Tag Archives: John Prine

Americana and Roots Music Videos: RPM 2

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

Like many of you, I’m always on the hunt for new music that’ll perk up my ears and lighten my soul. In the past I’ve relied on websites such as No Depression; a handful of blogs that I’ve followed through the years; the Americana Music Association weekly radio charts, which are both interesting lists to check out; and Bill Frater’s Americana Boogie, which offers a list of weekly releases. And since crossing over to the dark side and fishing in the deep digital stream, I’m finding that curated playlists have added another fast and easy way to catch a keeper.

It wasn’t all that long ago when your friends would show up at your house with a stack of their favorite new albums under their arms, and you’d each take turns spinning your faves on the turntable for each other. And the neighborhood record stores that were like Cheers, the bar where everybody knew your name. Maybe you’re too young to have experienced that, or too old to remember. But in that spirit, I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Here’s a handful of new music (or old music that I’ve recently found) that’s been buzzing inside my ears for the past few months.

Sweet Old Religion – Pharis and Jason Romero

It’s hard not to read a review about this Juno award-winning Canadian duo that doesn’t draw comparisons to Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. They each dwell in that same valley of old-time music played with acoustic stringed instruments with exquisite vocal harmonies, and there is similar tone and timbre. Their sixth album will be released in May, and I have been blessed with an advance copy that I can’t stop listening to. Here’s the title track.

The Ledges – Kieran Kane and Rayna Gellert

Gellert, a vocalist and fiddler who was a member of Uncle Earl before releasing solo and duet albums, teams up with her friend Kane, who is a legendary songwriter, performer, producer, and record label owner. Leaving Nashville for upstate New York, where Kane owns a bunkhouse, they bring a bunch of string instruments, stack some microphones on top of cinderblocks, and record one of the prettiest sets of harmonic wonder and simplicity.

The Orphan King – Ed Romanoff

A “late bloomer” who didn’t begin his music career until his forties, Woodstock-based Romanoff releases his second album supported by an interesting cast of players. Produced by Simone Felice, the collaborators include Rachael Yamagata, Kenneth Pattengale of the Milk Carton Kids, guitarist Cindy Cashdollar, The E Street Band’s Cindy Mizelle, and Larry Campbell along with his wife and duo partner, Teresa Williams.

Playing Chess – Elise LeGrow

It’s been nine years since this Canadian singer was signed to a publishing deal. In 2012, a single she released a single titled “No Good Woman” jumped into the top ten of our northern neighbor’s adult contemporary radio chart. Two years ago she recorded her debut album of covers from the Chess Record’s catalog, where she is backed by The Dap-Kings, and which features The Roots’ Questlove and Captain Kirk Douglas. Just released in February, this project is more about reinterpretation of the originals, and all the more interesting.

Love In Wartime – Birds of Chicago

I got a chance to see JT Nero and Allison Russell, who play as the Birds of Chicago, a few months ago and was blown away. Had no idea who they were, what to expect, or why my friend would book them into a 400 seat theater with less than 70 advance tickets sold. But he knew something I didn’t, because not only did they almost fill the space with walk-up customers, the band also presented a staggering showcase in advance of their new album being released on May 5 by Signature Sounds. This is a little taste from last year’s EP with Rhiannon Giddens on harmonies and banjo and Steve Dawson on guitar.

Motel Bouquet – Caitlin Canty

Like dozens of other musicians over the past couple of years, Canty has made the move from New York to Nashville. Not that it matters all that much, since I don’t think there’s anyone who has traveled more miles criss-crossing America with that big Recording King guitar of hers and that devastatingly clear-as-a-bell voice. I’ve seen her perform alone and in various musical configurations, and she sparkles and shimmers on every occasion. When I listen to the new album it makes me just want to stop, lay down, and set cool slices of cucumbers over my eyes. Every note and word draws me deeper. Two songs: the first from her new album, and the second is a few years old and the one that got away.

The Tree of Forgiveness – John Prine

In the evening on the day when the new album is released, Friday, April 13th,2018, I’ll be inside Radio City Music Hall in NYC on my feet and applauding loudly as Prine comes out on the stage. Don’t know what you might call it, but I believe it’s a blessing. (Alas…all the bad things one thinks about surrounding Friday the Thirteenth are true. Struck with pneumonia, I was unable to attend.)

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.

The Everly Brothers Watch Good Love Go Bad

 

In 1960 I was an eight year old boy with a teenage sister who watched American Bandstand every day after school and had a Tele-Tone 45 rpm portable record player in her bedroom. With a big fat plastic spindle, she would stack up to about a dozen records and it would automatically drop and play them one at a time. I was entranced by the whole concept – the music, the machine, the grooves on the disc, and especially the labels, which I would spend hours reading and memorizing. Composers, arrangers, song titles, publishers, ASCAP or BMI, selection numbers, running times, and especially the stylized fonts for the label’s logos.

One reason I took an interest in music at such an early age was because my cousin Arnold was a hot-shot producer and the whole family followed his many successes. His first big hit was in 1956 with Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ “I Put A Spell On You” for Okeh Records, and four years later he moved on to MGM, where he scored big with Connie Francis’ “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and eventually was promoted to president of the label.

On Billboard magazine’s chart for the Top Hits of 1960, Francis had three songs versus Elvis Presley’s two. And while Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” begat a national dance phenomenon and a Percy Faith instrumental was the number one single, only Bobby Rydell, Brenda Lee, and The Everly Brothers rivaled Miss Francis. Don and Phil’s biggest records that year were “Cathy’s Clown” and “Let It Be Me,” but this is the one I dropped the needle on most often and to this day it remains stuck inside my head.

Written by Don Everly and the first track on their Warner Bros. debut album It’s Everly Time, “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)” stayed on the American charts for 12 weeks and has been covered at least a dozen times. The biggest sellers of those all were country versions, starting with a duet by Hank Williams Jr. and Lois Johnson in 1970, followed by Connie Smith in 1976 and Emmylou Harris in 1983. When John Prine decided to include it on his classic In Spite of Ourselves duets album, he tapped Connie Smith as his partner on the song.

While I don’t know why I am so attached to this song, it turns out that there’s likely a scientific reason for it. Dr. Vicky Williamson is a music psychologist and memory expert at Goldsmith’s College in London, and several years ago she began studying earworms, otherwise known as stuck-song syndrome, sticky music, and cognitive itch. In a 2012 article I found on the BBC website, she suggests that “earworms may be part of a larger phenomenon called ‘involuntary memory,’ a category which also includes the desire to eat something after the idea of it has popped into your head. ‘A sudden desire to have sardines for dinner, for example,’” as she put it.

Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra and Traveling Wilburys covered “So Sad” on his 2012 solo release, along with other songs of that era, and described it this way: “These songs take me back to that feeling of freedom in those days and summon up the feeling of first hearing those powerful waves of music coming in on my old crystal set. My dad also had the radio on all the time, so some of these songs have been stuck in my head for 50 years. You can only imagine how great it felt to finally get them out of my head after all these years.”

In 2013, Will Oldham (as Bonnie “Prince” Billy) and Faun Fables’ Dawn McCarthy released what has become one of my all-time favorite albums, titled What The Brothers Sang. An Everlys’ tribute album, it jumps over their entire Cadence Records catalog of hits from the ’50s, and dives deeper into the more obscure catalog tunes. In Pitchfork’s review, Stephen Deusner wrote: “ ‘Devoted to You’ and ‘So Sad’ are all the more powerful for being so spare in their arrangements, as though illustrating the power of a small country bar band.” One of the highlights of the year was having the chance to see them perform the album from end to end at Town Hall in NYC.

We used to have good times together
But now I feel them slip away
It makes me cry to see love die
So sad to watch good love go bad

Remember how you used to feel dear?
You said nothing could change your mind
It breaks my heart to see us part
So sad to watch good love go bad

Is it any wonder
That I feel so blue
When I know for certain
That I’m losing you

Remember how you used to feel dear?
You said nothing could change your mind
It breaks my heart to see us part
So sad to watch good love go bad
So sad to watch good love go bad

How an 8-year-old boy can latch onto a song such as this and hold it close for 47 years is almost unexplainable. The above-mentioned Dr. Williamson has been working on a “cure” for earworms, suggesting tips such as finding another song to replace it with, going for a run, or doing a crossword puzzle. But for myself, I think I’ll pop open a tin of sardines for dinner and give y’all a vertical stacking of some cover versions I’ve found. Bon appetit.

 

 

 

 

 

In 1973 Don Everly showed up drunk to a show. He kept screwing up the lyrics until Phil smashed a guitar over his head and stormed out. The only time the brothers spoke during the next decade was at their father’s funeral. The brothers patched things up in 1983 enough to embark on a lucrative nostalgia tour that yielded a double album and was captured and released on video.

 

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

Novelty Songs: From Benny Hill To John Prine

demento
Last week I was sitting in a chilly room with about a dozen guitar pickers and as is the protocol for this particular song circle, each person took their turn at presenting a tune and leading the group through it. There were traditional songs, some blues and the now-standard Sixties folk-rock repertoire. Really…just shoot me if I have to play “The Circle Game” one more time. But when the fellow sitting next to me said he wanted us to do “Shaving Cream”, I almost fell off my stool. A novelty song!

Benny Bell was an American singer-songwriter born at the turn of the last century, and he got his start in vaudeville singing in English, Yiddish and Hebrew. An early adopter of the DYI ideal, he founded his own record company and he sang and wrote in many styles: ethnic music, hot jazz arrangements with risque lyrics for juke box operators only, radio jingles (including the one for Lemke’s cockroach powder) and mainstream comedy records. In 1946 he released what would be his three best-selling songs, and for the next three decades he was a minor player in the New York Borscht Belt circuit of Jewish singers and comedians who performed in the popular Catskill Mountain resorts.

In 1970 a young ethnomusicologist from Minnesota by the name of Barry Hansen took his love for comedy, novelty and simply weird music to the airwaves in Los Angeles, and within a few years the radio persona of Dr. Demento was in syndication on FM stations throughout the United States, usually late on Sunday nights. The list of artists that he brought to the attention of his audience is pretty amazing in it’s depth and it still lives on through his compilation albums released on Rhino Records. When he began to regularly play ‘Shaving Cream’ in 1975, Vanguard Records rushed to release it and was an out and out smash. I found this video posted by a fan, and it seems to hit the high points.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines the novelty song as such: ‘A popular song that is either written and performed as a novelty or that becomes a novelty when removed from its original context. Regardless of which of these two categories applies, the assumption is that the song is popular because of its novelty, because it sounds different from everything else being played on the radio or jukebox. It follows that novelty hits are unique; the second time around, the sound is no longer novel.”

Leave it to the British to make things clear as mud. I’ll describe it simply as a funny song; the style comes out of Tin Pan Alley, was popular in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and can be satiric, political, nonsensical, a parody and just plain weird. This one here qualifies for the latter.

Putting aside Allan Sherman’s My Son The Folk Singer album for the moment, when I think about roots music and novelty songs, “Alice’s Restaurant” is one of the first that come to mind. And maybe Arlo’s “Motorcycle Song” as well. But then I recalled Larry Groce, now of Mountain Stage fame, and the classic “Junk Food Junkie”.

You’ve got to mention Joe Dolce in this context. The Ohio-born singer-songwriter-poet -actor emigrated to Australia in 1978 and two years later recorded “Shaddup You Face” which became a multi-million-selling worldwide hit. He seemed to ride the ‘one hit wonder’ life for a few years and then settled into a more serious music career along with his wife Lin Van Heck. In the past decade he has become a well-published poet and essayist, winning awards along the way. I forgot how good this song was until I found it for this piece.

Somebody has said that there is hardly anything that John Prine has recorded that won’t either bring you to your knees in hysterical laughter or make you cry. I’ll close this out with one of my favorite Prine tunes. Should the spirit move you, feel free to add to the thread anything else that comes to your mind. Novelty music might not be the most important footnote to American culture, but I think it’s an interesting one and maybe it’s still out there, waiting to be found. The doctor will see you now.

This was originally published at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. March 2015.

Tryin’ to Find a Hero in a Haystack

Haystack_-_geograph.org.uk_-_462934You should know that this first paragraph was written after I wrote what follows below. So that you don’t scratch your head and wonder what the hell I may be thinking about posting this on a website devoted to the topic of roots music, the idea for this piece actually began to germinate two weeks ago as I sat beside my ninety-three year old mother and watched a local bluegrass band perform. If you can just bare with me, I’ll get back to the topic of music shortly.

Growing old seems often be paired up with the notion of wisdom, as if simply making it through another day and another year will give you greater insight and context. Forgive me for not putting some of these quotations in quotes, or bothering to cite their source, but generally this is how it’s been described by those who have a way with words:

Wisdom begins at the end. He who devotes sixteen hours a day to hard study may become at sixty as wise as he thought himself at twenty. The years teach much which the days never knew. The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions. How can you be a sage if you’re pretty? You can’t get your wizard papers without wrinkles.

For myself as the years have tumbled by, wisdom seems to have eluded me. In it’s place has crept cynicism. And it’s something that I work hard to chase away every single moment, because I don’t think it’s a very healthy state to live in. But truth be told, it’s hard to escape.

As I watched on my television the town of Ferguson Missouri begin to burn and saw the tear gas canisters being hurled back and forth between the crowd and the police as if they were simply having a friendly game of catch, my first thought was of a smiling Bill Cosby. Out of the headlines in time for the holidays, his past misdeeds slithering back under the rock that they had crawled out from the week before. Hey hey hey. Hello cynicism. Hello in there.

I’ve been thinking recently about this notion of heroes; a person who is admired for great or brave acts or fine qualities. Our initial thoughts when we talk about such people are often tied into some sort of celebrity or accomplishment. And when I was younger, it seemed that they were easier to find. Or at the very least, their status endured over time.

Today we are able to lift the veil in record time, discovering the lies and deception behind the myths we create. From Pee Wee Herman to Tiger Woods, OJ Simpson to Oscar Pistorius, Gary Hart to Larry Craig…and it’s not only people that have disappointed us. I used to trust the newsmen and the newspapers, like Walter Cronkite and the New York Times. But today we have Fox News, which has begat a new CNN…twenty four hours of non-stop babble from experts and pundits who know nothing more than you or me, but who are simply there to incite, titillate and entertain. After centuries, we seem no more wiser…the story of feeding lions (be it real or imagined) comes to mind.

If you’ve stayed with me this far, let me share a more upbeat thought I had recently.

When people grow older and become unable to take care of themselves for whatever the reasons, a nursing home (or some euphemism that seems much more palatable to their family) often becomes the last stop. My own mother is now living in such a place; a ‘home for the aged’ they call it. There are residents who are alert and active, and those who are not. It sits on the banks of the Hudson River, with a beautiful view of Manhattan to the south, and there is a huge lawn with benches that sits empty most of the year.

The minutes and hours and days roll along slowly. Meals seem to be the high points of the day. Much of the conversation centers around what was last eaten, and what will be served next. And there are activities for those who choose to partake. Bingo is the mainstay, but you can go to the library to hear a lecture, the art center to paint, make jewelery or do some sort of craft, check your email in the computer room, exercise or just watch television.

Every Sunday at two there is a concert.

Recently while visiting, I tagged along downstairs with my mom to see a local bluegrass band. They were probably about my age, and I’d venture to guess that they don’t have a record deal, aren’t heard on the radio and rarely perform outside of venues such as this. But they were talented and entertaining, and it made me wonder. How many musicians are there who live in our communities do this sort of thing? The answer is…more than I could ever have imagined.

I plugged this into a Google search: ‘local musicians who play at nursing homes’...and got 31,300,000 results. Sifting though the pages, I found news stories and profiles of so many musicians that I was astounded. Many are people you might know of, having seen them perform or heard them on records from another time. Most are unknown; from that local bluegrass band I enjoyed to wannabe rock n’ rollers, jazz players, dinner theater singers, symphonic and classical musicians. And there is a common theme among all of them.

Meet Barry Dye from Bowling Green Kentucky.

Out in California, there is a fellow by the name of Gary Gamponia who heads up a group of musicians under the name of Pay It Forward Volunteer Band. They’ve been around almost five years, playing exclusively in skilled nursing homes. With a rotating roster of 140 musicians in Los Angeles alone, they’ve got branches in other cities as well.

In an article I found on a website called McKnight’s, Gamponia told the reporter that ‘We’re out there for that 90-year-old lady who’s been living there for three years, whose husband is dead and has very little to live for. These are people who built this country after the Great Depression, the people who defeated fascism and kept this country a democracy. When we do a show, we say that this is our way of saying thank you to that generation. We want to thank all the people who came before us.’

Keeping that in mind, this particular organization focuses their music on the thirties through the fifties. For the ‘younger residents’, maybe they’ll throw in a Sinatra classic. In twenty years, if you or I are the ones sitting there on a Sunday afternoon, wonder what we’ll want to hear?

Should you be a musician yourself, and think that maybe you’d like to donate some time to play for a nursing home or hospital, there is no shortage of groups that can help you connect. Musicians On Call has branches in fifteen cities, many of the websites that hook people up for jams feature a volunteer section, and local musician unions often are involved within the community.

In a world where it’s easy to become enveloped in cynicism, and where heroes seem hard to find, I’m glad to have discovered something I didn’t know about, or maybe just took for granted. To the thousands of musicians out there who take the time to share their talents to those who are easily forgotten…you are all heroes in my book.

To close it out, the Merry Musicians of Caloundra in Queensland are an amazing group of talented older Australians with an average age of 79. They play at nursing homes, retirement villages, and seniors events. They are “young at heart” and they will perform wherever there is a “free cup of tea and a willing audience.” Stella, the leader of the group is nearing 90 and as piano player Ted says “we’re just spring chickens”.