June Link Roundup

June was a busy month. We came back to Winnipeg for a week, then drove to Washington state where we camped, saw the Columbia River (roll on…), spent a day in Seattle, and, most importantly, saw Joni Mitchell perform her first headline concert in 20 years—at sundown, in a natural amphitheatre overlooking a gorge.

I’ve been to a lot of shows in my life, and there’s something different about seeing an artist who’s lived a long and sometimes difficult life perform songs she’s been refining for decades, surrounded by friends she’s been playing with for years. I guess that’s a quality I’m drawn towards when it comes to the music we play on the show, too. The first few videos I’ve picked for this roundup reflect that quality.

Videos

4 Videos of Master Musicians

• Here’s a small glimpse of that night—it felt like such an impossible moment when Joni came back onstage, picked up her guitar, and started strumming “Just Like This Train.” Hopefully you can get a sense of what it was like to be there.

• This is the last song John Prine ever recorded.

• George Gibson is an expert banjo player from Kentucky who, in recent years, has been mentoring a younger generation of banjo players interested in keeping traditional music alive. Nora Brown learned this song from him and included her own version on her most recent album, Sidetrack My Engine.

• This is a really lovely video of Othar Turner, Ed Young, and Jessie Mae Hemphill demonstrating Mississippi hill country fife and drum music on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1982.

2 Miscellaneous Informational Videos

• I recently came across this video in which Jason Romero introduces the various banjos he uses on Pharis & Jason Romero’s most recent album, Tell ‘Em You Were Gold. He makes his own banjos at his studio in Horsefly, BC.

• This is a video from one of my favourite YouTube channels about the 1913 Italian Hall Disaster, which Woody Guthrie memorialized in a song we played on our June 29 edition of the show.

Albums

3 Favourite CanCon Albums

• Something about Old Man Luedecke’s Domestic Eccentric just seems right for this time of year. Makes me want to build my own cabin to record albums in.

• I stopped by Light in the Attic’s record store while in Seattle but didn’t find any Willie Dunn albums, which I would’ve bought in an instant. We’ve played a few from this anthology recently.

• Sometimes you regret listening to the live versions of the songs you love—this isn’t one of those times. I think the audience gave Stan an energy he just couldn’t muster in a studio by himself. He was at his best playing in front of (or surrounded by) people.

Articles

3 Articles About Folklorists and Folk Singers

• If you were a kid any time between the 1980s and the early 2000s, you likely remember the absolutely haunting Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark book series. Before I came across the books myself, my sister recounted several of the stories that she had read, and while I was really afraid of ghost stories as a kid, I was also intrigued. I later found the courage to flip through one of the books in the safety of my elementary school classroom, and the distinct feeling of those stories has stayed with me. It was only in the last few years that I found out the books were compiled by a folklorist named Alvin Schwartz, who collected the stories himself. This article is about Schwartz and the books.

• We’ve played a lot of music by Chilean artist Victor Jara on the show over the last few years. Jara was tortured and killed in 1973 during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and the military officers who murdered him remained free for many years. This short article from 2018 gives a brief overview of the situation and describes the justice that has been served in recent years.

• This is a nice obituary for Faith Petric, a key figure in the San Francisco folk scene who died in 2013 at the age of 98.

2 Folk Song Deep Dives

• This is an excellent article about race and the American outlaw, examined through the story of Railroad Bill, a figure who’s had several ballads written about him. We played a few different versions of the most popular “Railroad Bill” ballad on our June 22 edition of the show.

• We played a rare ballad called “Bill Banks” last week, about the first and last legal hanging in Ashe County, North Carolina, which took place in 1907. Though the story was well-known in the region at one point, it seems that photographs of the hanging are more readily available than the story itself now, so I was glad to find something beyond a gruesome image separated from historical fact. This is a section of a book about the event that gives important context for the hanging.

Well, thanks for stopping by—I guess I felt like talking today. Hope you can catch next week’s show, and I’ll see you back here in a month. Take care.