June Link Roundup
I’m on summer vacation! Here are some links from the past month that I’m excited to share with you.
Videos
3 Older Performances
We’ve played Precious Bryant on the show many times, and we’ve played Jake Xerxes Fussell many times as well. Bryant was actually a mentor of Fussell’s and this is a really sweet video of the two playing together, presumably in the early 2000s. Fussell’s latest album, When I’m Called, comes out next week on the 12th.
I think many folks are introduced to traditional music through Elizabeth Cotten’s recordings—I know she was one of my first “discoveries” when I really started getting into folk and roots, and we play her pretty regularly on the show. This is a nice live performance of “Shake Sugaree,” which she wrote with her great-grandchildren.
The quality of this video isn’t very high, but the quality of the performance itself is excellent. We played Tomoya Takaishi’s Japanese version of “Little Boxes” on June 20th and I linked this video because Takaishi presumably translated his version from Pete’s 1963 recording, which helped popularise the song (though as Pete notes, it was written by his friend Malvina Reynolds, whose own version is fantastic).
1 Incredible Cover
Ever since Dylan showed me this cover, it’s kept appearing in my YouTube suggestions and I’ve found myself listening to it every time it’s appeared—there’s no way to avoid it, it’s just too good. We played it on June 13th, and I love the harmonies Adrienne Lenker provides.
1 Movie Scene
If you’re a fan of Bob Dylan and you’ve never watched Masked and Anonymous, do yourself a favour and put it on at your earliest convenience. Even if you’re not really a Dylan fan, it’s interesting enough on its own to merit a viewing. To convince you, here’s a knockout performance by John Goodman, interspersed with Dylan’s in-character version of “Diamond Joe.”
Albums
3 New Discoveries
Penny Lang was a folksinger from Montreal who was active from the 1960s onwards. We played her music a couple of times in June, and both tracks came from her 1997 album Live at the Yellow Door.
Jandek is another June discovery, and although most of his music doesn’t really fit Barking Dog’s sound, we did play his version of “House of the Rising Sun” from his 1987 album Blue Corpse on June 13th. He’s worth mentioning here simply because he’s so mysterious. Though he’s been releasing music since the 1970s, very little is known about him and he made his first live appearance nearly 30 years into his career, in 2004.
Etulu Etidloie rules. He was a musician and carver from Nunavut who released just one album, called Today’s Thoughts. I really wish we had more recordings from him, though we did manage to save a video of a performance he gave from Wayback Machine limbo, which I’ll try to share soon.
2 Live Recordings
We’ve played many tracks from the 1960 album American Folk Song Festival: Jean Thomas, The Traipsin' Woman, most recently on June 6th when we played Ruby Dean and the Journeymen’s Quartet’s version of “Give Me One More Day,” which was recorded when Dean was just nine years old.
One of my favourite things about making Barking Dog is the ability to introduce people to things they might not have otherwise heard. I especially love playing music from the Japanese folk movement that occurred parallel to the western folk revival of the 1960s. We played “I Don’t Know About War” from the Folk Crusaders’ final concert recording on June 27th, and I had it stuck in my head for days.
3 Spoken Word Albums
There’s no mention of this album on the Folkways website for some reason. We played the infamous Joseph Campbell’s reading of page 65 of Finnegan’s Wake on June 6th.
We played the poem “Requiem for the Croppies” on June 27th, from this album that Seamus Heaney and his colleague John Montague released in 1968.
Brown was a folklorist, poet, and literary critic who served as the first poet laureate for the District of Columbia. We played “Puttin’ on Dog” from this album on June 20th. The album is a collection of his complete recordings for Folkways Records, which he made between 1946 and 1973.
Articles
We’ve played “Johnson’s Hotel” from the 1958 album Folk Songs of Ontario several times on the show. The song is about the Peterborough county jail that stood on the banks of the Otonabee River and operated between 1842 and 2001. The building was demolished in 2016 and the site reopened in 2017 as a heritage park that preserves part of the original structure and provides interpretive panels about the history of the facility. The Peterborough County website has an interesting and thorough page about everything from the jail’s architecture to the experiences of those who were incarcerated at the facility.
Miscellany
You may have noticed that we play Willie Dunn pretty regularly on the show. Although I’ve been a big fan of his for awhile, I wasn’t aware of the extent of his career as a film director until recently. The National Film Board has a page with biographical information about Dunn and some of his directorial work on their website.
That’s all for this month! I’ll be combining July and August into one link roundup since I foresee us taking a few weeks off, so I’ll catch you back here at the end of summer. In the meantime, if you have any music or theme suggestions for the show you can reach me in the comments, on my website, or at ckuwbarkingdog@gmail.com. I love to learn about new (or new-to-me) music, so don’t hesitate to get in touch! I hope you all have a relaxing summer—to get you in the mood, here’s one final bonus album suggestion: