Tag: british folk

Canadian Cousins Exploring Strange Countries: A Conversation with Kacy & Clayton

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Cousins Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum may hail from Canada — specifically the isolated Wood Mountain Uplands in Saskatchewan — but their music is by no means limited to that geographical region. Fans of older sounds than what they heard playing on the radio growing up, they sought out British folk and American roots music that broadened their horizons and went on to influence their own take on these classic traditions.

Their new album, Strange Country, contains darker subject matter that belies the pair’s young age: Kacy at 19 and Clayton at 21 write music far beyond their years. With Clayton’s clear, articulate guitar guiding the songs along and Kacy’s woeful, emotionally laden vocals — sliding from soprano to a weighted alto and back again — the pair have penned an album that feels woozy at times for the heights it soars and the depths it reaches, all dealing with tragedies in one way or another. Strange Country feels solemn and especially grave, both figuratively and literally. The album’s last song, “Dyin’ Bed Maker,” is a murder ballad Kacy wrote from the point of view of a female. The sheer desire that arises from the song’s melody and lyricism feels overwhelming: “I know he loved me best. I know he loved me best,” Kacy sings, her voice edging on provocation against Clayton’s mournful guitar.

It seems like the younger generations are largely interested in the past in an ironic sense. How do you keep your engagement more genuine?

Kacy: I think you can kind of stray away from clichés. If you know about certain song topics or things that have been overdone, in different periods or over time, then you can kind of be aware of that and draw from lesser-known influences. Yeah, just go for a more uncommon influence, I guess.

Clayton: Wow, that is so true. I did not realize that. [Laughs] This is educational for me, too. Keep ‘em coming, Kacy. That was genuine tone and it came off as sarcastic.

How do you avoid appropriating a musical tradition?

Clayton: I think not dressing like pioneers.

Kacy: Yeah, I think that’s actually the main thing. And not having press photos that show us churning butter and riding on wagons with a team of horses.

Clayton: That is one thing that we’ve really been striving for, is to take influence from that older world but not try and put on a theatre production.

Kacy: It’s cool if it’s done really well, but I don’t think I’m capable of being … like there are certain people, like Frank Fairfield, he’s just — I don’t know how to say this in a non-cheesy way because everything that’s come to mind is a total mom phrase — so authentic and he doesn’t try, but that’s where all of his interests are. He has no regards for the current world. There are certain people like that who can do it real well. Personally, I don’t think I can, so I’m not going to wear suspenders and little old timey shoes. That does not make sense for me, because I don’t want to spend all my time trying to find woven pants and stuff. That’s a whole new level of hard work.

Clayton: And hard work to wear them.

Especially in the Summer.

Clayton: Oh, yeah.

Kacy: I do also love pioneer clothes and acting in pioneer dramas that my Aunt Thelma writes.

Obviously, you’re both very young, but there’s a weighted solemnity about your music that suggests someone much older and experienced. Where does that sensibility come from?

Kacy: I think that it mostly just comes from listening to traditional music from certain areas where it’s so dark, and you are consumed by tragedy and death and music relating to hard parts of life, experiences you haven’t really had. I don’t know anyone that’s been murdered or anything. But you can listen to a murder ballad and get a sense for it and relate to it and try and make your own stories or work off of things that you heard. I think just talking about kind of heavy subject matter makes the music seem a little more mature.

Do you find that since you’re singing about characters that you almost inhabit characters?

Kacy: Yeah, I think when there’s a strong character in a song or a good story or something, you feel attached to it. You put yourself in the situation. I guess that’s the fun thing about singing songs: It’s getting to sing from other people’s perspective. With folk music, for sure. It’s not as fun to sing your own songs, because you know yourself. It’s boring.

You hail from the prairie provinces, but some of your songs, especially “Down at the Dance Hall,” have an Acadiana feel. What interests you about that sound?

Clayton: Well, if you’re wondering about where that influence came from, we were both listening to a lot to the Balfa Brothers around the time we recorded the album. Kacy had been playing around with the fiddle and I thought, "Who do we know that could play button accordion?" And the answer was not really anyone, so then I tried to learn the accordion and learned about two songs, and played it briefly on that song. That’s about all the progress I’ve made. It happened in about a month and then stopped.

Are you going to pick up the accordion again?

Clayton: You know, I think I will. I would like to take some lessons. I had a couple homespun Dirk Powell DVDs, which are great. I just need to motivate myself a little more. And someone gave us a negative review. They called it "unnecessary accordion," so that was a bit of a blow.

Kacy: Yeah, that’s a major blow.

I can see how that’s a set back, but don’t let it derail any future accordion plans.

Clayton: I won’t. I was just fishing for some pity. I think I was successful in that, so thank you.

Take me through your recording process. How did the frozen wilderness surrounding the recording studio eke its way into the record?

Kacy: It definitely made everything a little bit more urgent. When I was singing, I felt kind of tense and the studio furnace kicked out at a certain point. We had to wear mittens and coats when we could. When I heard the album, I was surprised by how fast all the songs were. I think it was just because it was cold. I would like to make a record in the Summer. I feel like you get a definitely laidback sound.

Yeah, it would languish a bit.

Clayton: We’ve made all of our albums in the Winter.

Kacy: Yeah, or even just record in a warmer climate during the Winter.

Are there any modern artists you admire?

Clayton: We definitely like Jason Molina. Is that what you were going to say Kacy? Did I steal that from you?

Kacy: No, I just said Jason Molina’s dead, so that’s not current.

Clayton: Well, I know that he’s dead but he’s …

Right, like artists in the past 20 years or so.

Clayton: I really like Ryley Walker and Daniel Bachman. I like what they did on the guitar a lot.

Clayton, do you tend to listen to instrumental songwriters or narrative songwriters?

Clayton: I tend to listen to mostly old country music these days, like Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard and that kind of songwriting. I think Kacy and I both are pretty influenced by that style of country imagery and country storytelling. We try to bring that into our British folk influences, as well, which is kind of what Richard Thompson was doing back in the Richard and Linda days. He was really into Buck Owens and Merle Haggard, but he’s also got the traditional British stuff.

That’s the interesting thing about watching artists develop. Once they introduce listeners to their own sound, they can begin stretching themselves by incorporating influences more heavily.

Clayton: It takes a while to get comfortable enough to try and mimic a style that you’re not really known for or what people expect. But I think that it’s kind of good for a longer career, if you’re able to do that.

And also for your own personal growth. I want to turn to murder ballads. I noticed that you composed “Dyin’ Bed Maker” from the perspective of a female. What provoked you to explore that subject matter in that way?

Kacy: I took influence from “Henry Lee,” where it’s just a lady and she’s very rancid. She does some dirty deeds. Basically, that one lacks a lot of detail — the storyline — I think, but I kind of liked that about it. There are no real characters introduced or anything.

Speaking of writing, how does the composition process work?

Kacy: We write back and forth, and then work together — try and come up with something good.

Clayton: It’s kind of a filtering process, you know? We both trust each other’s opinions and sometimes it’s kind of frustrating if something is rejected by the other person, but in the end, it’s kind of rewarding because you feel that much better about the songs if they pass through two minds. I think that’s something unique that you don’t get just working on songs by yourself.

Kacy: Yeah, having a person that you trust as much or more than yourself that can give just an opinion or change something or tell you what they think. Like things that I might be unsure about and then Clayton might think is really great, or maybe I’m really confident in it and Clayton thinks it’s awful and tries to cover it up by saying, "It’s fine, but …"

Is that how conversations usually go? There’s no nitty gritty critique?

Clayton: I say Kacy usually gives me the nitty gritty, and I have to dance around my point a lot.

Kacy: Well, your songs are really annoying.

Clayton: My songs are really annoying? Sheesh, I didn’t expect to get that on this interview call. I think what Kacy was saying is that she doesn’t really hold back with me, and I think what I’m saying is that’s just the way it is.

Photo credit: Dane Roy

Take This Hammer, Blow Your Kazoo: Skiffle in the 1950s and Beyond

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In July, 1954 — the same month that Elvis Presley unleashed his first two world-changing singles — a Scottish-born singer and trad-jazz musician named Lonnie Donegan released a cover of “Rock Island Line” with backing on washboard and bass. Inspired by the African-American singer Lead Belly, Donegan explains the rules of the rails in his spoken-word intro and includes the shouts and cries of the engineers. Though he strums his guitar in a persistent rhythm to evoke the chug and drive of a freight train, the song picks up speed along the way, finally achieving a breakneck momentum as Donegan’s high-pitched vocals grow wilder. It’s a remarkable performance, studious to the point of mimicry, yet reckless like a runaway train.

It took two years, but the single finally caught on and started climbing the British pop charts in 1956. Donegan followed it up with a full-length album, An Englishman Sings American Folk Songs, which became a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic. In its wake, a series of like-minded folk acts starting popping up all over Britain: young men and women well-schooled in American folk music yet too irreverent and too wiley to be classified as traditional. Emphasizing ingenuity and spontaneity, they played rhythm guitar almost exclusively, along with whatever instruments happened to be on hand: usually kazoos, banjos, washboards, tea cabinet bass, and assorted homemade noisemakers. This was closer in spirit, if not in sound, to the rock 'n' roll coming out of the American South.

Thus was born skiffle, a short-lived scene with a lasting influence.

The word itself has a long history that reveals the concerns of its mid-century practitioners. Skiffle originated in the 1920s as a word to describe wild, impromptu jazz that mixed blues, ragtime, and folk. When Donegan and a few other musicians began playing sets of folk tunes during their trad-jazz shows, he called them “skiffle breaks,” borrowing the term from the semi-popular ‘30s jazz act the Dan Burley Skiffle Group. Eventually, the break would become the entire show, with Donegan and his small outfit often improvising their covers.

After the success of “Rock Island Line,” skiffle groups came out of the woodwork, with trad-jazz musicians migrating to this more lucrative market and kids picking up guitars for the first time. The Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group enjoyed a hit with a cover of Elizabeth Cotton’s “Freight Train” featuring Nancy Whiskey on vocals. A London outfit called the Vipers Skiffle Group — later known as simply the Vipers — rivaled Donegan as the trend’s guiding light, thanks to a string of smash singles like “Cumberland Gap” and “Don’t You Rock Me, Daddy-O” (which was produced by George Martin, later known as the Fifth Beatle). America even produced its own skiffle star, Johnny Duncan, who was born in Oliver Springs, Tennessee, but found fame in the clubs and charts of England with his 1957 hit “Last Train to San Fernando.”

As Rob Young writes in his indispensible 2010 guide to British folk music, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music, “Skiffle’s accelerated swing rhythms and domestic equipment — kazoos, harmonicas, comb and paper — placed music-making in the hands of the amateur, as well as opening up a conduit for the dust-bowl and rust-belt blues and folk poetry of Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly to be siphoned into British ears.”

Like the trad-jazz scene and like the blues revival of the following decade, skiffle was a result of Britain’s obsession with American traditional music. During the post-war years, even as many musicians strove to define and preserve a specifically English folk tradition in pubs and social clubs, much of the country looked west for musical inspiration, finding it in the music made by poor Americans often in rural settings. Granted, those folk songs could be traced back to European sources, brought over by immigrants generations before and gradually mutated over the years, but by the middle of the 20th century, the music sounded distinctly American.

What distinguishes skiffle from imported jazz or blues is its emphasis on labor and class. Most of the main skiffle hits were about workers’ laments: engineers and linemen, sharecroppers and cotton pickers, migrants and chain gang prisoners. Weirdly, skiffle was viewed as largely apolitical at the time, a harmless fascination with another country’s past. However, the subject matter of these songs reinforces the populism that lies at the heart of all folk music, which likely made it more appealing to everyday Brits, especially teenagers.

As Alan Lomax noted at the time, “At first, it seemed very strange to me to hear these songs, which I had recorded from convicts in the prisons of the South, coming out of the mouths of young men who had suffered, comparatively speaking, so little. But I soon realized that these young people felt themselves to be in a prison — composed of class-and-caste lines, the shrinking British empire, the dull job, the lack of money … things like these. They were shouting at the prison walls, like so many Joshuas at the walls of Jericho.”

Skiffle left a mark on an entire generation of men and women who picked up guitars and created some of the best music of the 1960s. The list of musicians who started out in skiffle is long and impressive: Jimmy Page, David Gilmour, Ritchie Blackmore, Pete Townshend … even Cliff Richard. Van Morrison was not only a huge fan of the genre, but also recorded an album with Lonnie Donegan and Chris Barber in the late 1990s. And one obscure skiffle group from Liverpool eventually changed its name from the Quarrymen to the Beatles.

The craze lasted barely five years, replaced by the screams and shouts of American rock 'n' roll, which offered similar freedoms and pleasure. Skiffle remains a brief chapter in pop history, but its lasting influence belies its short life. Although it remains obscure today — unknown by pop fans and often overlooked by folkies — the genre reinforced the idea that popular music is often best left to the amateur, the unschooled, the self-taught: those artists who innovate intuitively, without anyone telling them what they can’t do.

Dewi Peter's Skiffle Group outside Kayser Bondor, Pentrebach C.1957. Photograph courtesy of Clive Morgan.

Squared Roots: Brandi Carlile Makes the Case for Elton John

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The classically trained Sir Elton John wasn’t always just so. In his early days, Reginald Dwight was so hooked on the American sounds of Elvis Presley, Ray Charles, Jim Reeves, Bill Haley, and Jerry Lee Lewis that the band he formed in 1962 was called Bluesology. Then, in 1967, John met lyricist Bernie Taupin and music history would soon be made. The pair continues writing together today, after more than 57 Top 40 hits (in the U.S.) on 30+ albums … and nearly as many awards.

“Border Song,” “Tiny Dancer,” “Crocodile Rock,” “Philadelphia Freedom,” and myriad other John/Taupin collaborations fill the soundtracks of so many lives … singer/songwriter Brandi Carlile‘s among them. She grew up idolizing the two British music men and, after combining their influence with a dash of Johnny Cash and a pinch of Patsy Cline, found her own rootsy sound evolving and emanating from that somewhat surprising foundation.

To connect the dots between Sir Elton and American roots music, you have to go back to his days as Reggie Dwight. Draw that line for us.

I feel like sometimes an artist’s separation from their influences by proximity and culture almost intensify and exaggerate the effect that a certain genre has on them. Examples of this that come to mind are Paul McCartney’s passion for Buddy Holly and American rock ‘n’ roll; Old Crow Medicine Show cutting their teeth in Ithaca, NY, only to become incredible live Appalachian bluegrass on steroids — complete with Ketch Secor’s almost savant encyclopedia of knowledge on the genre and his preoccupation with southern culture; British, bluegrass-influenced arena band Mumford and Sons and Colorado-based Lumineers are also good examples of this … not to mention my personal obsession with country music and the South as a northerner or, as an American, my obsession with Brit Pop — Freddie Mercury, the Beatles … but, above all these, Elton John. Admiration from a distance is the strongest kind.

While Elton, by definition, is decidedly British, he has pushed the envelope on genre so far that it’s completely inapplicable to him. He was deeply influenced by American rock ‘n’ roll and roots music. Being so far away from Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Elvis Presley only seems to have fueled the obsession with the culture of early American rock ‘n’ roll roots music for him.

Elton once said that Elvis looked like an alien to him. My great uncle Sunny, a guitar player and singer, told me that he was too busy (along with his friends) being jealous of Elvis Presley to be influenced by him at the time. The space between an artist and the music that inspires them becomes purer as it grows, erasing lines of competition, jealousy, even racism and politics. Elton John is a lover of early American rock ‘n’ roll roots music, pure as the driven snow. He could probably teach you and me a thing or two about it!

The most defining influences from early to current Elton John are his deep love for Leon Russell and Buffy Sainte-Marie. It took an eccentric British man in his 60s to teach me about these two absolute pillars in American folk/roots and to see something fundamental that was right in front of my nose whole time.

Once he teamed up with Bernie Taupin, things shifted. What threads of honky tonk, gospel, and other roots do you hear in their early work?

When Elton John started writing with Bernie Taupin, it was like rock ‘n’ roll met roots — Captain Fantastic meets the Brown Dirt Cowboy — and now you don’t only have early American overtones, musically, but they’re touching lyrically on early American themes. The entire Tumbleweed Connection record is Civil War fantasy meets early American Western. Good guys and bad guys, riverboats, Yankees and the Union, sons of their fathers, New Orleans, and “good old country comfort in my bones.”

Early American gospel makes its way onto Elton John many times, most notably in “Border Song” complete with a nod to ending racism. These themes are a constant throughout their career and continue to be. “Texan Love Song,” to Roy Rogers, all the way to the T Bone Burnett records of today, The Union and The Diving Board.

Bernie Taupin, to me, is the best lyricist there is and certainly the most fantastical and unselfish in his work. He is deeply interpretative and, honestly, self-revealing while also introducing us to fantasy and objectivity unchanged for 40 years.


Elton John with Bernie Taupin (left) in 1971. Photo credit: Public domain.

You have a thing for big personalities in your musical heroes … Elton, Elvis, Freddie Mercury, Johnny Cash. So you clearly don’t think Elton’s flamboyant, costumed persona took anything away from his respectability as an artist. Correct?

No! No way! Elton John’s eccentricity is authentic. Picture Elton John in the hipster attire of his time — skinny jeans and a beard, all browns and fedoras with a tiny tie. Who’s going to believe anything a guy has to say about “Bennie and the Jets” in that? He proved that he could make you cry dressed like Donald Duck. That means everything. Little Jimmy Dickens and Minnie Pearl probably loved him.

There aren’t many artists who could do a duets album that included Tammy Wynette, Leonard Cohen, and RuPaul. So what is it about Elton and his music that create such a wide berth?

The thing about Elton John that creates a wide berth is that he is a truly authentic person who thrives on enthusiasm and loving people! In fact, he loves so many different kinds of people that he regularly offends someone over his acceptance of someone else. Dolly Parton also has this rare gift. Elton tends to embrace the unacceptable — from collaborating with Eminem when he was in such hot water, to playing at Rush Limbaugh’s birthday party, to insinuating that Jesus might be gay, to now getting on the phone with Vladimir Putin on behalf of LGBT Russian citizens. As a result, when Elton john speaks out against something, everyone listens … I certainly do.

Elton is wildly diverse in his efforts to become a bridge builder. He’s very intriguing and his musical collaborations have been very reflective of that. I used to listen to Duets, his collaborative duets record from the ’90s, and I never got tired of it because even if I was over [Don] Henley that day, I could hear him sing with Tammy.

Which album can we point to as the one where he moved completely away from his early influences? Or is there an argument to be made that they are still there, even in “Circle of Life”?

The beauty of Elton and Bernie is that there are no absolutes that can be applied to any one of their albums. They are a wild ride of genre twists and turns, career long. Say what you will about musical consistency, none of these records are background music. You don’t want to have them playing while you’re hosting a dinner party.

If I had to point to a departure from roots music — although never completely — I’d say maybe some of the mid-80s to early-90s stuff. From Leather Jackets, Breaking Hearts, maybe Too Low For Zero, or The Big Picture. However, having said that, those records made a huge impact on me and, last time I checked, I’m still a roots artist. Elton’s Americana leanings are firmly in tact. His last two records with T Bone Burnett are truly some of the best of his career. The Union with Leon Russell is a favorite of mine and The Diving Board is a return to form in a way that feels to me like hearing Johnny Cash sing alone on American Recordings.

Elton and Bernie have deeply influenced me as an American roots artist from 5,000 miles away! Thanks for giving me the chance to say so.

Brandi Carlile photo courtesy of Brandi Carlile. Elton John photo credit: Heinrich Klaffs / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA.