Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – February 13, 2024: A Tribute to Jelly Roll Morton on Mardi Gras Day

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif finds connections and develops themes in various genres. The show is broadcast on CKCU, 93.1 FM, in Ottawa on Tuesdays from 3:30 until 5 pm (Eastern time) and is also available 24/7 for on-demand streaming.

This episode of Stranger Songs was recorded and can be streamed on-demand, now or anytime, by clicking on “Listen Now” at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/595/63877.html

Theme: A Tribute to Jelly Roll Morton (1890-1941) on Mardi Gras Day.

Jelly Roll Morton, whose birth name was Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe, was a pianist, singer, songwriter and bandleader from New Orleans who was steeped in traditional music and was one of the first important composers in jazz. Morton died in 1941 at age 50 from respiratory problems related to a stabbing in 1938 from which he never fully recovered. Morton claimed to have singlehandedly invented jazz in 1902, a claim that few music historians accept, despite his immense contributions to the early development of jazz. Some of the songs on this show were written by Jelly Roll Morton, all were from his vast repertoire.

Jelly Roll Morton- Original Jelly Roll Blues

Birth of the Hot (Bluebird)

Dave Van Ronk- Mamie’s Blues

Sunday Street (Philo)

Dr. John- Milneburg Joys

Goin’ Back to New Orleans (Warner Bros.)

Leon Redbone- Winin’ Boy Blues

Double Time (Warner Bros.)

Jelly Roll Morton- Mr. Jelly Lord

The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume 2: Anamule Dance (Rounder)

Paul Geremia- Dr. Jazz

Love My Stuff (Red House)

Billy Novick’s Blue Syncopators- Wild Man Blues

Music from The Great Gatsby (Billy Novick)

Jelly Roll Morton- Shake It

Last Sessions: The Complete General Recordings (Commodore)

Saffire-The Uppity Blues Women- Sweet Substitute

Old, New, Borrowed & Blue (Alligator)

Dave Van Ronk- The Pearls

Sunday Street (Philo)

Amos Garrett- Michigan Water Blues

Acoustic Album (Stony Plain)

Dr. John & Danny Barker- I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say

Goin’ Back to New Orleans (Warner Bros.)

Andrew Homzy Ensemble- Black Bottom Stomp

Hommage to Jelly Roll Morton (DSM)

Jelly Roll Morton- New Orleans Bump

Great Original Performances 1926-1934 (BBC)

Hot Tuna- Don’t You Leave Me Here

Hot Tuna (RCA)

Guy Van Duser & Billy Novick- Wolverine Blues

Every Little Moment (Daring)

Wynton Marsalis & Catherine Russell- Make Me a Pallet on the Floor

Bolden: Music from the Original Soundtrack (Blue Engine)

Julian Fauth- Tricks Ain’t Walking

The Weak and the Wicked, the Hard and the Strong (Electro-Fi)

Jelly Roll Morton- Dirty, Dirty, Dirty

Last Sessions: The Complete General Recordings (Commodore)

Jelly Roll Morton- The Murder Ballad, part 7: Goodbye to the World, I Know I’m Gone

The Library of Congress Recordings, Volume 3: The Pearls (Rounder)

Henry Butler & Steven Bernstein- King Porter Stomp

Viper’s Drag (Impulse)

Dirty Dozen Brass Band- Kansas City Stomp

Jelly (Columbia)

Next week: Songs of Chuck Berry.

--Mike Regenstreif

 

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Tuesday October 25, 2022: Songs of Yip Harburg & Hoagy Carmichael

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif finds connections and develops themes in various genres. The show is broadcast on CKCU in Ottawa on Tuesdays from 3:30 until 5 pm (Eastern time) and is also available 24/7 for on-demand streaming.

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

This episode of Stranger Songs was prerecorded and can already be streamed on-demand by clicking on “Listen Now” at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/595/58052.html

Theme: Songs of Yip Harburg (1896-1981) and Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981).

Part 1 – Songs of Yip Harburg. E.Y. “Yip” Harburg – who died in 1981 at age 84 – was a lyricist who collaborated with several composers. This show includes some of Harburg’s collaborations with Jay Gorney, Harold Arlen, Earl Robinson and Burton Lane.

Yip Harburg (circa 1950)

Deborah Holland- Brother, Can You Spare a Dime

The Panic is On: Songs from the Great Depression (Gadfly)

Ella Fitzgerald- Ding Dong! The Wicked Witch is Dead

Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Harold Arlen Songbook (Verve)

Stephen Mendel- If I Only had a Brain

Sing Me a Story (Stephen Mendel)

Ian Tyson- Somewhere Over the Rainbow

All the Good ’Uns Vol. 2 (Stony Plain)

The Juggernauts- Lydia, the Tattooed Lady

Live Lunch (The Juggernauts)

Chaim Tannenbaum- It’s Only a Paper Moon

Chaim Tannenbaum (StorySound)

Josh White- Free and Equal Blues

From New York to London: The Classic Recordings (Jasmine)

Happy Traum- How are Things in Glocca Morra?

There’s a Bright Side Somewhere (Lark’s Nest Music)

Part 2 – Songs of Hoagy Carmichael. Hoagland Howard “Hoagy” Carmichael – who died in 1981 at age 82 – was among the most successful songwriters of the Tin Pan Alley era.

Hoagy Carmichael (1947)

Ray Charles- Georgia on My Mind

Singular Genius: The Complete ABC Singles (Concord)

Jane Voss & Hoyle Osborne- Bread and Gravy

Beyond the Boundaries (Ripple)

Amos Garrett- New Orleans

Amosbehavin’ (Stony Plain)

Maria Muldaur with Hoagy Carmichael- Rockin’ Chair

Sweet Harmony (Reprise)

David Clayton-Thomas- Stardust

Combo (Antionette)

Dave Van Ronk & Christine Lavin- Two Sleepy People

Hummin’ to Myself (Gazell)

Martha Seyler & Robert Resnik- Skylark

Martha Sings & Robert Plays (Martha Seyler & Robert Resnik)

Cindy Church, George Koller & Joe Sealy- I Get Along Without You Very Well

The Nearness of You: A Tribute to the Music of Hoagy Carmichael (Seajam)

Judy Henske- Baltimore Oriole

The Elektra Albums (Ace)

Loudon Wainwright III with Vince Giordano & The Nighthawks- Heart and Soul

I’d Rather Lead a Band (Search Party) 

Jeff Healey- Hong Kong Blues

The Best of the Stony Plain Years: Vintage Jazz, Swing and Blues (Stony Plain)

Junior Brown- Riverboat Shuffle

Mixed Bag (Curb)

Hoagy Carmichael- Lazybones

Stardust Melody (Bluebird)

Leon Redbone- Lazy River

Up a Lazy River (Rounder)

Geoff Muldaur & Amos Garrett- Washboard Blues

Geoff Muldaur & Amos Garrett (Flying Fish)

Cindy Church, George Koller & Joe Sealy- In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening

The Nearness of You: A Tribute to the Music of Hoagy Carmichael (Seajam)

Next week: Radio.

Find me on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Geoff & Maria Muldaur – Pottery Pie; Sweet Potatoes

GEOFF & MARIA MULDAUR

Pottery Pie

Omnivore Recordings

omnivorerecordings.com/shop/pottery-pie/

Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band were early favorites of mine when I was first getting into music and record collecting as a kid in the 1960s so I was already familiar with (and a fan of) the husband and wife team of Geoff & Maria Muldaur – stalwarts of the Kweskin band – when they recorded Pottery Pie in 1968, the first of two LPs they would release as a duo. Remarkably, Pottery Pie and the other LP, Sweet Potatoes, have just recently been reissued for the first time in North America.

Geoff and Maria alternated lead vocals on Pottery Pie, an album that seemed to point in directions both would go on to explore later on. Geoff’s version of “Death Letter Blues,” for example, is the kind of track he’d record some years later as a member of Paul Butterfield’s Better Days, while Maria’s version of “Me and My Chauffeur Blues,” presaged the tribute to Memphis Minnie she would produce years later.

Geoff’s other highlights on Pottery Pie include a great version of “New Orleans Hopscop Blues,” originally recorded by Bessie Smith, that combines an updated classic blues feel with a New Orleans-style horn arrangement, and a soulful rendition of “Prairie Lullaby,” a classic recorded by Jimmie Rodgers in 1932, that features great playing by Bill Keith on pedal steel and an uncredited fiddler (who I suspect may have been Maria).

And I must mention Geoff’s fun version of “Brazil,” a classic Brazilian jazz tune that would go on to give Terry Gilliam’s film its name when he used this recording in the movie.

Among Maria’s highlights is her sexy definitive version of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and the traditional gospel song “Trials, Troubles, Tribulations” with nice harmonies from Betsy Siggins.

But my absolute favorite track on Pottery Pie is Maria’s gorgeous version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Georgia On My Mind,” with a sublime electric guitar solo by Amos Garrett, perhaps the first of many notable guitar solos Amos would play on albums with both Muldaurs.

GEOFF & MARIA MULDAUR

Sweet Potatoes

Omnivore Recordings

omnivorerecordings.com/shop/sweet-potatoes/

While Pottery Pie seemed to be equal parts Geoff and Maria, Geoff dominates Sweet Potatoes, their second and final LP, released in 1972. It’s a charming album, but just a tad disappointing that only three of the 10 songs featured Maria.

That said, some of my favorites of Geoff’s leads include “Havana Moon,” a very atypical Chuck Berry tune given a bluesy arrangement featuring Paul Butterfield on harmonica, and “Dardanella,” a New Orleans jazz standard whose intricate arrangement points at the kind of work Geoff would do decades later with his album of Bix Biederbecke material.

Another favorite is the languid but delightful version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Lazy Bones,” with a lead vocal and patented guitar solo by Amos Garrett, that certainly presaged the duo album they recorded on Flying Fish after playing together in Paul Butterfield’s Better Days.

Maria’s three lead vocals are also highlights of Sweet Potatoes. These include “Blue Railroad Train,” a Delmore Bothers song that Doc Watson introduced to the folk revival in the mid’60s, and the title track, a lovely little number on which she’s accompanied by pianist Jeff Gutcheon, the song’s composer.

But my absolute favorite is Maria’s beautiful version of “Lover Man (Oh Where Can You Be),” a jazz standard sung decades earlier by Billie Holiday. This version features another dreamy guitar solo by Amos as well as strings and woodwinds – including Geoff on clarinet. 

I should note also that the cover painting for Sweet Potatoes was by the great folk and blues performer and visual artist Eric Von Schmidt.

These two albums are much more than footnotes in the discographies of two artists would go on to give us – and still continue to give us a half-century later – much great music.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Tom Russell – Play One More: The Songs of Ian & Sylvia

TOM RUSSELL

Play One More: The Songs of Ian & Sylvia

True North Records

tomrussell.com

truenorthrecords.com

I got into record collecting as a kid in the 1960s and Ian & Sylvia’s LPs had a huge impact on me. They were a big part of my introduction to traditional folk music and to original, folk-based songwriting. By 1966, I owned all of their early LPs and kept on buying the new ones as they came out later in the ‘60s and early-‘70s. And I got to see them play live a couple of times. I still return to their music often – particularly the first five albums.

As a music journalist, I’ve written about the CD reissues of the Ian & Sylvia LPs and about both Ian Tyson’s and Sylvia Tyson’s solo albums. I've seen both of them live on many occasions and, in the 1990s, I produced a couple of shows in Montreal with Sylvia (a stage setting of Timothy Findlay’s “The Pianoman's Daughter” and a concert with Quartette, her group with three other great women singers). And I’ve done long (and separate) radio interviews with both Ian and Sylvia that have included extensive looks back at their Ian & Sylvia years.

Ian & Sylvia were also a huge influence on the young Tom Russell, who I’ve repeatedly referred to as the finest singer-songwriter of my generation. As a songwriter, Tom has collaborated with both Ian and Sylvia and on his new album, Play One More: The Songs of Ian & Sylvia, offers a remarkable tribute to Ian’s and Sylvia’s songwriting with eight songs from the Ian & Sylvia years and two more each from their solo years (including one of his co-writes with each of them).

The album opens with Ian’s “Wild Geese,” a gorgeous song from the 1967 LP So Much for Dreaming that vividly captures the Canadian countryside. It is one of many songs on the album to which Cindy Church, one of Sylvia’s partners in Quartette, lends her beautiful harmonies to.

Tom follows it with “Thrown to the Wolves,” a song he co-wrote with Sylvia and sang a duet with her on her 1994 album You Were On My Mind (not to be confused with the 1972 Ian & Sylvia LP of the same name). The ‘wolves’ motif comes up again at the end of the album on the astute western ballad “When the Wolves No Longer Sing,” a fairly recent song co-written by Tom and Ian that Ian recorded on Carnero Vaquero and that Gretchen Peters sang on Tom’s extraordinary folk opera The Rose of Roscrae: A Ballad of the West.

Three of my favorite songs on the album came from Ian & Sylvia’s 1966 LP Play One More: “These Friends of Mine” is one of my all-time favorite songs of Ian’s. I’ve always thought of it as a companion song to Bob Dylan’s “Bob Dylan’s Dream”; “Short Grass,” co-written by Ian and Sylvia, vividly captures what ranch life might have been like 60 or so years ago for a young cowboy like Ian; and “Play One More” describes a musician’s life on the road and a disintegrating relationship at home.

Each of the other songs is a highlight.

“Rio Grande,” from the 1970 album Great Speckled Bird (Ian and Sylvia’s band at that time, a pioneering country-rock band, was called Great Speckled Bird), co-written by Ian and Amos Garrett, is a cowboy’s lament set on the U.S.-Mexico border that seems predictive of the drug wars that would come to scar much of that border in later years.

“The Night the Chinese Restaurant Burned Down,” also from Sylvia’s 1994 album You Were On My Mind, is a beautiful song that may be based on Sylvia’s hometown of Chatham, Ontario. In the song, she recalls the night she and her best friend, young women ready to leave the town for the big city, hop on the last bus out of there.

Ian’s “Old Cheyenne,” first recorded on the Ian & Sylvia’s 1972 LP You Were On My Mind, is a sad one about a rodeo cowboy who can’t make a living at it, while “Sam Bonnifield’s Saloon,” first recorded on Ol’ Eon, Ian’s first solo LP from 1973, concisely captures a scene from a bar in the Yukon.

In Ian’s “Red Velvet,” from the 1965 LP Early Morning Rain, a prairie farmer laments how farm life just couldn’t hold the woman he loves, while “The Renegade,” a co-write by Ian and Sylvia from their 1968 album Nashville, relates the feelings of an indigenous man determined to return to the traditional way of life. Although written almost a half-century ago, the song seems particularly topical in view of what has become common knowledge in Canada about the residential school system which is referenced in the song and which was labelled “cultural genocide” a couple of years ago by the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Play One More: The Songs of Ian & Sylvia is a great tribute to Ian Tyson and Sylvia Tyson – to the remarkable songs they wrote and recorded as a duo in the decade between 1962 and 1972, and to the equally remarkable songs they’ve written (and co-written) in the decades since. The production is wisely kept minimalist with just Tom on vocals and guitar, Cindy on harmony vocals and Grant Siemens on lead guitar.

Mike Regenstreif & Tom Russell (2012)

The album is capped off by two bonus tracks: previously unreleased demos by Ian & Sylvia from the 1960s of “Grey Morning” and “The French Girl.”  

Play One More: The Songs of Ian & Sylvia will be released on May 19. 

I played five of the songs from Play One More: The Songs of Ian & Sylvia on the April 29, 2017 edition of the Saturday Morning show on CKCU. The show can be streamed on-demand at http://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/128/32143.html.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif