Tag: Joan Baez

BGS 5+5: The Accidentals

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Accidentals
Hometowns: We split hometowns of Traverse City and Nashville; we have houses in both (Sav and Katie) and Michael is from Grand Rapids
Newest Album: TIME OUT (Session 1)
Nicknames: Savannah is Sav, Katherine is Katie, Michael is ALWAYS Michael. haha.
Rejected band names: Flavor Monkeys, Savage Kittens (now our publishing company), Go Dog Go, Jalapeno Honeymoon, Comfort and Dismay. We were The Treehuggers before.

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

Katie: Brandi Carlile is one of those through-line artists we bonded over when we were teenagers and have never stopped learning from. I’ll never forget hearing “The Story” for the first time and doing a double take when the music drops out and she belts the chorus like there’s no tomorrow. As a socially anxious kid I wanted nothing more than to be able to hurl my feelings out of my lungs the way she does. Over the years we’ve watched her do everything from producing records to making her own music festival in order to support women artists.

One of the last shows we saw before the lockdown was Brandi playing with Kim Richey at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. We had just moved to town and as we sat on the worn wooden pews overlooking the stage, I was moved to tears watching the young girls in the front row throwing their heads back and belting along to “The Story.” Never in a million years would we imagine that a few months later we’d be writing music for our TIME OUT EP with Kim Richey, but we’ve learned even our heroes are humans who we can talk to on Zoom while wearing sweatpants and talking about bread baking. When we cancelled all our tours in 2020 we started feeling lost, but so many artists including Brandi reminded us that you never have to give up collaboration, activism, hard work, and heart.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

Katie: Looking back, I have to say that 90% of my favorite moments were the unplanned ones. In 2018 we had the opportunity to sing on stage with Joan Baez for the Ann Arbor Folk Festival. I had just finished reading her biography and was starstruck, but once we were onstage her voice made everyone at ease and soon there were thousands of voices singing along. While everyone was walking off stage she grabbed my hand and I felt like my feet were floating.

Another favorite memory was playing Summerfolk Festival in Ontario — they have a tradition of pairing up two bands at the festival who’ve never met, and put them on stage together to play an after-party set. We had no idea what to expect when we loaded in our gear, but ended up playing an insanely fun hour-long set with Turbo Street Funk, a five-piece brass funk band including electric guitar, drums, sax, French horn and a hand-painted sousaphone plugged into a bass amp. We improvised on each other’s tunes all night, throwing in covers of “Ghostbusters” to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs to the Black Keys. We’re friends to this day, it was amazing.

What other art forms — literature, film, dance, painting, etc — inform your music?

Sav: Katie and I pick up inspiration everywhere we go. Usually every song is a culmination of things we’ve picked up around us – a piece of an Edgar Allan Poe poem here; the first sentence of Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief paraphrased; a story in the New York Times about an endangered kind of parrot; an art piece made entirely of thread in the Crystal Bridges Museum, or if you’re Katie, sometimes a perfectly made plate of zucchini noodles is all it takes to be inspired.

We never really know where the moments of inspiration strike. I keep voice memos on my phone of little ideas as they come to me (usually in a public place, so I have to mumble them into my phone like a nerd) and a whole list of sticky notes of random billboards saying ominous phrases or things I pick up in conversation. There’s an episode of the Song Exploder podcast featuring John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, who talks about keeping a whole list of song titles written down at his disposal, so I started picking that up recently, too.

I will say that being in the music industry requires you to know a little bit about other art forms like film and visual art, because you never know when you’re going to be writing a treatment for a music video, or brainstorming / creating an album cover from scratch. Seeing how projects like TIME OUT EP or our upcoming album Vessel translate into film or visual art is fascinating, because it shows how when an art piece becomes multimedia, it starts to feel like you’re not just looking at a picture anymore – you’re standing in a room full of color, and you can see how it all fits together.

What’s the toughest time you ever had writing a song?

Sav: I think the answer would be different for both of us — our processes for writing vary song-to-song, but also Katie and I are really different writers. Katie usually takes her time with writing, and she’ll work on the same song for months at a time until it’s perfect. I usually like to knock out a song by sitting down once in a blue moon and just getting it down in two hours. So a process like “Night Train,” co-written with Dar Williams over the course of many Zoom calls, was pretty tough for me. That song had a Leonard Cohen-like aspect where it had infinite verses; the stories Dar told would have amounted to at least ten different songs. It was really hard to pick and choose what best told the story we were trying to tell.

Ultimately the version we kept is a travel journal about the power of community, the magic you experience in meeting strangers and finding common ground. The song is about coming to the realization that we are more alike than not, and there is more goodness in the world than we might believe. We wanted a song that would speak to every generation and community, a song about healing and investing in our future, because there’s still work to be done.

How often do you hide behind a character in a song or use “you” when it’s actually “me”?

Sav: This is one of the very first things Beth Nielsen Chapman called me out on when Katie and I were doing our first co-write with her (which was also our first co-write in general). Beth made a good point that using “you” too many times in a song starts to sound pretty accusatory. If that’s what you’re going for, great! Ha ha. She went further to say that saying “I” makes it more personal. I definitely have a habit of doing this — putting “you” where “I” should be — and sometimes I still do it, but I’m watchful of it now.

One thing we picked up this year is that songs don’t always have to be about us, necessarily. They can be from someone else’s perspective, while still using “I” and “me.” On one of our weekly Monday writes with Tom Paxton, he told us one of the best ways to get started was to pick up a newspaper, read a story, and write like you’re a person standing in the room where it happened. There will always be some personal piece of you invested in it by the time you’re done. The goal is to get outside of yourself for a moment and write for the sake of the story. That was a good lesson to take away after a year of isolation. It’s human nature to tell stories — whether that story is to heal, to inspire, to relate, or to learn from. So even if it’s “me” or “you” or “they” or “we,” the goal is for someone to walk away feeling like they got something out of that story, so that they may retell it in their own way.

Photo credit: Aryn Madigan

What Was Tony Rice Really Like? Todd Phillips Reminisces With Robbie Fulks

Posted on by Editor

No BGS reader needs a rundown of Tony Rice’s biography or accomplishments. Earlier this month I chatted with Todd Phillips, Tony’s close friend and bassist across multiple groups (David Grisman Quintet, Bluegrass Album Band, Tony Rice Unit) from 1975 to 1985. During these years Tony used inspiration from mid-century jazz and musical peers, along with his innate willpower, as levers to crack open a stunning new guitar vocabulary. In doing so he rose from a bluegrass badass to a global force, operating well above tribes and vogues.

When Todd emerged in the 1970s, bass guitar was a cross-genre norm. A young upright player who melded Scott LaFaro’s gracefulness with J.D. Crowe’s timefeel was a fairly wonderful anomaly in bluegrass. I started working with Todd in 2014, and grew close with him fast. He brought something rare — a relaxed whiphand — to the feel onstage. In the van, he indulged my ceaseless fanboy questions about the old days. An equable ex-stoner with a mildly grumpy edge, he’s as adept at building an instrument or a chicken coop as analyzing acoustic riddles, and his long experience working with people as unalike as Joan Baez, David Grier, and Elvis Costello gives him a high perch from which to reflect. He reminisced fluidly about Tony over the phone with me for two hours, stopping only twice, once overwhelmed by emotion and once to get a bottle of tequila. (Read more from our conversation at my blog.)

Members of David Grisman Quintet, 1977. L-R: Tony Rice, Todd Phillips, David Grisman, Darol Anger. (Photo by Jon Sievert.)

Robbie Fulks: I listened back today to California Autumn and other records I hadn’t heard for ages, and heard little passages that sounded uncharacteristic of Tony. Did gestures come into his vocabulary, stay there for a while, and then fade off as he went to concentrate on another idea?

Todd Phillips: That’s true, yeah. He would go through cycles, get on a kick. He’d get on riffs, like hearing Billy Crystal: “You look marvelous.” He’d say that 40 times a day, and a year later, drop it for some other riff. The vocabulary would change, according to the era.

That’s fascinating, to compare it to a non-musical example. So let’s dive in, go back to the start. Tell me about meeting Tony — when, where, and how you guys got underway with the Grisman project.

I was a beginning mandolin player, and I was certainly in over my head, playing mandolin with David, but he’d never heard me play bass, which I’d played since I was a little kid. This was 1974, and Clarence White had died the year before. And we just thought, this is a good band, we don’t need a guitar — no one else could fill Clarence’s shoes, and he’d be the only guy that would work in this thing. Then David came home from a Bill Keith recording session and said, “I just met the guy that could do it.”

(Photo by Todd Phillips)

Shortly after that, J.D. Crowe and the New South were on their way to Japan, and they stopped in San Francisco to play one gig. They hung with us for a couple days and… I had never hung with, um, that many guys from Kentucky all at once. [Laughs]

I’ve told you about that Mexican restaurant in Berkeley. The Californians — me, Darol, and David — and the Kentucky guys — J.D., Tony, Ricky, Jerry, and Bobby — were seated at one giant round table. First, Crowe ordered: “Six tacos and a Coke!” Then each New South guy ordered exactly the same. I guess they were used to the little three-inch tacos you can eat in two bites. So this big table ended up covered with plates full of giant tacos, surrounded by a pretty interesting mix of characters. I wish we had a photo. Polyester and tie-dye T-shirts all around.

After they came back from Japan, Tony gave J.D. his notice. He hooked up a little U-Haul trailer — clothes, suitcase, guitar, and stereo system — and got an apartment in Marin County. And we started rehearsing. At that point, we had what we had, but then Tony’s chemistry came into it. And it just catalyzed the whole thing. It was huge. Tony had to learn his harmony and a bunch of chords he hadn’t really played before — but we had to learn to play rhythm like J.D. Crowe. So we probably rehearsed for another six months before we went out and played our first shows.

Recording the first David Grisman Quintet album. (Photo by Todd Phillips)

Tell me about the first gig.

Our first show was in Bolinas [in Marin County], in the community center. We made our own posters and put them up all over Bolinas, so it was sold out. And no sound system. We wanted people to hear us just like we rehearsed. There were probably 200 people there.

So small room, gather round, and somehow the guitar projected through.

We played with dynamics — if Tony was soloing, we shut ourselves up. We got down light and tight under him. Since we hadn’t played through a sound system, we just did what we did every day anyway.

The first on-the-road thing, not long after, was in Japan. Our show was a bluegrass quintet with Bill Keith and Richard Greene, followed by a set of DGQ. Then, as soon as we got back from Japan, we recorded the first quintet record. So it still had that energy. We were still excited to hear it, too, every time — it would raise the hair on our arms! It was kind of a… strong existence. Life felt — pumped up, you know?

First photo of David Grisman Quintet, 1975. (Photo by Todd Phillips)

Close companions in an intense situation. A lot of people have been in a band or in the army. But on top of that, you guys were altering the course of music.

Yeah. Maybe it is a little like an army buddy. I was a cross between his bass player and his little brother. Also his babysitter, sometimes! He had left his old friends, and when he came to California, I seemed to be the guy he gravitated to. On off days, all of a sudden there’s a knock on the door at 10 a.m., and it’s Tony — “Hey man, let’s go the boardwalk, ride the roller coaster. Let’s go to the record store.” We went to the record store a million times. Came home with bags of records and stayed up all night listening — I mean, he taught me to listen close, whether playing music or just listening to records.

Any memories of the 1975 Grisman Rounder album sessions?

Tony was hilarious! We’d go out to eat, and he’d come back with a couple of cloth napkins. He’d fold one up and put it on his head, and put on sunglasses. Looking like a weird Quaker. And then drape another napkin over his left hand and go, “I don’t want anybody to steal any of my licks.” [Laughs] He’d leave that thing on his head, with the sunglasses, for like, three hours.

(Photo by Todd Phillips)

Have you heard guitarists who managed not to sound like Tony, in the years since?

Well, because Tony opened the door, after Clarence, you can’t help but sound like him as a bluegrass soloist. He found those avenues on a fingerboard that you can play with a strong attack and accurate, strong expression. A lot of it is mechanics. A D-28 with semi-high action, there are certain phrases that fall naturally under your fingers, and Tony found those. So I think a lot of guitarists use those avenues because — they’re there. You might hear different phrases but they’re not as strong. They might be more interesting, or more academically pleasing, but the effect — I haven’t heard it as strong as in those passages that Tony found.

Tell me about Manzanita.

There was no preparation that I remember. The guys came to Berkeley and we went to work. We ran a tune for 20 minutes, then recorded it maybe three to six times.

Béla Fleck said Tony didn’t like to rehearse much.

Yeah. Sink or swim.

David Grisman, Todd Phillips, Tony Rice (Photo by Todd Phillips)

Any road memories involving Tony?

He didn’t go out a lot. We went to Japan once, the three Rice brothers — Larry, Wyatt, Tony — and me. And Tony — maybe that’s when he started — he just never left his hotel room.

What was he doing in there?

Ordering room service. Later, traveling with the Unit, he’d stick to the room. I mean…he pretty much lived in front of his stereo, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. That’s what he thrived on.

How did you listen to music away from the home stereo back then?

In the early days, he drove a noisy Dodge Challenger. A muscle car, with a cassette player in the dashboard. We’d listen loud. And driving from Grisman’s house back to mine every night, it was pretty much all John Coltrane, the classic quartet.

Interesting!

Yeah, and later, a lot of Oscar Peterson. He’s like Tony: you recognize the phrases, and they’re strong as hell. Meticulous mechanics. Tony never studied music academically — but the sound of it. He took that in and it’d come out later somehow, the power and the attitude, more than specific notes or theory.

(Photo by Todd Phillips)

Did he have any relationship to the written page?

No. Not at all.

Tony cited Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy as favorites, but I don’t hear a strong kinship.

I think those were unique voices. Like Django, or Vassar.

Individualists.

I think that’s it. The attitude. He liked those kind of characters, like David Janssen — he really had an obsession with David Janssen. Or Lee Marvin.

Ha!

I’m not kidding! The Marlboro Man.

People that laid it down.

Exactly.

David Grisman Band in silhouette, 1976. (Photo by Todd Phillips)

I’m curious about the chemistry between Tony and other strong personalities. You’ve told me your take on the Skaggs-Rice dichotomy, the good and bad guys from everyone’s high school…

Yeah, Ricky would be class president and Tony would be Eddie Haskell. [Laughs] There’s a little of that, but musical respect bridges all gaps.

With David, did Tony slip easily into a sideman role?

The chemistry was — not volatile, but exciting. The New Jersey hippie and Mister Perfection. You know, when Tony was new to California, David’s living room was a real event. You never knew who you’d run into — Jethro Burns, Taj Mahal, Jerry Garcia. I think that excited Tony. He’d dig in his heels, just be who he is, and people respected that. He was…I guess I want to use the word “stubborn.” Clear-headed, with his vision.

Were cigarettes it for Tony, or were there harder things he liked to do?

No! He actually went light on the marijuana, compared to everyone else in Marin. He kinda puffed a little bit, just to participate.

Any whiskey?

No, he drank a few beers at home. I don’t remember any hard liquor at all.

New Year’s at Great American Music Hall, 1978-1979. (Photo by Jon Sievert.)

I read in The Guardian obit: “apprentice pipe fitter”…?!

Yeah! His dad was a welder, pipe fitter, and Tony and his brothers did that too.

What did he do to keep his fingers strong besides play?

Nothing. He bit his nails. He had no fingernails, and his fingertips looked like blocks of wood. Like the rounded end of a wooden dowel. The guy played a lot. He had hands that physically, mechanically, work in a different way. He could push down with his thumb, on his right hand, but also push up, with his first finger. You can look at YouTube and see it — a really strong muscular mechanism between thumb and index.

His down and upstrokes weren’t ascribed to the usual beats, weren’t automatized in the normal way — and were equally forceful.

Yeah. And rhythmically, a lot of triplet syncopation on the upstrokes. People just say “syncopation,” but technically it’s playing 3/4 against 4/4, like Elvin Jones’s drumming. You can’t tell if it’s in 3 or 6 or 4 or 2. It’s all of it. It’s all of it! And those subdivisions, I learned that from Tony — you slice that up in all kinds of ways, so those polyrhythms are all churning in your hands or head at the same time. That’s what generates good time, not tapping your foot. Tony had all those superimposed polyrhythms in him.

(Photo by Todd Phillips)

Bluegrassers work hard and live long, on the whole. And with so many players of your generation now in their 70s and performing as energetically as ever, Tony’s story looks more profoundly sad to me.

You know, I don’t know why Tony went the way he went. Why he couldn’t be as youthful as Sam Bush. Who knows, if there was some kind of a depression, or if that desire for perfection wore him out. You know? Because he did play with joy, but it was also that crazy obsession, to be perfect and accurate — maybe he was just too hard on himself.

He was hard on everybody around him. I know that I developed way more than I ever would have developed if I’d never known him. It was not that he was ever mean or harsh to me, but being around him, you put pressure on yourself to live up. I think everybody that played with him was like that. He jacked up the music to this level — and then it was your challenge to get up there with him. Being around him changed me forever.

Lede image by Heather Hafleigh. All photos provided by Todd Phillips and used by permission.

LISTEN: Newport Folk Festival Opens Bluegrass Archive for Saturday Stream

Posted on by Editor

Where do you begin to talk about bluegrass at Newport Folk Festival? And how do you capture 60 years of musical magic in just one show? The curators of the festival’s archive have taken a very cool approach, pulling out musical highlights from their first decade as well their most recent decade for the upcoming Burnin’ & Pickin’ Bluegrass set.

The 90-minute show — featuring some recordings that have never before been released — will stream during the festival’s Revival Weekend on Saturday, August 1, starting at 1:37 pm ET. The list of performers on the show has not yet been announced, but considering the breadth of talent that the festival has hosted, you might hear iconic figures like Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, and Doc Watson, or a new generation that includes Carolina Chocolate Drops, Old Crow Medicine Show, or Gillian Welch & David Rawlings. Legendary artists like Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, and Elizabeth Cotten could potentially show up on the set list, too.

One thing we do know: The Burnin’ & Pickin’ Bluegrass set will include this previously unreleased recording of Ralph Stanley and Ray Cline’s “Sally Goodin'” from 1968.

To honor the festival’s incredible heritage, please consider a donation to Newport Festivals Foundation, which in the last year has provided financial relief to over 400 musicians impacted by the pandemic and over 100 grants for music education programs across the country.

Billy Glassner, archivist for Newport Folk Fest, tells BGS, “Bluegrass has always been an important ingredient in the Newport Folk magic. From its first year in 1959 when Earl Scruggs brought the Cumberland Gap to the shores of the Narragansett Bay up through last years’ collaboration between Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle, that high lonesome sound has been a constant companion to the Newport Folk Festival.”

Glassner hints at more music to come from the vault, too. He adds, “The Newport Folk Archives house an embarrassment of bluegrass riches and curating this set proved to be a joyful yet challenging experience. The only way we were able to make the tough decisions of what to cut was with the knowledge that this is only the beginning of our efforts to make the recorded history of Newport more available to our fans.”

Tune in to Newport Folk’s Festival Revival Weekend from Friday, July 31-Sunday, August 2.

 

The Show On The Road – Dar Williams

Posted on by Chris Jacobs

This week, Z. Lupetin’s conversation with revered singing songstress and deeply wise wordsmith, Dar Williams.

LISTEN: APPLE PODCASTS • MP3

Coming out of the Hudson Valley outside New York City, Williams has released over thirteen albums across a quarter century as one of America’s touchstone folk poets, first bursting out of the famed Lilith Fair folk rock scene in the mid 1990s with contemporaries like Ani Difranco and the Indigo Girls and gaining a devoted following. She has toured with luminaries like Joan Baez and Patty Griffin, written a book about what makes communities resilient, she runs her own songwriting retreats, and has inspired generations of women to fearlessly embrace their creativity and exercise their limitless potential. Z. was able to catch up with Williams in the green room at the historic McCabe’s Guitar Shop before her second show of a sold out weekend in Los Angeles. A new album is on the way.

MIXTAPE: Lily Kershaw’s Songs That Made Her Want to Write Music

Posted on by Editor

“I decided to make a mixtape of the songs that inspired me to write music. It is always good to return to the reason you started something, especially if you find yourself lost in the middle or far from the start and you need to anchor back to where you began. It’s like going home to reground, rejuvenate, and revitalize! Luckily music is a portable home on our phones these days so I can always dive back in whenever I need to. I hope you enjoy my Mixtape!” — Lily Kershaw

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Sound of Silence”

I chose this song to begin with because it was the first song I heard that made me want to write music. I remember the first time I heard it the world felt like it stopped and an immediate desire to create a song arose in me.

Joni Mitchell – “Cactus Tree”

I’ve been listening to Joni since I was a kid, and this song of her’s in particular made me want to write. I love that she is talking about a woman who would be deemed as “complicated” just because of her desire to be untethered and free, but Joni made her seem so alive and well and glamorous. I remember wanting to be like the woman she sang of.

“He can think her there beside him
He can miss her just the same”

How brilliant is that lyric?!

Leonard Cohen – “Chelsea Hotel #2”

I have covered this song at the majority of shows I’ve ever played live. Cohen wrote this about Janis Joplin. These particular lyrics break my heart:

“Ah but you got away didn’t you babe
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away I never once heard you say
I need you, I don’t need you”

Crosby, Stills & Nash – “Helplessly Hoping”

I went through a very dark season in my life and the first thing I would do when I woke up in the morning during that time was listen to this song. It would make me feel better even if only for a fleeting moment. I always hope that the music I write can bring comfort to anyone who needs it.

Bob Dylan – “A Simple Twist of Fate”

“People tell me it’s a sin
To know and feel too much within”

I deeply relate to these lyrics.

Joan Baez – “Diamonds And Rust”

Joan actually wrote this song about Bob Dylan. The poetry is next level!

“Well you burst on the scene already a legend
the unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half shelf could keep you unharmed”

Cat Stevens – “The Wind”

This song always re-grounds me and connects me back to my heart and my goal to write music and tell stories from my heart.

Elliott Smith – “Between the Bars”

This is another song I love to cover live and have done so often. I love and relate to this passage of lyrics in particular:

“People you’ve been before that you don’t want around anymore
That push and shove and won’t bend to your will
I’ll keep them still”

Nico – “These Days”

I love a woman simply speaking about where she is at in that moment of her life. It is honest, poetic, simple, and profound.

“I’ve been out walking
I don’t do too much talking these days
These days
These days I seem to think a lot
about the things I forgot to do”

Sufjan Stevens – “Chicago”

This song brings me life. I feel so many things when I listen to this song. It definitely connects me back to my heart and to the place in me that wants to write music.

Now comes the part of my mixtape that is solely a Simon & Garfunkel appreciation section. Here are some of the lyrics that have most inspired me to write!

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Boxer”

“I am leaving I am leaving
but the fighter still remains”

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Dangling Conversation”

“In the dangling conversation
and the superficial sighs
The borders of our lives

And you read your Emily Dickinson
and I my Robert Frost
and we note our place with book markers
that measure what we’ve lost”

Simon & Garfunkel – “The Only Living Boy in New York”

“Half of the time we’re gone
but we don’t know where
And we don’t know where”

Now these next two songs are ones I have written. They show the side of what the inspiration from the songs thus far have lead me to create!

Lily Kershaw – “Now & Then”

This is a simple honest folk song about the complicated nature of love and how it changes over time.

“Remember the rooftop parties
Remember the friends
Remember the way I love you now
and the way that I loved you then”

Lily Kershaw – “Darker Things”

This is another of my more acoustic, stripped songs. In it I worry about someone I love very much and how they are hurting and in return hurting themself.

“And you say you hate the way your
mind makes you feel about
all the darker things in your life
I feel you now
I can feel you”

I hope you have enjoyed my mixtape of the songs that inspired me to write music!

Photo credit: Lindsey Byrnes

Six of the Best: Protest Songs

Posted on by Editor

It’s hard to pick my favorite protest songs. The Woody, the Dylan, the ’60s counterculture pop hits, the singularly chilling “Strange Fruit” — I love them all. The original “This Land Is Your Land” is an anarchist hymn, Dylan’s “Masters of War” is as scathing and righteous today as it was then, “Ohio” by CSNY was so poignant and cathartic in its time, and Billie Holiday laid bare the terrorism of whiteness, breaking the silence for a new generation to sing and speak their truth.

But I’ve opted to go toward the personal: the formative songs that revealed to me just how powerful songwriting could be in conveying a message. The ones that viscerally grabbed me, shook me and changed me; that still send a chill down my spine when they twist the knife. The songs that made me look up from the pages of my diary and want to write songs about the world and the way it could be.

In the past three years I have ramped up my commitment to learning to write this kind of song, and I have had plenty of inspiration. So much so that Front Country’s next record is almost entirely protest songs of one kind or another. Songs of meaning and truth and change. Here are six of the songs that made me the hopelessly idealistic and sanctimonious songwriter I am today. — Melody Walker, of the band Front Country.

“The Wagoner’s Lad” – Traditional

The old ballads are not known for being feminist anthems — far from it — but this one has to be my favorite. The first verse is one of the most honestly brutal accounts of what life was (and still is) like for women in most of the world living under Abrahamic religious rule: “Oh, hard is the fortune of all womankind / They’re always controlled, they’re always confined / Controlled by their parents until they are wives / Then slaves to their husbands the rest of their lives.” As well as the first known field recording sung by Buell Kazee, I recommend Joan Baez’s version because I love her interpretation of the lyrics, and my favorite modern version is by The Duhks. Interestingly, Doc Watson recorded it with a declawed first line “The heart is the fortune of all womankind,” as did several others after him, and I’d be ever so curious to know the story behind that change.

“Killing in the Name” – Rage Against the Machine

You know how parents in the latter half of the 20th century were convinced that music was radicalizing and warping the minds of their children? Well, I can safely say that Rage Against the Machine was my gateway drug into politics and protest, and I’ve never looked back. The raw angst and explosive energy drew me in, and the messages made me stay. Fox News themselves couldn’t write a more cliché tale of my descent into liberal madness: I went to my first RATM show at age 13 in Oakland, California, got a million pamphlets outside the show, read them all, and was immediately indoctrinated into progressive politics. Rare in the realm of protest music, this song, the performance, and the production still sound as fresh today as they did all the way back in 1991. This song was released in the wake of the Rodney King protests and it’s famous refrain sadly still rings true in America: “Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses.”

“One Tin Soldier” – written by Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter

Cheesy as all get out, preachy as hell, but one of the most hard-hitting story songs with a pacifist moral out there. The one time I got to go to sleep-away summer camp at 10 years old, our cabin counselor would sing us to sleep with her favorite folk songs, and when she sang this one I was pretty sure it was the best songwriting I had ever heard in my life. What can I say? It never fails to turn me into a blubbering mess by the end. Truly great songs can stand up to any style or instrumentation, so take your pick of the original ’70s AM gold, punk rock, and pop reggae versions — or this legendary clip of the Bluegrass Alliance from the documentary Bluegrass Country Soul featuring baby Sam Bush and Tony Rice!

“Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” – Buffy Sainte-Marie

I first heard this song on a live Indigo Girls album and it turned me on to Canadian-American First Nations singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. Though she has had a long and successful career as a writer and performer since the early ’60s, including co-writing the inspirational “Up Where We Belong,” this song is from her ’90s comeback album and it pulls absolutely no punches in its accounting of ongoing terrorism against indigenous people in North America. One listen to this song is an invitation to learn more about the activists of the American Indian Movement and how corporations still collude with governments every day to displace and destroy native cultures around the world.

“My IQ” – Ani DiFranco

No one artist embodies the 3rd Wave Feminism of the 90s more than prolific and perpetually independent songwriter Ani DiFranco. Every song is a stream-of-consciousness integration of the personal and the political, redefining and queering the protest song in a polarizing performance style you either love or hate. She paved the way as a completely DIY artist with her own independent record label from the beginning, sending a message not just through her music, but also her entire business model. Each song is a subversive blend of breakup song, political manifesto, slam poetry piece and almost jazz-like playful vocal exploration, unwilling to be pinned-down as a singular statement. I finally settled on one that ends with my favorite of her famous zingers: “Every tool is a weapon… if you hold it right.” I love this well-worn, reimagined live version from 2002.

“If I Had A Hammer” – Pete Seeger & Lee Hays

Speaking of tools, it’s easy to see why this menacingly titled early hit of the “folk scare” put the fear of revolution in the hearts of the powerful. While it was debuted in 1949 by writers Pete Seeger and Lee Hays at a meeting of the Communist party, it became as mainstream as apple pie by the time Peter, Paul & Mary had a hit with it in 1962. Perhaps considered a children’s song today, it has a subversively empowering message in its simplicity. The night Trump got elected, Front Country had just flown to Seattle to start a tour, and there was a palpable sense of grief in the air at those West Coast shows. We closed every show of that run acoustic, on the floor, with a singalong of this song. It seemed to provide a much needed collective catharsis for ourselves and our fans. When one feels helpless, this song reminds the singer that we each have our own unique tools to bring to the work of dismantling systems of oppression and creating the world we want to see. There are a mind-bending number of recording of this song, so here are a few lovely ones.

Photo of Ani DiFranco: GMDThree

Pete Seeger: Listening from the Rafters (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on by Editor

Pete Seeger would have turned 100 this month, but he fit well over a century’s worth of impact into the ninety-four years he had. His accomplishments as an activist, musician, folklorist, and organizer have long been numerous enough to fill an anthology—and this month, Smithsonian Folkways has finally released one, complete with six CDs, a 200-page book, and twenty previously unreleased recordings.

The release, Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, is just one way to celebrate his centennial. Fans and admirers have also marked the occasion with “Spirit of Seeger” concerts nationwide, and a special set at this summer’s Newport Folk Festival, an event where Seeger’s impact is perhaps most evident.

But Pete’s legacy is about more than a single release or celebration. Jay Sweet, executive producer at Newport Folk and a friend to Seeger, says the late folk music icon wouldn’t want any fanfare for his birthday—he’d rather see a new generation put that energy towards helping others. Here, in the first of a two-part interview, Sweet recalls conversations and memories with Seeger and discusses the way Pete’s egalitarian spirit and fiery pursuit of truth continues to propel the Newport Folk Festival forward.

BGS: You met Pete for the first time after he was a well-established icon in the American folk scene. What was that like for you?

Sweet: They say to be careful when you meet your heroes. For me, with Pete, it was the exact opposite, and it was mostly because he wasn’t Mister Positive. When I met him in his late eighties, he was a bit of a curmudgeon. I actually really liked that. He was feisty, he was disgruntled with the state of everything that was happening in the world, and he was questioning why the younger generations weren’t doing more. I think he kind of considered them soft, and I liked that he was calling it like it was.

Did that attitude reveal itself more as you grew closer over the years?

A story that I love happened few years after I met him, at Newport the first time I brought the Decemberists there. I was really excited to see them—they were going to do a funny reenactment of Dylan Goes Electric, including Pete with an axe. (I’d even told them it’d have to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, because, y’know, uh, Pete’s here.) But during the set, I get this security guard running up to me: “We’ve lost Pete. You told us to keep an eye on Mr. Seeger. We don’t know where he is.” Then, immediately, there’s another security guard running up to me. “There’s somebody in the scaffolding up on stage left, thirty-five feet up in the air. We’ve asked him to come down, but the music has started and we don’t want to interrupt the band on stage. What do we do?”

So I go, and I look, and lo and behold—in his Wranglers and a purple-pink button-down work shirt, with his little hat—was Pete Seeger at ninety-plus, thirty-five feet up in the air, looking down at the Decemberists. I remember being terrified, thinking, Well, the best thing to do is to not scare him, to wait til he comes down. There were no stairs or anything, he had just climbed.

So when he got down, I was like, Pete… what?! And he said, “I was so sick of people asking me to take pictures with them and sign autographs. You told me that this band had a lot of good stuff—that their music was based in old-time sea shanties, had all these metaphors, took from these old tales. And I was fascinated. I had to see it. And they’re fantastic!” And I just remember thinking, I know Newport is onto something when Pete Seeger is climbing the scaffolding to be left alone, just to see good music.

I’ve heard that it was actually Pete’s idea, decades ago, to pay all of the performers the same fee to play—$50. And I know that’s not how it works now, but—

It’s pretty close! [Laughs]

What elements of that spirit are still around?

Well, we perhaps overpay up-and-coming artists — those who need it, really, in order to be able to take the dog-crap offers they get all over the place and still survive. If we don’t overpay them, we give them the opportunity to collaborate with somebody that is gonna help their star shine a little brighter, give them a platform to succeed. With anybody bigger than that, we basically ask to take a zero, or even more than a zero, away from their normal asking fee. And then we make a donation in their name to something that they believe in.

And the reason that works is because there’s an understanding. You can look at, say, the Avett Brothers, who I booked three or four times before they ever headlined. Hozier — his very first, basically, gig, in the United States? It was Newport. Courtney Barnett and Leon Bridges and Margo Price, all these amazing people that came to Newport before they became the names that you might recognize. We need to support the hell out of them, and not just for altruistic reasons. Bands like the Avett Brothers and Wilco and Hozier and the Alabama Shakes and My Morning Jacket, you don’t get those bands to come back year after year if you didn’t support them when nobody else did.

And I think that is all about that $50 model, and a general understanding of it. Fleet Foxes’ Robin [Pecknold] said it really well on a PBS special: He said, when we first came here, they didn’t pay us much, but we hadn’t proven ourselves. Then I think they paid us the exact same amount when we came back to Newport to headline. The interviewer was confounded by that, he asked — why? And [Robin] essentially said, “Because now there’s another band that Jay needs to book. They’re the Fleet Foxes from ten years ago, and they need that help. Me playing it, it’s a giving back.”

And that? It’s very rare. But it comes from the spirit of Pete saying that regardless of whether you’re Bob Dylan at the height of his popularity or church singers from Appalachia, you’re getting fifty bucks. That we’re-all-in-this-together mentality comes from that fifty dollars. And if during my tenure, if the whole thing is as close as I can get to the ideal of Pete Seeger, the better off the festival will be.

What were some of your last interactions with Pete, and how do they affect the way you move forward with Newport?

My last conversations with Pete were much more interesting than my first ones, in some respects. One is that he said to me, “Jay, if you’re not upsetting someone, you’re doing it wrong.” That’s a mantra I keep with me — a what-would-Pete-say kind of thing. That’s what makes Newport, this festival that Pete basically co-founded with George Wein, iconic in American music and around the world, even though it’s so small—why its name gets continuously mentioned in the same breath as the Glastonberrys and Bonnaroos and Coachellas. I remember him saying, “You’ve gotta keep challenging the ears of our audience. Unless you’re upsetting a certain faction, you’re doing it wrong. Take the opportunity.”

About four months before he died, he asked me, “How are you going to keep booking people that speak truth to power, speak on the human condition? Who is doing that now?” I said, “Well, at this point Pete, it’s hip-hop.” I sent him some lyrics—just lyrics at first, no music—and he wrote back and said, “These are fascinating. Does any of this stuff get radio play?” And I was like “Actually, no. It’s somewhat like when you started the festival.” Because when people like Pete and Joan Baez and others had lyrical messages that, due to the lingering effects of McCarthyism, were not “fit for radio,” Newport was created out of that blacklisting.

Pete figured, if I can’t get my message to the masses via these mediums, I’m just gonna do it in person, all over the country and all over the world. I’ll take it to union halls and VFWs and town assemblies, and whatever it is—gymnasiums at public schools. The festival was basically just a massive culmination of the grassroots effort to play for the island of misfits. So I think there was a lot of connection there, for him, with hip-hop—Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper. It was fascinating to me. But white Pete was alive, we could never bring that to fruition for him. Bring somebody to Newport in a free rhyme, just a beat and somebody freestyling. I think he actually would have climbed that scaffolding again: “Leave me alone—I want to go see this truth.”

Illustration: Zachary Johnson
Editor’s Note: Read the second part of our interview with Jay Sweet.

For Mandolinist Andy Statman, Music Is the Great Unifier

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

Mandolinist Andy Statman is quick to deny that his identity — he’s a devout modern Orthodox Jew — has anything to do with his music. “To tell you the truth,” he says, “it never entered the picture. I was just into the music…”

However, his latest album, Monroe Bus — an exploration of traditional mandolin techniques utilized in contexts as familiar as Bill Monroe standards and as far-reaching as klezmer and jazz-infused originals — belies that denial. And, as we converse about his history in music and the harlequin nature of the album it becomes obvious that his work isn’t devoid of his identity at all. In fact, the opposite is demonstrable.

Statman’s music is, of course, archetypically and idiosyncratically his own. He, as much or more so than any other mandolinist on the scene today, is truly original. He’s reached this destination not through purposeful attempts in his music to express his identity — religious, cultural, and otherwise. Instead he simply focuses on playing the most meaningful music he can, while remaining in the moment and establishing human connection with his fellow musicians. The rest, his whole identity, shines through his art organically and effortlessly as a result. Statman is a testament to roots music’s ability — whether consciously or subconsciously, overtly or covertly — to allow its purveyors’ souls to be the keystones on which entire albums, catalogs, and genres are built.

BGS: Your record strikes me as “melting pot” music. Whether you’re playing more jazzy music or bluegrass or klezmer, you’ve always considered your music to be quintessentially American. Why is that?

Statman: First of all, I’m an American, so the culture I grew up in was an American culture. I heard things through an American ear, I saw things from an American eye, and while there might be certain regional differences, all in all it’s all pretty much the same. I grew up right after World War II, my father was a veteran. I was born in 1950, so I grew up in the early 1950s in an area in Queens, New York called Jackson Heights. It was a diverse neighborhood. Everyone got along. Everyone grew up together. The other kids were just other kids, and it didn’t matter what their background was. The music played at this time was classical music, or jazz, or square dance music, or other stuff. As a kid we used to have square dances every week in public school. I remember every year we used to have a Lebanese American come and play songs for us. At that era you were able to sort of culturally imbue almost all of the last one hundred years of American culture. It was all there to be touched and heard and seen and lived. It was there, in the air, but it was America so it was live and let live.

What was your entry point to bluegrass, then?

My brother is about eight years older than me. He went to college in the ‘60s — 1960 I guess was his first year. He got very involved in listening to like the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, the beginning of the folk revival. Then he started bringing home records of Dave Van Ronk, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez. That wasn’t really so much for me, but then he started bringing home some New Lost City Ramblers records and this other record that Mike Seeger was involved in, Mountain Music Bluegrass Style, which basically was recordings of the incredible bluegrass scene in Baltimore, Maryand, and Washington D.C. in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s — people like Earl Taylor and Smiley Hobbs, just an amazing collection. I really gravitated to that. I remember for my birthday he got me Foggy Mountain Jamboree, a compilation of the early, classic Flatt & Scruggs Columbia 45s. He was also involved in what they used to call jug and skiffle bands and they used to rehearse at the house. He played guitar and sang and there was a banjo player in the band who played some bluegrass and I was just very excited by that whole thing. That just did it for me. All I wanted to do was play bluegrass.

What was it about the music that grabbed your ear?

On a very simple level, emotionally, I was excited and moved by the music. It really spoke to me. The singing, the harmonies, the instrumental playing. There was an excitement to it that I really liked. I was very moved by the slower, ballad types of things, also. I started listening on the AM radio to WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia, which was a bastion of country music back at that time. We had a guitar in the house, my brother’s guitar, so I started learning the Doc Williams guitar method, I learned some chords, but I really wanted to learn banjo. I finally was able to get a banjo and started taking lessons.

On Sundays back then in Washington Square Park people would go down and play outside in different groups. There’d be a group playing bluegrass, a group doing topical songs, a group doing blues, so I started meeting people doing bluegrass. On these records that I liked I was getting more and more moved by the mandolin playing — it was really exciting me. Earl Taylor’s playing and I think on the Scruggs records it was Everett Lilly playing one or two solos that were just like, wow. I was getting chills from hearing this stuff. I decided I would make the switch and become a mandolinist. I had already been playing banjo and guitar for a few years. I was still in my early teens, so when I stepped into the mandolin role I already had some muscles developed and some understanding of the music.

The record, Monroe Bus, really clearly illustrates the value and the beauty that comes from allowing our musical art forms to reflect our identities. How do you think we can help foster the idea that any background or identity is valid and can be showcased through these art forms?

You know, I don’t think that way. Forgive me. I’m just into playing music, playing the best music that I can, and I’ve been fortunate that I’ve been able to study with a lot of musicians of different cultures and different backgrounds, both playing American music and music that maybe isn’t played here so much. To me, it’s all about the music. When I’m playing, I’m just playing. Identity or background is really meaningless to me. It was always like that, but at this point in my life even more so. When I’m playing I’m just looking to play the most meaningful music I can play. Those are my only real concerns.

 

Bill Monroe (foreground) and Andy Statman at Fincastle Bluegrass 1966. Photo by Fred Robbins

You are always blending different musical forms in these crazy, unexpected ways. How do you respond to folks that are worried that that dilutes bluegrass or that it will kill the genre in the long run? What’s your response to the typical, “That ain’t bluegrass” kind of gripe? Do you have one?

First of all, this is not a bluegrass record, obviously.

But there are undeniable bluegrass threads throughout.

Of course, but I’m not presenting myself as [pure bluegrass.] I spent a lot of time studying bluegrass, and there are always new insights and things to learn, but for me, the original blossoming of bluegrass is where it’s at, where it reached its fullest expression. If I’m going to listen to bluegrass, I’m probably going to listen to bluegrass from before 1970. Not to say that what came after is bad, this is just my preference. The feelings and creativity of that particular period, to me, are really unsurpassed. And while the technical level might have gotten better, this doesn’t necessarily make for a more meaningful, deeper music, it just makes for a more athletic music. [Laughs]

Listen, people have to be who they are. It’s just music. There are always going to be people who hear things differently, who want to add or subtract things, and if you don’t like it, then you don’t like it. I can see that there’s a strong core of people who are really interested in playing music in the mode of what was played in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and ‘60s. I think there isn’t any danger of that not continuing.

I do believe, though, that it’s important for musicians to really try and master a traditional style. Because, if you’re going to try to build on something, you really need to understand where it’s coming from, to be able to relate to that music on its own terms. Which is getting back to the roots of all this music and being able to speak that language naturally, in your own way and find your own voice in it. You’ll understand phrasing, variation, improvisation, how to play melodies, how to bring out what’s in the melody, how to play rhythm. Without that firm grounding in a particular style, particularly when we’re talking about folk music, it won’t click.

It’s interesting that you say that, because I think that a song that perfectly illustrates what you’re talking about on the record is “Raw Ride,” a sort of version of Bill Monroe’s “Rawhide.” I love this version because the song is so iconic, but you’re still turning it on its ear. You’re demonstrating that foundation that you’re talking about, but you’re finding your own voice in it. How did you come up with this arrangement?

Well, I’ve been playing the tune for years. “Rawhide” is one of those tunes that, if played in the traditional Monroe manner, requires a lot of energy. It’s always a question of is it worth the energy for the payoff? [Laughs] It usually is. There’s obvious extensions of the melody or the chords that you hear if you’ve been involved in playing other types of music. So I just sort of followed those. As with all of these things, it reflects who I am, my musical experiences, and my studies.

…When you’re writing music and playing music it really just reflects who you are and what your experiences are and how you live. It’s a reflection of that. That’s what Bill Monroe did. His music was a synthesis, an ongoing synthesis, and he developed a certain kind of aesthetic.

When I came out of the closet and was going through that process of coming to terms with my identity as a gay man, I had a moment where I doubted my place in bluegrass. I thought maybe bluegrass wasn’t the place for me, it wasn’t a place where I could belong. Did you ever feel like your Jewishness made you question your place in bluegrass?

Not really, no. To me, it was all about the music. All the musicians I know are wonderful, thoughtful, and kind people — in the bluegrass scene and in others as well. We’re all in this together and we all have a common passion for the music. It’s a uniting force. It has a real life of its own, and we’re just sort of passing through it, so to speak. If you’re worried about the thoughts or beliefs of the people you’re playing music with, then you can’t really be playing music. Music, in its essence, is the great unifier. It can unify people in terms of ideas and feelings and speak to the commonality of everyone. At that point, all of these other things melt away.

It really has to do with heart. It’s a spiritual thing. In Hasidic teachings they say that music, particularly instrumental music, can go higher than anything. A song without words isn’t even bound by the concepts of those words. In certain ways, it’s a universal heartbeat. You can see the tremendous life force that music carries. To me it’s something that’s very sacred.

Photo credit:Bradley Klein 

Joan Baez: Turning the Glass Upside Down

Posted on by Editor

Joan Baez admits there’s a gaffe in “Civil War,” a harrowing song of uprisings, both personal and public, on her new album, Whistle Down the Wind. “There are a couple of words that come out funny,” she says, “and there’s one where I sound like I have a big lisp.” It’s hard to catch that particular mispronunciation, especially as the lyrics are littered with sibilant S’s (“… this civil war”) that might blur her words together, and those mistakes may not be apparent to a casual listener or even an obsessive fan. But Baez hears them every time.

Partly, those blemishes are the byproduct of the recording process, which was loose, casual, and largely unrehearsed. Baez made the trip from her home in the Bay Area down to producer Joe Henry’s studio in Los Angeles, where she worked with a band of session musicians who have become regulars on the albums he has helmed for Solomon Burke, Lizz Wright, Bettye LaVette, and Over the Rhine. She would play a song a few times for them, enough to give them a sense of the piece and the ideas she wanted to convey. “I didn’t stop to say, ‘Listen, we’re going to hold this note for this long and do this thing here,’” says Baez. “I just didn’t know any of that. We just pieced everything together.” As a result, “We’ve got mistakes all over the place, and we didn’t bother to fix them, because the feeling was right. We didn’t want to sacrifice that feeling in the song for some technicality.”

Henry agrees, arguing that a mistake isn’t a mistake, if it actually strengthens the song: “To me, it’s only a mistake if it breaks the story and takes you out of the trance. I don’t hear that happening anywhere on the album, because people are playing together. They’re in a real-time conversation, musically speaking. They’re in a moment of discovery together, in real time. Nobody is playing anything by rote.”

Least of all Baez. Sixty years into a storied career, she is still searching, still discovering. Whistle Down the Wind is her first album in 10 years, and she has intimated that it may be her last. If so, it will be a remarkable swan song: a collection that gauges the tenor of 2018 just as intuitively and authoritatively as her self-titled debut did in 1960 or Diamonds & Rust did in 1975.

Baez speaks through the songs of other writers, bending them to the present moment or finding new implications buried in the lyrics and melodies. There are two Tom Waits character studies, odes to personal stubbornness, whose melodies and sentiments fit so well with Baez’s delivery that you’d think he wrote them specifically for her. She covers Zoe Mulford’s “The President Sang ‘Amazing Grace,’” about President Obama’s impromptu performance of an old Sacred Harp hymn at the funeral of Rev. Clementa Pinckney. Josh Ritter’s “Silver Blade” sounds like a response to the traditional ballad “Silver Dagger,” which has haunted Baez’s set lists for half-a-century.

Whistle Down the Wind is not interested in replaying old glories or indulging any nostalgia for the heyday of folk music. And that’s why those technical mistakes matter so much. Even if you don’t hear them, they nevertheless act on your subconscious. They increase the intimacy of the recording, making these songs sound more direct, more forthright, more urgent. Moreover, they speak to the messiness of what has become Baez’s truest subject: the times. Certain ideas and issues — whether it’s civil rights in the 1960s or gun control in the 2010s — are much more complicated and unwieldy than the means by which we choose to address them. It is less the fault of the song than the singer. As well intentioned and as righteous as an artist may be, the implication is that she or he remains an imperfect vessel for the song and the ideas contained within. Leaving that lisp in “Civil War” is Baez’s way of acknowledging that fact.

The miracle of her long career is that she still believes mightily that such songs are still worth singing, that they can speak to their historical moment, that music still has a function in the everyday life of a community or a nation or a planet. “It’s community building,” Baez says. “It’s empathy building.”

In the 1960s, that belief placed her at the epicenter of the folk revival, when she played demonstrations as routinely as she booked concerts. Like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, she was armed with a guitar, an encyclopedic history of folk music, and a strident sense of mission. Unlike those two influences, she had a high-flying voice, one that swooped playfully around her upper register. In recent years, age has robbed her voice of its former agility, but on Whistle Down the Wind, it has grown deeper, taking on a slightly rougher texture, yet retaining its original authority and compassion.

Her peers might have taken determined steps away from the responsibilities of protest music, but Baez simply expanded her scope and subject matter. Especially in the 1970s, she found new ways to mix the personal and the political. Never a confessional singer/songwriter — at least not in the way the West Coast folkies were — she still put a lot of herself in her songs, whether they were about her own personal relationships or those between communities. “I don’t know how I would have done that stuff back then without the music,” she says. “That was such a big part of it.”

Few folk musicians of her generation managed to keep the audience rooted in the foreground of her music. Her songs speak to “you,” but in most cases that “you” is plural. On her cover of “Another World,” by Anohni, who previously performed as Antony & the Johnsons, Baez bangs softly on the frets of her guitar, creating a gently frenzied pulse for lyrics about leaving this world and finding a new one. Her version is an ecological warning, a life-size take on a planet-size woe.

“I’m gonna miss the snow,” Baez sings. “I’m gonna miss the bees.” As the song continues, that guitar thrum becomes a timer counting down the end of a life or possibly the end of all life. “The song is as dark as it is beautiful and as beautiful as it is dark,” says Baez. “It’s spellbinding. [Anohni] turns the glass upside down. It’s not half-full or half-empty, but upside down.”

Baez changes the song in one crucial way. In her original, Anohni sings, “I’m gonna miss you all.” Baez adds a new word: “I’m gonna miss you all, everyone.” It’s a small change that doesn’t disrupt that melody or change the song in any dramatic way, but it does give an idea of the audience Baez (and Anohni) imagines for herself. She is addressing that “everyone.” “Joan understands very well that music is about community,” says Henry. “It’s about gathering people in real time to a pointed moment. It’s always and only about community for her.”

That idea is ingrained in her vast catalog, although it grows more poignant now that her career appears to be winding down. “When I go tootling around the world, I’m seeing so many different audiences,” Baez says. “I’ve played a lot of festivals in Germany and adopted France as a second country. I do five songs in French for them. I have a song for each country, or sometimes it’s just a line. It means so much to people, if you sing something to them in their own language. It’s hard work, but it’s a way to thank people for showing up.”

It’s also a way of speaking to them more clearly. In 2009, she recorded a simple YouTube clip of herself, presumably seated in her kitchen, singing a version of the old spiritual “We Shall Overcome.” It’s a song she’d sung countless times, but this version was both in English and Farsi, and she dedicated it to the people of Iran, who were protesting the contested election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “The lyrics were written out phonetically. I couldn’t possibly remember them. And they don’t have the same scales, which meant I couldn’t get the notes right. They just didn’t exist in my vocabulary of notes.”

For Baez, music not only speaks to these communities; it binds them together and can, in some ways, define them. Every movement demands a soundtrack, and Baez is under no illusion she can provide one for March for Our Lives or Black Lives Matter or #MeToo. “We need a brilliant anthem so people have something to sing, so they don’t have to shout so much. I wish I could write that kind of thing. But it’s so hard. Still, I think it will come.”

Illustration by Zachary Johnson

MIXTAPE: Janiva Magness’s Folk Is a Four-Letter Word

Posted on by Editor

I have long known that I am, at times, a highly emotional creature. I’m good with that and ever grateful I have the music to help sooth me through it. Folk music has always been a part of that balm and always had a quiet place in me. Although, over time, the definition of what folk music is has changed, depending in part on its popularity. For me, this is a beginning of some of my always and all-time favorite folk music. These tunes contain both comfort and melancholy — for me, two of the “absolute musts” to great folk songs by great artists. — Janiva Magness

Bob Dylan — “If You See Her, Say Hello”

How is it possible to not love this track? Besides, there is no one who can turn a phrase like Mr. Zimmerman. No one!

Blackie and the Rodeo Kings — “Brave”

Steven Fearing of B.A.R.K. has such a soulful voice and tone, then add Holly Cole’s vocal with him, and I find it a haunting tale of deep and abiding love born of infidelity. It is both comforting and stunning.

Joni Mitchell — “Both Sides Now”

An epic song written by a then very fresh Joni Mitchell with so much wisdom, it seemed impossible to come from such a young woman.

Joan Baez — “Diamonds and Rust”

This classic — and at the time controversial — track about Joan and one other very famous folk singer and their love affair remembered.

Gillian Welch — “Look at Miss Ohio”

Just love this song and, though it’s not one of Gillian’s most played tracks, I have worn this out at home, in the car, and everywhere. I love it because it’s about a beauty queen being herself behind the scenes, and doing wrong — grinnin’ all the while.

Taj Mahal — “Corinna”

I have loved this track since first laying my ears on it in the ’70s. Simple folk blues. It don’t get any better than Taj.

Ry Cooder — “That’s the Way Love Turned Out for Me”

A haunting song originally recorded by James Carr, I believe, and then adapted by Ry Cooder. I just love this version because of its fractured vulnerability.

Bonnie Raitt — “Love Has No Pride”

A song penned by Libby Titus and portrayed by Bonnie. Her early ’70s material is incomparable for me really. This tune is a heart broken in two and laying on the floor right in front of you.

Zachary Richard — “No French, No More”

A haunting and, as I understand it, true tale written by Zachary Richard about his upbringing as a young Acadian boy in the swamps and woods of Louisiana, where his native language was French but, once placed in public school, the children were forced to abandon their language and culture for English.

Bobbie Gentry — “Ode to Billie Joe”

A captivating tale of love gone wrong with two teenagers in the rural South. Bobbie Gentry’s painful and almost detached vocal track make it all the more mysterious

Jackson Browne — “My Opening Farewell”

One of the most beautiful and lonesome songs of all time to me. Love and grief. Nuff said.