September Link Roundup
Every time I start to write one of these, I have to stop myself from beginning the roundup by saying it was a busy month. But really, September was busy. I’m back to being an undergrad, studying textiles, learning all about natural dyeing methods and embroidery and fibre history, and I haven’t taken so many classes in one semester in a long time. I’m really enjoying it, but I also enjoy stepping away for a few hours every week to put together a show and discover new things about my other big passion: folk music. Here are just a few of the things I came across on the internet while researching for the show last month.
Videos
2 Live Performances
On September 7th, we played Tom Parrott’s version of “Wild Mountain Thyme,” which the Irish musician Frances McPeake wrote in the 1950s, adapted from the 19th century song “The Braes of Balquhither.” Here’s a video of the McPeake family performing the song in 1960.
We played Shel Silverstein reading his poem “Hector the Collector” from his book Where the Sidewalk Ends on September 21st. Aside from his work as a children’s book author, Silverstein was an immensely talented songwriter, musician, and artist who wrote songs that were recorded by Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show, Waylon Jennings, Emmylou Harris, and many others. He also wrote one of Johnny Cash’s most popular songs, “A Boy Named Sue.” Here he is performing part of that song and another of his songs on The Johnny Cash Show.
1 Feature Film
We play Morley Loon and Willie Dunn pretty regularly on Barking Dog. It turns out they both appear in the 1975 National Film Board-produced film Cold Journey, directed by Martin Defalco—Loon as an actor playing a student at a residential school, and Dunn providing the soundtrack. This short feature film takes inspiration from the true story of Charlie Wenjack, an Anishinaabe boy who froze to death in 1966 while running away from residential school. It’s a brilliant, heartbreaking representation of the ways in which the forced assimilation of the Indigenous peoples in this country detrimentally altered their relationship with their land and culture.
Albums
3 Non-Music Albums
Folkways Records has released a bunch of non-music albums over the years, and if you listen regularly, you know that we like to switch it up every once in awhile and feature things like poetry, animal sounds, and instructional tracks. For a whole episode of non-music recordings, check out March 16th’s show. Here are a few of the non-music albums we featured in September:
Six Montreal Poets from 1957 is the first album Leonard Cohen ever appeared on, released ten years before his first musical album. It presents poems from him and five other members of the Montreal Group, which was formed by modernist poets at McGill University in the 1920s.
Relaxation Record by Milton Feher is unlike anything I’ve heard before. Feher was a dance instructor who founded the Milton Feher School of Dance and Relaxation, and he developed a method for movement based in relaxation exercises, which he said cured his arthritis. He lived to be 98 years old and was still teaching into his 80s, so he must have been onto something.
Sounds of Medicine is a classic and a favourite of ours. Hear everything from operation sounds, to normal heart and lung sounds, to the sounds of the bowels of a “normal hungry man smoking a cigarette before dinner.”
3 New Canadian Releases
Lots of new Canadian roots music is coming out right now! We’ve played a lot of songs from these recent/unreleased albums lately:
Scottish-Canadian folksinger David Francey released his new album The Breath Between on September 15th, and we’ve played tracks from it pretty much every week since he released the first single.
Au cœur de l’aube (In the Heart of Dawn) is the seventh album by traditional Québécois band Genticorum, and it features both traditional songs and songs written by the band’s members.
Lonesome Ace Stringband releases their first album of all-original songs on October 13, called Try to Make It Fly. We’ve played a bunch of the singles from it.
2 Recent Collections
On top of all the Canadian releases, a few other albums have come out in the last few months that we keep coming back to. We especially enjoyed exploring these two in September:
Playing for the Man at the Door is a collection of 66 songs recorded by Mack McCormick between the 50s and the 70s. McCormick was a blues fan who became a documentarian of the genre, photographing and recording musicians in their own neighbourhoods and developing lifelong relationships with those he interviewed. He died in 2015 without ever releasing most of his recordings, and this album is the very first compilation of music from his collection.
If you know me, you know I go nuts every time they release new Connie Converse music. She was a musician who moved to New York City in the 1950s to try to “make it,” but turned out to be decades ahead of her time, and ended up moving to Michigan to work as an editor for an academic journal. She disappeared in the 1970s after writing letters to friends and family stating that she intended to start a new life somewhere else. Home recordings that her friend Gene Dietch made of her in the 1950s were first released in 2009, and this new release, Musicks, is an album that Converse recorded for her brother and sister-in-law in 1956. It’s so special.
Articles
3 Articles About Influential Musicians
Here’s an article about the life of American folksinger Rosalie Sorrels, written by the musician and author Elijah Wald shortly after Sorrels’ death in 2017. The entire article is wonderful, but I think my favourite sentence from it is, “She liked any music that related directly to people's lives.”
This is an archival piece about the 1973 murder of Chilean musician, poet, teacher, theatre director, and activist Victor Jara during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, published in NME in 1975. A warning: it contains graphic descriptions of violence.
John Fahey was the founder of Takoma Records, the originator of the American primitive guitar genre, and one of three guitarists (Leo Kottke and Robbie Basho are the others) who aimed to raise steel string guitar to the level of a concert instrument. This article from 2018 is about his life and work.
3 Articles About Historical Events Captured in Song
Woody Guthrie wrote a poem about a 1948 plane crash in Los Gatos, California, in which 32 people died, 28 of whom were migrant farm workers who were being deported to Mexico. The victims weren’t named in national news coverage of the crash, so Guthrie decided to assign symbolic names to the dead. Schoolteacher Martin Hoffman put the poem to music a decade later.
One of my favourite murder ballads to play on the show is “The Murder of FC Benwell,” recorded by Lamont Tilden for the folklorist Edith Fowke’s 1958 album Folk Songs of Ontario. This is a very detailed 1931 article about the 1890 murder and the subsequent trial.
We were kind of on a Franklin Expedition bent in September, and played a couple of versions of “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” a ballad that was written while the search for the lost expedition was underway in the mid 19th century. This article provides a good summary of the failed expedition and the discoveries of the expedition’s two ships in 2014 and 2016.
Miscellany
We’ve played a few versions of “The Kettle Valley Line” on the show. It’s a song about a scenic railway that ran from Hope, BC to Lethbridge, AB, from the perspective of a hobo riding the rails during the Great Depression. I discovered this month that a portion of the rail line was preserved, and they provide steam locomotive rides on it under the name The Kettle Valley Steam Railway.
I also found a full digitized copy of George Milburn’s The Hobo’s Hornbook from 1930, and while it’s obviously dated, it’s a valuable document of hobo songs that might otherwise have not survived into the present day.
Thanks for coming along for the ride! I hope at least one of these links piqued your interest, and don’t forget that I link even more stuff in the show posts I make every week on my website. If you’re looking for something to do in Winnipeg on Friday the 13th, Uncle Sinner is playing an all-ages show at Into the Music at 7:30PM. Happy October!