April + May Link Roundup
Hey there, I have some links for you! Here are some videos, albums, and articles to explore as you enjoy the increasingly warm weather…
(And please get involved in Manitoba wildfire relief if you can. You can find a list of organizations taking monetary donations and supply requests in this article)
Videos
4 Concert Clips
We played Art Bouman’s version of “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues” on May 1st, and I found this great clip of Skip James performing the song at the American Folk and Blues Festival in Cologne, Germany in 1967, 36 years after he first recorded the song.
Here’s the beloved Richie Havens with part of his Woodstock performance. Havens was the opening act for the festival and he improvised a lot during his 45-minute set.
On May 22nd we played Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s version of “The Ballad of Frankie Lee & Judas Priest,” recorded in the 1990s. Bob Dylan himself played the song with the Grateful Dead in 1987, and it turns out there’s some nice footage of the performance available.
We also played Joan Baez’s version of “Seven Curses” on our May 22nd show, which celebrated the music of Bob Dylan. The song took inspiration from “The Hangman” and “Anathea,” this powerful version of which I discovered while finding links for the website. It was filmed for the 1967 documentary Festival! at the Newport Folk Festival.
Albums
5 New Releases
Peggy Seeger has just released her final album, Teleology. The album is a strong finish to a 70+ year music career. We played “Slow” on April 24th and “Sing About These Hard Times” on May 8th.
Rhiannon Giddens & Justin Robinson were two of the founding members of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a contemporary old-time string band from North Carolina, and they released a new album called What Did the Blackbird Say to the Crow on April 18th. You can hear their version of “Old Joe Clark” on the April 24th edition of Barking Dog.
Ellen Stekert has been busy lately! In March, she released her first album since 1958; Go Around Songs, Vol. 1 is a collection of archival recordings made between 1954 and 1980, and it includes fantastic versions of songs like “The Green Grass Grew All Around,” “The Walker Outside,” and “The Trees They Do Grow High.”
She also just released an archival recording made in 1959 for the CBS TV show Camera Three, which includes a version of a previously unknown and undocumented Woody Guthrie song and performances by Jean Ritchie, Oscar Brand, Dave Sear, and the New Lost City Ramblers.
Taj Mahal and Keb’ Mo’ are back for the first time since 2017 with a second album called Room on the Porch. We played their version of “Rough Time Blues” on May 29th.
6 Folk-Legacy Albums
Sandy and Caroline Paton founded Folk-Legacy Records together in 1961, along with Lee Baker Haggerty. The label’s catalogue of over 100 albums was transferred to Smithsonian Folkways in 2019, and you can view it on their website. We often play songs from Folk-Legacy albums on the show, so I thought it would be nice to spotlight some that we’ve pulled from over the last couple of months. We played “The Lamoille River Song” from this album on April 17th.
We also played a couple of songs from Living in the Trees by Rick & Lorraine Lee in April—as far as I know, it’s the only album the duo recorded.
Irene & Tony Saletan’s Folk Songs and Ballads is definitely a favourite of the show. Irene is perhaps better known as half of the Kossoy Sisters, and Tony is known for his 1970s children’s television shows The Song Bag, Let's All Sing with Tony Saletan, and Singing Down the Road. We played “K’ang Ting Love Song” on April 24th.
Edna Ritchie was one of Jean Ritchie’s older sisters, and they both grew up in a well-known ballad-singing family in Kentucky. We played “May Day Carol” to celebrate May Day on May 1st.
On May 15th, we played a series of songs at the start of the show to celebrate Utah Phillips’ birthday. Phillips and Rosalie Sorrels were good friends, and they each covered the other’s songs many times over the course of their careers. This album includes songs by both Sorrels and Phillips.
Most recently, we played Norman Kennedy’s version of “The Fause Knight Upon the Road” from his 1968 Folk-Legacy Album Ballads and Songs of Scotland on May 29th, and I discovered that Kennedy is not only a skilled musician, but a master weaver who founded the Newbury School of Weaving in Vermont after moving to the United States in the 1960s.
3 Albums of Labour Songs
Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrant anarchists accused of murdering two men during an armed robbery in Massachusetts in 1920, and later executed. They appealed their conviction several times before their execution on factors that cast serious doubt on their guilt and raised questions about the biases of the jury that sentenced them. Woody Guthrie wrote many songs about the case during his career, and they were compiled into this Smithsonian Folkways album in 1996. We played “Red Wine” on April 10th.
We’ve probably played just about this whole album on the show at this point. It’s a great combination of well-known labour anthems like “Which Side Are You On?” and more region-specific original songs including “Ghosts of Bay View” and “The Wreck of the Carl D Bradley.”
Peyton Hopkins was a pastor, musician, and poet from Oklahoma who recorded two albums of union and labour songs, including this one from 1986, which is about teachers and other school employees who struggle for fair wages and good working conditions.
Articles
We lost several folk legends in April including Tracy Schwarz, the last surviving member of the New Lost City Ramblers. This obituary from the New York Times is a nice summary of his career, which later involved performing as a duo with his wife, Ginny Hawker.
Freak-folk legend and underground comic book author Michael Hurley also left us in April at the age of 83. Several years ago, I discovered that he sold his albums through the mail, so I sent off a letter to his PO box in Oregon with a (Canadian) twenty-dollar bill and received a handwritten letter back, along with a couple of his albums. It was bittersweet to see how many people he’d connected with throughout his life.
On April 24th we played “Ain’t Done Nothing if You Ain’t Been Called a Red” by Faith Petric and Mark Ross. Petric was an important member of the San Francisco folk community who was the longtime leader of the San Francisco Folk Music Club, assisted Spanish Civil War refugees, and participated in the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches of 1965, among many other activities. This is a recent article about Petric and a new documentary about her life.
If you’re curious about Sacco and Vanzetti’s story and want to read more after hearing Woody Guthrie’s music, this is an excellent article from Smithsonian Magazine about the case.
Robert Johnson has increasingly become a mythological figure in American history since his recordings gained prominence in the 1960s, but the mythology surrounding his life often has little to do with biographical fact. This article from the New York Times’ “Overlooked” obituary series deals with that rift and provides a more balanced perspective of his life and work.
We first learned of Phoebe Snow through Brian Bowers’ version of the song by Utah Phillips, which we played on May 15th. “Phoebe Snow” was a character created by the Lackawanna Railroad to advertise their express passenger train, though hobos later spoke of Snow as if she were a real person, and some female hobos took the name “Phoebe Snow” as a moniker. You can read more about the character here.
Miscellany
Big Turnip Records came out with an album of previously unreleased recordings from the Helen Creighton Collection in 2022, which includes songs that made their way into her 1971 book Folksongs from Southern New Brunswick. You can see that book in full on the Internet Archive website.
For more information on Ellen Stekert, you can check out her website, which is regularly updated with memories, photos, and music.
That’s all from me—thanks for stopping by! I’ll be back in another month or so, but if you want to get in touch, you can reach me in the comments, on my website, or at ckuwbarkingdog@gmail.com. Seeya!