Tag: Woody Guthrie

Bluegrass Memoirs: Thanks to Eric Weissberg

Posted on by Justin Hiltner

On the morning of March 24, 2020 I learned Eric Weissberg had passed away when a friend posted a long and detailed obit. I found several other substantial ones online — Rolling Stone, Variety, New York Times. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Weissberg’s family had a press release ready; he’d been in decline, suffering from dementia. A few days later Jim Rooney posted a very moving memoir focused on his long-time friend Weissberg in mid- and late years; it shed more light on this influential musician. 

Recently Bob Carlin finished a bio on Weissberg. When we spoke at IBMA’s business conference last fall he told me publishers weren’t interested in a book about a studio musician. Too bad, it’s a good story. In 1972 Weissberg won a Grammy for the banjo hit that propelled the growth of bluegrass festivals, “Dueling Banjos,” the theme from the movie Deliverance. 

I first heard Weissberg’s banjo playing in the fall of 1957. I was an 18-year old Oberlin College freshman who’d gotten into folk music as a high school student in Berkeley, California. This was my first time “back east.” I now had classmates from New York City. One of them, Mike Lipsky, had a new Folkways album, American Banjo Scruggs Style. The final band on the second side was by a friend of his from New York, Eric. 

Weissberg was 17 when he recorded for Folkways, backed by Mike Seeger and Ralph Rinzler. He picked a medley of “Jesse James” and Woody Guthrie’s “Hard Ain’t It Hard,” using Scruggs pegs on the latter. When Lipsky played it to me and my roommate Mayne Smith (fellow Californian and a fledgling banjo picker) he had to explain what Scruggs pegs were. 

Lipsky knew about this music because he was one of a group of New York teenage folk music fans, mainly from elite high schools — Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech, Music and Art — who socialized together. They’d networked not only in school, but also at leftist summer camps where folk music, spearheaded by Pete Seeger, was an essential part of the experience. They called themselves “The Squadron” and they gathered regularly in Greenwich Village on Sunday afternoons to hear two members of their crowd, Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman, picking at the Washington Square folk music jams. Weissberg, a student of Pete Seeger, had been playing the banjo since the age of ten.

Lipsky told us Weissberg and Marshall’s fancy picking confounded Roger Sprung, an older banjoist generally thought to be the best Scruggs picker in New York. And he described their banjos — not long-neck, open-back Vegas like Pete Seeger played, but Gibsons! With resonators, too. And on the fingerboard, down toward the body of the banjo, a little block of mother-of-pearl with “Mastertone” written on it.

This weirdness was all new to me. I’d never heard of “Scruggs picking,” and it was only when I borrowed the LP and read its notes, written by Ralph Rinzler, that I learned this music was called “bluegrass.” 

The following March, at spring vacation, my roommate and I went to New York. I stayed with Mike Lipsky, on this, my first visit to The City. Mayne stayed with another classmate. Among our many adventures — we were rambunctious teen tourists — we went one night to a party for The Squadron in a posh upper East Side residence. 

This was a homecoming party. Attending were young women and men most of whom were like us, on spring vacation from their first year as college and university students at a variety of institutions. Lipsky and Karen, another Oberlin classmate who was part of the group, introduced us to their friends. We’d brought our instruments, leaving them in the anteroom and going up a small flight of stairs to the main floor of this elaborate place. Eric Weissberg and Marshall Brickman, both of whom were freshmen at the University of Wisconsin, did the same. 

Midway through the evening we were encouraged to get our instruments out and sing. Mayne had his banjo — an old Stewart with a resonator — and I, my guitar — a 1943 Martin 000-21. We went back downstairs. This was the nearest thing to a front porch or back room we could find. We did several pieces, and then Weissberg and Brickman came down and got out their banjos. Mayne had taken one or two lessons with Billy Faier, the virtuoso banjoist who’d arrived in the Bay Area from New York the previous August. Faier had introduced him to three-finger picking. Mayne chatted about Scruggs with Eric and Marshall. 

Then they played a banjo duet, a Scruggs tune, “Earl’s Breakdown,” in harmony, with each picking with the right hand on his own banjo while reaching around to fret the strings on the neck of the other’s banjo. This was the first time we’d ever seen anyone play the banjo Scruggs style, much less a fancy stage stunt like that! It was a very impressive tour-de-force. You can get a good sense of what the harmony sounded like from the version on their 1963 Elektra album, New Dimensions in Banjo and Bluegrass (reissued in 1972 as Dueling Banjos from Deliverance) although they weren’t playing the fancy solo breaks in 1958.

Afterwards Weissberg told us that the best way to learn this music was to study Scruggs’ playing on one of his instrumental records like “Earl’s Breakdown” or “Flint Hill Special.” Mastering all those licks note-for-note would take you a long way towards being able to play like Earl.

Weissberg noticed that I was playing the guitar with just two picks on my fingers — thumb and index. He recommended that I add a pick on my middle finger, like he and Marshall used for the banjo. I followed that advice immediately, and the following year, when I began working seriously on banjo, I also took his advice about studying Scruggs closely.

Putting our instruments away, we went upstairs and joined the party. I conversed for a while with Eric. I told him I’d heard Billy Faier in Berkeley last summer, had been very impressed with his music, and was looking forward to his forthcoming Riverside album, The Art of the Five-String Banjo. Eric agreed, Faier is a great banjo player, and said he had collaborated with Billy and another banjo player, Dick Weissman, on an album due out this coming summer called Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos! 

That summer of 1958, Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos! arrived at Art Music on Telegraph in Berkeley where I hung out listening to new folk records. The album was on Judson, a bargain line label owned by Riverside’s Bill Grauer.

Grauer’s Riverside productions catered to the hip college kids of the fifties — a generation that grew up on hi-fi LPs. Riverside reissued historic prewar jazz and blues; released contemporary jazz and folk; and recorded sports car events. This major independent label ended abruptly in 1964 when Grauer, just 42, died. Their catalog is now with Concord Records, which has reissued some jazz recordings on CDs.

Riverside albums were well-produced, with glossy full-color cover art. Back covers — liners — had a standard format: bold head at the top with album title and artist names. Below it, three dense columns giving the playlist along with information about the music and musicians. Lots to read while listening!

Faier’s The Art of the Five-String Banjo liner held a full column endorsement by Pete Seeger, slightly longer notes by producer Goldstein, and Faier’s bio. In contrast the liner of Banjos, Banjos and More Banjos had its playlist followed by three columns of folklorist John Greenway’s flowery history of the instrument, and brief bios for the three banjoists. I bought the album (later reissued on Grauer’s Washington label with new cover and title: Five-String Jamboree: A Treasury of Banjo Music) because Eric Weissberg was playing Scruggs-style banjo on it.

At the bottom of the center column on the liners for both albums was the standard data of the time: 

A HIGH FIDELITY Recording (Audio Compensation; RIAA Curve). Produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein. Cover by Paul Weller (photography) and Paul Bacon (design). Engineer: Mel Kaiser (Cue Recordings). New York: May, 1957.

 Now I look back at the album, listen to it for the first time in years. When I last heard of Faier, about ten years ago, he was busking in Albuquerque. He died in Alpine, Texas in 2016. We’d seen each other and talked at the Tennessee Banjo Institute in November 1990, recalling the summer of 1958 when I guested on his KPFA show and worked as his backup guitarist at an SF coffee house. Dick Weissman, now 85, had distinguished careers: first as a performer, then as teacher and author. He published his memoir, The Music Never Stops: A Journey Into the Music of the Unknown, The Forgotten, The Rich & Famous, the same year Faier died.

These guys must have been in the Cue Recordings studio more than once in May, 1957. Their recordings were made with a single-track tape recorder; no overdubs. Faier made his solo album at Cue with Frank Hamilton playing guitar, and there’s one track on Banjos with that pairing — probably an outtake from The Art. Most of the other guitar on this album is by Dick Rosmini, then considered the hot, young, go-to guitar accompanist.

Weissberg is heard playing Scruggs-style banjo on five tracks, and singing tenor harmony in duets on three of those. One was an old spiritual, “You Can Dig My Grave,” with Faier. With Weissman, Eric harmonized on the old folksong “Chilly Winds.” My favorite was another spiritual, “Glory Glory.” This vocal duet with Rosmini featured great backup guitar and seven banjo breaks by Eric, each a new variation. I played that track a lot for my friends that summer!

He also did a reprise of his 1956 Folkways track, focusing on “Hard Ain’t It Hard” complete with Scruggs pegs, and a cool version of “900 Miles” in G minor tuning. 

Weissberg’s music spoke to me as a young folk fan just getting into bluegrass. He’d mastered the instrument in this new style, and learned the vocal style that went with it. Here he was applying it to music that I knew — Woody Guthrie songs, a tune the Weavers had sung on their famous Carnegie Hall concert album, and familiar Black spirituals. 

The door to bluegrass was newly opened. Eric Weissberg stood just inside, beckoning in. Come on, it’s not that hard, it’ll be fun.

Neil V. Rosenberg is an author, scholar, historian, banjo player, and Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame inductee.

Photo of Neil V. Rosenberg: Terri Thomson Rosenberg
Photo of Banjos, Banjos, and More Banjos: Neil V. Rosenberg

BGS 5+5: Griffin House

Posted on by Editor

Artist name: Griffin House
Hometown: Springfield, Ohio; currently resides in Nashville, Tennessee
Latest album: Rising Star
Personal nicknames (or rejected band names): “Balls” was my nickname, which is part of why I named my 2013 album Balls. I guess you could say it was kind of like a self-titled album. My friend (when we were younger) thought it was funny to add the suffix “balls” onto everything. All nouns, common and proper, including people’s names. Griff-balls apparently had a nice ring to it, since it stuck. Eventually it was shortened to G-Balls and eventually just Balls. It was fun when that album “dropped.” The jokes were endless.

Which artist has influenced you the most … and how?

So many influences, but I think probably Woody Guthrie is the greatest. I do a little more singing than I heard him do, being influenced by guys like Bono and Jeff Buckley, but Woody passed down an American tradition to Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, etc; his songwriting influenced [and] shaped how we’ve all done things. I relate to him particularly being a guy with his guitar traveling all around America and singing and telling stories about what’s going on around him. He really paved the way for all of us modern day troubadours singing any kind of folk songs.

What’s your favorite memory from being on stage?

One of the first shows I played when I started was opening for John Mellencamp. I was so nervous I told the crowd I was going to go back behind the curtain and “When I come back out,” I said, “Can you just pretend like you are all here to see me and go crazy?” They gave me a standing ovation and went wild before I even played a note. On the last song, I did a victory lap around the audience of 5,000 people and high-fived everyone and then finished the last song. I mostly did it because I didn’t know if I’d ever if I’d ever have an opportunity like that again and I wanted to make the most of it (and have a good story to tell). It felt like something you’d see happen in a movie.

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

Lots of film. I love watching movies and disappearing into the scenes that I’m watching. It’s a great escape for me and sometimes inspires a song. Going to museums and looking at paintings and sculpture is a wonderful joy for me too. I also love books; I majored in English Literature in college and learned to really appreciate writing during that time. Poetry and literature probably have the biggest direct influence.

What was the first moment that you knew you wanted to be a musician?

I saw Rattle and Hum and wanted to be Bono, circa 1988. [U2] were just so unbelievable. That set the bar pretty high, but I’m also content just making a living, telling my stories, and being a singer and storyteller playing for smaller crowds.

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

“Yesterday Lies.” I think it took me a couple years to write. But the toughest ones were the ones I couldn’t write at all. Every one I finish is easier than the ones that never happened.

Photo credit: Gabe McCurdy

A Spirit of Activism Informs Son Volt’s New ‘Union’

Posted on by Editor

Jay Farrar took a field trip to make Union, Son Volt’s ninth studio album. Rather than book more sessions at Red Pill Recording Studio in St. Louis — where the long-running alt-country band recorded 2017’s Notes of Blue — he wanted to take his songs out into America and find fresh inspiration. So the band trekked west to Tulsa, where they cut tracks at the Woody Guthrie Center, then road-tripped north to Mt. Olive, Illinois, to record at the Mother Jones Museum.

The spirit of activism embodied by those two figures informs the thirteen songs on Union, an urgent and at times angry account of American life at the close of the 2010s. More naturally than on any other album, Farrar balances the political and the personal, penning songs about how the media-industrial complex profits by dividing the country alongside songs about how his children are growing into adults.

BGS: Why did you want to record at the Woody Guthrie Center and the Mother Jones Museum?

Farrar: I felt like it was a little too comfortable in the studio where I had recorded before. I was writing about topical issues, so I felt like some of the songs needed to be taken out of the studio. I wanted to take them out into the world. I wanted to record them in a more challenging environment, so we went to Tulsa and Mount Olive to remind ourselves of the contributions Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie made, how each in their own way helped get us where we are today. We just felt like we needed to be inspired.

Those are two very different places. How were those experiences different?

The Mother Jones Museum is pretty small. It’s connected to the City Hall, I think. It’s evolved a lot since I was younger. I remember seeing hand-painted signs on the side of Interstate 55 going north. It was like folk art. Over the years it’s evolved, and I guess they got some funding from the city. They’re continuing to grow and build on it. I think she’s buried in the cemetery there as well.

At the Woody Guthrie Center, they have the new Bob Dylan archives, and we were able go by there after the recording. Amazing stuff there — the tambourine that inspired “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Dylan’s address book from ’63 or ’64. He’s got Lenny Bruce in there. Stuff like that. We geeked out for sure. It’s pretty comprehensive, too, because they have everything archived digitally as well as the physical objects. They wouldn’t actually let us touch anything, of course.

That sounds amazing. And, as you said, inspiring.

It was. And we were looking through some of the materials and had a question about one of the videos we were watching. So the curator said, “Wait one minute and I’ll get an answer for you.” He called Bob Dylan’s business office and talked with someone there. He got an answer straight from the source.

How did those places inform the songs on Union?

The songs were ready to go prior to going in. I didn’t write anything there, but with some of the heavy topical subject matter, this batch of songs needed to be taken out of the studio where I recorded Notes of Blue. We needed to be challenged in every way, but maybe I was just looking for a field trip. But I think those two people really did inspire some of the writing, in a roundabout way. Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie really helped shape our society and really stressed the importance of pushing society forward and not backwards.

How much of a conscious decision is it to write topical songs? Do you sit down and think, “I’m going to write a song about the media”?

It goes in cycles for me. I’ve done some topical writing in the past, but this time around it felt like it was my job to take it on. There’s a lot of turmoil in our society right now. I did a lot of the writing in November 2016, right before Notes of Blue was released in the spring of 2017. So I had a few months to put pen to paper and woodshed, and that’s when a lot of these songs came out.

Probably midway through the writing process, I decided I needed some songs that represented a regular rock ethos — essentially, non-topical songs. There needed to be a balance between topical and non-topical songs. I was thinking about the Replacements, who would fall off the stage on the first note of a song. Or The Who. I was thinking about the essence of what a rock band is. “Devil May Care” came from that approach.

Do you find new shades of meaning the more you live with a song, the more you play it night after night after night?

These new songs will probably evolve a bit from rehearsals to when we start the tour. That’s always one aspect of being on the road that I enjoy: reinventing older songs and playing them in new ways, just to keep things interesting. Certain songs just want to evolve, especially if you’re playing them every day in rehearsals and soundchecks. “Windfall” is one that has changed a lot. There’s a CD out there called Artifacts that has a reggae version. We change that one up pretty regularly, and we changed it up again over the holidays. Actually I think we’ve got reggae versions of almost every Son Volt song. But that one in particular is so well-suited to that style that we put it out on a live CD.

Why reggae?

“Windfall” is conducive to reggae. It’s just a couple of chords. But I think from one day to the next you like to stretch out and just try out different kinds of music that you’re not necessarily playing every night. I think some of the guys in the band would probably like to try some experimental jazz-fusion versions of some songs.

Can we expect to hear “Caryatid Easy” done in the style of Bitches Brew?

That’s one song we plan on resurrecting for the tour, so who knows?

Can you talk about “The Reason”? That song seems to suggest that travel and music can be salves in hard times, which makes me think it’s somewhere between topical and non-topical.

That song reminds me of Dylan’s “Forever Young” or Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.” I think it relates to watching your kids become adults, that sort of sentiment. It’s certainly informed by them, to the same degree that those Dylan and Petty songs were informed by their kids. But yeah, in troubled times getting out and traveling is good. You have to find hope wherever you can.

On the other hand, “Union” was inspired by my dad. The chorus goes, “He said national service will keep the union together.” National service is something my dad used to advocate for. Maybe he’s right, I don’t know. There’s a lot of money being made today by media conglomerates hawking divisiveness. It seems like there needs to be a counterbalance somewhere.

You’ve written topical songs in the past, with Uncle Tupelo and on 2005’s Okemah and the Melody of Riot. How different is it to write this kind of song in 2019 than when either of the Bushes were in office?

It’s not the process itself that was different, although I will say I was more focused this time. I had a block of time and was thinking about these issues, so I could be more focused on getting these songs written, maybe more so than I had been in the past. A few topical songs wound up on records in the past, maybe one or two. Okemah had a good amount of them. I guess I’ll keep cranking them out.

Photo credit: David McClister

LISTEN: Andy Hedges, “Song of the Cuckoo”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: Andy Hedges
Hometown: Lubbock, Texas
Song: “Song of the Cuckoo”
Album: Shadow of a Cowboy
Release Date: April 16, 2019

In Their Words: “I first heard the name Billy Faier in Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s song ‘912 Greens’ about an epic road trip he and some friends made across the Southern United States. I met Billy after playing a show in Alpine, Texas, immediately recognizing his name from ‘912 Greens.’ Billy was born in Brooklyn, spent most of his life based in Woodstock, but always wanted to live in the desert so as an old man he moved to Marathon, Texas. Billy had traveled with Ramblin’ Jack and Woody Guthrie on Woody’s last trip across the US. He was the first person to interview Dylan on the radio. He taught a song to Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger once said that he was the best banjo player he had ever heard. Billy and I became fast friends and had some great adventures together. When he passed a few years ago, I ended up with his beautiful old guitar. I played Billy’s guitar on this recording of his song and it seemed fitting to tag it with a line from ‘912 Greens,’ the song that connected me to Billy in the first place: ‘Did you ever stand and shiver just because you were lookin’ at a river?'” — Andy Hedges

Photo credit: David Tau

LISTEN: The Nell & Jim Band, “Dime in My Pocket”

Posted on by Editor

Artist: The Nell & Jim Band (Nell Robinson and Jim Nunally)
Hometown: Bay Area, California
Song: “Dime in My Pocket”
Album: Steel
Release: February 15, 2019
Label: Whippoorwill Arts

In Their Words: “‘Dime in My Pocket’ was written as an exercise in songwriting, and inspired by the book Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?, the story of the Carter Family. I wanted to try to write a song about A.P. Carter and his feelings about Sara that I gathered from the book. I borrowed a melody, like Woody Guthrie would, which was ‘Rollin’ On’ from the Monroe Brothers, which I recorded with the David Grisman Bluegrass Experience. I changed a few notes of the melody and a couple chords and there you go. I put the words to that and there you have ‘Dime in My Pocket.'” –Jim Nunally, The Nell & Jim Band

Photo credit: Jay Blakesburg

MIXTAPE: Cordovas’ Unknown Legends

Posted on by Editor

The playlist is called Unknown Legends because each song carries a factor of the unknown; be it a somewhat unknown version (“Connection”), artist (Altyrone Deno Brown) or even origin (“Statesboro Blues”). These compositions and singers are the backbone of American weirdness, the reason we love our country’s music. – Cordovas

“Shake Sugaree” — Elizabeth Cotton

Cotton’s “Shake Sugaree” is crucial. Hard to find anyone that good at being a singer songwriter in the early 1900s but she was. Perfectly written, this song is a masterpiece of American music. This Carolina girl was an unknown legend

“Sweet Pea” — Altyrone Deno Brown

Just look at the picture of the dude. He could slay drums and he was 9 or 10 when he got signed. They want him to be the next Michael Jackson. Listen to his vibrato and the tenderness in his voice. The way he heard other singers seems to come out.

“The End of the World” — Skeeter Davis

This perfect melody. So sweet. Skeeter. Heartbroken and gettin’ over it by singing the blues. Some dynamite two part she throws down.

“Sign Language” — Eric Clapton

Clapton is obviously very well-known but this is a lesser known song. Featuring lead guitar by Robbie Robertson, harmonies by Richard Manuel, and a verse by Dylan himself, this is a beautiful scene in some movie. Two lovers. “You Speak to me in sign language as I’m eating a sandwich in a small café at a quarter to three.” So simple.

“Jesus I’ll Never Forget” — Forbes Family

Gospel Vocal groups. They believe. They lift their voices. This one has some epic 5 part harmony. It gets us singing in exaltation “Jesus I’ll Never forget” in the van as we ramble on. We are atheists.

“Piney Mountains” — Bruce Molsky

Jump up on the flat wheel car and let this fiddle tune take you up into the u-pined hills. “My hands can’t fiddle and my heart’s been broke, lord, and my time ain’t long.” Brother Bruce.

“Runs in the Family” — The Roches

The Roches have a masterpiece here. They address here the things we pass down in our families and in our ways and ambitions. Our desires. Through and through, concept, arrangement, feeling, this one is so well thought out and executed. On the idea of the sisters themselves coming of age the Roches sing, “Something about the danger zone, wouldn’t leave the bunch of us alone”

“Matty Groves” — Fairport Convention

This is a reworking of the old English ballad that tells a tale of lust, deceit and revenge in a renaissance setting. Sandy Denny’s powerful, convincing vocals are flanked by 20 year old Richard Thompson’s innovative, unpredictable guitar lines and Dave Swarbricks masterful electric fiddle, tying the tradition to a new era.

“Shady Grove” — Doc Watson

An Appalachian folk ballad by Doc Watson. There are some 300 stanzas collected reaching back to the 1800’s. There have been a vast amount of versions recorded and documented of this song, but Doc Watson’s version would come to be known through the folk revival period of the 1960s and making its mark into popular music by way of Jerry Garcia and David Grisman.

“Statesboro Blues” — Blind Willie McTell

This song came about from his many trips to a tobacco warehouse during harvest season in Statesboro, Georgia. He collected change from the laborers in a tin cup tied to the neck of his 12 string guitar that could be heard right outside the loading docks. “Reach over in the corner mama, grab my traveling shoes”.

“Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad” — Woody Guthrie

Accompanied by Sonny Terry (harmonica) and Cisco Houston (mandolin, vocals) Guthrie’s rendition would provide the template for many subsequent versions of the song in both the bluegrass and the folk rock genres. Alan Lomax recorded this for the library of Congress.

“Connection” — Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

“Connection” is a Jagger/Richards song about being stuck while traveling, wanting to be home. Covered by NRPS among others, the song is on Elliott’s Reprise debut where it takes new life, now sung by a gunslinger-type.

“Tamp’ Em Up Solid” — Ry Cooder

Cooder’s “Paradise and Lunch” is a collection of older tunes, some somewhat unknown, including songs by McTell, Philips, and more. “Tamp’ Em Up Solid” is a traditional, attacked by Cooder in his unique style.

Photo credit: Alysse Gafkjen

Another Ring in the Tree: A Conversation with Ketch Secor

Posted on by Editor

Maybe it’s true in life, but it’s certainly true in writing about music that the longer you do it, the more often you hear echoes of the past — not only in the music itself, but in artists’ attitudes and, especially, in their stories. Hearing Old Crow Medicine Show’s Ketch Secor recount the odyssey that preceded the band’s settling in Nashville, it’s easy to be reminded of the contintent-spanning journey taken by Western swing ensemble Asleep at the Wheel some 30 years earlier. Like AATW, who eventually were embraced by all but the most benighted purveyors of authenticity — and with whom they recorded a blistering “Tiger Rag” in 2015 — Old Crow have made their way into the heart of hillbilly music’s most cherished institutions, signified by their 2013 induction into the Grand Ole Opry cast.

Yet the group’s ascension to Opry membership was hardly predictable, much less preordained. Old Crow’s stature in the country music world has been built on a determination to make their own sound that’s every bit as strong as their allegiance to the broad swath of hillbilly music music that forms its foundation. When Marty Stuart invited them to join the Opry, he mentioned an early description of the radio barn dance as a “good-natured riot,” and it’s a description that obviously applies to the band’s shows, too — a simultaneous looking back and looking forward that has made legit fans out of the likes of bluegrass Hall of Famer Del McCoury. With Volunteer marking the group’s 20th anniversary, it seemed like a good time to look back at how they got from there to here.

The press release mentions this is the 20th anniversary of the band.

That’s no joke, brother.

Does the band have a hard start date — a day you could point to and say, “This is the day the band was formed”?

Well, the band left — that’s the day the wheels turned, and we left our home — in October of 1998, because grape season was over, and we had money. We had picked enough, and raised enough, and washed enough dishes, and cleaned enough attics, and played enough nursing homes, and bought enough cartons of cigarettes to get across the border in style.

I was thinking about this because the occasion for this interview is the release of a new record and, 20 years ago, the record industry and the music industry looked a lot different than it does now. And you guys have become what you are during this period of tremendous change and turmoil.

For example, when we crossed that border and finally got waved through into Canada in the fall of 1998, one of the things we had packed was our boombox, so that we could dub our tapes. Because this band sold cassettes. In 1998, this band sold cassettes on the street corner for $10 — Canadian. That was crazy. We were selling them, too. Our tape was flying out of the box — we had a shoebox full.

Why was that?

Well, it was not the quality of the tape. The tape wasn’t very good. We recorded it with one microphone hung from the ceiling, on a four-track recorder. It sounded really, really shitty — low-fi, low quality. That tape was called Trans:Mission. It was the time to dream, with your body, the things that you wanted to have happen. It was the time to read Bound for Glory by Woody Guthrie and think, “I’m going to get on that boxcar, too, goddammit; I’m going to hobo. I’m going to thumb it, I’m going to flag the diesel down. I’m gonna go West.” A good time in life to take that risk, and drop out. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Isn’t that where all of the magic lies, in that moment of deciding that you’d rather wear a mask — and pick a really great one?

So you made your way to Nashville …

That happened three or four years later. Now, I had already been to Nashville before I got to Ottawa. I had been here with another band in 1997, and played on the street corner here. I was gonna busk! I’ve been busking Nashville for like 23 years, or something stupid like that.

What’s the value of busking? I mean, aside from the financial.

Well, we can’t all play like Del McCoury, or anyone in that band — particularly when we’re kids. But we had the passion. It’s the same passion. I was never gonna get as good at playing the fiddle as Jason Carter, but I had the same drive to play as hard as Jason plays. And I couldn’t get onto a stage anywhere because … well, one, I was drunk. I had taken this old-time loyalty oath that made me fiercely pro-old-time and anti-bluegrass, so I didn’t play well with others. I was rabble-rousing. And also, I sucked. So where was I gonna go, with all of that energy and drive, but none of that finesse? And I was somewhat unapproachable. I might have smelled bad. I might have had blood on my shirt, or on my mouth. That was part of the mask I wore, was unapproachability.

Being in Tennessee seems to be important to the band, at this point. Is that a fair statement?

Yeah. I think, as soon as we got to Tennessee, it got a lot more legit.

In what way?

It got legit because it got more focused on the idea that, all right, this band is the soap box. In the chapter previous to our move to Nashville as Old Crow — which is the chapter that runs from about 1999 to about 2000-and-a-half — in that chapter, we were probably as interested in farming and making whiskey and planting by the lunar signs as we were about playing live shows. And that was where learning about early hillbilly and country music was as much an engagement with the landscape of the music as it was with the actual performance of the music. When it got to Nashville, then it became about doing that in Nashville, which had a different musical landscape.

So, in our journeying, we start with the quixotic journey, which is the fire, the odyssey. And then we end up in this sort of hillbilly monastery up in east Tennessee and west North Carolina. And then we come to Nashville, and we end up in this crack house kind of mentality of revolving doors of freaky people, motel rooms, and rent money going out and booze coming in, and songs, and percolation, and Del McCoury, and the road. The beginnings of the way the road would look. It became more vocational and less about kind of artistic presence and disturbance. As buskers, we were as much protesters as we were entertainers.

You guys still feel that way?

Yeah.

How does it express itself? Musically?

Oh, there’s a ferocity to what we do, and an intensity. I mean, I’m feeling it right now, which is why I’m jacked up. But I’m jacked up always. I’m always jacked up, when I talk about the fiddle, and when I talk about John Hartford and Del McCoury. I’m always jacked up because that stuff’s just so powerful.

When I hear “volunteer,” especially in a music-related setting, I think of the Volunteer State — Tennessee. Is the title a reflection, in part or in whole, of the environment in which you’re in now? Or does it have some other significance?

What I think it means is that it hearkens to the pack mentality of our youth. The band really took this oath, this pledge, and we all volunteered to risk our lives, to sacrifice personal identities, personal goals, for collectivity. To be very much a band. The way that we lived together — it’s like we had all signed up, that we would do it come hell or high water. And it turned out it was both.

There’s an audience connected to old-time and bluegrass and country music — all the variety that gets presented on the Opry — by virtue of where they were born, who they grew up with, and the community they live in. And then there are whole other audiences who are drawn by maybe musical affinity, or some kind of cultural signifying. One of the features of our world in the last few years has been that the differences between all these people has become more apparent and the edges become a lot sharper. You guys are also heading for your fifth anniversary as Opry cast members. You play the Opry, which is still kind of a focal point for one community, and then you go out and tour and play for all these other audiences. It feels to me like that’s reflected in some way in this record. Is that true?

When we play the Opry, we’re mostly playing for tourists. But we’re also playing in a kind of center of all of hillbillydom. And when we play the “Wabash Cannonball” on the Grand Ole Opry, we sound more like the Woody Guthrie role than we do the Montgomery Gentry role, or even the Roy Acuff role. Roy is kind of the same as Woody. He’s a good example because, though politically, he’s certainly on the right — he’s from East Tennessee, he’s a Republican, he’s a conservative dude, he wants to shut down the Opry because he doesn’t want to share the same locale as the peep shows and the drug dealers, so he advocates moving it out. But he’s singing music that makes you want to desegregate a school, because that’s the power of the “Great Speckle Bird,” that’s the power of the “Wabash Cannonball.” They’re actually very front-line songs, really excited, rabble-rousing kind of proletariat sounds.

That’s the thing about country music: The people, en masse, who believe in the power of folk music, just by nature of having an underserved class being championed by a music — that’s a very expansive concept, one that can’t be pigeonholed in any particular political realm. We played the Budweiser stage last week, and most people were about 25 years old or younger. We’ll play gigs this summer where everybody’s 25 or older, 50 or older — we’ll see crowds from Delaware to Red Rocks and everything in between. We’ll play in Oklahoma to drunk leftists, and we’ll play in New York City to conservative lawyers. And everywhere we go, we will allow people to step into a world that has no political affiliation. That is the world of Old Crow, the entertainer. And the Old Crow who’s an entertainer, I always think of him as this top hat-wearing bartender that’s serving it up to the people, no matter what the color of the skin is, or who they voted for. Because the Old Crow, he doesn’t vote. He just pours.

So what’s the connection between Old Crow, the entertainer, and that volunteer collective that stepped up and took its oath? What you described as the fundamental nature of the band — of you coming together and making this choice to pursue something — seems to imply a certain kind of purposiveness that goes beyond being an entertainer.

The political party here is, live music is better. The revival tent, or the voting booth, or the campaign rally is one in which you believe that live music has the power to change the world. I like records fine, but we’re a live band. What we do is play the music that we play in the moment that you’re hearing it. If you’re on your phone getting a message from a friend, you missed it. Sorry, dude. If you go to the beer line, that’s cool, we’re going to keep doing it. You don’t have to hang on every word. But this is our tent here. It’s the live music hour. That’s what we do.

We’re having this conversation, in part, because you made a record. So if live music is where it’s at, and that’s one of the changes in the music industry over those 20 years, and that records no longer occupy the same position in the music world, what are you wanting to do with this record?

Put another ring in the tree upon which this Old Crow has been precariously perched these 20 years. It’s just another ring in the tree, another notch in the belt.

Photo credit: Danny Clinch

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

LISTEN: John McCutcheon, ‘When My Fight for Life Is Over’

Posted on by Editor

Artist: John McCutcheon
Hometown: Smoke Rise, GA
Song: “When My Fight for Life Is Over”
Album: Ghost Light
Release Date: February 9, 2018
Label: Appalsongs

In Their Words: “One of the great treats and honors of my life has been to work with some of Woody Guthrie’s lyrics. This one was especially challenging because the lyrics were obviously incomplete — it was up to me to flesh out both lyrics and melody. But after a lifetime of being ‘schooled’ by Guthrie’s work, I though I might be ready. Taking it to Tim, Kathy, Stuart, and Richard was the icing on the cake.” — John McCutcheon

Photo credit: Irene Young

LISTEN: Country Joe McDonald, Arlo Guthrie, Jack Elliott, & Pete Seeger,

Posted on by Editor

Artists: Country Joe McDonald, Arlo Guthrie, Jack Elliott, & Pete Seeger
Song: “Goin’ Down the Road (Ain’t Gonna Be Treated This A-Way)”
Album: Woody Guthrie: The Tribute Concerts
Release Date: September 22, 2017
Label: Bear Family

In Their Words: “On Sundays, my father would come home from the hospital and lots of musicians would come over for a hootenany. Old friends, young-uns … you never knew who was going to show. It was a mix of talents and instruments — bring something, play something, sing something. This track reminds me so much of those days. Here, Pete Seeger is backed by a young Ry Cooder, trading verses and breaks with Country Joe McDonald and Swampwater fiddler Gib Gilbeau. Jack Elliott and Arlo hold it together because, hey, like Dylan, they’re usually the ones who know all the words!

That’s what Woody’s original 1940s hootenanies were like when the young-uns then included Pete Seeger, backed by elders Woody or Lead Belly. ‘Goin’ Down the Road’ is a perfect example of this classic, easy-going approach to music learning, which spurred the ’60s community of folk and folk-rock musicians who continued to ‘hoot up’ (aka jam) on this song.” — Nora Guthrie