Some voices...

Voices, mainly, today... an odd collection of favourite songs – a lot dating from the seventies, I've just noticed. First up – Emmy Lou Harris and her achingly beautiful - and personal - rendition of 'Boulder to Birmingham' which she wrote after the tragic death of Gram Parsons – private grief turned into art...

The McGarrigles have been around for as long – here is their expanded family lineup (with the Wainwright clan) doing the choral thing on the old Stephen Foster song 'Hard times come again no more.' For a long time a staple of folk singers since Foster was resurrected and it became OK to sing his songs again. Rather odd, thinking about it, as the English folk clubs were very much a creation of the old left (especially the Stalinists centred round the late Ewan McColl) and still have a politically correct ethos at times – although I suppose many traditional songs run riot through those particular purist gates – hunting anyone? Sod it anyway – this is a tremendous version of a song that does tend to get butchered as a rule. An odd fact about Foster is that he spent most of his life in Pittsburgh and only visited the Deep South once on a trip to New Orleans – as a professional songwriter, with connections to abolitionists, that might explain the fact that his 'plantation/minstrel' songs may seem patronising from a distance in their dealings with black people ('Old Black Joe' etc.) but within the context of his own time were extremely sympathetic to their subjects – more so, perhaps, than if he had been born on a plantation. 'Hard Times' was written in 1855 -and has a foreshadowing, maybe, of the civil war to come as well as a clear sense of the hardness of mid-century frontier life. White blues...

To Maria Muldaur... who supplies an edged riposte to sentimentalising the South in those aforementioned 'minstrel' songs, albeit with a rueful affection, in 'The Work Song.' I can live with both and like the conflict engendered... music is not the bastion of the purists – despite what the purists think...

Existential blues noir – Robert Johnson's chilling 'Love in Vain,' given a reasonable reading, one supposes, all those years ago by the Rolling Stones. Here's the real thing, hard yet vulnerable.

Skip James recorded 'I'd rather be the devil' in the thirties – here's John Martyn – one of the best live performers of the seventies in the interregnum between sixties rock and seventies punk. A bit of a tosser at times with all that spliffed up drunk falling off stage crap but on a good night – unbeatable.
Here with Danny Thompson on bass and somewhat surprisingly, the late John Stevens on drums, doyen of Brit free improv, from his seminal 'Live at Leeds' album – echoplexing everywhere – bluejazz folk spaced psychedelia with a razor edge. Martyn was adept at stepping across boundaries in music- this track is a paradigm of his approach. Light up and listen...

A song by the late and much-lamented Jackson C. Frank – whose star burned brightly across the Soho scene in the sixties, who recorded one album and then disappeared back to the U.S. To disappear into mystery until he was discovered in a flop-house, down on his luck. One the edge maybe of a comeback - he died a couple of years ago. I saw him play many times and thought he was brilliant. This song has been a staple of the acoustic scene for years and years – white blues that Jackson unfortunately lived to to unfortunate end. He wrote this song on the boat over from the U.S. as a young musician ready to conquer London - a sad and eery harbinger of his future...

To end – on a happier note – King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band's stomping version of 'Dippermouth Blues.' Recorded in 1923, the young Louis Armstrong in tandem with the older Oliver, the moment when New Orleans comes up the river to Chicago, I suppose. 84 years back and still sounding remarkably fresh and joyful: it is intructive to consider the influence of these old recordings on the history of popular music since the twenties. But enough pedantry: 'Oh, play that thing!'

Emmy Lou Harris

Boulder to Birmingham

Download

Buy

The Garrigles and the Wainwrights

Hard times come again no more

Download

Buy

Maria Muldaur

The Work Song

Download


Buy

John Martyn

I'd rather be the devil

Download

Buy


Jackson C Frank

Blues run the game

Download

Buy

King Oliver's Creole Jazz Band
(King Oliver, Louis Armstrong: cornets: Johnny Dodds: Clarinet: Honore Dutray: trombone; Lil Hardon: piano: Bill Johnson: bass/banjo; Baby Dodds: drums).

Dippermouth Blues

Download

Buy