The Yearlings: Americana Lost and Found

Last week my local library was the recipient of about 500 barely, hardly, or never played compact discs that have made their way to my mailbox over the past couple of years. There were also a few boxes of recent books that have all been read and kept in excellent condition. They were my donations to the annual sale that will raise money to help fill the library’s shelves with new stuff. I’m really not much of a philanthropist, but hopefully the effort will bring in some money to an underfunded public institution, and admittedly it’s already done wonders for decluttering my apartment.

While it is indeed my good fortune to write a weekly column for this esteemed website, it is also both a curse and blessing that I am inundated every day with letters, emails, and packages trying to bring to my attention something new that I may choose to bring to your attention. Most come from marketing companies, managers, and public relations people, and as much as I’ve asked them to save the cost of paper, plastic, and postage since I’m an all- digital-all-the-time type dude, it just seems to be in their DNA to send me boxes and padded envelopes. So I guess on behalf of the public library, thanks for supporting reading and education.

Not to solicit or open the flood gates – repeat often: Ed does not write reviews – but what I prefer is when I get a note directly from the musicians. Like this one from a couple of weeks ago:

Dear Easy Ed,

The Yearlings are an alt-country band from The Netherlands. In November we released our album called Skywriting. Being a fan of your columns, we are very curious of what you think of it. Would you like to give it a listen?

With kind regards,

Niels Goudswaard
The Yearlings

Notice the subtle flattery? Very effective. Niels wisely included a link to a streaming service to make it easy for me, and I added it to a playlist that I call “Listen To This New Stuff Now” and wrote back:

Thanks. Just sampled and added it to my playlist. Sounds real nice with an R.E.M. and Jayhawks vibe to it. Lots of jingle jangle guitar work. Here’s a question…why sing in English instead of Dutch?

The next day Niels replied:

Good question. I grew up listening to English and American Music. Neil Young, The Band, The Beatles. Later on as teenagers we mostly listened to, indeed, REM, Uncle Tupelo, Wilco etc. The same for my friend Olaf, the other lead singer, who by the way works as a university teacher in English linguistics. When we started making music, it just felt natural to do it in English.

Thanks for listening! Its just nice to know that someone likes what we are making.

So, thanks a lot for your response!

Niels

The Yearlings formed in 1999 and they performed over 200 shows and released two albums before parting ways six years later. In 2014 Niels and Olaf Koeneman began exchanging musical ideas and writing again. With enough material for an album, the original lineup came back together — Herman Gaaff, Léon Geuyen, and Bertram Mourits — and they headed back into the studio along with René van Barneveld on pedal steel. Skywriting was released in November and is available in all the places you’d expect it to be, and they are touring throughout the Netherlands to support it.

Over on their website they’ve got about a dozen reviews posted already, mostly in Dutch, which really doesn’t help much when you’re trying to dig for more information but you only read English. But Keith Hargreaves over at one of my favorite sites, Americana UK, posted this review, and I’ll close it out by sharing a few of his words:

Hailing from that mecca of Americana …..Utrecht. Not an obvious location for an album chockful of big songs that speak of big skies and carry breezy melodies by the score. These are Pettyesque songs played with brio and verve and the harmonies really chime. This is an album of influences constructed in a loving way to celebrate a particular genre and it works in its own joyous way.

But wait … there’s more…there isn’t just one Yearlings, but two!

Several thousand miles away, down in Australia, there is another band called The Yearlings, which features the folk and alt-country sound of Chris Parkinson and Robyn Chalklen. Together since 2000, they have released five studio albums and toured internationally. Although their last album, All The Wandering, is already almost five years old, they are indeed alive, well, and performing with their incredible collection of vintage instruments.

Y’all can consider this last clip a bonus: You’re getting two Yearling bands for the price of one. Don’t forget to support your local library and go out to hear live music whenever you can.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

If You Could Name Just One Album

Moby Grape Debut Album / Columbia Records

Many of you who have been reading my articles over the past almost-ten years also follow my Facebook page, Americana and Roots Music Daily. I started it up about three years ago and it can best be described as an aggregation of news stories, art and photography, historical notations, my own writing, and music videos, as well as a place where people can connect and have conversations about music. It’s not a business venture, but just a hobby that has slowly grown from some of my friends to a couple of thousand people from all over the world.

Earlier this week, on a slow news day when I really couldn’t find much to post, I decided to put up a picture of a 51-year-old album that has meant a lot to me and posed this question:

If you could name just one album that has had a major impact on your musical interests and appreciation … damn this is hard. Go. (For you youngsters who don’t recognize my choice, it’s the first Moby Grape, in mono.)

It’s really an unanswerable question to ask of someone, since we maintain a huge jukebox inside our brains that is acquired over time, triggering our memories and creating a baseline of shifting interests and taste. It’s nether a fair assessment to choose one over another, nor does it say much about anything. I could have easily chosen any of a couple dozen if I gave it more thought, yet this is the one that first popped into my mind.

Without spending too much time explaining my choice, I’ll just say that Moby Grape released this self-titled album when I was 15 and there has not been a span of more than a couple of weeks that has since passed where I don’t listen to at least one or two of the 13 tracks. I stared at and studied the cover photo by Jim Marshall endlessly, alone in my bedroom, fascinated and enchanted with the band members’ hair, facial expressions, Don’s finger on the washboard, and the scarf wrapped around Skip’s neck. It came with a free poster that I hung on the wall and it was my go-to album cover for rolling joints. The music featured a rarely heard three-guitar attack, every member was a songwriter, each took turns singing lead vocals, and the production was crisp. They were rock, country, blues, jazz, and soul … often with all five elements surfacing in less than three minutes. Before they self-destructed a few years later, I got to see them live on three occasions. They were my guys.

Over on Facebook people began responding to my question, and within a few hours it was seen by thousands of people, many of whom shared their own choices. Here’s just a few of them:

Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Will the Circle Be Unbroken
Flying Burrito Brothers – Gilded Palace of Sin
Little Feat – Dixie Chicken
The Beatles –White Album, Sgt. Pepper’s, Revolver, and Rubber Soul
The Paul Butterfield Blues Band – East West
Uncle Tupelo – Anodyne
Sex Pistols – Never Mind the Bullocks
The Velvet Underground – The Velvet Underground
Grateful Dead – Workingman’s Dead
J.J. Cale – Naturally
Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited and The Basement Tapes
R.E.M. – Reckoning
John Fahey – The Legend of Blind Joe Death
Gillian Welch – Time (The Revelator)
Golden Smog – Down by the Old Mainstream
Various Artists –The Rock Machine Turns You On (Columbia Records sampler)
Elton John – Elton John
Bruce Springsteen –Nebraska and Born to Run
Terry Allen – Lubbock On Everything
Steve Earle – Guitar Town
Fred Neil – Bleeker and MacDougal
The Byrds – Fifth Dimension and Sweetheart of the Rodeo
Paul Revere and The Raiders – Greatest Hits
Delaney and Bonnie – Accept No Substitute
Mothers of Invention – We’re Only in It For the Money
Herb Alpert and The Tijuana Brass – Whipped Cream and Other Delights
Tom Petty – Wildflowers
The Band – Music from Big Pink
Arlo Guthrie – Last of the Brooklyn Cowboys
Buffalo Springfield – Retrospective
Simon and Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Waters
Hiatus Kaiyote –Tawk Tomahawk
Camper Van Beethoven –Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart
Neil Young –Everybody Knows This is Nowhere
Tim Buckley – Blue Afternoon

Other albums mentioned were by Ella Fitzgerald, Waylon Jennings, Jackson Browne, Jean Ritchie, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, NRBQ, The Mahavishnu Orchestra, Keith Jarrett, Dave Brubeck, Sly and The Family Stone, Duane Allman, John Coltrane, Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones.

With the exception of my friend and surrogate daughter Charly, a 23-year-old woman from Germany who listed Hiatus Kaiyote (great name!) as her choice, you could conclude that we fans of roots music are getting up in years. As more than one noted, it seems that we are most connected to the music from our youth. And so despite a slow news day, it brought about an interesting moment of reflection, and a helluva good list of music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Americana and Roots Music Videos: RPM 5

An occasional series of Americana and roots music videos. Sharing new discoveries, and revisiting old friends.

This started out as a story about my travels throughout the world in a quest to find hidden and long forgotten places of pleasure, often called record stores. Getting down on my hands and knees, pushing through cobwebs and kicking away a dead rodent or two in order to find those elusive hidden musical artifacts that I take home, place on my turntable while pouring myself two fingers of a fine whiskey, and then let the sweet sounds baptize my body and soothe my searing soul.

So that didn’t happen. I’m on the wagon, haven’t stepped on a winged vessel for over six years, and my turntable awaits my oldest son’s ability to rent a van, enlist a helper, and transport it to Brooklyn, where such things are cherished. I surf in the stream and scour YouTube.

Here’s a few things that caught my eyes and ears this season.

There Is Nothing Like Jason Isbell and an Acoustic Guitar

This should hardly be a surprise, as Isbell has been consistently putting out incredible music from back in his days with the Drive-By Truckers, followed by his first solo album in 2007 and those that followed with his band The 400 Unit, named for the psychiatric ward of Eliza Coffee Memorial Hospital in Florence, Alabama. His wife, Amanda Shires, manager Traci Thomas, and Ryan Adams assisted in getting Isbell into treatment for alcohol and cocaine addiction in early 2012 and he now speaks openly about it. He’s intelligent, street smart, has a sharp wit, runs one of the best Twitter accounts you’ll ever follow, he was married to Shires by musician Todd Snider, is a fanatic fan of the beleaguered Atlanta Braves — and I’ll stand on Steve Earle’s coffee table and tell you he is currently the best songwriter we’ve seen since Dylan’s most prolific period, whenever that was. While I prefer him alone with his acoustic, this year I’ve gone back into his catalog from the past ten years, and if you’re a Jason-come-lately, you’d be well served to do the same.

This Is the Dawning of the Age of Geriatrics

The other night I went to see Bob Weir and The Wolf Brothers here in NYC, and as I stepped off the subway and headed up Broadway toward the theater, it was if somebody freeze-dried 1967. People of a certain age were decked out in tie dye or wearing faded concert tees across large stomachs, and as I made my way to the loge I saw one poor soul suffering from an overdose of stool softeners. But the music? First rate and as rockin’ and rollin’ as you might not have expected, but Bobby stretched out on his guitar and sang like I’ve never heard him before. It was truly a wonder to behold.

Along with John Prine, who will likely top every person’s end of the year poll, there has been an avalanche of older musicians who’ve either gone out on tour for the first time in years or written and recorded some great music. Examples would include Willie and Dylan, who never seem to stop touring, the Sweetheart of The Rodeo show which allowed Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman to show that they still have the chops, and Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, and Dwight Yoakam criss-crossed the country. Paul McCartney has his first number one album in 36 years, and Diana Ross is killing it in Vegas. Paul Simon went around the world one last time, and I think by now you get the idea: It’s better to burn out than to fade away.

The Year That Americana Music Died

Not that anybody, but a few, cares about such things, but when was the last time you looked at Billboard magazine’s Americana/Folk chart? A few years ago everyone made a big fuss that not only did “our music” warrant a Grammy award (never televised, of course, and who can forget Linda Chorney?), but we also got our own official chart. As I wrote this Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hitsis number nine, followed by Ed Sheeran, John Mayer, Jack Johnson, John Denver, James Taylor, and Jim Croce. Sure, Chris Stapleton occupies both the number one and three spots, but if this is the best we have to show for it — schlock pop and geriatric redux — I’m outta here.

These are the musicians who came out with some kick-ass music this year, in no particular order, and, for at least this week, aren’t on the Americana chart: Dave Alvin and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Malcolm Holcombe, Lindi Ortega, St. Paul and The Broken Bones, Lula Wiles, I See Hawks In L.A., Laura Veirs, Milk Carton Kids, The Rails, Eliza Gilkyson, Mary Gauthier, The Jayhawks, Modern Mal, Clay Parker and Jodi James, Brandi Carlile, Shemekia Copeland, The Earls of Leicester, Pharis and Jason Romero, Tim Easton, Ry Cooder, Sarah Shook and The Disarmers, The Mammals, John Hiatt, Ed Romanoff, Jules Shear, Hayes Carll, Whitey Morgan, Rosanne Cash, and Colter Wall, to name but a few.

And now the real craziness: Of the top ten albums on this week’s chart from the Americana Music Association, not even one made it on Billboard‘s chart. Thank god for Dale Watson’s Ameripolitan music association or whatever he calls it … they’re gettin’ it right.

Why Ska and Rocksteady Have Gotten My Attention

I haven’t inhaled for over 23 years, have no hair left even if I wanted to grow it out, and never went to Jamaica. But for reasons unknown even to me, this was the year I began to get absorbed into the roots of reggae. Blame it on a small radio station in NYC with the call letters WVIP that spends much of the day hawking vitamin supplements and selling help for your damaged credit reports. But every so often they break out the music, and it’s worth the wait. I’m a white boy who can’t even begin to explain it, but here are a few albums that shouldn’t be too hard to find if you want to dip your toes into the water. Start with Lee “Scratch” Perry and Friends – The Black Ark Years, Everything Crash: The Best of The Ethiopians and then The Story of Rocksteady: 1966-1968.

Video Killed the Radio Star

When was the last time you pulled out your old Low Anthem albums? It’s amazing how great this band is, and after opening on the Lucinda Williams’ tour last year, they recorded and released The Salt Doll Went To Measure the Depth of the Sea. Best album title of the year and just a wonderful group of writers and players.

Anybody who has been paying attention these past ten years knows that I keep going back to Marissa Nadler, the Boston-based singer-songwriter-guitarist-artist who can sing about ex-Byrd Gene Clark, cover a Townes Van Zandt song, and just as easily open for a death metal band in a small club in Germany at three in the morning. When her new album For My Crimes was recently released, it coincided with this nice mention from Richard Thompson in The Quietist:

“My youngest son, Jack, introduced me to Marissa Nadler. Her music is really strange, lovely stuff. I think it’s a little bit linked to shoegazing, or that sound, although I don’t know a lot about that. I find it very mesmerising and very dreamy, especially the way she harmonises with herself. I’m also never quite sure what she’s talking about – there’s lots of ambiguity in her lyrics, which I like. Songs and stories don’t always have to be straight.”

King of The Road: Tribute to Roger Miller is a two-disc album showcasing the songwriting of Miller through artists that span all corners, from Ringo Starr to Asleep At The Wheel, Lyle Lovett to Loretta Lynn. It’s a bit uneven and sadly they really missed the mark on “Husbands and Wives,” one of my favorites. Instead of using the great Jules Shear version above (video from Sherry Wallace), they teamed a mismatched Jamey Johnson with Emmylou Harris and murdered it. Despite that, you can cull a number of great performances here if you pick and choose.

And That’s All There Is Folks … It’s Cartoon Time

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

This Land May Not Be Our Land

You’ve likely seen the image of Woody Guthrie’s guitar an infinite number of times in your life. It reads “THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS” and you could interpret that phrase to mean that lyrics and music will unite people to rise against economic, racial, and social injustice. The origin was likely from a World War II government propaganda campaign, a sticker that was printed and handed out to defense plant workers. While living in a small New York hotel room, Woody likely affixed it to his instrument while writing songs such as “Taking Hitler’s Head Off Blues” and “All You Fascists Bound To Lose,” the latter performed live on New York radio along with Pete Seeger, Cisco Houston, and Sonny Terry as The Headline Singers.

I’m gonna tell you fascists,
you may be surprised,
people in this world
are getting organized.

On Feb. 23, 1940, Guthrie wrote what would become his most popular song, a sing-along titled “This Land Is Your Land” that has been documented as his response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” In true folk music tradition, he based the melody and structure on another song, “Little Darlin’ Pal of Mine,” that was recorded in 1928 by The Carter Family and made it onto Billboard magazine’s music chart the year after, landing at number 14.

An online Library of Congress entry about Guthrie’s version, with his updated lyrics, offers this interpretation of the meaning and origin of his thoughts, which has often been restated and circulated in news articles and stories:

“Guthrie heard Berlin’s song repeatedly while he traveled cross-country and became increasingly annoyed that it glossed over the lop-sided distribution of land and wealth that he was observing and had experienced as a child. Although Guthrie was no statistician, his observations accurately reflected the fact that, even in the depths of the Depression, nearly 20 percent of the nation’s wealth rested with one percent of its population.”

In the original version Guthrie used the phrase “God blessed America for me,” but he changed it to “this land was made for me and you” when he first recorded it with Cisco Houston in April 1944. And as you may or may not know, through the years he played around with the words and verses, leaving some out and putting others back in.

In an unrecorded verse, scribbled on a sheet of loose-leaf paper now in the possession of daughter Nora’s Woody Guthrie Archives, he adds a question perhaps insinuating hopelessness, something I feel very much in touch with in these modern times:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple,
By the Relief Office I saw my people.
As they stood hungry I stood there wondering if
God blessed America for me.

To wonder if God blessed America for me (and you), could Guthrie also have been accepting, or at minimum questioning, the possibility that there was no blessing? And by extension, could it just be that economic disparity and exploitation of the poor and those of color who are different than the “one percent” simply represents the way things are? Taken in that context, rather than as a song calling out injustice under the banner of patriotism and suggesting the potential for change, it could suggest something completely different: We’re fucked.

For those of us who’ve traveled through the decades observing and experiencing both the good and evil in people, along with the systems we create to either raise up or crush each other, these are the hardest of times. The last two major election cycles have provoked in me a feeling I’ve been unable to express for the past several years until now: With an almost even split between voters, America is not the land I once thought it to be. We do not come together, we divide. We do not have a common set of morals or beliefs, nor do we have the capacity to listen, accept, or change. We are at odds with each other, and maybe this is not unique to the times. Perhaps we’ve always fallen for the con game of one nation under God.

As much as I try to block out hate speech and the dangerous violent rhetoric of a particular poor excuse for a human being who rides along with the support and complicity of millions standing with him, this evil permeates the air we breathe almost to the point of suffocation. For me, now closer in years to death than birth, who lives in a blue state with a diverse population and pervasive liberal thought, I wake up each morning and simply go about my business one day at a time, staying in my lane and pondering if my surrender is in itself an act of complicity.

Although it’s always given me strength, I’m not singing Woody’s song much these days because it feels futile. I pray that our children will still hold it close and carry it into the future. I might be a lost cause when it comes to hope, but one never knows what the future may bring.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Postscript: As a columnist for No Depression, I have been given the freedom to choose my own topics and share my views for the past ten years, which I’m grateful for. I want to remind those who may disagree or take offense that these words and opinions are mine alone. Most often it’s about the music, sometimes it’s not. This one combines several themes. I always publish my personal contact information for those who feel the need to take it further, so feel free to reach out. Any anger or distress you may have toward No Depression would be sadly misplaced.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed at my here own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

From Tejano To Polkas: Americana Lost and Found

Photo by Jacqueline Macou/Creative Commons 2.0

Back in the fifties when I was just a little squirt, most Saturday nights were spent at my grandparents’ house, where we ate boiled chicken, played endless card games, and watched television on a small Dumont black and white. It was always the same routine: Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason, Gunsmoke, a bowl of cherry Jell-O and then off to bed. Not sure how my older sister escaped these tortuous nights, but while she was out at sock hops dancing with her friends and cruising the parking lot at Bob’s Big Boy on the boulevard, part of my musical DNA was being formed by the sound of Myron Floren’s accordion playing, an Amercan-ized, white-bread version of polka music.

Fast forward to the mid-’70s, and I was working as a sales rep for an indie music distributor with a territory that took me deep into the small steel and mining towns of Pennsylvania, with an enormous catalog of multigenre titles, including all of Floren’s albums. For almost a half-dozen years I drove through the mountains on the turnpike and country roads with my VW Super Beetle equipped with a Craig eight-track player and an AM radio. Long hours were spent in that car, smoke-filled from Winstons and weed, listening to my own psychedelia mixtapes while alternating through the small local radio stations to get weather updates, check out the farm reports, and listen to polka music. Half-step or waltz, fast or slow, instrumental or with vocals, I loved it. And although this song from Tom Russell sure ain’t a polka, it captures that time period and geography spot on.

One of the people I was listening to back then was Augie Meyers, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator of Doug Sahm. It was his organ playing on the Sir Douglas Quintet albums that added the Norteño style that cut through anything else you were hearing on the radio at the time. Sometime after they released Mendocino, I picked up a copy of Augie’s Western Head Music Co. and played it to death. Pretty sure I still have it somewhere in the vinyl stacks, and I recently found this song posted on YouTube. It was my connect-the-dot to the polkas from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania to the border music of Southern Texas.

Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records — now owned and administered by Smithsonian Folkways — has been a longtime fan and collector of Tejano and conjunto music, issuing a great series of albums culled from his 1990 purchase of Ideal Records under the banner of Tejano Roots. He’s also filmed two documentaries and written extensively about this music, which is posted on a page from the University of Texas at Austin site. Below he explains how the music of Mexico was influenced by other countries and cultures.

“The musical traditions of the Tejanos of South Texas and Norteños of Northern Mexico have been influenced not only by the mother country, Mexico, but also by their Anglo-American, African-American and immigrant neighbors like the Czechs, Bohemians, and Moravians as well as the Germans and Italians. Industry, especially brewing, in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, was developed in part by German immigrants; and the distributors of German-made accordions aggressively marketed the loud, sturdy little ‘boom boxes’ as far back as the late 1800s. Norteño/Conjunto accordion pioneer Narciso Martínez learned many tunes from German and Czech brass bands.”

American-born or based performers who’ve since popularized and included the style into rock and folk music include Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs, Ry Cooder, Calexico, Los Lobos, Latin Playboys, The Mavericks, The Mars Volta, and Los Super Seven. In 1971 Doug Sahm was signed to Atlantic Records as a solo act, and Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, and Augie Meyers were often in the studio backing him up. In 1990 the quartet released their debut album under the name Texas Tornados, and it was recorded in both English and Spanish. Sahm died in 1999, and Fender in 2006. Doug’s son Shawn has kept the music alive, working with Meyers and Jiménez as well as Tornado original musicians Louie Ortega, Speedy Sparks, and Ernie Durawa, and releasing Está Bueno! in 2010. Shawn is still out there performing regularly.

This is a link to Smithsonian Folkways’ catalog of Latin recordings, most of which were acquired by the Arhoolie purchase. You can buy, download, and stream most, if not all. The Tejano Rootsseries is comprised of several collections focusing on specific topics such as women, accordions, orquestas, San Antonio, and artists including Jimenez, Tony De La Rosa, Conjunto Bernal, and Lydia Mendoza.

As in all forms and subgenres of American roots music, this is simply another example of how our country is culturally richer because of our diverse heritage. Whether through the willful immigration from countries spanning the globe or the horrific forced slavery from Africa, people have found ways to connect and share their collective hopes, dreams, and talent, throwing it into the melting pot. And as Woody Guthrie wrote, “In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling, the voice come chanting as the fog was lifting … this land was made for you and me.”

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

New Tunes For Old Ears

Photo: Creative Commons 2.0

‘How To Catch Fish And Music In The Stream’ was the working title to this one, but as you can see I focused on new tunes for old ears instead. While it’s pretty easy to discover music on playlists and from recommendations on most of the streaming services that I hop around on, I’ve honestly never caught a fish in a stream. Nor a river, creek or lake for that matter. And then I also realized that if I stuck with that headline, I’d better include some great recipes too. Of which I have none. So I went with an idiom that was likely first used back in 1616 by Shakespeare in his play Comedy of Errors.

I’m gonna guess that y’all aren’t that interested in idioms or their country cousin phrasal verbs, but damn if it didn’t capture my attention for a good 15 minutes. A few examples of the former would be things like: “add insult to injury,” “Elvis has left the building,” “once in a blue moon,” and “to make a long story short” … or in this case, a short story long. But I don’t want to just jump into the music without sharing some phrasal verbs: do over, give back, hang up, and take down are but a few. And some of you might recall this triple grouping from back in the ’60s: turn on, tune in, drop out. I’ll leave it at that.

Kate Wolf

I had sadly put Kate’s music in a corner of my mind until I came across a live clip of Nanci Griffith and Emmylou Harris singing what is likely her most popular song, “Across the Great Divide.” She left us early at the age 44 back in 1986, diagnosed with leukemia and passing away after complications from a bone marrow transplant. Her recording and concert career began in 1976 and she released seven albums while alive, and another six have since come out. There’s also a wonderful tribute album that Red House Records did in 1998, Treasures Left Behind: Remembering Kate Wolf. She was so well loved and respected in the folk community that each year since 1996 her family has hosted the Kate Wolf Music Festival in Northern California. If you’re looking for an entry ramp to her discography, I’m partial to Poet’s Heart and Give Yourself to Love.

The Other Years

The Other Years are Anna Krippenstapel and Heather Summers from Kentucky, and their self-titled album goes far beyond yet another collection of old-time music. Using only their voices, guitar, fiddle, and banjo, they complement each other as if they’ve been doing this forever and yet it’s Heather’s first group effort. Anna plays fiddle for Joan Shelley and Freakwater, and the group will be opening on Louisville’s Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s current tour.

Marc Ribot: Songs of Resistance 1942-2018

This album of 11 songs of original and traditional songs features a number of different guests and styles. Appearing are Tom Waits, Steve Earle, Meshell Ndegeocello, Justin Vivian Bond, Fay Victor, Sam Amidon, Ohene Cornelius, Tift Merritt, Domenica Fossati and Syd Straw.A seasoned guitarist with over 25 solo albums and an in-demand session player you’ve heard on dozens and dozens of recordings, Ribot gives this as his reason for releasing this compilation:“There’s a lot of contradiction in doing any kind of political music, how to act against something without becoming it, without resembling what you detest. Sometimes it is hard to figure out what to do, and I imagine we’ll make mistakes, and hopefully, learn from them. But I knew this from the moment Donald Trump was elected: I’m not going to play downtown scene Furtwangler to any orange-combover dictator wannabe. No way.”

Portions of the album’s proceeds will be donated to The Indivisible Project, an organization that helps individuals resist the Trump agenda via grassroots movements in their local communities. More info can be found at www.indivisible.org.

Laura Cantrell

Hard to believe that it’s been almost six years since Laura Cantrell last released an album. I’ve placed all five of her albums, as well as the five EPs she’s put out, on my current “crazy compulsive obsessions” playlist and have been playing the heck out of them. Laura is based here in New York and did gigs earlier this year in England, Ireland, and Spain, and she has a monthly concert series called States of Country that she does here at Sid Gold’s Request Room. She also hosts Dark Horse Radio, a program devoted to the music of George Harrison, on SiriusXM’s Beatles Channel.

Lindi Ortega

This year’s Liberty album has me totally entranced. I’ve gone back and revisited all of her past work and the only thing you really need to know is she’s from Canada, now lives in Nashville, and is doing stuff nobody else does. Brilliant work. Go forth and seek it out. Done.

And don’t forget … Willie’s reminder to vote:

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Dale Watson And The New Honky Tonk Heroes

Photo from dalewatson.com

Do y’all know what they call the type of roots music that is no longer played on country music radio? Ameripolitan. You can thank Dale Watson for that genre classification, and the story of how it came about can be found in this excerpt from a 2014 profile of the Texas singer-songwriter that ran in The New York Times, in partnership with Texas Monthly:

“Country music has to evolve in order to survive,” Mr. [Blake] Shelton said in an appearance on Great American Country TV in January last year. “Nobody wants to listen to their grandpa’s music. And I don’t care how many of these old farts around Nashville are going, ‘My God, that ain’t country!’”

Many musicians … were incensed. “This guy sounds like in his own mind that his head is so large no hat ever made will fit him,” Ray Price, the recently deceased crooner extraordinaire, wrote on Facebook.…

Ten minutes after hearing of Shelton’s barb, Dale Watson, who was touring Belgium at the time, wrote “Old Fart (A Song for Blake).” A video of Watson and his band, The Lone Stars, playing the song against a backdrop of the famous photograph of Johnny Cash giving the finger was uploaded to YouTube on Jan. 25, 2013.

When Watson returned to the United States, he came up with a new term to describe the genre of music that encompasses honky-tonk, outlaw, rockabilly, and Western swing. By February 2013 the first Ameripolitan Music Awards were held in Austin, and Ray Price was acknowledged for lifetime achievement. Five years later, the association and awards are still alive, and though it’s all sort of low budget and not as well known or promoted as the Americana contingent, younger musicians turned off by today’s country-pop are tapping into the sound, and it feels as if it’s building.

If I wore a hat I’d tip it to Dale Watson, and should the Americana Music Association be looking for someone to give some sort of an award to next year, I nominate him. He’s keeping a musical tradition alive.

Here’s a few folks I’ve recently been listening to, and this Ameripolitan is not all homegrown here in the USA. A number of radio stations are coming onboard and there are live venues all throughout the country and beyond, including Sweden, Germany, England, and Belgium. Just goes to show, it’s hard to keep a good ol’ honky-tonk hero down.

Jake Penrod and His Million Dollar Cowboys

Jake Penrod has been kickin’ around his home state of Texas for well over a decade, often playing tribute shows as Hank Williams, who he looks and sounds like. In 2007 he took the lead for a road production in Buffalo, New York, of the musical Hank Williams: Lost Highway. He followed that gig up with two albums of Williams’ music and played atnumerous legends tribute shows at the Gladewater Opry, Texas Star Opry, and the Louisiana Jamboree in Shreveport. Since 2013 he’s released a full album and two EPs of his own music. Now based in Austin, Penrod was named Honky Tonk Male Artist of the Year in the 2017 Ameripolitan Music Awards, and in 2016 he was awarded the Academy of Western Artists’ Will Rogers Award for Pure Country Male Vocalist of the Year. New album coming soon, so keep your ears open.

The Country Side of Harmonica Sam

This five-piece band is out of Sweden, of all places. They describe their music as “inspired by the honkytonk sound of the late ’50s and early ’60s. The band delivers steady 4/4 shuffles with whining steel guitar and tic-tac bass. Dale Watson is a huge fan; here’s what he wrote about the song “True Lies”: “Harmonica Sam’s vocals are reminiscent of Webb Pierce crossed with Wynn Stewart. The band is tight and confident and settle around Sam’s vocals like warm whiskey. Their originals are such natural progressions, drawn directly from their musical influences, yet obviously make their own individual sound and style.”

Casey James Prestwood and The Burning Angels

Prestwood has been nominated in the honkytonk male vocal category for this year’s Ameripolitan Music Awards. The band’s web presence is a little thin, but they’re based in Colorado and I pulled this off their Facebook page: “If the late night scene on Broadway Street in Nashville, Tennessee, could talk, they’d sing you a Casey James Prestwood tune. Drenched in the honest twang that made Gram Parsons and Hank Williams household names, the classic crooner’s carefree vocals and careful guitar playing feel more like country than a worn-in pair of cowboy boots.”

The band has released four albums, with the latest being Born Too Late.

Weldon Henson

With five albums under his belt, Henson is another Texas-based seasoned songwriter and performer. Along with his band Honky Tonk Frontier, they play extensively throughout the state at the historic dance halls and bars. Growing up in Humble, Texas, Henson played the piano and violin, and picked up the guitar in his late teens. After a stint in the Air Force, he moved to Austin and last Feb. 25 the mayor proclaimed it “Weldon Henson Day” for the city, placing him among the noted local ranks of Willie Nelson, Rosie Flores, and Jon Dee Graham.

Zephaniah OHora with The 18 Wheelers

One of my favorite albums from 2017 was OHora’s debut album This Highway. Based in Brooklyn — yeah, that Brooklyn — OHora is the music director at Skinny Dennis, the honky tonk bar named after Guy Clark’s bass player that is the center of the region’s classic country music scene. His album was heralded by a couple of other websites — Wide Open Country and Saving Country Music. American Songwriter magazine had this to say: “Channeling the country icons of decades past is something of a trend these days, but only a handful of artists are able to pull off such homage without devolving into mimicry. Brooklyn’s OHora is one of those artists.”

Since we don’t do all that much line dancing here, OHora’s music is less Texas dance hall and more Bakersfield with a touch of western swing. By the way, that video was from a recent gig in Sweden. Small world.

Let’s close this one out with the great Dale Watson himself.

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.