Saturday Morning with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Saturday April 27, 2019

Saturday Morning is an eclectic roots-oriented program on CKCU in Ottawa heard live on Saturday mornings from 7 until 10 am (Eastern time) and then available for on-demand streaming. I am one of the four rotating hosts of Saturday Morning and base my programming on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches format I developed at CKUT in Montreal.

CKCU can be heard at 93.1 FM in Ottawa and http://www.ckcufm.com/ on the web.

This episode of Saturday Morning can be streamed on-demand at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/128/42656.html

“We are traveling in the footsteps of those who’ve come before,” this program celebrates the enduring legacy of Pete Seeger (1919-2014). Some of the songs on the show were written or co-written by Pete, others are traditional or contemporary songs from his repertoire, and some were inspired by him. Friday, May 3, will be the centennial of Pete’s birth.

The Weavers- When the Saints Go Marching In

Best of the Vanguard Years (Vanguard)

John McCutcheon- To Everyone in All the World

To Everyone in All the World: A Celebration of Pete Seeger (Appalsongs)

Peter, Paul & Mary- If I Had a Hammer

Peter, Paul and Mary (Warner Bros.)

SONiA disappear fear & Gitte Diatsschuk- Where Have All the Flowers Gone

Live at Maximal (Disappear Records)

Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer- Well May the World Go/Letter from Pete’s Banjo

Get Up and Do Right (Community Music)

Grit Laskin- The Photographers

Unabashedly Folk: Songs and Tunes 1979-1985 (Borealis)

Rosalie Sorrels- Old Devil Time

Report from Grimes Creek (Green Linnet)

Ken Whiteley- Quite Early Morning

Ken Whiteley and the Beulah Band (Borealis)

Pete Seeger- Both Sides Now

Young vs. Old (Columbia)

Spook Handy- Pete Seeger’s Life

Dedicated to the Proposition: Pete, Woody & Me, Vol. II (Akashic)

David Wiffen- Times are Getting Hard

At the Bunkhouse Coffeehouse, Vancouver BC (Universal International)

Happy Traum- Empty Pocket Blues

I Walk the Road Again (Roaring Stream)

Bonnie Dobson- Dink’s Song

Take Me for a Walk in the Morning Dew (Hornbeam)

Penny Lang- Oh, Had I a Golden Thread

Carry On Children (She-Wolf)

Kate & Anna McGarrigle- Petites Boîtes (Little Boxes)

La vache qui pleure (Tribu)

Pete Seeger- My Dirty Stream (The Hudson River Song)

The Smithsonian Folkways Collection (Smithsonian Folkways)

Richie Havens- Of Time and Rivers Flowing

Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (Appleseed)

Arlo Guthrie- Sailing Down This Golden River

Outlasting the Blues (Rising Son)

Kim & Reggie Harris- High Over the Hudson

Unreleased recording used with permission

The Wailin' Jennys- Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie

The Wailin’ Jennys (The Wailin’ Jennys)

Long John Baldry- Rock Island Line

Remembering Leadbelly (Stony Plain)

Odetta- Midnight Special

Lookin’ for a Home: Thanks to Leadbelly (M.C.)

Pete Seeger- Huddie Ledbetter was Helluva Man

Pete (Living Music)

Ramblin' Jack Elliott & Jerry Jeff Walker- Hard Travelin’

Friends of Mine (HighTone)

Tim O'Brien- Pastures of Plenty

Tim O’Brien Band (Howdy Skies)

Judy Collins- So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh

Woody Guthrie: The Tribute Concerts (Bear Family)

Pete Seeger- This Land is Your Land

The Smithsonian Folkways Collection (Smithsonian Folkways)

Joe Jencks- Let Me Sing You a Song

Poets, Philosophers, Workers & Wanderers (Turtle Bear Music)

Kate Campbell- Passing Through

The K.O.A. Tapes (Vol.1) (Large River Music)

Pete Seeger- L’Internationale

Singalong, Sanders Theatre, 1980 (Smithsonian Folkways)

                  

Bruce Cockburn- Turn, Turn, Turn

Where Have All the Flowers Gone: The Songs of Pete Seeger (Appleseed)

Perla Batalla- Guantanamera

Discoteca Batalla (Mechuda Music)

Malaika- Malaika

Live (Malaika)

HARP: Holly Near, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Gilbert, Pete Seeger- Wimoweh (Mbube)

A Time to Sing (Appleseed)

Dave Fry- Lessons from Pete

Troubadour (Dave Fry)

Chaim Tannenbaum- Farther Along

Chaim Tannenbaum (StorySound)

The Klezmatics w/Joshua Nelson & Kathryn Farmer- Oh Mary Don’t You Weep

Brother Moses Smote the Water (Piranha)

Manx Marriner Mainline- This Little Light of Mine

Hell Bound for Heaven (Stony Plain)

Bruce Springsteen- Jacob’s Ladder

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (Columbia)

Dawn Tyler Watson- Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

En Duo (Justin Time)

Tom Paxton- The Honor of Your Company

Live For the Record (Sugar Hill)

Pete Seeger w/Arlo Guthrie & Shenendoah- Precious Friend You Will Be There

Precious Friend (Warner Bros.) 

Jim Kweskin- Living in the Country

Unjugged (Hornbeam)

I’ll be hosting Saturday Morning next on May 25.

Find me on Twitter. @MikeRegenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

SONiA disappear fear – By My Silence

SONiA disappear fear

By My Silence

Disappear Records

soniadisappearfear.com

(A version of this review was published in the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.)

Sisters Sonia Rutstein and Cindy Frank founded disappear fear as a folk-rock band whose material included a focus on social justice issues. Now working as a solo artist, Rutstein tours and records as SONiA disappear fear.

By My Silence, Sonia’s latest album, was inspired by the growing waves of anti-Semitism that she has observed and encountered in recent years.

Perhaps the most powerful of Sonia’s original songs on the album is “Wandering Jew,” a joyous, anthemic song in which she asserts her Jewish identity, recalls that her own ancestors were refugees and finds common cause with contemporary refugees. Another is “A Voice for Nudem Durak,” a song of solidarity, sung in both Kurdish and English, with a Sunni Muslim woman who was sentenced to 19.5 years in prison because she sang publicly in Kurdish in Turkey.

A couple of songs mark Jewish holidays. She wrote “Light in You” for a young neighbour disappointed that there were no Chanukah songs included in his school’s holiday concert while “Ahavnu (We Have Loved)” is her setting of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s words for a Yom Kippur prayer.

Sonia also includes compelling versions of “By My Silence,” a song by Nick Annis and Ellen Bukstel based on the famous Holocaust-era poem by Reverend Martin Niemoller, and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.”

Also of note are her versions of Israeli folksongs “Elel Chamda Libi” and “Oseh Shalom,” sung in Hebrew, as is a stunningly beautiful version of “Hatikvah,” sung as a prayer-like meditation that reflects on the feelings of hope at the heart of the Israeli national anthem.

And in “Who I Am (say amen),” Sonia, a lesbian, seems to be in dialogues with her mother and with God about her sexuality. “Mom, is it OK if I am who I am,” she asks at the end of the first verse. She puts the question to God in the second verse along with a plea for God to say it’s OK. It is OK she concludes at the end of the song and says “Amen.”

Sonia and I chatted when we were both at the Folk Alliance International conference in Montreal in February. She told me that when she finished making this album on Friday, October 26, 2018, she then turned off her TV and all electronic devices for Shabbat. The next night, when she turned on the news, she learned of the massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

As the songs on By My Silence show, SONiA disappear fear is a convincing and truly fearless artist.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

–Mike Regenstreif