Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – April 23, 2024: Songs of Shel Silverstein

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/595/64883.html

Theme: Songs of Shel Silverstein (1930-1999)

Shel Silverstein – who died of a heart attack in 1999 at age 68 – was a renaissance man: an author, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician, and playwright.

Shel Silverstein- Folk Singer’s Blues

Inside Folk Songs (Water)

Tom Paxton, Anne Hills & Bob Gibson- Sing for the Song

Best of Friends (Appleseed)

Bob Gibson- Whistlers & Jugglers

Makin’ a Mess: Bob Gibson Sings Shel Silverstein (Asylum)

Martin Simpson- In the Hills of Shiloh

Rooted (Topic)

Sarah Jarosz with Black Prairie- Queen of the Silver Dollar

Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein (Sugar Hill)

Shel Silverstein- Bury Me in My Shades

Inside Folk Songs (Water)

John Prine- This Guitar is for Sale

Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein (Sugar Hill)

The Irish Rovers- The Unicorn

The Best of The Irish Rovers (MCA)

Dr. Hook- Sylvia’s Mother

Gold (Crimson)

Johnny Cash- A Boy Named Sue

The Legend of Johnny Cash (American/Columbia/Legacy)

Shel Silverstein- 25 Minutes to Go

Inside Folk Songs (Water)

Gordon Lightfoot- On Susan’s Floor

Don Quixote (Reprise)

Bob Gibson- Stops Along the Way

Makin’ a Mess: Bob Gibson Sings Shel Silverstein (Asylum)

Lucinda Williams- The Ballad of Lucy Jordan

Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein (Sugar Hill)

Papa John Kolstad & Wildman Mike Turk- Beans Taste Fine

Beans Taste Fine (Wampus Cat)

Shel Silverstein- Have Another Espresso

Inside Folk Songs (Water)

The Folk Legacy Trio- The Mermaid

Homecoming (The Folk Legacy Trio)

Rosalie Sorrels- You’re Always Welcome at Our House

Be Careful, There’s a Baby in the House (Green Linnet)

Shel Silverstein- Boa Constrictor

Inside Folk Songs (Water)

Nanci Griffith- The Giving Tree

Twistable, Turnable Man: A Musical Tribute to the Songs of Shel Silverstein (Sugar Hill)

Bobby Bare- Rosalie’s Good Eats Café

Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends and Lies (RCA)

Bob Gibson- Living Legend

The Living Legend Years (Bob Gibson Legacy).

Next week: Remembering Pete Seeger.

--Mike Regenstreif 

Deborah Robins – Lone Journey

DEBORAH ROBINS

Lone Journey

Zippety Whippet Music

cdbaby.com/cd/deborahrobins

On Lone Journey, Deborah Robins offers a set of 23 lovingly performed traditional folksongs and composed songs that have mostly entered the folk tradition – sung and played front porch or kitchen table style – mostly solo or with occasional backup from Larry Hanks, her husband and usual performing partner.

Deborah has a lovely voice and accompanies herself solidly on nylon-string guitar and banjo-guitar (a banjo head with a guitar neck and strings so it essentially sounds like a banjo but plays like a guitar).

Among my favorite tracks on this generous set are a pretty version of “Tell Old Bill” (which I can’t listen to without remembering my late friend Dave Van Ronk); “Goodbye to My Stepstone,” a coming-of-age song sung from the perspective of a young person leaving home to make his or her own way in the world; “Take It Slow and Easy,” one of Jesse Fuller’s goodtime blues songs featuring Larry playing some fine Lead Belly-style 12-string guitar; and a sprightly version of “Dance, Boatman, Dance,” an infectious riverboat song learned from Bob Gibson.

Lone Journey is a nice reminder of the simple joys of traditional folk music.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Bob Dylan – Another Self Portrait (1969-1971)

BOB DYLAN
Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10
Columbia/Legacy 
bobdylan.com

I was 16 years old and heavily into Bob Dylan when Self Portrait was released in 1970. I knew every line of every song on every album he’d released in the 1960s and well remember the almost unanimous chorus of critical mud that was slung at the album.

“I once said I'd buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly,” wrote Greil Marcus in his Rolling Stone review that famously asked, “What is this shit?”

Well, despite what Marcus and other critics had to say – less than five years later, I’d write my own first music reviews for the Montreal Gazette – I bought Self Portrait. While I recognized that it was easily Dylan’s weakest album to date, there were a lot of songs on it that I did like and the album grew on me. Sure enough, it wasn’t in the same league as Blonde on Blonde or John Wesley Harding (my favorite Dylan album to that point), but I liked it and I’ve returned to it occasionally over the years.

Listening to the newly released Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 is revelatory. Although one track, a perfunctory version of “Minstrel Boy,” was recorded with The Band during The Basement Tapes period in 1967, the rest of the 35 songs date from 1969 to 1971 and includes outtakes, alternate versions, and alternate mixes from Nashville Skyline, Self Portrait, New Morning and Greatest Hits Vol. II – as well as demos and a couple of live tracks with The Band from the 1969 Isle of Wight concert.

There are Dylan songs, traditional folksongs and songs written by other songwriters. The set really shows how creative and interesting Dylan’s work of that period is and re-enforces my oft-stated opinion that most of Dylan’s work is very much part of the great folk continuum that reaches back to what the same Greil Marcus has called the “old weird America” of folksongs, blues and minstrelsy from the 19th and early-20th centuries, and which continues through and beyond the folk revival of the 1950s and ‘60s. As I wrote in my “Bob Dylan at 70” essay in 2011, Dylan never abandoned those traditions, he took them in new directions.

Mike Regenstreif and Tom Paxton

Before listening to Another Self Portrait as a whole from beginning to end, I went straight to a couple of songs written by old friends of mine that were recorded at the Self Portrait sessions but never released. Both Tom Paxton’s “Annie’s Going to Sing Her Song” and Eric Andersen’s “Thirsty Boots” are songs I’ve always loved. Tom and Eric, respectively, sang those songs at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I ran in the 1970s and ‘80s, and later as my guests on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio program.

“Annie’s Going to Sing Her Song” is one of three songs that Tom wrote about the mysterious Annie (the others are “When Annie Took Me Home” and “Has Annie Been in Tonight”). I long wondered about Annie and finally asked Tom about her during a songwriters’ workshop I was hosting at the Champlain Valley Folk Festival in 2001. It turned out that Annie was just Tom’s fictional creation. Dylan’s lovely version – with nice support from David Bromberg on guitar and Al Kooper on piano – is a nice nod to the man who was (in my opinion) Dylan’s greatest peer as a singer-songwriter on the Village folk scene.

Eric’s “Thirsty Boots,” also with Bromberg and Kooper, I think, is both a nice nod to Eric, but also

Eric Andersen and Mike Regenstreif

to the civil rights movement and the songs it inspired – a soundtrack to which Dylan himself contributed mightily.

I loved hearing Dylan doing the various traditional folksongs included in this set. Among the best are “Little Sadie,” a traditional Appalachian murder ballad, “Days of ’49,” a California gold rush ballad, and “Belle Isle,” a Newfoundland folksong, all stripped of the superfluous overdubs from the Self Portrait release; a beautiful version of “Pretty Saro”; a terrific version of “Railroad Bill” that I’m pretty sure is based on Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s version; “This Evening So Soon,” a version of “Tell Ol’ Bill,” that Dylan acknowledges picking up from Bob Gibson; “Tattle O’Day,” a version of “I Buyed Me a Little Dog” that sounds like it was picked up from Dave Van Ronk’s version; “House Carpenter," the British ballad with an arrangement built around Kooper's piano; and a variation of “Bring Me a Little Water (Sylvie)” that seems quite different from any of the many other versions I know.

Other tracks from Self Portrait that are completely rejuvenated by having the overdubs stripped off are “All the Tired Horses,” a pretty throwaway on which the back-up singers sing the only two lines over and over; the wordless “Wigwam”;  and “Copper Kettle,” a faux-folksong from the 1950s that Dylan likely picked up from the singing of Joan Baez.

Among the other highlights are the slower, alternate version of “If Not for You,” from the New Morning sessions featuring Dylan on piano and an unidentified violinist; the acoustic demo version of “Went to See the Gypsy” that leads off the first CD; a version of “Only a Hobo,” with Happy Traum playing banjo and singing harmony that was recorded at the sessions for the Greatest Hits Vol. II bonus tracks; and the demo of "When I Paint My Masterpiece" that ends the album. It's an appropriate coda to the collection for a songwriter who has created so many masterpieces over the past 50 years.

There are also a couple of interesting alternate mixes of tracks from New Morning. The title song is nicely punched up by a horn arrangement but the orchestral overdubs on “Sign on the Window” are a drag on the song. I much prefer the mix of “Sign on the Window” from the 1970 LP. I also much prefer the swinging hipster version of “If Dogs Run Free” from the LP over the alternate take included here.

Those last two minor quibbles aside, Another Self Portrait would have made for a great album 40 years ago and is a great album today.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Anne Hills – The Things I Notice Now: Anne Hills Sings the Songs of Tom Paxton

ANNE HILLS

The Things I Notice Now: Anne Hills Sings the Songs of Tom Paxton

Appleseed

annehills.com

The Things I Notice Now: Anne Hills Sings the Songs of Tom Paxton is the second excellent tribute album to Tom Paxton in less than two years and if I hadn’t reviewed Tim Grimm’s Thank You Tom Paxton in 2011, I’d want to begin this review of Anne Hills’ tribute album with the story of how Tom propelled me into my life in folk music, back in the late-1960s, when I was 14 or 15 (you can read the story and the review of Tim's album at this link).

Anne is about the same age as me and discovered Tom’s music at about the same time. We also both began working with Tom at about the same time in the early-1980s. I began producing annual concerts for Tom in Montreal and Anne began singing with him on records and on stage. She sings harmonies on a bunch of Tom’s albums and they briefly joined forces with the late Bob Gibson to form a trio called Best of Friends.

In 2001, Anne and Tom did an excellent CD of duets called Under American Skies. 2001 was the second of the two year stint that Robert Resnik and I booked and programmed the Champlain Valley Folk Festival in Burlington, Vermont and I made sure both Tom and Anne were at the festival so that I could program an Under American Skies concert with the two of them. It was a highlight of the festival.

And now Anne has recorded this wonderful set of a dozen Tom Paxton songs – some dating back to the 1960s, one heard for the first time here. Three of the tracks are duets with Tom.

The album opens with a jazzy version of “The Things I Notice Now,” the title track from one of Tom’s albums from the late-’60s, featuring some really nice piano playing by co-producer Scott Petito (who plays various instruments throughout the album) and a trombone solo and fills by Chris Brubeck, a classmate from the days Anne first discovered Tom’s songs. The track sets a high standard that is matched on each of the 11 songs that follow.

While it’s had to pick favorites, a few of the others would include “Mother,” a poignant song sung from the perspective of woman addressing the birth mother she never knew (as much as I like Tom’s version, this is a song that is even more compelling when sung by a woman); “Dogs At Midnight,” which paints a sad picture of a coal mining town and the slow death that is a consequence of miners’ breathing coal dust; and “Time to Spare,” a look back to youth and the changes the years bring.

The three duets with Tom are “Early Snow,” which reflects on an increasingly disappearing way of life; “Hold On To Me, Babe,” of the most beautiful of Tom’s early love songs; and “When Princes Meet,” an allegorical ballad about princes and kings who make wars and the poor men who must fight them. While the song dates from the time of the Vietnam War, and was certainly inspired by that war, it could well be about almost all of the wars that have been fought over the centuries.

The new song, “Redemption Road,” is a beautiful winter-of-life song that weds Tom’s lyrics to Geoff Bartley’s lovely melody. Geoff recorded it as an instrumental, just called “Redemption,” on his album, Blackbirds in the Pie.

Tom's catalog is among the deepest of any songwriter I know (and I know more than a few). So deep that Anne’s album has no songs in common with Tim Grimm’s tribute from last year, while the gorgeous love song, “Every Time,” is the only song in common with Carolyn Hester’s A Tom Paxton Tribute from 1999.

Pictured: Mike Regenstreif, Anne Hills and Tom Paxton at the 2001 Champlain Valley Folk Festival.

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And on Facebook. www.facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif