Guy Davis & Fabrizio Poggi – Sonny & Brownie’s Last Train

GUY DAVIS & FABRIZIO POGGI

Sonny & Brownie’s Last Train

M.C. Records

guydavis.com

mc-records.com

The magnificent blues duo of singer/harmonica master Sonny Terry and singer/guitarist Brownie McGhee were the first really old musicians I ever got to know. 

Let me qualify what I mean by “really old.” They were 10 to 15 years older than my parents and 10 to 15 years younger than my grandparents. But most of the artists I was encountering in coffeehouses when I was 15 or 16 were in their 20s and 30s and Sonny and Brownie were in their 50s (younger than I am now) – so they seemed “really old.”

Sonny and Brownie started working as duo in the early-1940s and had been playing together for nearly three decades by the time I met them sometime in 1969 or ’70. Sonny and Brownie were playing a five-night gig at the Back Door – a great, but short-lived folk club in Montreal – and I think I went at least three or four of those nights. I remember their sets as being fantastic. I particularly loved songs like “Rock Island Line” that they would sing together. And I remember being fascinated watching the muscles in Brownie’s arms move as he played guitar.

On one of those nights, I screwed up my courage and asked if I could talk to them about Woody Guthrie. I had become fascinated with Woody and had been listening to his records and reading everything I could about him. I had seen their names associated with Woody and I recognized that the amazing and distinctive harmonica player I was listening to at the Back Door was the same harmonica player I heard on some of the Woody Guthrie records I had. Sonny and Brownie were both most gracious in talking with the curious kid that I was. Speakiing with them was an incredible experience that taught me so much more than I realized at the time.

By the mid-1970s, I was producing concerts in Montreal and was honored to present a couple of shows with Sonny and Brownie.

On Sonny & Brownie’s Last Train, Guy Davis, one of the finest blues artists of my generation, combines with the excellent Italian harmonica player Fabrizio Poggi for what Guy describes as “a love letter to Sonny and Brownie.”

Indeed, the entire album is a loving homage to the inspiring folk-blues masters. Guy and Fabrizio include several of Sonny and Brownie’s original songs and a bunch of other songs drawn from their extensive repertoire. Of special note, though, is the opening title track. Guy says he improvised “Sonny and Brownie’s Last Train”during the recording session. The song lets us know how he feels about Sonny and Brownie and about how unique and special they were.

  

Brownie McGhee (left) and Sonny Terry

While I enjoyed the entire 12-song set from start to finish, some of my favorite numbers included Brownie’s “Walk On,” which, as much as any song, could be called his signature song (I remember driving with him once in Montreal and his car’s California license plate read “Walk On”); “Take This Hammer” and “Midnight Special,” two songs Sonny and Brownie got from their friend Lead Belly; “Step It Up and Go,” a bouncy tune favored by a lot of the Piedmont style bluesmen of their generation; and a sweet version of “Freight Train” that hues closer to Elizabeth Cotton’s original than to Sonny and Brownie’s variant.

As the guitarist, Guy recalls Brownie while Fabrizio on harmonica recalls Sonny for those of us who were lucky enough to have seen Sonny and Brownie on stage (see the drawing on the CD cover). I’ll note, though, that Guy is the only singer tackling songs on which both Brownie and Sonny variously took the lead vocals. I’ll also note that Guy is playing both harmonica and guitar on “Shortnin’ Bread” (while Fabrizio plays kick drum) while on the title track, both Guy (right channel) and Fabrizio (left channel) are playing harmonica.

Guy and Fabrizio’s Sonny & Brownie’s Last Train sent me back to the subjects of the homage. Over the past week as I’ve listened to and enjoyed Guy Davis and Fabrizio Poggi doing these songs, I’ve also been listening to and enjoying albums by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

Sonny & Brownie’s Last Train was released in the U.S. on March 24. It will be released here in Canada on March 31.

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Blind but Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson by Kent Gustavson

Blind but Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson

By Kent Gustavson

Sumach Red Books

368 pages

docwatsonbook.com
  

Note: Blind but Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson was first published in 2010. This review is based on the revised and expanded version published in 2012.

The Back Door was small coffee house on the corner of McTavish and Sherbrooke Streets in downtown Montreal beside the McGill University campus. It’s two-year existence from 1969-1971 corresponded to my last two years of high school and the time that I began to seriously immerse myself in the folk music world. Among the artists I saw and met at the Back Door were Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Jerry Jeff Walker, Paul Siebel, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Rosalie Sorrels and Doc & Merle Watson.

Doc and Merle – billed that week as “Doc Watson & Son,” Merle would have been 21 then – played an amazing concert. Their guitar playing and Doc’s warm singing were like nothing I’d heard before. I quickly acquired the Doc and Doc & Merle albums which had been released over the previous decade and nearly every other one that’s been released in the four decades since. Doc was among the most-played artists in the 14-year history of my Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio program.

Doc Watson was one of the greatest and most influential musicians of all time – particularly on guitar players. Although not primarily a bluegrass musician – Doc played virtually every kind of Southern roots music from traditional Appalachian music through blues, folk and rockabilly – Doc’s guitar playing redefined the role of the acoustic guitar in bluegrass music making it a lead, rather than just rhythm instrument. Today, it’s not unusual to hear guitar virtuosos picking the bejeezus out of fiddle tunes, but it all comes back to Doc’s masterful playing in the 1960s.

Doc was in his last days when Kent Gustavson put a copy of the revised version of his 2010 book, Blind but Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson, in the mail to me. It arrived a few days after Doc passed away, at age 89, on May 29.

The book is a compelling read. Although it would appear that Gustavson was not granted direct access to Doc and his immediate family, or even to Mitch Greenhill, his longtime agent (who took over from his father, Manny Greenhill) at Folklore Productions, his research was thorough and drew on many years of interviews of interviews with the legendary artist, articles, book references and many direct interviews with musicians and others who worked with Doc over the decades and knew him well.

Among the anecdotes I particularly enjoyed was the story of how Jerry Ricks, a young African American blues musician, took Doc in for a couple of weeks in 1963 when Doc was playing in Philadelphia. Jerry, who passed away in 2007, was a friend of mine. The way the story is told in the book is very similar to the way Jerry told it to me when I first met him in 1973.

Although I crossed paths with Doc several times in the 1970s and ‘80s, I didn’t really know him personally, so there was much I learned from this book. From the stories of his boyhood years at home and at the boarding school for the blind that he attended to the devastation he felt after Merle’s death in 1985 (and from which he never really recovered).

Although every Doc Watson concert I was ever there for, and every Doc Watson record I’ve ever played (and played and played and played), was the work of a master, Doc, apparently, did not enjoy the musician’s life of playing for strangers every night and being away from home. The early years playing concerts with traditional musicians like Clarence Ashley or traveling on his own to coffee houses and college concerts gave him ulcers.

And while I knew that Doc had spent most of the 1950s playing electric guitar in a local rockabilly band prior to his 1960 discovery by folklorist Ralph Rinzler (who played mandolin in the Greenbriar Boys), and while I knew that Rinzler had prevailed on Doc to just play traditional music on acoustic guitar (and banjo), I was unaware of how restricted Doc felt as a musician during the years he worked with Rinzler. By the time of my first Doc Watson concert a decade later, it was a given that Doc would move seamlessly from a traditional folksong, to a Mississippi John Hurt blues, to a Jimmie Rodgers country song or a contemporary folk-rooted song by Tom Paxton or Townes Van Zandt, and whatever else Doc might want to play – including an occasional rock ‘n’ roll classic. But, as the book reveals, that wasn’t the case in the early years when Rinzler would shape Doc’s recordings and concert sets.

Things began to ease up for Doc by the mid-1960s when teenaged Merle began to go out on the road with him. His son provided company and greatly eased the logistics of traveling for the blind musician.

But, as we learn from the book, the road was not kind to Merle either.

The Merle I remember from the stage was almost silent but for his guitar playing. Off stage, though, he relieved his own frustrations and loneliness through too much partying, substance abuse and promiscuity – losing his marriage in the process – culminating in the strange circumstances of the late-night tractor accident that claimed his life in 1985.

Gustavson tells the story of Merle’s struggles and his death candidly without either sensationalizing or suppressing what was undoubtedly that darkest chapter of Doc’s life.

As well as telling the story of Doc’s life, I particularly enjoyed the way Gustavson provided the context surrounding the story, from the descriptions of Appalachian mountain life when Doc was growing up to the realistic portraits of the music scene during the long decades of Doc’s career.

Gustavson tells Doc Watson’s story, from boyhood through to his later years, well. The writing is crisp and I appreciated the sidebar style contextualization he built into the narrative. Even when discussing the seeming aloofness that Doc retreated into after Merle’s death, Gustavson writes with an understanding of the circumstances and always with the complete respect due to one of the greatest of all musical giants.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Paul Geremia – Love My Stuff

PAUL GEREMIA

Love My Stuff

Red House

paulgeremia.org

As I noted in my Sing Out! magazine review of his 2004 album, Love, Murder & Mosquitos, I was a teenager and Paul Geremia was in his mid-20s when I first encountered him at the Back Door Coffee House in Montreal, circa 1969 or ’70. Paul was certainly a factor in my developing a taste for traditional country blues and he’s remained one of my all-time favorite revivalists of pre-war blues traditions, and one of my favorite songwriters within the idiom. Now, after more than 40 dedicated years of playing the music, and despite the fact that he came from outside the culture that originally produced the genre, I am almost loath to still think of Paul as a revivalist; the blues have become as much a part of Paul’s essence as anyone who was born to them.

Love My Stuff is a great 18-song live collection built from many gigs recorded over a long period of time at various locations. While most of the tracks are from the past decade, a few stretch back about three decades. And while most of the performances are solo, Paul singing with his guitar and, sometimes, harmonica, the terrific swinging version of “Dr. Jazz,” a great old King Oliver tune from the 1920s – also done by Jelly Roll Morton – adds Rory MacLeod on bass, and Sleepy John Estes’ “Special Agent,” features Rich DelGrosso on mandolin, in effect playing Yank Rachell to Paul's Sleepy John.

A few of the other highlights include nifty versions of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Shuckin’ Sugar Blues” and “Silver City Bound,” Lead Belly's tribute to Blind Lemon; Blind Willie McTell’s “Savannah Mama,” featuring Paul’s soulful slide work; and a terrific version of “See See Rider,” one of the most popular of the early traditional blues songs featuring some great singing and guitar and harmonica playing.

The vast majority of these songs date from the pre-World War II era. But there are three examples of Paul’s excellent songwriting. “Cocaine Princess” is a clever kiss-off tune to a messed-up woman who wasn’t the woman of his dreams, while “Where Did I Lose Your Love,” is a blues for a woman who might have been. Then, on the infectious “Kick It In the Country,” he sounds like he might be singing to a woman who falls somewhere in between the princess and the woman whose love he lost.

I’ve seen Paul play lots of concerts over the past four decades – I booked him a lot at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I ran in the 1970s and ‘80s – and have never been disappointed at the beginning, middle or end of an evening. I’ll say the same about this live album. Paul Geremia is one of the great ones, he is.

--Mike Regenstreif

Coen Brothers to do film about Dave Van Ronk?

According to this Los Angeles Times blog, the Coen Brothers – Joel and Ethan – are working on a film script loosely based on the life of Dave Van Ronk. 

(Thanks to Mary Katherine Aldin for the blog link.)

According to the report, Dave’s posthumous book, The Mayor of MacDougal Street, written with Elijah Wald, is being used by the Coen Brothers as source material. That’s pretty cool. The last time Dave was in Montreal – in 1998 to perform at the jazz festival – he did a long interview with me on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio show that was one of the many sources Elijah drew on when putting the book together.

I first met Dave sometime around 1970 when he played at the short-lived Back Door Coffee House in Montreal. He was gracious then in answering all the questions that the teenaged me could throw at him. He also pointed me in some interesting directions in music to listen to.

Our friendship actually developed later in the mid-to-late-1970s when I was spending a few days at a time a couple of times per year in New York City and got to hang out with Dave in the Village and spend a few late nights and early mornings getting an education at the University-of-Dave Van Ronk’s Couch. Have a listen to Tom Russell’s piece, “Van Ronk,” on Hotwalker or The Tom Russell Anthology: Veteran’s Day, for an appreciation of what it meant to spend a night on Dave’s couch.

In the 1980s, Dave came up to Montreal several times to play at the Golem, the folk club I was running, and he would stay at the little apartment I had on Kensington Avenue. We’d sit up there too, arguing politics, and talking about music, and listening to music. Once, he made me play a particular solo from a Lester Young LP that I had over and over again.

Time spent with Dave Van Ronk taught me how to really listen to music. I mean really listen to music. (I should also say I learned a lot in that regard from David Amram and Rosalie Sorrels.)

The Mayor of MacDougal Street remains one of the best books I’ve read about the 1960s folk scene (and I’ve read a lot of them). And Dave’s many albums remain essential listening for me.

He was a friend of mine.

--Mike Regenstreif