sung by other artists. So what we have here is a tribute album, originally a double-album now on a single CD, that represents some of the best first and second generation folk singers who followed in the path blazed by America's troubadour.




The first generation would be those artists that actually got to play with Guthrie, which would be not only the Weavers with Pete Seeger (the artist who most closely followed in Guthrie's footsteps), but also Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry and Ramblin' Jack Elliott. The next generation is represented on the album by Odetta, Joan Baez, and Country Joe McDonald. Yes, there is an authenticity to hearing Guthrie sing his songs that nobody else can touch, but there is something to be said for other artists replacing his rawness with more of the inherent beauty of his songs (the same way Peter, Paul & Mary did for Bob Dylan).

One of the outstanding tracks is Odetta's "Pastures of Plenty," simply because it best represents how far you can go with Guthrie's music from its folk roots and make it work. When you listen to Cisco Houston do "Do-Re-Mi" you are moving a notch up on the authenticity level, and with the Weavers singing "So Long (It's Been Good to Know You)" and "Jackhammer John" you get a real sense of how these songs were popularized. Of course, everytime you actually get to hear Guthrie sing on one of these tracks, such as the duet with Houston on "Hard, Ain't It Hard" you want to go listen to one of Guthrie's own albums, so those tracks tend to be a bit intrusive given the overall theme of the album.

This is breathtaking from the beginning till the end



Listen and Learn

Posted by Joski at 11:36 AM | 2 comments  
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Classic A.L. Lloyd


Albert Lancaster Lloyd (29 February 1908- 29 September 1982), usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.


Bert Lloyd was a great father-figure to the aspiring folk-revivalists of the 60s. His albums are good – well chosen traditional songs sung with great conviction – he sang beautifully if not always in perfect pitch (who cares). He was a consummate performer and put great spirit into the songs he sang. He was recorded in Australia, (where he spent most of the years of his childhood) in America and England. There are probably over 100 albums that he has sung on.


Classic A.L. Lloyd is a generous seventy-six minute long covering his recording period with Topic Records.Here are the folk club favourites such as John Barleycorn, Farewell to Tarwathie and Sovay; the shanties "Roll and Down the Bay" and "Blood Red Roses" (which he sang in John Huston's film "Moby Dick"); Australian songs and whaling songs.

We hear Bert in different moods from the tender - "Foggy Dew", and "Weaver and the Factor Maid" - to the joyful amusement of "Short Jacket and White Trousers", and "Byker Hill". He approached the big ballads in the same way he sang the lesser songs not with awe and respect but as good stories worth telling, just listen to "Tam Lin" or the "Demon Lover" then tell me that the big ballads are boring.

The songs are accompanied in the main by the great Alf Edwards on concertina and by the young Dave Swarbrick on fiddle, the assortment of additional musicians and singers read like a folk revival hall of fame. Eleven of the tracks are unaccompanied.

http://lix.in/-4ba0d4

Enjoy the Master

Posted by Joski at 11:20 AM | 2 comments  
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Hard times n the Country (1927-1938)


Here is a wonderful collection of 18 songs taken from old 78 rpm records (put out from 1927 to 1938) that reflect the difficulties of life in the rural south in the years of the great depression.


While all of the songs deal with real problems of life in hard times, they all incorporate various degrees of humour in their presentations, and all of the performances are musically sound - many of them real gems.


The Lee Brothers bemoan a workingman's fate in "Cotton Mill Blues," while Blind Alfred Reed sounds nearly hopeless in "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Hard Times and Live." As Bill Malone writes in the liner notes, farmers in the south had experienced hard times before the Great Depression.


Following the Civil War, America began to evolve into a country of urban centres and small farmers became sharecroppers or tenants. Despite the downbeat subject matter, Hard Times in the Country is — musically speaking — an enjoyable collection. Fiddle, guitar, and banjo accompany Kelly Harrell’s vocal on the catchy "My Name Is John Johanna," while bright, bouncy banjo bolsters Uncle Dave Macon's lively "Wreck of the Tennessee Gravy Train."


Clarence Ashley and Gwen Foster deliver "Bay Rum Blues," which sounds like a stripped-down version of a jug band song, and Lowe Stokes offers his unadorned opinion in "Prohibition Is a Failure." Besides providing a musical document of the rural south, the songs on this collection also offer an interesting juxtaposition to trends in country music (the 1990s and beyond).


The earlier music is founded in the customs and habits of rural workingmen and women, and it's easy to imagine that players like Fisher Hendley had at least secondhand knowledge of a weaving room.







Listen and Learn

Posted by Joski at 11:03 AM | 0 comments  

The land where the blues began - Alan Lomax


A self-described "song-hunter," the folklorist Alan Lomax traveled the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s and 40s, sometimes in the company of black folklorists like John W. Work III, armed with primitive recording equipment and a keen love of the Delta's music heritage. Crisscrossing the towns and hamlets where the blues began, Lomax gave voice to such greats as Leadbelly, Fred McDowell, Muddy Waters, and many others, all of whom made their debut recordings with him.


This is the soundtrack to Alan Lomax's acclaimed book of the same name.

Here is an unforgettable tour of the haunted landscape that gave birth to the blues, a story told through the work of such legendary figures as Muddy Waters and Fred McDowell, as well as in the work songs, field hollers, hymns, ballads, fife-and-drum music, sermons, stories, and barroom toasts chronicled in the book.


Recorded between 1933 and 1959 by Alan Lomax, Lewis Jones, John W. Work, John A. Lomax, and Herbert Halpert. Remastered to 24-bit digital from the original metal and acetate discs, and the original paper and acetate-backed tape recordings.

Alan Lomax takes us on an adventure into the "bad old days" of the post-slavery, Jim Crow Mississippi Delta — the birthplace of the blues — when railroads and levees were being built and cotton boomed at the expense of Southern working-class African Americans.


Singing of their misery and their barely concealed rage, the Bluesman enlisted their African heritage to keep their souls alive and in the process created the first satirical song form in the English language..

Listen and Learn

Posted by Joski at 10:40 AM | 0 comments  
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None But One / High Hills and Mountains - Jean Ritchie & Friends





Out of Kentucky In the mid-thirties Alan Lomax recorded in Kentucky for the Library of Congress's Archive of Folk Song. Among the people he recorded was "The Singing Ritchies". Abigail and Balis Ritchie had 14 children and Jean was the last one, born on the 8th December 1922. 10 girls slept in one room of the farming family in the Cumberland Mountains. She quickly memorised songs and performed at local dances and the country fair in Hazard. In the late forties the family acquired a radio and discovered that what they were singing was Hillbilly music, a word they had never heard before. Jean attended Cumberland College in Williamsburg, Kentucky and later the University of Kentucky in Lexington. At college she joined the glee club and choir and learned to play piano. In 1946 she graduated with a BA in social work. During the war she taught in elementary school. In the summer of 1946 she moved to work in the Henry Street Settlement in New York. Here she met Oscar Brand, Leadbelly and Pete Seeger and started singing her family songs again.

Here are two albums :



None But One - This recording caused quite a stir when it was originally released on a major label. Unanimously excellent reviews cropped up in national and international magazines as well as in the obscure folk journal and newsletters. It even prompted Rolling Sone to present Jean with its prestigious Critic's Cirle Award as Folk Artist of the Year.



High Hills and Mountains - As Artists in residence at California State University at Fresno, Jean became friends with Kenny Hall and the Bluestien Family, as well as other musicians in the area and they naturally began to make music together. Enhanced by the old timey stringband playing of the "Fresno Friends" the resulting recording provides an exuberant sampling of some of the best of Jean's music.

The music itself seems to have come from another world and another time, which makes the fact that much of it was recorded in New York City seem totally incongruous
Have fun while it lasts

Posted by Joski at 10:25 AM | 1 comments  
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Friday, June 12, 2009

Peter, Paul and Mary (live in Japan) (1967)



The group was created by producer Albert Goldman. He was trying to put together a “folk” group, bringing together "a tall blond (Travers), a funny guy (Stookey), and a good looking guy (Yarrow)".


The group was launched in 1961, booking them into the Bitter End, a coffee shop in New York City's Greenwich Village that was a favourite place to hear folk artists. The group recorded their first album, Peter, Paul and Mary, the following year. The album was listed on Billboard Magazine Top Ten list for ten months and in the top one hundred for over three years.


By 1963, they had recorded three albums, released the now-famous song "Puff the Magic Dragon," which Yarrow originally wrote in 1958, and performed another major hit, their cover of "If I Had a Hammer" at the March on Washington, best remembered for Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous speech, "I Have a Dream." For many years after, the group was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and other causes promoting social justice.


The trio broke up in 1970, following Yarrow's conviction for taking "improper liberties" with a 14 year old girl. (he was arrested and convicted for what were termed "immoral and improper liberties" with a 14-year-old girl who came to his hotel room after a concert. He served three months in jail; 11 years later he was pardoned by President Carter).


The members pursued separate solo careers, but none had a fraction of the success they did as a group. They have periodically performed together on an irregular basis since 1978 and have issued several new albums.


Nowadays they perform together again.




Here is an album that usually gets forgotten when talking about the trio’s discography.


The album was recorded in 1967 in Japan, and was only released in this country.
It shows the trio at its peak.
Have fun

Posted by Joski at 9:45 AM | 2 comments  
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Monday, June 1, 2009

A.L. Lloyd - All for me grog 1961 (TOPIC EP TOP66)



Albert Lancaster Lloyd (29 February 1908- 29 September 1982), usually known as A. L. Lloyd or Bert Lloyd, was an English folk singer and collector of folk songs, and as such was a key figure in the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.

When he returned to the UK in the Great Depression of the early 1930s, in the absence of a permanent job, he pursued his interests in studying folk music and social and economic history, doing much of his research at the British Museum: he is quoted as saying that there is "nothing like unemployment for educating oneself". In 1937 he signed on board the factory whaling ship the Southern Empress bound for the southern whaling grounds of the Antarctic.

During this decade, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and was strongly influenced by the writings of the Marxist historian, A. L. Morton, particularly his 1938 book A People's History Of England. In 1937, Lloyd's article "The People's own Poetry" was published in the Daily Worker (since 1966 renamed the The Morning Star) newspaper.

In 1938 the BBC hired him to write a radio documentary about seafaring life, and from then on he worked as a journalist and singer. A proponent of communism, Lloyd was staunchly opposed to Adolf Hitler, and, in 1939, he was commissioned by the BBC to produce a series of programmes on the rise of Nazism. Between 1945 and 1950 he was employed as a journalist by Picture Post magazine but he left the job in an act of solidarity with one of his colleagues.

By the 1950s he had established himself as a professional folklorist—as Colin Harper puts it "in a field of one". Harper goes on to note that, at a time when the English folk revival was dominated by young people who wore jeans and pullovers, Lloyd was rarely seen in anything other than a suit (and a wide grin). Ewan MacColl is quoted as describing Lloyd (with affection) as "a walking toby jug". In 1959 his collaboration with Ralph Vaughan Williams, The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs, was published.

In the early 1960s, Lloyd became associated with an enterprise known as "Centre 42" which arose from Resolution 42 of the 1960 Trades Union Congress, concerning the importance of arts in the community. Centre 42 was a touring festival aimed at devolving art and culture from London to the other main working class towns of Britain. It was led by Arnold Wesker, with MacColl and Lloyd providing the musical content and Charles Parker on production. Centre 42 was important in bringing a range of folk performers to the public attention: Anne Briggs, the Ian Campbell Folk Group, The Spinners and The Watersons.

Lloyd recorded many albums of English folk music, most notably several albums of the Child Ballads with Ewan MacColl. He also published many books on folk music and related topics, including The Singing Englishman, Come All Ye Bold Miners, and Folk Song in England. He was a founder-member of Topic Records and remained as their artistic director until his death. He died at his home in Greenwich in 1982.

This is an EP of English Drinking Songs from 1961 (TOPIC TOP66)

http://lix.in/-48d2dc

Cheers

Posted by Joski at 11:26 AM | 8 comments  
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Harry Taussig




'Fate is Only Once' was originally released back in 1965 but was an impossibly short run privately pressed LP, obtainable by almost nobody.

Of course it has become the stuff of legend for John Fahey fans and Takoma collectors desperate to find more Harry Taussig material than the short contributions to 'Contemporary Guitar Spring '67' compilation and now thankfully it's been given the full-on re-issue treatment from NY label Tompkins Square.

Remastered and packaged with the same liner notes as the original record this is a stunning example of the Takoma style of solo guitar picking. Fahey fans will find much to sink their teeth into here and it is quickly apparent that the man had an incredible skill, much in the same way as Fahey.

This is the sort of American music steeped in history, in blues and folk and in rock 'n roll - and now a new generation of listeners and guitarists are hearing these recordings and being inspired once more. If you've been enjoying the stream of releases from axe worshippers Jack Rose, James Blackshaw or Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny then there's not a chance you won't fall for 'Fate is Only Once'.



The only other recordings that Taussig issued appeared on a 1967 compilation, Contemporary Guitar Spring '67, which as it happened also featured Fahey (whose Takoma label issued the LP) and Basho, as well as Max Ochs and Bukka White.

Here are both of these legendary recordings

http://lix.in/-4eebb2
http://lix.in/-507253

You'll find more on "American Primitive Guitar" here :
http://grapewrath.blogspot.com/2009/04/va-american-primitive-guitar.html

Listen and Learn

Posted by Joski at 10:03 AM | 2 comments  
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