Guy Clark was an iconic American songwriter and folksinger with more than twenty albums to his credit. In 2014 he won a GRAMMY for “My Favourite Picture of You.” His songs have been recorded by a great many of the most important artists in the business including Jerry Jeff Walker, Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harris, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Kathy Mattea, Lyle Lovett, and Johnny Cash.
An obituary that ran in the Guardian at the time of his death in 2016 said of Clark that he “was never a chart-busting phenomenon, but he was the embodiment of the painstaking craft of the songwriter, where meaning emerged from fine details, carefully observed and polished.”
One of the best examples of how he practiced his craft is surely “Dublin Blues,” the title track from his 1995 album.
Here’s a stunning version from an episode of Austin City Limits.
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The Canadian duo Ian & Sylvia (Ian & Sylvia Tyson) are recognized as important figures in the North American folk revival of the early 1960s. In Canada, “Four Strong Winds” is still something of a second national anthem. And then the British Invasion happened and folk music either got absorbed into rock, country, or pop music or moved into highly creative but less commercially successful directions.
By the early ‘70s, Ian Tyson was hosting a country music TV show on which Sylvia would regularly perform. A number of never-released recordings were made during this period and quite amazingly Sylvia found them while doing some cleaning around the house. These tracks, 26 in all, country and pop music classics, have now been released under the title The Lost Tapes by Stony Plains Records.
Nicholas Jennings writes:
The Lost Tapes contains classic songs from Ian and Sylvia’s folk period, notable for the duo’s rich, unrivalled harmonies, with the backing of Great Speckled Bird. These include Ian’s evergreen Four Strong Winds, once voted the greatest Canadian song of the 20th century in a CBC listener poll, Four Rode By and Summer Wages, his semi-biographical number about the gamble of seasonal work and romance. But there are also live versions with the band of many of the duo’s traditional repertoire, old ballads drawn from Anglo-Celtic and Appalachian sources: Little Beggarman, When First Unto This Country and Come All You Fair and Tender Ladies.
So much to choose from on this collection, but this traditional song stands out as just the kind Sylvia liked to unearth, showcasing the pair’s always beautiful harmonies.
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“Come Saturday Morning” was first performed by The Sandpipers as part of the soundtrack for the 1969 movie the Sterile Cuckoo, a film featuring Liza Minnelli. The song was written by Fred Karlin (music) and Dory Previn (lyrics). In 1970, it was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Unfortunately “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was also nominated that year so that was that.
The Sandpipers were one of those groups formally classified as folk-rock, but really pretty folky with harmonies you were more likely to hear at the height of the folk revival in late ’50s and early ’60s before the whole British Invasion thing happenned- not that I’m complaining. To prove my point, along with “Come Saturday Morning,” The Sandpipers are best known for their cover version of “Guantanamera.”
Not to get into it here, but a favourite topic for me has always been how folk music sort of got lost in the transition to rock in the ’60s, but didn’t really get lost when one considers the folk influences in groups like The Birds, The Mama and the Papas, and The Lovin’ Spoonful, not to mention the splash made by singer-songwriters in the early ’70s. Clearly those scoring a big-budget movie in 1969 had no trouble using a song that is more folk than anything else – but I digress.
“Come Saturday Morning” is a pretty little song with pretty little chord changes. Not life changing, but sweet, and a favourite of mine.
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One would not necessarily have to be an historian of the Folk Revival to be familiar with the work of Bob Gibson (1931-1996) but it would useful. Gibson was big news in the late 1950s to early 1960s during what some wag once called “the great folk scare.” His main instruments were banjo and 12-string guitar. He wrote songs recorded by many others including Peter, Paul, and Mary, Simon & Garfunkel, and the Kingston Trio. One of his claims to fame is that he introduced a then-unknown Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959.
Sadly, Gibson’s career was side-tracked by an addiction to drugs and alcohol, and by the time he was sober and ready to get back at it in the late 1970s the kind of music he had to offer was no longer much in demand, at least not as far as mainstream musical culture was concerned. He did, however, continue to work on new albums, musicals, and plays. He died in 1993 at the age of 64, having been diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy.
His released what is considered his best known album in 1961, Gibson & Camp at the Gate of Horn. You can find his complete discography here.
Richie Unterberger’s brief bio of Gibson at AllMusic is particularly instructive.
While Bob Gibson’s recordings may sound like run-of-the-mill folk to modern listeners, he played an important role in popularizing folk music to American audiences in the 1950s at the very beginning of the folk boom. His 12-string guitar style influenced performers like Gordon Lightfoot and Harry Chapin; he was a mainstay at one of the first established folk clubs in the U.S., the Gate of Horn in Chicago; and he wrote songs with Shel Silverstein and Phil Ochs as well as performing in a duo with Hamilton Camp. Most of all, he was one of the first folkies on the scene — when he began performing and recording in the mid-’50s, there was hardly anyone else playing guitar-based folk music for an educated, relatively affluent audience.
Coming first or at least early may not make you famous, but it does make you important.
The song I chose to post is from the aforementioned album Gibson & Camp at the Gate of Horn. “Old Blue” is an old folk song likely originating from the minstrel shows of the late 19th century. The album is a live recording so it really provides a great sense of what it must have been like to be at a club when folk music was the thing – with banjos, guitars, tight vocal harmonies, a pronounced nod to the folk tradition, all in front of a very appreciative audience.
Someone once called this song the “the unofficial anthem of the counterculture movement of the 1960s,” and that sounds about right – I mean it’s got “flowers in your hair” right there in the title.
An interesting fact about this one, written as it was by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and sung by Scott McKenzie, is that it was used as a promo piece for the Monterey International Pop Music festival held in June of 1967, and then just sort of took off from there. Of course the song not only helped to bring ticket buyers to a particular festival, but also acted as something of a siren song bringing thousands of kids to San Francisco during the late 1960s.
The release date for the single was May 13, 1967, after which it became a hit almost immediately, reaching number four on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. by mid-summer and staying there for four weeks.
The lyrics are pretty direct. The title might well have been “You Really Should Come to San Francisco – It’ll be Fun, and There’s No Telling Who You Might Meet.” Seductive stuff.
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“Other Side to This Life” is a cut on Fred Neil’s first solo album Bleecker & MacDougal. It was on the Elektra label, put out in 1965. This LP figured prominently in the movement toward the electrification of folk music and helped to push other purely acoustic performers in that direction, though that hardly does justice to the impact Neil had on other artists. Almost everything on the album was written by Neil including “Another Side to This Life.”
If you love everything about the New York City folk scene in the early 60s, the album cover is stunning, a picture of the intersection of Bleecker & MacDougal in Greenwich Village, an area where so much important music of the time was developed and performed.
Backing up Neil on various tracks is Pete Childs (dobro, guitar, baritone guitar), Felix Pappalardi (bass), Douglas Hatfield (bass), and John Sebastian (harmonica).
About the album, Thom Jurek at AllMusic writes:
In 13 songs, Neil transformed the folk genre into something wholly other yet not unfamiliar to itself, and helped pave the way for an entire generation of singer/songwriters who cared as much for the blues as they did for folk revival traditions. This is — more so than his fine compilation The Many Sides of Fred Neil (also on Collector’s Choice) or his debut Capitol album, Tear Down the Walls — the Fred Neil record to have.
I do recall that some people without a sense of humour were somewhat annoyed by the hilarious 1993 mockumentary A Mighty Wind. The film, co-written (with Eugene Levy), directed, and composed by Christopher Guest, parodies the American folk music revival of the late 1950s to early 1960s and its personalities. It is a gentle, sweet, and very funny take on the sometimes over-serious nature of some practitioners of folk music, but it means no harm and is in so many ways a delight.
I mention it only because I recently came across a song by the Glencoves called “Hootennany,” released in 1963. It takes very little imagination to connect various real acts to the ones created for A Mighty Wind, either more or less directly or in composite, but if the Glencoves were not on the minds of Levy and Guest, they might well have been. They are such a pure distillation of the time one can only smile.
For the record, the Glencoves were a folk group formed in 1961 in Mineola, New York, on Long Island. They got together while attending the same hight school and consisted of Don Connors (founder, lead vocals, banjo and guitar), Bill Byrne (vocals), and Brian Bolger (vocals and guitar). After releasing their first single record, the group was joined by John Cadley (vocals and guitar).
The song featured here, “Hootenanny,” was their one hit. It peaked at #5 or #6 (Billboard and Cashbox) in the local New York market, and reached a #38 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963.
Whatever one may think of it, I would suggest that this recording gave them one more hit than had by the vast majority of those who strap on a guitar or banjo in search of fame and fortune a the time.
As much as music is frequently used to highlight important issues, there has always been a tension between the inspiration of the songwriter and the business interests of those who run the music world not to rock the boat (so to speak). Such was the case with Gordon Lightfoot and his 1968 song “Black Day in July” having to do with race riots in Detroit in 1967.
At that time, the predominantly African-American Detroit neighbourhood where the riot occurred was ready to explode with 60,000 low-income residents crammed into 460 acres, living mostly in small, sub-divided apartments.
The Detroit Police Department, which had only about 50 African-American officers at the time, was viewed as a white occupying army. Accusations of racial profiling and police brutality were commonplace among Detroit’s Black residents.
At the corner of 12th St. and Clairmount, William Scott operated a “blind pig” (an illegal after-hours club) on weekends out of the office of the United Community League for Civic Action, a civil rights group. The police vice squad often raided establishments like this on 12th St., and at 3:35 a.m. on Sunday morning, July 23, they moved against Scott’s club.
In the end, 43 people were left dead, hundreds were injured, thousands arrested, and many businesses were looted and burned.
But, with references to snipers on rooftops, Motor City madness, and dead youth in the street in Lightfoot’s lyrics, a number of American radio stations decided against playing it. You know how it is, if you don’t talk about something, it didn’t really happen. Curiously, the lyrics aren’t particularly contentious, and pretty well fact-based, which tells you something.
Dala is an acoustic-folk two-piece out of Scarborough, Ontario consisting of Sheila Carabine and Amanda Walther. Having met in a high-school music class in 2002, they have since released five studio albums, one live album and have toured extensively in North America.
Best Day (2012)
Angels and Theives (2005)
Who Do You Think You Are (2007)
Everyone is Someone (2009)
Girls From the North Country (2010) (Studio)
Best Day (2012)
They are past Juno nominees and won the 2010 Canadian Folk Music Award for Vocal Group of the Year. They write and sing beautiful harmonies with frequently understated acoustic accompaniment in the best tradition of the genre. They note influences including the Beatles, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and Bob Dylan.
One review talks about their “extraordinary musical blend,” which “would be just as at home in a 1960s coffeehouse as it is now on the contemporary stage.” (Andrew Craig, of CBC “Canada Live.” ) . I would agree.
This is a relatively recent clip of the two performing the traditional song “Carrickfergus.” There are other clips to choose from, lots of great original material, but this is a particularly nice version of the old tune and showcases some of what they have to offer.
Benjamin Dakota Johnson has scored a Juno nomination in the Traditional Roots Album of the Year category for his 2023 release Paint Horse. He is a Southwestern Ontario native having grown up there on his family farm. His bio draws attention to his “distinct, immediate, and truly wild voice,” which is certainly true. The album is also full of beautifully played fiddles and banjos and all that a traditional roots music fan could desire.
As for the material, according to one reviewer, “Rogers’s biggest feat with Paint Horse is the way he’s fused the hardscrabble tales of the people from songs with a lived-in love for his surroundings.”
It is truly a beautiful album containing some very fine cuts. The new release follows a 2019 album called Better By Now. This is of course the title track from the current release.
