January Link Roundup
Time for another Barking Dog link roundup! January felt particularly long this year, and though I enjoy the winter weather, I’m looking forward to the longer hours of sunlight. My days at the moment are filled with school activities—screen-printing, basket-making, research—and radio production, but we still try to get outside when we can. Montreal is so conveniently walkable compared to St. John’s, though you can’t beat Winnipeg for flatness. Anyway, I have a bunch of links I’m excited to share with you, so let’s get into it.
Videos
3 Home Recordings
We played Turner Foddrell’s version of Railroad Bill on January 11th. He was a piedmont blues musician from Virginia who was first “discovered” by a wider audience in the 1970s, playing music with his brother Marvin at their family’s general store. Here’s a clip of the Foddrell family from Elizabeth Fine’s 1982 documentary Up and Down These Roads: A Rural County in Transition.
While Turner and Marvin often played as a duo on recordings and at festivals, Turner continued to play with his son, Lynn, after Marvin died in 1986. This is a video of Turner and Lynn playing at the general store together in the 1990s.
On January 4th, we played Sam Amidon’s version of “Reuben,” which uses the lyrics from the old-time banjo breakdown “Georgia Buck”. Here’s a video Mike Seeger filmed of Rhiannon Giddens in her home, playing “Georgia Buck” and talking about traditional music.
1 Film Scene
In case you missed it, we did a show on January 25th where we played versions of folk and roots songs that have been recorded in genres like jazz, rock, punk, and new age. We played David Byrne’s version of “Don’t Fence Me In,” a popular song written in 1934 by Cole Porter and cowboy poet Robert Fletcher and first performed onscreen in the 1944 film Hollywood Canteen by Roy Rogers. Here’s that scene, with a truly impressive performance by Rogers’ horse, Trigger.
1 Theatre Performance
This is a really wonderful live recording of “Copper Kettle” that Joan Baez made in London in 1965. We played Joni Mitchell’s version of the song on January 4th, though Baez popularised the song during the folk revival.
Albums
3 Light in the Attic (Re)releases
I love Light in the Attic and their dedication to bringing attention to artists who perhaps didn’t receive as much attention as they should have during their careers. They released Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology in 2021, and we’ve played many tracks from it on the show since then, including “Broker” on January 4th.
Morley Loon is another artist whose name should be more widely known. He was, in the words of the album description, a “Cree singer-songwriter, actor, and force of nature,” and Northland, My Land really captures his skill. Light in the Attic reissued it in 2016.
Light in the Attic just announced that it’s reissuing Karen Dalton’s 1969 album It's So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best, which means that they now carry her entire studio album catalogue, along with a few collections of her home recordings. We played her song “Reason to Believe” on January 4th, which comes from a rehearsal tape from 1966 that was first released in 2012.
3 Somewhat Recent Compilation Albums
On January 11th, we played Gillian Welch and David Rawlings version of “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” from the 2014 compilation album Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears Revisited. The album features artists like Norman Blake, Emmylou Harris, and Kris Kristofferson as well.
Rogue's Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs, & Chanteys is one we pull from a lot on Barking Dog. I’m especially fond of John C. Reilly’s contributions because his voice perfectly suits these songs, but you can also hear songs performed by artists like Richard Thompson, Lucinda Williams, and Lou Reed.
Chimes Of Freedom: The Songs Of Bob Dylan is kind of an odd one to me, mostly for the sheer volume and variety of artists who provide covers, including Queens of the Stone Age, Miley Cyrus, My Chemical Romance, and K’NAAN, whose version of “With God on Our Side” we played on our off-genre episode on January 25th. Fun fact: before I was even a fan of Bob Dylan, I became familiar with “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” through Cage the Elephant’s cover of the song from this album.
Articles
This is an excellent obituary for Robert Johnson, written in 2019 as part of the “Overlooked” obituary series in the New York Times. We played Johnson’s “Milkcow’s Calf Blues” on January 4th.
On January 11th, we played Haruomi Hosono’s version of “It Was Sad When That Great Ship Went Down,” which is a song about the sinking of the Titanic. Hosono has a personal connection to the Titanic, as his grandfather was Masabumi Hosono, the only Japanese passenger on the ship. This is an interesting article about the elder Hosono from the AV Club that takes the form of a Wikipedia deep-dive.
We’ve played many versions of “Amazing Grace” on the show, most recently on January 25th. Here’s a very interesting article from the Library of Congress about the songwriter, John Newton, a slave trader turned abolitionist.
Miscellaneous
We’ve talked about and played the ngoni quite a few times on Barking Dog, including on January 4th, when we heard a track from Cheick Hamala Diabate and Bob Carlin. Here’s a post about the ngoni from the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures.
I find this timeline of Lead Belly’s relationship with the Lomaxes particularly interesting because we talk about both of them so often on the show. It provides a rather unbiased view of the tumultuous relationship between Lead Belly and John Lomax, which was clearly marked by the common racial biases of the time despite Lomax’s simultaneous efforts to bring attention to African American music. It’s a complicated subject that necessarily requires detailed documentation.
That’s all for me this month. If you have any music or theme suggestions, you’re always welcome to get in touch in the comments, on my website, or at ckuwbarkingdog@gmail.com. Also a reminder that CKUW’s Fundrive starts next week on February 9th, so if you’re able to, please consider donating! Community radio relies heavily on listeners for support, with 20% of CKUW’s budget coming directly from Fundrive. We can’t make radio without you!