Category Archives: Aaron Keith Harris

by

“The Story of the Day That I Died” by Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice

Junior Sisk & Ramblers Choice
The Story of the Day That I Died
Rebel Records
4 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

There’s something about Junior Sisk’s voice that makes it perfect for bluegrass. It’s got the ragged edge of a Blue Ridge mountain top, and he balances emotion and restraint like few of his fellows in country or bluegrass.

That means that he kicks the heck out of straight-up, hard-driving numbers like the McCoury-esqe “High in the Mountains” (with banjo man Jason Davis giving Rob a run for his money), the whimsically sadistic “Old Bicycle Chain,” the nostalgic “Good to See the Home Place Once Again” (check out Billy Hawks’ greasy fiddle break), and “Drinking at the Water Hole,” an anthem for those of us in southwest Ohio with roots in the Commonwealth across the river.

There’s plenty more packed into this 12-track, 36-minute project, most notably the title track, which Sisk puts across with the pain and humor required for a tale of a creative way to get back at your cheating wife. “The Story of the Day That I Died,” written by Ashby Frank, could easily pass for a long lost Tom T. Hall track and is a sure contender for song of the year at the various bluegrass awards.

One of the best vocals of Sisk’s career is “If the Bottle Was a Bible,” his wounded vocal getting every drop of meaning from the rich lyrics co-written by Ronnie Bowman. There’s more hard emotion on “A House Where a Home Used to Be,” which favorably recalls both George Jones’ “The Grand Tour” and Longview’s “Lonesome Old Home.” And speaking of Longview, Joe Mullins brings his incomparable banjo picking and tenor voice to an old-school duet of “Lover’s Quarrel.”

Mandolinist Chris Davis leads on the contemporary gospel of “Prayers Go Up,” and bassist Josh Tomlin steps out front on “Another Lonely Day,” adding a slightly more mainstream tinge to a well-produced album that’s puntcuated by a kickin’ run through the traditional banjo instrumental “Jesse James” and “Walking in Good Company,” a gospel co-write between Sisk and his father, Harry Sr. that could have been written 50 years ago.

REB-1851_cover-sm1-300x256

About these ads
by

“Old Sock” by Eric Clapton & “Electric” by Richard Thompson

Eric Clapton
Old Sock
Surfdog Records
1 star (out of 5)

Richard Thompson
Electric
New West Records
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

Eric Clapton’s place as the godfather of rock guitarists is undisputed—of course because of his brilliant early work, but also because he seems like a nice guy who has outlived greater talents like Hendrix and Duane Allman—but as a solo artist his work has been erratic, reaching a new low with the fittingly—and frighteningly—named Old Sock. All of the adjectives it brings to mind apply to this 12-track, 53-minute set that nearly put me to sleep on a recent road trip.

There are only two new songs here—more about them later—and the remaining 10 are don’t seem to have been chosen for any other reason that the minimal effort they required. A folksy “Goodnight, Irene” and a syrupy “Born to Lose” (from Ray Charles’ country and western phase) would be bad enough, but tossing in three chestnuts from the so-called Great American Songbook in as well, all with shimmering strings and Roy Conniff-style backing vocals, is just painful, surpassing even the dreck that Rod Stewart has been shoveling for the last decade or so.

“Further on Down the Road” (Jesse Davis/Taj Mahal), “Till Your Well Runs Dry” (Peter Tosh), and “Your One and Only Man” (Otis Redding) sound like faux-reggae rejects from the 461 Ocean Boulevard sessions, while the late British blue guitarist Gary Moore’s “Still Got the Blues” is most assuredly devoid of any trace of the purported blues. A soft arrangement, a lazy vocal, and a brief guitar solo that could have been pieced together from three or four other solos from different songs just doesn’t cut it.

Neither of the new songs did Clapton write. “Gotta Get Over” almost comes to life, but not quite. It’s a decent song, with a decent vocal and lots of those familiar guitar fills that Clapton does better than anyone, but which have been done to death. The other original is “Every Little Thing,” which may have already wrapped up the award for worst track of 2013. Not only is it another of the faux-reggae lot, complete with a faux-Marley title, but its chorus halfway in assaults the listener with the worst sound that can be captured by a recording engineer: a children’s chorus. After this debacle, I’d be surprised if we ever got a good new track out of Clapton again.

However, the constant stream of great work from Richard Thompson continues. Electric was recorded in Nashville with Buddy Miller producing, with Thompson including, for the most part, just Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Michael Jerome on drums, and, occasionally, Siobhan Maher Kennedy on backing vocal. Without anything to hide behind, Thompson’s strengths as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist—both electric and acoustic—continue to amaze.

“Stony Ground,” “Sally B,” and especially “Stuck on the Treadmill” have the thump and heft of the sort of rock songs that aren’t getting made much these days: a cranky guy belting out pointed lyrics and driving the point home with guitar solos that sound like the gleam on a shiny new barbed-wire fence you glimpse as you’re about to hit it face-first after being thrown over the handlebars.

“Salford Sunday” and “Where’s Home?” have the folk tinge that Thompson’s work has had since his days with Fairport Convention, the latter featuring the incomparable Stuart Duncan on fiddle and some of the Buddy Miller sound that one might have expected on the rest of the disc. (I also wanted a Thompson/Miller guitar duel, but I guess Buddy knew better). “Straight and Narrow” is another rocker that Thompson does well—a grungy look at an unattainable, frustrating vamp—but I’ve never cared for the Farfisa organ sound.

Another Nashville luminary—Alison Krauss—lends her translucent voice to “The Snow Goose.” Though it’s only for a couple of slight passages, the two voices together are as as gorgeous as a summer sunset sliding through the clouds.

Thompson has always been able to write about the bitter and the sweet of mature relationships as well as anyone, and “Another Small Thing in Her Favour” and “Saving the Good Stuff for You” are two more that resonate more deeply than anything new I’ve heard lately.

“My Enemy” and “Good Things Happen to Bad People” are aptly situated near the middle of Electric, and they amount to 11 devastating minutes of haunting melody, harrowing guitar work, and a vocal/lyric meditation on self-hatred and contempt for the world that holds everyone to account. The effect is not quite cathartic, leaving the listener to deal with the scab that’s just been scraped off.

Electric is my frontrunner for this year’s best album, and it’s going to take something remarkable to change that.

RichardThompson-Cover-300dpi

bilde

by

“Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music: 1923-1936″ by Various Artists

Various Artists
Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music: 1923-1936
Tompkins Square Records
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

The story behind Work Hard is as wonderfully odd as the music this three-disc set contains. Some guys were cleaning out the house of a recently dead hoarder—Don Wahle of Louisville, Kentucky—and they knew enough to know that the boxes and boxes of 78 RPM records might be of interest to someone.

The Tompkins Square label culled much of its 42-track survey of hilbilly records from 1923 to 1936—including 19 cuts previously unissued in any format but 78—from Wahle’s collection, and the result is captivating.

I’ve always loved recordings from this era, because you can hear the performers (and those running the primitive recording equipment) trying to figure out exactly what it is they are doing. They’re not playing a barn dance with whiskey and dancing, they’re not playing in a church at the back of a holler, and they’re not playing in their parlor with family and friends gathered close. Most of them have never owned a record player. The closest they could have come to mass entertainment was a big fiddle contest, or the various radio shows that were beginning to fill the air and help songs and styles to spread quickly.

But one imagines the musicians recorded here shifting their feet, asking where they should stand and look, and holding back a little, not quite able to cut loose as in their native element. The picking is a little tentative at times too, but the effect is deeply satisfying. The rules of American popular music—country, pop, gospel, and even bluegrass, blues, and jazz—have long been codified 80 or 90 years after these sides were cut, and when we hear Earl McCoy’s staccato steel guitar on “John Henry the Steel Drivin’ Man” with that one unexpected note in his riff, Jimmie Tarlton and Tom Darby’s quavering, yodeling harmonies on “All Bound Down in Texas,” or the Happy Four’s shape-note arrangement with harmonica fills on “Climbing the Golden Stairs,” we can’t help but touch parts of our musical and cultural imagination stored way in the back of our amygdala.

The Work Hard songs on Disc One deal with imagery far removed from most of us—Fiddlin John Carson’s “The Farmer is the Man Who Feeds Them All,” Oscar Ford’s “The Farmer’s Dream,” Red Gay & Jack Wellman’s “Flat Wheel Train Blues, Pts. 1 & 2,” Pierre La Dieu’s “Driving Saw Logs on the Plover”—while talking about ideas we still confront: class division in “Poor Man, Rich Man (Cotton Mill Colic No. 2)” by David McCarn, consumer cynicism in “I’ve Got the Chain Store Blues” by the Allen Brothers, and the injustice of prohibition (alcohol then, certain drugs now) in “When the Roses Bloom Again for the Bootlegger” by Earl Johnson.

The Pray Hard cuts on Disc Three often address issues that came up when country boys went to the city, or city culture came to the country. The listener may not be entirely convinced to go dry by Gid Tanner’s “You’ve Got to Stop Drinking Shine,” but the scolding of the Georgia Yellow Hammers on “I’m S-A-V-E-D” will surely get him to takea firm position one way or the other. “The Gambler’s Dying Words” from Sid Harkreader & Grady Moore sports a melody quite similar to “Roving Gambler” to draw listeners close to hear their warining, reminding me of the chart my church youth pastor put up that pointed the impressionable to soundalike versions of dangerously secular bands.

The Kentucky Holiness Singers live up to their name with “I’m On My Way,” a tune with a proto-bluegrass mandolin break punctuated by a little shouting, and the Dixon Brothers turn in a lovely, pious performance on “Easter Day.”

The most fun here is of course on the 14 Play Hard tracks of Disc Two. Gid Tanner’s “Work Don’t Bother Me” captures the relish that those who worked so hard must have took to the weekend opportunity to tie one on and forget everything for a couple of days. The unnamed members of the improbably named North Carolina Hawaiians turn in a nifty “Solider’s Joy,” the dance number picked on ukulele, guitar, and steel guitar (picked Hawaiian style with some slides reaching into Duane Allman bird-chirping territory), the Carolina Ramblers rave their way through “Barnyard Frolic,” and the Hack String Band’s “Too Tight Rag” is the soundtrack to a cartoon short that hasn’t been made yet, with fiddle, mandolin, tenor banjo, and jazzhorn taking turns on lead licks.

I hadn’t heard of several of the acts on this set before, much less most of the songs, and this set can be enjoyed equally by old-time aficionados and new initiates into these strange and old sounds: you’ll get some of the more typical sounds from this style and era in songs you haven’t heard to death, and some real gems, patterns of sound you’ve never imagined, like the Taylor-Griggs Louisiana Melody Makers’ “When the Moon Drips into the Blood,” and Whit Gaydon’s “Tennessee Coon Hunt.”

http://www.tompkinssquare.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/TSQ2783_WorkHardPlayHardPrayHard.900.jpg

by

“God Didn’t Choose Sides: Civil War True Stories about Real People, Volume 1″ by Various Artists

God Didn’t Choose Sides: Civil War True Stories about Real People, Volume 1
Various Artists
Rural Rhythm Records
4½ stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

The Civil War, or, as it’s more properly called, the War Between the States, has been the subject of several great bluegrass songs—”Legend of the Rebel Solider” by the Country Gentlemen, “Last Day at Gettysburg” by Larry Sparks, and “He Walked All the Way Home” by Blue Highway” come to mind—and this 13-track, 45-minute effort from Rural Rhythm Records adds to the list in a refreshing way.

On God Didn’t Choose Sides, executive producer Sam Passamano II employs a strong lineup of singers, musicians, and songwriters to create a dozen original songs (the album-closing hymn “There is a Fountain,” which gets a gentle, yet majestic reading from the Gap Creek Quartet, is the exception) about actual people who played a part, willingly or not, in a truly horrific war.

Paula Breedlove, Mark Brinkman, and Mike Evans, working in different combinations, share most of the writing credits, with Brad Davis, Ray Edwards, Terry Foust, Steve Gulley, and Tim Stafford also pitching in.

The product is some fine original tunes that offer neither the shallow cant that lionizes the politically motivated Lincoln and the butchers he employed as generals, nor romantic notions of the South, which was controlled by slaveholding oligarchs—the one percenters of the South, if you will—who allowed their blessed homeland to be attacked because they put their private interests ahead of it.

One of the best vocals on the disc, unsurprisingly, comes from Dale Ann Bradley on “Christmas in Savannah,” a tale of a group of Union soldiers from “General Sherman’s line” who brought yuletide provisions with mules dressed as reindeer to the residents of the besieged town. It’s a nice story that shows that even in the worst circumstances people find ways to be kind, but there’s no mention of the fact that Savannah was the lone city that General Sherman, one of America’s most shameful war criminals, didn’t put to the torch on his sadistic march across a defenseless south at the behest of Lincoln and Grant.

I know pointing out things like that aren’t the point of this project, but a little true contrast now and then between the actions of politicians and generals on one hand and ordinary folk on the other can only enhance the esteem we have for the latter.

There are a couple of songs that do that to some degree by pointing out the inhumane treatment of prisoners on both sides—the brooding “Providence Spring” from Tim Stafford and the deceptively soothing ghost story “The Lady in Gray” from Ronnie Bowman.

There are also stories of individuals doing the best to act bravely and honorably in situations where such actions seldom come to a good end: “I’m Almost Home” from Steve Gulley whose delivery embodies the snuffed-out joy of a soldier who leads one last charge only to die on the front steps of the home he had left to go fighting, Russell Moore bringing his sentimental tenor to “A Picture of Three Children” clutched in the hand of a dead solider, the Lonesome River Band performing “The Legend of Jennie Wade” in which three friends try to communicate over hundreds of miles to no avail, and Bradley Walker’s voice singing of one man’s “Last Day at Vicksburg” with stentorian richness.

We meet some other great characters too: the feisty “Old John Burns” from Ricky Wasson & Dwight McCall who turn in one of the ‘grassier cuts included here, Carrie Hassler’s melancholy “Carrie’s Graveyard Book” about a woman who honored the dead to an extent far beyond anyone could have asked her to do, and Dave Adkins’ soulful story of “The River Man” who risked his life repeatedly to help slaves cross the Ohio River.

My favorite track from this fine collection is “Rebel Hart,” from Brad Gulley, son of Steve Gulley and lead singer for Cumberland River. The upbeat track about a 16-year-old Virginia girl who used her feminine wiles and incredible courage to inflict improbable injury after injury on those who had invaded her country cries out for a movie version.

Before “There is a Fountain” closes things out, elder statesman Marty Raybon offers the title track with his characteristic humility, reminding us that the God of the Bible who was worshiped by those victimized could never  have ordained an unnecessary war fought for political reasons that killed as many as 750,000 people. One wishes that a nation that had survived such an ordeal would have learned its most obvious lesson.

by

“Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir” by Josh Graves, edited by Fred Bartenstein

Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir
Josh Graves (Edited by Fred Bartenstein)
University of Illinois Press
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

If you made a Mt. Rushmore for bluegrass music instrumentalists, there would have to be six faces—not five as Bill Monroe originally intended—and that sixth face would have to be the smiling visage of Josh Graves. Burkett Howard Graves, known professionally as “Buck” or “Uncle Josh,” was born in Tellico Plains, Tennessee (Monroe County, oddly enough) in 1927 and popularized the use of the Dobro, or resonator guitar, in bluegrass music.

Others, including yodeler Cliff Carlisle and his Hawaiian steel guitar and Bashful Brother Oswald, who played Dobro with Roy Acuff, had made the slide guitar sound part of country music, but when Monroe’s new brand of music called bluegrass branched off just after World War II, the Kentucky bandleader brought with him only guitar, upright bass, fiddle, and his own rapid-fire mandolin. Joined with Earl Scruggs three-finger banjo style, the new style became a separate and distinct form of country music.

In a series of recorded interviews that Fred Bartenstein has shaped into Bluegrass Bluesman: A Memoir, Josh Graves tells us how his Dobro playing was able to cut in and become a partner in what quickly became a highly stylized dance. First with Mac Wiseman and, starting in 1955 with Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys, Graves’ tone-rich, loud Dobro sound—the right hand influenced by Scruggs’ picking style, the left hand by Lightnin’ Hopkins and other black blues players—cut through the other noise to become an accepted part of a music played by hard-headed men whose main innovation was to tweak and then codify tradition.

At 176 pages (including a foreword from Neil Rosenberg, an introduction from Fred Bartenstein, and 16 pages containing 41 great black and white photographs) Bluegrass Bluesman is a slim volume, but that’s one of its virtues. The effect is that of spending a a day on the bus with a genial host who has lots of great stories not only about himself, but of many of the founders of one of America’s unique contributions to world music. Some of portraits are less-then-flattering, but there’s nothing vindictive or gratuitous, just the confirmation that our musical heroes are people too, and that their foibles and faults sometimes had important effects on the music just as their incredible talents did.

About 20 pages are dedicated to short tributes and remembrances from well-known colleagues, friends, and acolytes, and there’s a short appendix from Bobby Wolfe about Graves’ best-known guitars that will be of great interest to many.
Bluegrass Bluesman belongs with Can’t You Hear Me Callin’: The Life of Bill Monroe, Traveling the High Way Home: Ralph Stanley and the World of Traditional Bluegrass Music, and Still Inside: The Tony Rice Story as essential portraits of musicians essential to the history of bluegrass music.

by

“The Colored Pencil Factory” by Astrograss and “Blue Couds” by Elizabeth Mitchell & You Are My Flower

Astrograss
The Colored Pencil Factory
Foggy Borough Records
4 stars (out of 5)

Elizabeth Mitchell & You Are My Flower
Blue Clouds
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

I was made an uncle almost four years ago, and since then I have started thinking about music for children for the first time. The first question to ask is whether there should be any difference in music children listen to. I guess there has been literature and music for children as long as adults have had the disposable income and free time to make it—and it would make sense that some subject matter isn’t appropriate for certain ages—but should music for children sound any different? Do silly voices and jumpy tempos appeal to children more? Why do they make versions of already juvenile pop music sung by insipid choirs of children?

I would suspect that most of the worst music for children is simply marketed toward their parents with no thought to the children themselves, but, happily, two recent examples of good music made especially for children have reached me recently.

The first is from Brooklyn-based Astrograss, who bill themselves as “NYC’s premier bluegrass band for all ages.” The Colored Pencil Factory looks to be their third recording for children, and its 16 tracks and 49 minutes are a fun listen even for a curmudgeonly bachelor. Their musicianship is truly first rate, with Dennis Lichtman’s mandolin kickoff to “Hey Blue Dog” worthy of Monroe himself, Jonah Bruno’s banjo on “Playground” influenced by Monroe sideman Rudy Lyle’s famous “White House Blues,” and standards like “Sawing on the Strings,” “Shortenin’ Bread,” “Cluck Old Hen,” and “Sail Away Ladies” presented with great fiddling by Sarah Alden with pretty much the same attitude one would find on any old bluegrass or old-time record.

Alden trades vocal duties with Jordan Shapiro and Tim Kiah, one of whom has a voice that favorably compares to Darrell Scott’s, though from the liner notes I can’t tell which. Though they’re aiming for happy enthusiasm rather than subtle blends, their harmonies are usually quite good, and the lyrics on the original tunes assume far more intelligence on the part of children than most other stuff I’ve heard.

Elizabeth Mitchell’s Blue Clouds is just a bit better and is as good as I can imagine a children’s album getting. Mitchell and husband Daniel Littleton are part of the indie band Ida, and with daughter Storey, who looks to be about 12 now, mom and dad form the band You Are My Flower, who have now released seven albums for children.

Blue Clouds is gentle, quiet, and melodic, with Jay Ungar and Molly Mason contributing their talents, and Storey and a handful of other children singing backup. None of the vocals from adults or children here are hokey, with the effect that children who listen are drawn into a sound that has a deeper meaning than just having fun or getting silly.

Indeed, Bill Withers’ “I Wish You Well” is a song that will deeply touch both parents and children. Other musical giants are adapted here: David Bowie’s “Kooks” speaks to the virtues of being different, Jimi Hendrix’s tender “May this Be Love” is a showcase for Littleton’s gorgeous guitar playing, the Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky” (with a “Little Martha” intro) is an acoustic version as beautiful as the electric original, and Van Morrison’s “Everyone” may be the best cover ever done of one of the grumpy Ulsterman’s  songs, with flute and children’s harmonies filling out the playfulness of the original.

Throw in some originals, a couple of American folk songs (“Hop Up, My Ladies” and “Froggie Went a-Courtin’”), songs from Korea (“San Toki (Mountain Bunny)”) and Japan (“Yuki (Snow)”), and the 13th-century English tune “Summer is Icumen In,” and you’ve got an incredibly well-laden pallet of music that this curmudgeonly bachelor has listened to a few times for no other reason than it’s a great record.

by

“We’re Usually a Lot Better Than This” by Darrell Scott & Tim O’Brien

Darrell Scott & Tim O’Brien
We’re Usually a Lot Better Than This
Full Light Records
4 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

Even as American television viewers are treated  to the glamourous side of Nashville through the ABC soap opera named after Music City, where brassy vixens young and old tear their way through the town’s menfolk on their way to the top of the necrotic popular country music industry, desperately grasping for the dwindling dollars and adoring, but thinning, crowds, fans of what can rightly be considered music can still find it on the banks of the Cumberland.

Darrell Scott and Tim O’Brien are two of that city’s finest craftsmen, and first collaborated, on record, with 2000’s Real Time, melding two truly wonderful voices as different in timbre as they are alike in warmth and strength.

Four songs from that collection show up on this one, taken from two Asheville, North Carolina shows in 2005 and 2006 that prove the duo as fine a match live as in the studio, with the picking having a decidedly looser feel. The jaunty, life-is-good “Long Time Gone” (They sound tired, but they don’t sound Haggard / They got money, but they don’t have Cash / They got Junior, but they don’t have Hank) and “With a Memory Like Mine,” a welcome anti-war song that could be a sequel to Bob Dylan’s “John Brown,” were the best originals from Real Time; here they are just as good, as are the funky gospel of “Keep Your Lamp Trimmed and Burning” and a knockout a cappella of Hank Williams’ “House of Gold.”

Two more gospel numbers are among the 13 tracks: “Climbing Up a Mountain,” which opens the album with a Skaggs & Rice-style mandolin and guitar and Keith Whitley’s “You Don’t Have to Move that Mountain,” another groove as deep as “Keep Your Lamp.”

O’Brien and Scott pay welcome homage to songwriting heroes Townes van Zandt (“White Freightliner Blues”), Gordon Lightfoot (“Early Morning Rain”), and Lefty Frizzell (“Mom and Dad’s Waltz”) with covers, and to Scott’s songwriting father, Wayne Scott, with “The Hummingbird,” a song about a guitar Wayne played and Darrell played with.

The 58-minute album closes with “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as the second half of a medley that starts with “When There’s No One Around,” an insistent introspection co-written by O’Brien and Scott that was recorded by Garth Brooks. One can doubt whether that mawkish huckster did it justice—I can’t be bothered to find out—but not that it has paid some bills for two proper musicians.

My favorite discovery here is “Mick Ryan’s Lament,” a song from O’Brien’s 2001 Irish folk album Two Journeys that I’m ashamed to have missed. Sung in his emphatic tenor, it’s about one of the countless Irishmen who fled the British-caused Great Famine for Americay, only to end up slaving away in a factory few hard years before putting on a blue coat to go kill their white-skinned cousins in the South and, soon after, their red-skinned ones in the West in fights that can hardly be called fair. Mick Ryan survives Vicksburg before meeting his end at Little Big Horn with the pompous fop Custer, dying to the strains of “Garryowen,” an Irish quickstep that some U.S. Army regiments revived in the latest Iraq war. “Mick Ryan’s Lament” is what a folk song should be, a cinematic story with sharp detail, sung with passion to an audience who needs to hear its message. Nothing this powerful is likely to show up on ABC.

by

Lonesome Road Review’s Best of 2012

Five-star reviews:

“All In” by the Boxcars

“Outshine the Sun” by Foghorn Stringband

“Life Finds a Way” by the Grascals

“Life Goes On” by Musicians Against Childhood Cancer

“Papertown” by Balsam Range

 

Other notable releases:

“Hard Country” by Audie Blaylock & Redline

“Heart of the Country” by Chris Brashear

“The Gospel Side of Dailey & Vincent” by Dailey & Vincent

“Home from the Mills” by Jimmy Gaudreau & Moondi Klein

“Sing Me a Song About Jesus” by Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver

“They’re Playing My Song” by Joe Mullins & the Radio Ramblers

“New Bluegrass & Old Heartaches” by Bobby Osborne & the Rocky Top X-Press

“Road Into Town” by Danny Paisley & Southern Grass

“The Old Home Place Ain’t the Same Anymore” by Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers

 

by

“The Old Home Place Ain’t the Same Anymore” by Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers

Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers
The Old Home Place Ain’t the Same Anymore
Snowflake Records
4.5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

Finland is a long way from Nashville, but it was the latter place I thought of when unwrapping the recent mailer from Jussi Syren and the Groundbreakers postmarked in the former location.

Inside was an LP, along with a CD for those not as properly equipped for old music as yours truly, that vividly mimics the Technicolor covers of Monroe’s Decca recordings and others from the 1950s golden age of bluegrass music.

The thirty-two minutes of music inside also evokes that time: eleven tracks of loud, raw, pure bluegrass and one a cappella gospel, Carl Story’s “My Lord Keeps a Record,” in the style of Ralph Stanley,  the texture of whose voice Syren’s recalls more than a little.

The Groundbreakers employ the standard five-piece lineup—Syren (mandolin), Tauri Oksala (banjo), J.P. Putkonen (guitar), Karl Hella (bass) and Nelli Ikola (fiddle)—to honky-tonk perfection, with Putkonen’s mighty G-runs, Ikola’s greasy fiddle, and Oksala’s pealing banjo achieving a sound of which Jimmy Martin or Vern Williams would be proud, especially on original instrumentals “Syren Stomp” and “Rockhill Ride.”

Original Syren compositions “Detroit Blues” and the title track stand with Jim Eanes’s “Your Old Standby” and Stonewall Jackson’s “Blue Field” as the best on this record, showing that old musical formulae can still be used to great effect today.

My only complaint is that, in spite of several listens on LP and CD, with headphones and without, I found Syren’s lead vocals, which also contain a dash of Steve Earle, to be too low in the mix.

 

 

by

“Outshine the Sun” by Foghorn Stringband

Foghorn Stringband
Outshine the Sun
Foghorn Stringband
5 stars (out of 5)

By Aaron Keith Harris

For the Foghorn Stringband, the dream of the nineties is indeed alive in Portland, just as long as you’re dreaming about the eighteen nineties. (I hope no other reviewer has made that connection to the excellent Carrie Brownstein/Fred Armisen sketch comedy Portlandia on IFC, but I’m too lazy to googlebing it.)

Oregon-based eight-stringer Caleb Klauder and fiddler Sammy Lind, now joined by Quebecois bassist Nadine Landry and Washington guitarist Reeb Willms, are as good as you can wrangle if you’re looking for the picking and singing old-time, with Lind knowing when to be a little ragged here and when to be a little fancy there and Klauder’s tenor pained enough to hit nostalgia without bleeding through to melodrama. The ladies are not here for ornamentation, but for strong and supple performance that gives the band the range and talent to handle the ballads, love songs, instrumentals, parlor songs, and white gospel that make up the twenty-one songs clocking in two minutes shy of an hour.

Foghorn could keep the feet tapping the hardwood all night long with Hartfordesque fiddle tunes like “Humpback Mule,” “Indian Ate the Woodchuck,” and “Salty River Reel,” and with “Lover’s First Quarrel,” which somehow manages to be concise and baroque at the same time.

But it’s the singing—whether solo or harmony—that’s made me keep this one spinning. The simple voice blends on “Distant Land to Roam” and “Just a Few Old Memories,” a simple tearjerker led by one of the ladies (I’m sorry to say, from the materials at hand, I’m not sure which) indeed evoke “another place and time,” like the scent of an old upright piano.

The drop-thumb rave-up “Whoa Mule” and two almost-bluegrass hymnal thumpers, “Outshine the Sun” and “Gospel Ship,” have the band running hard and true vocally and instrumentally.

The track that haunts me is the penultimate “Over the Garden Wall,” a sweet and strange romance from the Carter Family oeuvre made sweeter and stranger by this fine quartet.