Tag Archives: Joni Mitchell

The Johnny Cash Show: Americana Lost and Found

ABC TV Promotional Photo 1969/IMDb.com

Bill Carruthers was in his late 20s in 1959 when he got the nod to become the director of The Soupy Sales Show as it became nationally syndicated. He moved his family to Los Angeles from Detroit, and eventually worked mostly as a director, creator, and producer of game shows including The Newlywed Game, The Dating Game, Give-N-Take, The Neighbors, Second Chance, and my personal favorite, Lee Trevino’s Golf For Swingers. He formed his own self-titled production company and along with Screen Gems’ Joel Stein produced The Johnny Cash Show for ABC.

Between its debut on June 7, 1969, and until its end on March 31,1971, there were 58 episodes taped at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. Along for the ride with Cash was his wife, June, The Carter Family, The Statler Brothers, Carl Perkins, and The Tennessee Three. It was originally a summer replacement for the Saturday night variety show Hollywood Palace, but it often landed in the top 20 of the Nielsen ratings, eventually making its way to a regular primetime rotation.

Featuring a blend of guests that were attuned to Cash’s own unique musical sensibilities and interests, along with the need of the producers to pander to the mainstream, it was occasionally used as a vehicle for promoting other shows. But the first show set the tone: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, comedienne Fannie Flagg, and fiddle player Doug Kershaw.

That first summer of 1969 offered a genre-busting array of guests: Gordon Lightfoot, Linda Ronstadt, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Joe Tex, Glen Campbell, The Monkees, Marty Robbins, Merle Haggard, O.C. Smith, Odetta, Ian and Sylvia, Charley Pride, The Staple Singers, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.

In January 1970 the show was back on the air and the first show’s guests were Arlo Guthrie, Jose Feliciano, and Bobbie Gentry. Over the next few months Pete Seeger appeared twice, and on Feb. 11 Cash performed this classic duet with Ray Charles.

The 1971 roster of shows continued showcasing all forms of roots music, including gospel, folk, country, jazz, and rock. The Edwin Hawkins Singers, Derek and the Dominos, David Houston, The Dillards, James Taylor, Kitty Wells, Conway Twitty, Randy Scruggs, and Neil Young were just a few of the guests.

A particular highlight of the show was the appearance of Louis Armstrong. Two years earlier he was suffering from heart and kidney ailments that took him away from performing. In the summer of 1970 he was given the green light by his doctors to resume touring, and he appeared with Cash in October. Soon after, Armstrong had a heart attack that caused him to take another break for two months, and the following summer, on July 6, 1971, he passed away.

After two seasons, The Johnny Cash Show was cancelled, the victim of a cross-network “rural purge” designed to seek out a more contemporary primetime audience that was younger, urban, and suburban. It was an absolutely absurd decision, as Cash’s wide range of guests across different genres, his commitment to both social causes and religion, and his outlaw image made him a cross-generational icon.

The show inspired a chart-topping live album of the same name from Columbia Records, and with millions of mainstream fans from national television exposure, Cash and his troupe would tour frequently and successfully in the ensuing years. He would also be called to return to primetime television, hosting other variety shows and specials with June by his side. And the best thing? Almost all of the shows, either in their entirety or through highlight clips, are viewable free on YouTube. The complete list of guests can be found on the show’s IMDb page.

Let’s close this out with the final sign-off from the last show on March 3, 1971.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at the website of No Depression: The Journal of Roots 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 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.

Sachiko Kanenobu’s Japanese Folk-Rock Masterpiece

Photo from SachikoKanenobu.com

Of all the pleasure I may experience in writing about music, it is simply the joy of discovery and hearing something new that offers the greatest reward. Many hours of my day are filled with searching out curated playlists on streaming sites; reading favorite music blogs, e-zines, and books; wandering through digital archives of old music publications that have long ceased to exist; cross referencing at Discogs and AllMusic; and scanning the dozens of daily messages from musicians, labels, and marketing companies seeking my attention.

It is the latter that is most daunting, but I do open each one, at minimum scan the contents, reply if it’s called for, and search for the occasional gold nugget. Since I’m not a music reviewer, most are submissions that are seemingly thrown against the wall in hopes someone might bite and write. Marketing companies in particular put a lot of effort into writing volumes with way too many words about their projects, and most often they’re so uninspired and generic that it leaves me feeling quite sad for the musicians who have spent their precious dollars on what they think might achieve results.

A week ago I received a message from someone representing Light in the Attic, an indie label I am familiar with from their start in Seattle and that has been dedicated since the beginning to building a catalog of quality reissues featuring a wide range of styles and genres, including a healthy dose of Americana and roots music. While their latest project is quite far from that realm, Sachiko Kanenobu’s 1972 album Misora was a previously unknown joy and blessing to these old ears, with a backstory worthy of sharing.

Considered to be one of the first female Japanese singer-songwriters, Kanenobu, who was born in 1948, was only 18 years old when she was signed to Underground Record Club (URC), a subscription-only indie label that didn’t release Misora for six more years. It was recorded in just seven days, mostly done in single takes. But in a “life happens” twist before its release, she met Paul Williams, the American music journalist who founded Crawdaddy magazine, while he was in Japan, became pregnant with his child, and they quickly married and moved to New York. When the album came out her absence and the inability to promote it added a level of mystique, and within the Japanese folk music scene she was regarded as someone with equal qualities to Joni Mitchell and Sandy Denny, with her gentle fingerpicking, upper-range melodic vocals, and lyrics.

In an interview with American guitarist Steve Gunn published earlier this year in The New York Times, Kanenobu spoke about Misora:

“When I was in high school, I used to listen to this album by Donovan, and I actually tried to imitate him. The first one, I think. I tried copying it, but it was so difficult, and so I just created my songs out of attempting to play like that. In Japan around 1967, it was all folk and pop music — Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, bands like that. Later, I got into the Okinawa scale, which is a unique scale, and not very Japanese in style. And then Takashi Nishioka from the band Five Red Balloons said, ‘Why don’t you come over and listen to this record? Don’t you feel like it’s kind of what you’re doing?’ And it was Joni Mitchell. Then I got influenced by Bob Dylan, of course — I love his words. I started reading his song book and it was kind of like my bible. I also got into the group Pentangle.”

Kanenobu kept busy raising her children and working in art galleries, moving to Northern California in 1982. Through Williams’ work and relationships she stayed connected to music.

“Paul brought Bruce Springsteen to come see us in New York — it was very early on,” she continues in Gunn’s New York Times interview. “He sang two songs for us with an acoustic guitar, that’s an amazing memory. Also, I met Bob Dylan — much later, though, when I was living in California. It was at a ball field in San Francisco, around 1980.”

But she didn’t begin making music again until she met author Philip K. Dick in Sonoma and he encouraged her to write again and began producing sessions.

“I wrote some new English songs after Phil had told me I should, instead of in Japanese. He started talking about making an album together — he would produce it and he’d be in the studio this time. That was 1982, around February. I was so excited, and then he died in March. It was so sad, the darkest time in my life. He was like my muse. He always called me and encouraged me and read me short stories and made me laugh. I am actually writing a book about the whole thing.”

Soon after Dick’s death, Kanenobu and Williams divorced and she formed Culture Shock, an alternative band that released albums through the mid-’90s and gained a following in Germany where they often toured. She went electric and sang in English. When Misora was re-released in Japan in the early ’90s to much acclaim, she released two Japan-only solo albums in 1995 (It’s Up to You) and 1999 (Sachiko).

Today at 71, she is astonished and elated that her early music has been rediscovered. Last November, she returned to Tokyo to play Misora live in its entirety for the first time, and was joined by old pals including Haruomi Hosono, the record’s producer. In America she has been doing select concerts, opening for Steve Gunn. Next month, Light in the Attic will be releasing remastered deluxe physical copies of Misora for the first time in America (the digital versions are already available on streaming sites) on vinyl and CD, each with lots of bells and whistles for her fans.

This week’s column is one of many that I consider simply a labor of love. Misora goes far beyond its reputation, restating the importance of preserving art and music. Hats off to Light in the Attic for their continued vision and execution, and I sure am glad that I take the time to check my messages every day. You just never know what you’ll find in the inbox.

This was originally posted as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Rotes Music’s website.

Ten Murder Ballads That’ll Slay You

‘Tis the season of ghosts and goblins, trips to the pumpkin patch and apple orchard, lots of candy and a reminder to visit your dentist. While some live in a climate without benefit of experiencing the change of seasons, this year in New York the leaves of the trees have been offering us a kaleidoscope of colors. With thoughts of skeletons, ghosts, and goblins in my head, it wouldn’t seem right to miss an opportunity to share some of my favorite songs about monsters and murder. Such a happy time of the year.

Back in the day before there were television networks that pumped in homogenized programming 24/7, local stations had to fill up morning and late-night slots with their own productions. My town had characters like Bertie the Bunyip, Chief Halftown, Sally Starr, and John Zacherle. The latter had a long career in hosting horror films in both Philadelphia and New York. He went by two names, either Roland or Zacherle. Maybe some might recall his 1958 recording of “Dinner With Drac.”

I suppose most people associate Halloween with “The Monster Mash” and Bobby “Boris” Pickett, but personally I prefer another song by Round Robin. An American songwriter and musician whose real name was Thomas Baker Knight Jr., he had quite a career writing hit singles in the ’50s such as “Lonesome Town” for Ricky Nelson, which was followed by decades of creating an impressive catalog that has been recorded by a long list of singers: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Paul McCartney, Elvis Presley, and Jerry Lee Lewis, to name just a few. He spanned multiple genres, from early rock to psychedelic to country, but my favorite is this 1965 novelty number he performed himself. It’s darn scary.

Transitioning back to roots music, if you have any interest in learning about the history of American traditional ballads, the Library of Congress offers an excellent article. But murder ballads are a different beast, a subgenre, and Wikipedia offers this simple definition:

A broadsheet murder ballad typically recounts the details of a mythic or true crime — who the victim is, why the murderer decides to kill him or her, how the victim is lured to the murder site and the act itself — followed by the escape and/or capture of the murderer. Often the ballad ends with the murderer in jail or on their way to their execution, occasionally with a plea for the listeners not to copy the evils committed by them as recounted by the singer.

One of the things that make murder ballads so interesting to me are that they show up in so many styles, including folk, bluegrass, country, pop, rock, blues, and hip-hop. Some are old, some are new, and I enjoy them all, especially on a cold, dark night. Running the gamut from the traditional to some fresh blood, I put together some songs and performances that are guaranteed to take you down the road less traveled. Seriously: Lindsay Lohan and Nirvana on the same list? Boo.

Johnson Mountain Boys – “Duncan and Brady”