folk music Archives - Vinyl From The Vault

“The Best of the Carter Family”

sfilzen — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 20:37:27 +0000

“The Best of the Carter Family” 2017. Third Man Records. A compilation of recordings from 1927-1933 (first released on 78rpm from Victor Records and Bluebird Records) by Sara and Maybelle Carter. A.P. Carter (Sara’s husband) is credited for writing the country/folk tunes writing but in reality he collected the songs from his sales travels throughout the Appalachia region (Sara and Maybelle also collected songs though they were not credited for this until much later). As always, Third Man has done a stellar job in the sound recovery of these old tracks as well as in the high quality of the album’s vinyl and packaging. Country/folk music is definitely not my go-to music, but I do have a soft spot for it…as a kid my parents would get together with their other folky/hippie friends for folk and bluegrass jam sessions and included a few Carter Family songs into the mix like “Keep on the Sunny Side,” “The Foggy Mountain Top” and “The Cannonball.” I think I also played a few of them as “fiddle tunes” as a kid on my violin. I honestly didn’t know that much about the Carter Family until we watched the Ken Burns documentary Country Music (2019), which was amazing. Featured extensively in that documentary was the history and current interviews of Dolly Parton, whose 75th birthday is today, January 19th (we don’t have any Parton on vinyl). So this Cater Family post is really a very long roundabout way of wishing Queen Dolly a happy birthday (she has, in my opinion, become a national treasure with her charity work, contributions to medical and scientific research, even Dollywood – which on its surface seems like an ego-booster – was her way of helping to bring much needed revenue to her hometown area in Tennessee). And, as noted above I am far from a country music fan, I think her song “Jolene” is one of the most haunting songs ever written.

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Johnny Cash “A Night To Remember”

sfilzen — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 15:36:01 +0000

Johnny Cash “A Night To Remember” 2020. Third Man Records, Vault Package, clear vinyl. Recorded live May 5th, 1973 at the Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles. The concert was part of a series, “A Week to Remember,” spearheaded by Clive Davis (who introduces Cash at the start of the concert), highlighting Columbia Records artists. The week also included performances by Miles Davis, Bruce Springsteen and Earth, Wind and Fire. The Vault package also includes a DVD of the concert (which I haven’t watched yet). The concert is simply amazing. Classic Cash originals like “Big River,” “I Walk the Line,” “A Boy Named Sue” (written by Shel Silverstein but mostly associated with Cash) and “Folsom Prison Blues” but also Cash’s versions of other Americana greats like “The City of New Orleans,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken.” Cash’s wife June Carter Cash joins Johnny on several songs, as does rockabilly great Carl Perkins (on “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Daddy Sang Bass.” Like all Third Man releases, the quality of this release is impeccable. Top quality vinyl, a glossy and durable gatefold sleeve and bonus inserts (the DVD plus a 7″ split single of Cash covers: The Lumineers doing “Pretty Pictures in My Mind” and Ruston Kelly’s version of “Dark and Bloody Ground.” According to the Johnny Cash website, these are “two brand new songs from Johnny Cash: Forever Words project, a multi-year project by John Carter Cash, who has combed the Johnny Cash archive for unreleased poems, prose and lyrics.”

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“Mountain Music of Kentucky”

sfilzen — Sun, 29 Mar 2020 19:47:56 +0000

“Mountain Music of Kentucky” 1960. Folkways Records. Compiled by John Cohen of The New Lost City Ramblers, it’s a compilation of folk music and musicians, featuring several artists, most prominently banjoist Roscoe Holcomb, whose style inspired prominent 60′s bluegrass and folk-revivalist singers including Bob Dylan. From Southern Spaces, “On a muggy Sunday afternoon in June of 1959, John Cohen wandered the winding mountain roads of eastern Kentucky searching for old-time musicians. Neon, Bulan, Vicco, Viper, Daisy, Defiance — tiny coal and timber towns with sonorous names popped up around each bend before giving way to the Cumberland Mountains. Cohen had come to Kentucky from New York City to find songs about “hard times” that would fill out the repertoire of his old-time music group, the New Lost City Ramblers. “In order to experience an economic depression firsthand, I visited eastern Kentucky and made photos and field recordings for six weeks in 1959,” he recalled. “The United States was quite prosperous at that point, but east Kentucky wasn’t and I had heard about that… . And I said, ‘Maybe I can find some music about the depression, experience the depression, and understand it more and maybe photograph it, maybe record music.’“ The music is plaintive, haunting, sparse. Songs like “Amazing Grace” (with a call-and-response probably recorded in a country church), “Foreign Lander” (Martha Hall), “The Spring of ‘65″ (James B. Cornett) and “Wayfaring Stranger” (Roscoe Holcomb) are hill-country blues and old-time music that ooze sadness. Even upbeat pickers like “Blackeyed Susie” (Roscoe Holcomb) are tinged with melancholy, mostly due to the “high, lonesome sound” of the mountain music singers’ voices.

This record comes from my parents’ collection (we culled it a few months ago). They were super-into the folk-revivalist movement in the 60′s and early 70′s and when I was little I remember them gathering with friends to play acoustic guitars, banjos, harmonicas and autoharps, singing songs similar to the ones on this LP. It’s not generally music I listen to, but it feels super-appropriate in this time of quarantine and world anxiety/depression.

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“The Best of Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band”

sfilzen — Tue, 28 May 2019 12:31:32 +0000

“The Best of Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band” 1968, Vanguard Records. Occasionally I find records propped up next to my turntable and this one appeared today for our “should it stay or should it go?” project. This is my first listen, in fact first awareness, of Jim Kweskin & The Jug Band and it’s what you’d expect: old-timey, folky, rural blues and ragtime jug music complete with fiddle, banjo, kazoo and washtub bass filtered through the lens of 60′s kinda-hippies. The band was active from ‘63 to around ‘67 or ‘68 and played the Newport Folk Fest in ‘64. Most of the tracks on this comp are covers: one of the best is “I’m a Woman” written by Lieber and Stoller (not that old-timey, written in ‘62 and made famous by Peggy Lee) and sung by Maria Muldaur. “Fishing Blues,” first recorded by “Ragtime Texas” Henry Thomas in 1928, isn’t too bad – I’m pretty sure that my folks and their friends would play this one on their makeshift jug band while hanging out in the early 70′s. The rest is mostly too camp, too “juggy” for my tastes, especially tracks like “Boodle Am Shake,” “Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me” (which would actually be rocking but the prominent kazoo solo kinda ruins it for me) and while the sad fiddle on “Never Swat a Fly” is lovely, the lyrics are just silly and there’s an inappropriately placed kazoo solo (again). I think this one is going to go.

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Bob Dylan “Bob Dylan”

sfilzen — Thu, 13 Oct 2016 17:02:26 +0000

Bob Dylan “Bob Dylan” 1962. The big news today is that Dylan has been awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, the first American to win the prize in literature since ‘93 (which went to novelist Toni Morrison), “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” so it seems fitting to spin his first album release. My favorite song on this record is “Highway 51″ – a rockin’ acoustic folk tune which also name-checks Wisconsin.

I am not a regular Dylan listener but spent a great deal of my 1970′s childhood hearing his albums, going to folk festivals around the Midwest and sitting around on various living room floors* listening to my dad play Dylan songs on guitar with my mom accompanying on autoharp, along with other hippie-ish folk music freaks. My parents are HUGE Dylan fans, in fact they were in Indio, California last weekend at Desert Trip on the Coachella grounds seeing Dylan along with Paul McCartney, The Who, Roger Waters, Neil Young and the Rolling Stones. Dubbed “Oldchella,” they joined hundreds of thousands other baby boomers, 20-something hippie wannabes and celebrities to see these rock legends perform. My folks reported that Dylan spent most of his time with his back to the audience, refused to let his face be shown on the gigantic screens and that his voice sounded a lot worse for wear, but that they loved it anyway. (Their only negative comment about the entire experience was that “The Who were too loud.”)

*Various living room floors, the lower two photos of me with my dad, probably in 1972.

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