July Link Roundup

Here I am, back with another Barking Dog link roundup! July was a great month for the show, especially with all the new music that came out and all the old stuff we heard for the very first time. Here are just a few highlights:

Videos

3 Archival Performances

• Here’s Doc Watson, objectively one of the greatest guitarists to ever live, playing “St. James Hospital,” a song from the “Unfortunate Rake” song family.

• This is Joan Baez’s version of “Silver Dagger” from a 1965 BBC recording. (The full performance can be found here)

• Dellie Chandler Norton was a ballad singer from North Carolina who preserved and performed the old Scottish and English ballads that were brought over by early settlers to the region. On top of her accomplishments as a musician, she’s described on the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area website as an “expert canner, spinner, weaver, quilter, and herbal healer”. Alan Lomax and his crew made this recording of her in September of 1982.

2 Short Films

• In case you’ve never seen it, this is a beloved and very relatable National Film Board short by Christopher Hinton, based on Wade Hemsworth’s “Blackfly Song,” which was originally included on his only album, Folk Songs of the Canadian North Woods, from 1955.

• This is the trailer for a 30-minute film by musician, musicologist, photographer, and filmmaker John Cohen about the music of working-class eastern Kentucky in the early 1960s. It features banjo player and singer Roscoe Holcomb, whom Cohen “discovered” in 1958 and helped introduce to a wider audience of folk music fans during the folk revival. (The full film can be found here)

Albums

3 New Releases

• No-No Boy (Dr. Julian Saporiti) released this great single with an equally great B-side in May. Both songs are about the historic experiences of Asian Americans, which was a main focus of Saporiti’s PhD fieldwork and research.

• Banjo player Nora Brown has been busy lately! This is one of two collaborations she’s released in the last two months. Stephanie Coleman, a fiddle and banjo player from New York, joins her on this one.

• This is the other collaboration, this time with Tennessee mountain dulcimer player Sarah Kate Morgan.

3 Themed Compilation Albums

• We played six different songs from the “Unfortunate Rake” song family on the July 13 edition of the show. This 1960 album compiled by Kenneth S Goldstein presents 20 different variants of the song, from traditional recordings of “The Unfortunate Rake” to more contemporary versions about telephone linemen and skiers.

• This 1990 album is a collection of songs by the Swedish-American labour songwriter and union activist Joe Hill, performed by a bunch of well-known musicians including Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Hazel Dickens.

• The Helen Creighton Folklore Society just recently added this 2004 album of east-coast field recordings to their Bandcamp, which I was happy to find since there’s a relative dearth of Canadian field recordings available online in comparison to American recordings.

Articles

3 Articles About Historical Events Memorialized in Song

• On the July 20 edition of the show, we played a song from Woody Guthrie’s album of ballads about Sacco and Vanzetti. This article from Smithsonian Magazine discusses the immediate reactions to and the lasting impacts of the case.

• This is an article about a longshoreman’s strike that took place in San Francisco in 1934, during which police killed two workers and injured hundreds of others on a day that came to be known as “Bloody Thursday”. The event was commemorated in a song included on the “Unfortunate Rake” album mentioned above.

• Maybe you’re familiar with the phrase “Kilroy Was Here,” or the associated image of a little cartoon guy peeking over a wall; here’s a short article about the pre-internet meme that first cropped up during World War II. We played a song by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl called “Kilroy Was Here” on July 20.

1 Wide-Ranging Folk Song Deep-Dive

• On the aforementioned album of sea songs from the Helen Creighton Folklore Society, there’s a recording called “The Mermaid” which we played on July 20. The song has a long history, some of which is documented in this incredibly detailed article by Stephen Winick from 2018.

Thanks for stopping by and catching up! By the way, if you’re in Winnipeg and looking for something to do on August 11, might I suggest catching Uncle Sinner at X-Cues Cafe? He doesn’t play live often, and he’s absolutely worth seeing. I’ll be back here in a month, and don’t forget to catch Barking Dog every week on CKUW.