Katie Moore & Andrew Horton – Six More Miles

KATIE MOORE & ANDREW HORTON

Six More Miles

katiemoore.ca

After several solo albums, Montreal-based country and folk singer-songwriter Katie Moore is joined by Andrew Horton for Six More Miles, a lovely set of (mostly) sad duets of eight country and folk classics and four original songs – two each by Katie and Andrew.

Katie and Andrew have a musical history together. Andrew played in Yonder Hill, a bluegrass band from about a decade ago that was fronted by Katie, Dara Weiss and Angela Desveaux, and has since played and sung in Katie’s bands. He also plays bass and sings harmony and occasional lead vocals in Notre Dame de Grass. They have developed a seemingly natural ease at singing together as lead and harmony vocalists.

They lead off the album with the title track. A lesser known Hank Williams composition, “Six More Miles (to the Graveyard)” sets the sad tone for the album as the narrator – Katie and Andrew singing in harmony – prepares to say a last farewell to his (her) “darling.”

A couple of my other favorites include a gorgeously haunting version of Bill Monroe’s “The One I Love is Gone,” that seems to come from deep in the well, and Shel Silverstein’s older but wiser song “A Couple More Years.”

Although there is a slow pace to most of these songs (they are, after all, sad songs), the pace does pick up on the traditional murder ballad (and sad story) “Wild Bill Jones” and the Carter Family classic “Lover’s Return.”

As mentioned, Katie and Andrew each contribute a couple of original pieces and these blend seamlessly with the classics. Katie’s “When We Reach the Valley” could easily be mistaken for an old-time country song while her “Blue Days” is an achingly beautiful song of lost love. Andrew’s “Since My Baby Been Gone” could be a companion song to “Blue Days,” while his “Owen’s Lullaby” is a gentle guitar composition – the album’s only instrumental – presumably written to send a baby off to sleep.

Katie and Andrew on vocals and guitars are ably and unobtrusively supported by Joe Grass on Dobro, mandolin and guitar; Alex Kehler on nyckelharpa (a bowed Swedish instrument) and fiddle; and Sage Reynolds on bass.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Doug McArthur – Tears Like Rain

DOUG McARTHUR

Tears Like Rain

dougmcarthur.ca

My direct involvement in the folk music scene started circa 1970 when I began volunteering at the Yellow Door, a Montreal coffee house that recently celebrated its 50th anniversary with a marvelous homecoming concert that I helped to MC.

Doug McArthur was one of the artists that I first encountered at the Yellow Door. He was playing there one weekend in the early-‘70s when a girl named Debbie brought her Sweet 16 birthday party to the Yellow Door. While Debbie may have wanted to hear folk music, most of her friends couldn’t have cared less; so it wasn’t the normally attentive audience we were used to in that little basement folk club. Doug, though, took it in stride, played the night and later parlayed the story of “Debbie’s Birthday Party” into a hilarious comedy routine.

“Tears Like Rain” was one of the songs I remember hearing Doug play at the Yellow Door in those days. It had opening lines, “Mr. Conductor, your train runs too slow, I paid for my ticket, I’m ready to go” and a chorus, “Oh Lord, tears like rain, Linda’s got the blues again,” that have stuck with me as an earworm for about 45 years. The earworm would always hit whenever I’d be on a train – particularly while the train sat in the station. For some reason, though, Doug never released the song on any of the albums he’s done over the years and I don’t recall hearing him do it live after the ‘70s.

Finally, though, the song has turned up as the title track of Tears Like Rain, a marvelous 10-song, 45-minute collection that includes several previously-released songs along with the newly-released material.

This version of “Tears Like Rain” has a swampier arrangement than I remember from the Yellow Door, but the almost-spoken lyrics remain compelling and it’s great to hear the full song again.

Among my other favorites on this CD is “Stumble From Vesuvio,” originally recorded on Angels of the Mission Trail, an elegant song-cycle Doug recorded with Jeffra that evokes earlier times in California. “Stumble From Vesuvio” imagines a literary café in San Francisco where time-out-of-place writers like Jack Kerouac, Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London mingle.

Another old favorite is “Boots & Saddles” – this version rearranged and rerecorded – a song set at a roadside diner and gas station run by Betty and Joe. Bill Monroe stops there in 1949 and Elvis Presley eight years later. Betty and Joe wish they could leave with Bill or Elvis – but they can’t. In the final verse, Doug represents all the singer, songwriters and musicians who, years later, are inspired by the likes of those legends.

Among the other highlights are “The Morning I Left Galway,” a beautiful song about leaving that city in Ireland (it could be sung by an emigrant leaving home or even by a tourist captivated by the city and country) and “The Big Canoe,” a spoken-word piece set against atmospheric music that draws on folkloric legends (or perhaps imagined folkloric legends) inspired by the river that runs through Wakefield, Quebec, the village north of Ottawa where Doug lives, and the Algonquin indigenous people who traditionally lived in the area.

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--Mike Regenstreif

The Del McCoury Band – Del and Woody

THE DEL McCOURY BAND

Del and Woody

McCoury Music

woodyguthrie.org/projects/DelandWoody.htm

As I’ve noted before, “Woody Guthrie’s astounding writing career – not just songs; also books, poems, letters, newspaper columns and more – was brief, less than 20 years. He began in the mid-1930s and it was over by about 1954 when he was hospitalized with Huntington’s disease, the hereditary neurological disease that eventually robbed him of his life in 1967 at just 55.

“It wasn’t too much time after Woody’s death that I, as a teenager, discovered his songs, books and records. I’ve been listening and reading for [almost 50] years. More recently, I’ve been fascinated with the work that Nora Guthrie has been doing to bring the thousands of her father’s unheard songs back to life.

“When I first began listening to Woody Guthrie records, and to others doing Woody Guthrie songs, back in the 1960s, it was commonly said that Woody was so driven to write that he must have written about a thousand songs. Through Nora’s work at the Woody Guthrie Archives, we now know there were many more songs, about 3,000, and most of them have never been heard. Whatever tunes or melodies Woody wrote or adapted for them are forgotten or were never known.

“Over the past two decades, some of these songs have come to life in new musical settings by a wide variety of artists – some in album-length projects, some in one-off settings. Among my favorite album-length projects have been Wonder Wheel by the Klezmatics, Ticky Tock by the German artist Wenzel, and Note of Hope by various artists in collaboration with Rob Wasserman. What never fails to astound me is how wide-ranging Woody’s writing was – all of these newly come-to-light songs revealing more clues into the Guthrie mystery – and how adaptable his writing was to so many different styles and musical genres and how it continues to speak to very varied artists.”

Bluegrass legend Del McCoury is another of Nora’s great choices for setting Woody’s lyrics to music. Steeped in traditional bluegrass – he played guitar and sang lead vocals with Bill Monroe and the Blue Grass Boys for a time in the early-1960s – and is widely regarded as one of bluegrass music’s greatest standard bearers. He’s been unafraid of looking for material beyond the bluegrass rules and he’s done some great collaborations with artists ranging from Steve Earle to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

On Del and Woody, Del adds a dozen “new” songs to the Guthrie canon while creating one of the best bluegrass albums I’ve heard in years. The lyrics are all Woody’s set to melodies by Del.

The album begins in terrific form with “The New York Trains,” a song Woody wrote in 1940 after his first family – wife Mary Guthrie and their three kids – came by train from Texas to join him in New York. Woody humorously describes the family’s first exposure to New York’s expansive subway system.

Woody’s humor can also be seen in such songs as “Wimmen’s Hats,” a bumpkinny – but good-natured – spoof of women’s headwear; “Cheap Mike,” a complaint about a used car dealer who sold him a “‘48 motor on a ’32 frame”; and “Californy Gold,” a tale of a California Gold Rush prospector who loses his fortune to a gold digger.

Among the most poignant songs are “Left in This World All Alone,” sung by a man left without family or friends, and “Family Reunion,” in which Woody encourages families to stick together and support one another.

Other highlights include a love song, “Because You Took Me in Out of the Rain,” and “The Government Road,” sung from the perspective of an ex-con who finds employment building new roads.

Throughout the album Del, who sings lead and plays guitar, is supported by his virtuoso band – sons Ronnie McCoury on mandolin and Rob McCoury on banjo, Jason Carter on fiddle and Alan Bartram on upright bass, all of whom sing harmony vocals – perhaps the greatest traditional bluegrass band currently active.

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--Mike Regenstreif