Category Archives: My Back Pages

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #8

Richard (R.L.) and Tammy

Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising: Ana Egge & The Sentimentals Collaborate-A-Go-Go

AnaEgge_SayThatNow_albumcover copy Last year when I wrote a story about Ana Egge, I pulled this quote from Steve Earle, who had produced her Bad Blood album several years earlier: ‘Ana Egge’s songs are low and lonesome, big square-state noir ballads which she plays on a guitar she built with her own two hands and sings like she’s telling us her deepest, darkest secrets’. I also called my friend Mark Miller, frontman of New York roots music band Spuyten Duyvil and a concert promoter, who offered this thought: ‘An artist’s ability to connect with an audience is frequently and disingenuously misrepresented in their marketing copy. Ana is a rare exception. She captivates a room and draws all eyes and ears with a combination of thoughtful and heartfelt lyrics, a heartbroken voice, and serious instrumental chops.”

While her last album Bright Shadow was a sweet collaboration with The Stray Birds…one of the finest string bands on the road today…on June 10th she’ll be releasing her ninth album Say That Now, which finds her playing with The Sentimentals, a Danish band who rock a little harder.

The Sentimentals are MC Hansen (vocals, harmonica,guitars), Nikolaj Wolf (bass), and Jacob Chano (drums), and they’re old friends of Ana. In addition to previously going out on the road together, the band has also played behind other touring musicians from the US such as Gurf Morlix, Jonathan Byrd, and Sam Baker. This album was recorded over two days in Denmark, and I reached out to Ana to share about the experience.

It is a different road from my last record Bright Shadow, for sure.. In a strange way though, I was drawn to working with The Sentimentals on Say That Now for the same reasons that I was drawn to working with The Stray Birds on ‘Bright Shadow’. Because each band had developed a psychic groove together as a group from playing so much together. The remarkable thing about both bands is that they’re all fantastic players and all amazing harmony singers. That’s the magic dust.

I realized the depth of feel that The Sentimentals had to offer by touring with them in Europe as my back up band over the years. They can be so supportive and quiet on some songs and then they can totally rock. Which gives me, as a vocalist, more ways to push my voice. It was so fun to work with them in the studio in Copenhagen and do so much focused, down to the wire co-writing as well. That’s what makes this album unique to the rest of my catalogue. We wrote most of the songs together and all of them were written in Denmark.

Go over to Ana’s website to check out her entire catalog and get this summer’s dates with the Sentimentals. They’ll be touring Denmark from June 23 through July 2, and then heading to the USA for at least another month. Ana lives in Brooklyn, so I’m particularly looking forward to the homecoming on July 19th at the Rockwood Music Hall.

I’d like to leave you with a little encouragement to take a listen to the video I’m posting below, which was put up on You Tube back in May 2015, just in time for Mother’s Day. The song takes my breath away, and inspired me to title my previous column Why I Cry at 2:35, which you can and should read here. Ana wrote this with Gary Nicholson and it features the Stray Birds. While it’s not very often that a song will come along that can repeatedly turn me into an emotional bowl of jelly at every listen, this is the one. 2:35.

Every Picture Tells A Story.

Sandy 2 The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.

On Smithsonian Folkways and Arhoolie Records…The Grand Acquisition.

sifolkwaysbwlogo

Those of us who’ve been pleased with the great job that the Smithsonian Folkways people have done with the preservation of Moe Asch’s record label, are over the top with news that they’ve now acquired Arhoolie Records as well. I’ve posted one of my Broadside columns about the news over at No Depression…and click here to read it. Back in April 2015 I profiled Chris Strachwitz and the great Arhoolie label he built, and you can read that here on this site.

Ben Sisario of the New York Times wrote a detailed story of how this deal came down, and I’m going to cut and paste the first paragraphs, but encourage you to follow the link to read the whole enchilada.

For more than 50 years, Chris Strachwitz has been one of the music world’s great pack rats and champions of American folk styles, as a record collector and the founder of Arhoolie Records. Since 1960, Arhoolie has released hundreds of albums of blues, gospel, Cajun and Mexican folk music that have caught the ear of musicians like Bob Dylan and Ry Cooder.

Now 84, Mr. Strachwitz has found a new home for the label: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which has acquired the Arhoolie catalog and will be adding more than 350 Arhoolie albums to its collection, the labels announced on Tuesday. In keeping with the longstanding policy at Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit label associated with the Smithsonian Institution, the catalog is to be kept accessible in a variety of formats. Click here to continue.

The Other Jack Johnson

Another Broadside column I published on the No Depression site recently, and it began like this:

jack_johnson If I was a baseball player you might say I’m in a slump. I feel as though, when I’m up to bat, I swing at air. If a ball speeds toward me, I reach up to catch but it just sails through my glove. I could grow a beard, shave it off, lower my right shoulder, raise my left, shuffle my feet, or tug at my ears. No change. And that’s probably the best analogy I can come up with, as to my current relationship with new music.

This affliction is hardly new, and I’ve been struck by it several times in the past few years. One cure that seems to work has been for me to take a break from the new stuff and get back to the tried and true — simply immerse myself in old favorites. I might spend a month listening to only the Carter Family Border Radio set, or something completely off the wall. Last year, it was 60 days of the complete Elvis Costello discography. To continue, click here.

https://youtu.be/lswBX3cBKAQ

Father John Misty Mocks Corporate Americana.

I picked this story up over at the NME site:

Josh Tillman – aka the indomitable Father John Misty – has just sneaked out a typically dry lampooning of new folk commercialism via his SoundCloud. Happy Wednesday. The just-over-two-minutes-long track brims with the heavy weight of capitalist ennui before you’ve ever heard it. The title, ‘Prius Commercial Demo 1’, gives you a pretty solid measure of the thing – this is FJM’s take on the shameless corporatisation of a seemingly salt of the earth sound, and effortlessly manages to make a mockery of the earnest linen-clad likes of the Lumineers and their big bucks pastiches of the work of Bruce Springsteen and The Band.

With it’s talk of riding traincars where the mountains reach the sky, drinking whiskey, never learning how to say goodbye and growing soya beans on a tinning farm, Father John Misty mercilessly lampoons the current vogue for Americana by numbers – even throwing in a meaningless “hey! ho!” over jaunty, jangly acoustic guitar. Give it a spin below, brothers.

Without Jazz and Blues, There’s No Americana.

And coming right behind Misty’s parody, is an interesting article published by The Atlantic by David A. Graham. A story about a new album titled Americana by sax player J.D. Allen ‘makes the case that any genre that pretends to represent the full scope of U.S. culture can’t ignore black music’.

Back in 2013 Giovanni Russonello wrote another Atlantic essay tracing the roots of the Americana genre and the ‘weather-beaten, rural-sounding music that bands like Whiskeytown and Uncle Tupelo were making. It was warm, twangy stuff, full of finger-plucked guitars and gnarled voices like tires on a dirt road.’ Graham writes:

Russonello pointed out that the artists grouped under the banner tended to be overwhelmingly white, male, and older—or at least obsessed with music from the 1950s to 1970. “Can a genre that offers itself up as a kind of fantasy soundtrack for this country afford to be so homogeneous and so staunchly archaic?” he asked.

The blame for this impoverished definition of Americana falls on the tastemakers of the genre. Since the Grammys established an Americana award in 2009, only three black artists have been nominated (one of them, Mavis Staples, twice). But musicians working in jazz and blues don’t necessarily see themselves as part of Americana, either, as Allen’s own story demonstrates.

Most of this article focuses on Allen and the new album, and it’s a great read that seemed to really piss off the ‘twang nation’ Americana-ists when I posted it on my Twitter feed. Read it here.

Americana

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

On Smithsonian Folkways and Arhoolie Records

920x920 Last week I was thrilled to hear that Smithsonian Folkways — the nonprofit record label associated with America’s national museum — has acquired Arhoolie Recordsfrom Chris Strachwitz and his business partner, Tom Diamant. In keeping with Folkways’ policy, the catalog will be kept accessible to the public in the same way that they’ve been managing Moe Asch’s Folkways catalog.

The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage purchased Folkways back in 1987, and one of the conditions of the sale was that all 2,168 titles would remain in print forever. Using a combination of modern digital distribution and their custom order service, every single title remains available for purchase. Over the years, the Smithsonian has added content from other labels and collections, and the addition of Arhoolie’s 350 titles of blues, gospel, Cajun, and Mexican folk music is a perfect fit.

The New York Times covered the story on May 10th with an article by Ben Sisario, who wrote:

Chris Strachwitz, born in Germany to an aristocratic family, came to the United States after World War II. In the 1950s, he joined the loose network of collectors and sleuths who tracked down and recorded folk and blues musicians who had made their first recordings decades before. Arhoolie’s first release was by Mance Lipscomb, a blues singer and guitarist, whom Mr. Strachwitz and his fellow researcher Mack McCormick located in Texas.

Partly inspired by Folkways, the label run by Moses Asch that released records by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and the landmark 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music,” Mr. Strachwitz took a scholarly approach to releasing records. The Smithsonian acquired Folkways in 1987, a year after Asch’s death, and in an interview this week Mr. Strachwitz said that it was Mr. Asch who once gave him advice about setting up his legacy.

“It was the late Moe Asch of Folkways Records who told me, ‘Chris, when you kick the bucket you’ve got to think about what you’re going to with all your stuff,’” Mr. Strachwitz recalled.

I’ve always been curious about how the Smithsonian operates, as I assumed it was a branch of some government entity. So I did a little research.

The Smithsonian was established in 1846 from the estate of a British scientist named James Smithson, and although two thirds of its employees are federal workers, funding comes from the Institution’s endowment, private and corporate contributions, membership dues, government support ($800 million in 2011), and retail, concession, and licensing revenues.

In the case of Arhoolie, the Times article states that the acquisition was made as a result of a donation from Laura and Ed Littlefield of the Sage Foundation. Strachwitz said that the Littlefields essentially bought the label and donated it to Smithsonian Folkways.

Imagining there must be a lot more music-related collections throughout the 138 million items that the 19 museums in Washington, DC, make available to the public, I came across a new building opening this year on the last available space on the National Mall, next to the Washington monument.

According to its website, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture “will be a place where all Americans can learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience, what it means to their lives, and how it helped us shape this nation.”

When that museum opens its doors in September, there will be an exhibition called Musical Crossroads that will showcase contemporary items along with those of the past. There will be rare recordings from Mahalia Jackson alongside George Clinton’s wigs, outfits worn on Soul Train, a pair of Curtis Mayfield’s glasses, and Cab Calloway’s suits. An Amtrak field trip seems like a pretty good plan.

This post was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #7

Iowa Beach

Kaia Kater Brings Me Back From A Hype-Induced Coma.

kaia A few days ago I posted my every other week Broadside column on the No Depression website, and I titled it Damn the Hype, Praise the Boxer. While you may feel free to click here to read it in its entirety, let me share the first paragraph here:.

If I was a baseball player you might say I’m in a slump. I feel as though, when I’m up to bat, I swing at air. If a ball speeds toward me, I reach up to catch but it just sails through my glove. I could grow a beard, shave it off, lower my right shoulder, raise my left, shuffle my feet, or tug at my ears. No change. And that’s probably the best analogy I can come up with, as to my current relationship with new music.

I go on to discuss how frustrated I’ve become lately in searching for new music because the ‘roots music’ media seem to focus on the same few artists every couple of weeks, and the hype and over-exposure is just turning me off. That all changed yesterday when in my mailbox I discovered a package from my friends at Hearth Music, and inside was the new album from an African-Canadian woman named Kaia Kater and it has brought me back to the future from my recent immersion of ripped jazz 78s of the thirties.

Before getting to the new album, here’s two videos that Kaia did for the Folk Alley Sessions last July to give you a quick sampling of her talent.

Despite already being written about with great enthusiasm on several notable websites, I think I might actually be ahead of the tsunami that will surely follow this singer, songwriter and clawhammer banjoist as more people discover Nine Pin. If like myself you missed her debut full-length album Sorrow Bound from 2014, I’ve pulled this bio information from her site to get you up to speed:

One of the youngest performers in the Canadian old-time and folk communities, this 22 year-old plays the banjo, sings, and has her own unique take on Appalachian and Canadian folk music. Originally from Québec and now based in Toronto, Kaia spends extensive time in West Virginia, where she is pursuing studies in Appalachian music and culture.

Her songs on the new album are fueled by her rich low tenor vocals, jazz-influenced instrumentation, and beautifully understated banjo, and they’ve got as much in common with Kendrick Lamar right now as they do with Pete Seeger.

Nine Pin is a beautifully recorded concept album released in a world afflicted with ‘one-song attention span disorder’ and it was recorded in just one day. Augmenting her vocal, banjo and piano, producer Chris Bartos contributed electric guitar, 5-string fiddle and moog, while bringing in an ensemble that added in trumpet, flugelhorn, percussion and upright bass. Mixing up old time music with current world topics, here’s a song from the album about the Black Lives Matter moment, called ‘Rising Down’.

While Kaia was able to receive funding for Nine Pin from several sources, including the Canadian government who seem to value supporting the arts more so than their southern neighbor, she’s also been running a crowd sourcing effort on Pledge Music. As I write this she’s at 118% of her goal, but it’s not too late to help out. Here’s a great overview of not only the album, but it’s an opportunity to get to know this amazing woman who will be graduating from college this month and is on the verge of breaking out in the roots music community and beyond. Perhaps too late for this summer’s festival circuit, I anticipate a very busy year ahead.

Every Picture Tells a Story.

Sandy 2

The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.

Donovan and The Invisible Fourth Dimension of Transcendental Superconscious Vision.

Donovan

The great English folksinger from the sixtes is turning seventy, and enjoying a renewed interest in his music with the release of a two-disc anthology titled Donovan Retrospective. There was a show this week in London and he’ll be performing at dates in the UK, Europe and North America through at least September.

I was a Donovan fan long before I discovered Dylan, and thanks to his hit single ‘Mellow Yellow’ I recall an afternoon spent with my friend David where we scraped the insides of a banana peel, dried it out in the oven and smoked it up while waiting for something to happen. Nothing happened except a coughing fit. Nevertheless, Donovan’s music dominated the AM radio airways for a couple of years, and his mystical-magical vibe and flowing satin garb was more interesting to me at the time than the denim-clad American folkies of the day.

The Guardian put together an interview this past week around the making of ‘Sunshine Superman’ that I think is worth a read. Click here to be transported, but come back to listen to this favorite track where he out-Dylans Dylan.

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

From Vice: A Photo gallery of Ethiopia’s Emerging Skate Scene.

Ok…your scratching your head wondering about what this has to do with roots music, but the answer is that youth culture in general terms is a breeding ground for the creative arts, and Vice put together a series of photographs shot by Daniel Reiter that I find really interesting. Hope you do too. Here’s the link and a pic.

skate

I’ve Been To Louisiana But I Never Visited New Orleans.

This years JazzFest just ended after a ten-day run with over 425,000 visitors. While it’s officially called the Jazz and Heritage Festival, the lineup was all over the place, going beyond the lines of what might consider jazz or heritage. Steely Dan, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Neil Young, Pearl Jam, Paul Simon and Snoop Dogg appeared at the Shell Oil-sponsored event and performed on the Acura Stage, and while you can’t complain about a lineup that was also heavy with blues, zydeco and a lot of local talent…it seems from afar that jazz takes a backseat. I’m still jealous that I didn’t get to go and the online aggregator Flipboard published a really first class photo gallery. Click here to…bop de de bop bop…check it out.

NEW ORLEANS, LA - APRIL 24: Big Chief Monk Boudreaux performs at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival at Fair Grounds Race Course on April 24, 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana. (Photo by Josh Brasted/WireImage)

Photo by Josh Brasted/WireImage

The Man Who Sliced And Diced The Hits Has Died…But Wait…There’s More!

Phillip Kives, the man who literally invented the television infomercial and sold over 28 million of the Miracle Brush (later renamed Brush-O-Matic) in the sixties before setting his sight to pitching various music collections under the name of K-Tel Records has passed away.

Along with such household faves as Veg-O-Matic, Patty Stacker, run-proof pantyhose, bottle cutters and mood rings, K-Tel soared in music marketing. By the early eighties the company had sold over a half billion units worldwide. And while Kives’ biggest seller was Hooked on Classics, probably his greatest contribution was the creation of the one minute commercial that packed up to twenty or thirty songs for one low price.

Damn the Hype, Praise the Boxer

I realize that it can wear a little thin when those of us who have the good fortune of being able to share our discoveries and opinions with readers on a regular basis are constantly dragging out endless stories about the good ol’ days. I have attempted — but perhaps not always succeeded — to strike a balance. After all, No Depression‘s new tagline is “The Journal of Roots Music,” but I think it’s fair to say that the majority of the subject matter and content that dominates this website and others like it is primarily focused on new releases: artists currently on tour, upcoming festival lineups, reviews of recent concerts.

About four months ago, I started to aggregate and post a minimum of three news stories per week on my various social media platforms that related to roots music. Relying on two dozen websites that emphasize folk, blues, jazz, alt-country, bluegrass, old-time, and the ilk, I soon discovered that everybody is (more or less) reporting on the same news, the same artists, and the same albums. While I still budget my “ear share” to listening to a dozen or so new albums each week, I find that very little of it is sticking.

Now, this isn’t a situation where the old curmudgeon doesn’t think there’s great music out there, waiting to be heard. At least I hope it isn’t coming off like that. To the contrary, I think there’s almost too much of the good stuff and too little time to find it. I find myself feeling as though I’m being manipulated by high octane hype that’s beginning to stifle my overall interest. Throw in the weekly Top 40 chart from the Americana Music Association along with dozens of stories about the artist-album-flavor of the week from Sturgill, Hayes, Parker, Margo, or the Jayhawks, and it just makes me want to … what … listen to Bruce Springsteen do “Purple Rain” again?

For now, I’m alternating my listening time between Norman Blake’s Flying Fish output and hundreds of various jazz titles that have been ripped from old 78s, digitized, and sent to me from a friend in Europe.

Meanwhile, Ernie in Kansas City piqued my interest when he sent me a note asking if I knew about the famous boxer Jack Johnson, who went by the nickname of “The Galveston Giant.” He was the first African-American world heavyweight champion, from 1908 through 1915. In the 1920s, after serving time in prison, he recorded a side or two for Ajax Records. He has an amazing life story and Ken Burns produced a film about him you might want to check out.

Recently I found this clip and it’s reminds me of why I love music. Both old and new.

https://youtu.be/lswBX3cBKAQ

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column on the No Depression website.

Photo by Otto Sarony/1908 CC 2.0

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #6

Photo by Sandy Dyas

Hidden Agenda Deluxe.

When I first heard the Pan Alley Fever, the debut album from Hidden Agenda Deluxe, I imagined that they must come out of Georgia or Alabama with their Allman Brothers meets The Band vibe. It appears that I missed the geographic location by about ten thousand miles because when I visited their website this is what I saw:

Wat krijg je als je een aantal Nederlandse drukbezette topmuzikanten bij elkaar zet die allemaal al van echte Americana hielden voordat iemand nog wist wat die term ging inhouden? Juist: Americana Deluxe. Met binnen de gelederen de internationaal gelauwerde singer-songwriters BJ Baartmans en Eric Devries, wekt een samenwerking hoge verwachtingen.

So yeah…Mississippi, right?

This is a collaboration of accomplished and established Dutch musicians that includes the aforementioned Baartmans and Devries, along with bassist Gerald van Beuningen and drummer-vocalist Sjoerd van Bommel. Though not listed as an official band member, Rob Geboers’ Hammond organ is sprinkled throughout.

While you can stream it here in the US on Spotify or download it from Amazon, so far there is little press about these guys and I see only a few one-off gigs booked. Looks like their own solo careers keeps them pretty busy but this album could change that.

Every Picture Tells a Story.

Had I Blinked I Might Have Missed Sammy Walker For The Second Time.

Were it not for Jim Allen’s story this past week in North Carolina’s Indy Week, there is an excellent chance I would have continued on with my life without ever hearing the music of Sammy Walker. Atfter reading the article and listening to his Folkways and Warner releases from the seventies, my first thought was the whole thing might be a hoax. How could I possibly have missed Walker and what was I doing in 1975….oh yeah…wait…never mind. But seriously, I doubt we’ll ever hear anyone who sounds so close to both Woody Guthrie or the early Bob Dylan than this.

The occasion for Allen’s piece and other media nods is the recent release of Brown Eyed Georgia Darlin from Ramseur Records. A collection of demos that Walker did for Warners, it’s now putting the spotlight back on a man whose backstory is worthy of a screenplay with his connection to a cast of characters that includes Phil Ochs, Moe Asch, Bob Fass, Lee Hayes, Mo Ostin and Harold Leventhal.

Here are the first three paragraphs to Allen’s Once a Leading Candidate to Be the “New Dylan,” Sammy Walker Deserves a Second Listen but I strongly urge you to just click here for the full story. Its a great one.

There should be a long German word for the phenomenon by which we endlessly seek new iterations of an irreplaceable cultural force. You’ll find few better examples than the music world’s desperate quest to anoint a “New Dylan,” starting in the sixties, continuing apace through the late seventies, and, to some extent, still happening now.

Singer-songwriter history is littered with artists who were simultaneously honored with and damned by the designation—Loudon Wainwright III, John Prine, Elliott Murphy, Steve Forbert, a young Bruce Springsteen, and so on.

Arguably, aside from Springsteen, none of these fine songsmiths achieved the same cultural impact as the inscrutable man from Minnesota. But they often ended up earning some cult-hero status—except, ironically, the singer most legitimately daubed with the New Dylan brush, Sammy Walker.

My Broadside Column At No Depression Is A Triple Play of Woody.

BroadwayDannyRose4-9580

This past week I had Woody on the brain. From a new Woody Guthrie project by Del McCoury, a concert with master blues guitarist Woody Mann and another look back at Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose. It’s on this site now: Press. Ctrl + F (Windows) or ⌘ Command + F (Mac) and then search for Woody.

I Wish I Could Watch The Everly Brothers: Harmonies in Heaven.

For those of us in the US who are not able to tune in BBC Four, we’ll be missing out on a new music documentary that focuses on the career of The Everly Brothers called Harmonies From Heaven. A production from Eagle Vision, it features Don Everly telling their story of how he and his brother Phil rose to fame after appearing as kids on their dad’s radio show in Shenandoah Iowa.

Set to a backdrop of 1950’s Eisenhower-led America, the film examines this troubled and transformative era, the trials and triumphs of this remarkable brotherly pairing, and the innovations and lasting impact of a musically revolutionary duo.

The film also features interviews with Don Everly, Art Garfunkel, Graham Nash, Bonnie Prince Billy, Dave Edmunds, Tim Rice, Jake Bugg, legendary guitarists Albert Lee and Waddy Wachtel, plus archive performances and home movie footage of the Everly Brothers in the recording studio.

A Woody Triple Play: Guthrie, Mann, and Allen

Portrait of folk singer Woody Guthrie smoking cigarette. (Photo by Eric Schaal//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Today I’ve got several threads running through my brain, and I’m going to throw them into a Yahtzee cup and see what spills out. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. And if the Woodys I’m here to talk to you about today aren’t of interest to you, you can click this link and watch Ted Danson talk about the time he took mushrooms with Woody Harrelson. I aim to please.

But, to one of my points: Woody Guthrie has been a prominent figure in the last hundred pages of a dense and detailed book I’ve been reading for what seems like months now, that was published back in 1998 by Peter D. Goldsmith. Making People’s Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records reads more like a history book than a biography. Should you be interested in learning about how roots music from Texas to Ethiopia was recorded and distributed in the 20th century, this one is for you. It’s available from the Smithsonian people but can also be found used on Amazon, starting at the steep price of 53 cents.

At times you can’t tell if its a narrative or an oral history, as Goldsmith brilliantly weaves the words of others around the theme of how a European immigrant came to New York, got interested in radio and recording, and went from releasing Yiddish records to building a catalog of essential folk, jazz, spoken word, gospel, and world music. Guthrie, Leadbelly, Josh White, Pete Seeger, the Harry Smith Anthology, Jazz at the Philharmonic — it’s an amazing American legacy.

You’ve likely been hearing a lot about the new the Del McCoury Band album of Guthrie tunes that came out last week, and it’s a fine project. I love how Nora Guthrie manages her father’s extensive archive and keeps the music alive with unique collaborations such as this one. Here’s a track to give you a taste of how McCoury does what he does.

My friends Mark and Beth, who front the smokin’ New York-based blues-infused roots band Spuyten Duyvil, have been running a concert series for the past seven years called Urban H2O. Last week they closed it out with an intimate performance from master guitarist Woody Mann. A student of the late Reverend Gary Davis and co-producer of the documentary Harlem Street Singer, this Woody has eight solo albums, tours around the world, and is currently a visiting artist at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he teaches Davis’ artistry to a new generation of young musicians. If you haven’t seen the film, track it down.

Woody Allen will be releasing a new film in August titled Cafe Society, and next year there will likely be a lot of press coverage on him and his wife Soon-Yi Previn, as they celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary. It’s quite a story how they came together, and I know a lot of people still have a hard time separating the man’s work from his actions and choices. Putting that aside for now, though, I happened to see Broadway Danny Rose again recently and it reminded me of Nick Apollo Forte.

A lounge singer from Connecticut who worked at Holiday Inns and Howard Johnson motels, Forte had zero acting experience when he was chosen to play Lou Canova in the 1984 comedy classic that starred Mia Farrow along with Allen. It is my all-time favorite film and there was never an official soundtrack released. I wish I could track down a clip of him singing his signature tune “Agita” in that film, but this is the best I was able to come up with:

And with that…I’m out of here.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed Broadside column on the No Depression website.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #5

sandydyas_katy RPM5

New Music Rising: A Family Album of Close Harmony and Tasty Covers.

Barber Born in Mississauga, Ontario, Matthew Barber is three years older than his sister Jill. Over the years they’ve enjoyed separate music careers that have taken them down different roads. Each have released multiple acclaimed solo albums, but they are stylistically different with Matthew the more hyphenated folk-pop-roots-singer-songwriter, while Jill zigs and zags across the genre-landscape of jazz, pop, chansons, old school soul and torch ballad country.

The Family Album is their first album as a duo, and features three originals from Jill, two from Matthew and cover versions of songs written or recorded by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Bobby Charles, Ian Tyson and Gene MacLellan. In addition to an eclectc song selection, the sibling close harmony with arrangements and instrumentation in the roots-folk tradition make this an absolute standout.

The entire recording process took only a week at a Toronto studio, and for many in America this may be your first introduction to the Barbers. And while songs like ‘Comes A Time’, ‘If I Needed You’ and ‘The Patrician’ might seem to some as being endlessly reworked in the past, these arrangements come off sounding to my ears more as well done redefinitions and less the usual note for note reworking.

There are about a dozen tour dates scheduled in Canada over the next month or two, and June gigs in NYC and Boston. Hoping that The Family Album creates a big buzz so that these two will wander across the border a little more often, and fly over the ocean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiIhpL_LDn4

Every Picture Tells a Story.

Jason and the Scorchers…Another in a Series of ‘Great Rock Bands From The Eighties’.

I happened to come across an article in The Guardian this past week from Michael Hann about Jason and The Scorchers, a band that for a brief moment in time back in the mid-eighties stood on the edge of immense possibility. Fronted by Jason Ringenberg who moved to Nashville in 1981 with the dream of starting up a high energy roots band, he found three musicians who were more interested in playing power-punk than twang. The blend was almost indescribable.

Hann’s memory is far better than mine, but like him I also got the chance to see them play during that summer of 1985 at Nashville’s Exit/In. I equate it to that moment when you tug on the seat belt as the roller coaster starts to climb and it’s too damn late to get off. It was a confluence of sound and energy that I’ve never seen before nor since.

Here’s just a few excerpts from Hann’s article. It’s really a great story, and so I encourage you to read it all here.

There are only ever a handful of names that get mentioned when the idea of “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world” is raised. Actually, there have been dozens of greatest rock’n’roll bands in the world, but most of them never get recognised – because they were only ever the greatest band for a week, or a month, a summer.

Jason and the Scorchers made music that sounded like no one else, a berserk, overdriven racket, in which country covers and Ringenberg’s originals were played with Never Mind the Bollocks power by the other three.

As you’ll already have guessed, the moment of greatness was brief. The Scorchers became less Ringenberg’s band than Hodges’, as EMI ushered them towards big hair and big makeup, to go with the big guitars. If the Pistols at the Opry worked, Poison at the Opry most certainly didn’t. Their next album, 1986’s Still Standing, might have been better retitled Going Backwards. One more record, Thunder and Fire, and the Scorchers were no more.

Back in 2004 there was a documentary released called The Appalachians which tells the story of the people and the land of Appalachia. The film uses interviews with ordinary people, scholars, and musicians like Loretta Lynn, Marty Stuart, Rosanne and Johnny Cash, and others. Dualtone Records put out a soundtrack, and Jason, by then a solo artist, contributed ‘The Price of Progress’ which has always been my favorite from him.

Steve Earle On Getting Beat Up and The Importance of Merle Haggard To Him.

This was published on April 12, 2016 by The New York Times as an Op Ed, and I’ll cut and paste the first few paragraphs along with the link to the entire essay that was written by Steve. Not only does he have a way with lyrics and music, but Earle is a fine wordsmith.

In late 1969 and early 1970, when “Okie From Muskogee” was blaring from every jukebox in every beer joint, truck stop and restaurant in my hometown, San Antonio, I wanted, sometimes very much, to hate Merle Haggard.

I say blaring because that’s the kind of record “Okie” was. The kind that, when it dropped into place on an automated turntable or crackled from the speakers of an AM radio, you wanted to turn it up.

Well, not me. I was pretty much a rock-and-folk guy, but this was Texas at the height of the Vietnam War, and San Antonio was a military town boasting five Air Force bases and an Army post, so I’m pretty certain I was in the minority. There were kids in my high school who took pride in listening to nothing but country music. Whether Hag intended it or not, his blue-collar anthem became a battle cry for Vietnam-bound working-class youths with a snowball’s chance in Saigon of a student deferment. Music to kick some hippie butt by. Click here for the full story.

Heartworn Highways Deluxe

Light In The Attic Records put together a 40th Anniversary Edition Box Set of Heartworn Highways a few years ago with restored image and sound, and a whole bunch of extras. The documentary was shot in late 1975 through early 1976, and covers singer-songwriters whose songs are more traditional to early folk and country music instead of following in the tradition of the previous generation. Some of film’s featured performers are Guy and Townes as well as other ‘outlaws’ such as Steve Earle, David Allen Coe, Rodney Crowell, Gamble Rogers, Steve Young and The Charlie Daniels Band.

I think the best of the bonus items in this set is an 80 page book with exhaustive 20,000 word essay by Sam Sweet interviewing artists, documentary creators and crew, including ephemera and over 100 unseen photos taken during the making of the film. Oxford American posted an excerpt this week on their website titles From Houston to Long Beach to Old Hickory Lake and it’s one great story. Here’s just the opening, and I’ll link it below.

Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt met during what Clark later called “the great folk scare.” Houston in the early 1960s had a folk community that paralleled those in Cambridge, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles—only smaller and with better bluesmen. The musicologist John Lomax ran the Texas Folklore Society and would arrange for veterans like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb to play concerts at the Jester Lounge on Westheimer, where they would turn Kingston Trio fans onto something tougher. As Lomax’s son, John Lomax III, put it, “Lightnin’ was as electric as you could get with an acoustic.” Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt were among the room’s transfixed teenagers. Click here to read the rest.