Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – November 19, 2024: Immigration, Part 1 – The Man from God Knows Where

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/595/67731.html

Theme: Immigration, Part 1 – The Man from God Knows Where.

As I wrote in Sing Out magazine in 1999 … Thomas Russell was a leader of the United Irish Rebellion in the 1790s. Two centuries later, singer and songwriter Tom Russell was playing a gig in Downpatrick, Ireland when he was approached by an old man in a bar. “Thomas Russell,” he said, “we hung you across the road in 1798.” Tom bought the old man a pint of beer and heard the story of his namesake and of the narrative poem about him called “The Man from God Knows Where.”

For several years prior to that encounter, Tom had been working on a song-cycle that began when a phrase, “American primitive man in an American primitive land,” occurred to him. Originally, Tom conceived the piece as a long tone-poem that would tell some of the history of America absent from the standard history texts. But as he wrote, Tom soon recognized that his own family’s history would provide much of the raw material he needed to tell a compelling story of immigration and the pursuit of the American Dream.

So, more than 200 years after Thomas Russell’s hanging, the man from God knows where is resurrected to observe and to chronicle the struggles, tragedies and joys of the Russells and Malloys who immigrate to the United States from Ireland in the nineteenth century, and of the Larsens and Olsens who come from Norway, and of their lineage through to today’s Tom Russell.

      

Tom Russell’s The Man from God Knows Where is more than just a song-cycle, it’s a fully realized folk-opera featuring Tom and a superb cast of American, Irish and Norwegian singers. Using singers with authentic Irish, Norwegian and rural and urban American accents helps provide authenticity to the voices of Russell’s ancestors and to the other characters who are brought to life in the folk-opera. As well, Tom frequently utilizes distinctly Irish and Norwegian instruments and musical forms to complement the more familiar American folk styles that run through the score to The Man from God Knows Where.

Tom wrote most of the songs we hear in The Man from God Knows Where. There are also some traditional folksongs, a song written by David Massengill, and a poem by Walt Whitman.

Tom Russell- The Man from God Knows Where

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Iris DeMent- Wayfarin’ Stranger

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell & Iris DeMent- Patrick Russell

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Dolores Keane- Mary Clare Molloy (American Wake)

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Dave Van Ronk- The Outcast

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Sondre Bratland & Iris DeMent- Ambrose Larsen

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell & Dolores Keane- The Dreamin’

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Sondre Bratland & Kari Bremnes- The Old Northern Shore

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell & Walt Whitman- The Man from God Knows Where/America

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Kari Bremnes- Anna Olsen

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell- Rider on an Orphan Train

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Iris DeMent- Acres of Corn

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell- The Man from God Knows Where

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell- Sitting Bull in Venice

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Iris DeMent & Kari Bremnes- The Old Rugged Cross

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Kari Bremnes- Anna Olsen’s Letter Home

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Sondre Bratland- Eg er framand

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Dolores Keane & Iris DeMent- When Irish Girls Grow Up

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell- Casey Jones

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell- Chickasaw County Jail

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Knut Reiersrud- Wayfarin’ Stranger (Passage of Time)

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell & Iris DeMent- Throwin’ Horseshoes at the Moon

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell- The Man from God Knows Where

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Dave Van Ronk- The Outcast (revisited)

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Iris DeMent- Wayfarin’ Stranger (revisited)

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

Tom Russell & Iris DeMent- Love Abides

The Man from God Knows Where (HighTone)

“Wayfarin’ Stranger” is one of the recurring themes in The Man from God Knows Where so I used the last few minutes of the show to play a recent version of the song.

American Patchwork Quartet- Wayfaring Stranger

American Patchwork Quartet (Carolina Jasmine)

Next week: Immigration, Part 2.

--Mike Regenstreif

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Tuesday April 5, 2022: Remembering John Prine

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif finds connections and develops themes in various genres. The show is broadcast on CKCU in Ottawa on Tuesday afternoons 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 at home and can already be streamed on-demand by clicking on “Listen Now” at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/595/55771.html

Theme: Remembering John Prine (1946-2020). John died on April 7, 2020 from COVID-19 at age 73 – an early victim of the pandemic.

John Prine- Souvenirs
Souvenirs (Oh Boy)

Steve Goodman- Blue Umbrella
Jessie’s Jig & Other Favorites (Red Pajamas)
Bonnie Koloc- Clocks & Spoons
Timeless (Mr. Biscuit)
Tim Grimm- Sam Stone
Names (Wind River)
John Prine- Boundless Love
The Tree of Forgiveness (Oh Boy)

Reggie Harris- Hello In There
On Solid Ground (Reggie Harris Music)
Nanci Griffith with John Prine- Speed of the Sound of Loneliness
Other Voices/Other Rooms (Elektra)

John McCutcheon- The Night That John Prine Died
Cabin Fever: Songs from the Quarantine (Appalsongs)
Ellis Paul- Angel from Montgomery
Ellis Paul’s Traveling Medicine Show Vol. 1 (Rosella)
Leo Gillespie- Aimless Love
Leo Gillespie (Leo Gillespie)
John Prine & Iris DeMent- In Spite of Ourselves
In Spite of Ourselves (Oh Boy)

Rob Lutes- Rocky Mountain Time
Walk in the Dark (Lucky Bear)
Tim & Mollie O'Brien- Unwed Fathers
Sugar Hill Records: A Retrospective (Sugar Hill)
John Prine- Egg & Daughter Night, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone)
The Tree of Forgiveness (Oh Boy)

Bonnie Koloc- Sabu Visits the Twin Cities Alone
Timeless (Mr. Biscuit)
John Prine- Please Don’t Bury Me
Souvenirs (Oh Boy)
Mark Haines & Tom Leighton- That’s the Way the World Goes Round
Hand to Hand (Borealis)
Keith Sykes & John Prine- Everybody Wants to Feel Like You
Don’t Count Us Out (Syren)
John Prine- Spanish Pipedream
Live at The Other End, December 1975 (Rhino)

Folkapotamus- I Remember Everything
We’ll Dance Again (PhatCat)
John Prine- Fish and Whistle
Souvenirs (Oh Boy)
Johnny Cash- Paradise
Personal File (Columbia/Legacy)

John Prine- When I Get to Heaven
The Tree of Forgiveness (Oh Boy)

Next week: Songs and Conversation with Eliza Gilkyson

Find me on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Tom Russell – The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets

TOM RUSSELL

The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets

Frontera Records

tomrussell.com

fronterarecords.com

The first time I wrote about Tom Russell was in a review of his 1987 LP, The Road to Bayamon. I think I’ve written about every album he’s released since. At some point along the way I referred to Tom as the best singer-songwriter of my generation – the generation that came along 10 or 15 years after Dylan. It was a claim I repeated in 2008 when I wrote the long essay that accompanied Tom’s 2-CD career retrospective, The Tom Russell Anthology: Veteran’s Day and it is a claim that still resonates with me eight years later with the release of The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets.

This second volume of the Anthology is a generous 19-song, 79-minute set that includes several early songs, several previously-unreleased tracks, and many that were first released in the years since that first volume. The collection is a great introduction to Tom Russell neophytes and it has enough previously-unheard material – and a fresh-sounding sequencing – that makes it a great listen for longtime aficionados like me.

The set kicks off with an undated demo version of “Honkytonk Heart (Like Mine),” an infectious rockabilly tune that sounds like it could have been a hit for Elvis or Jerry Lee back in their Sun Records day. Then we hear a couple of great songs from the ‘80s: an alternate take of “Spanish Burgundy” from the Poor Man’s Dream sessions and a terrific live version from Lost Angels of Lyon of “The Road to Bayamon,” Tom’s vivid description of life in a traveling Puerto Rican carnival.

As I noted in my essay for the first volume of the Anthology, “I’m convinced that Tom’s folk-opera, The Man from God Knows Where, a song-cycle that documents the immigrant experience in America, is the most important folk recording by anyone in the past 25 or more years,” and the track from The Man from God included on the second volume is “Love Abides,” a duet with Iris DeMent, that was the finale to the folk-opera. Set along the borderlands of the United States and Mexico, it’s a beautiful song that contrasts tragedy with blessings, hope and love.

“When Sinatra Played Juarez,” from Borderland, featuring the masterful Tex-Mex accordion playing of Joel Guzman harkens back to decades ago when the Mexican city across the river from El Paso was a mecca for its nightlife and not a drug cartel warzone while in the rocking “Tijuana Bible” from Modern Art he tells the true life tale of a famous Hollywood murder case.

Three tracks follow with backing from Calexico from the 2009 album, Blood and Candle Smoke. On “East of Woodstock, West of Vietnam,” Tom recalls 1969 when – as the war in Vietnam raged, Neil Armstrong took his small step onto the moon, and 500,000 people sat in the Catskills mud for a three-day music festival – he went to Nigeria as a young academic to teach. The song “Nina Simone” references the great blues-jazz-folk singer but it’s not about Nina Simone per se. It’s about finding what you need in a voice that understands. Maybe for Tom in a bar in San Cristóbal, it was the voice of Nina Simone on the juke box. I know I’ve heard Nina Simone cut through to my soul when she sings about being “lost in the rain in Juarez” in a way I think Dylan would appreciate. Sometimes my “Nina Simones” have been Rosalie Sorrels or Billie Holiday or a dozen other singers who understand. In “Don’t Look Down,” Tom uses a tightrope walker’s advice as a starting point to reflect on past history, the meaning of life and love, and the future.

Then we hear a couple of tracks from the 2011 album, Mesabi. The title song, which begins with about 10 seconds of solo acoustic guitar picking out the melody line to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” is named for the Mesabi Iron Range in Minnesota, the area where Bob Dylan grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s. The song begins with a description of the kid that was the young Robert Zimmerman in Hibbing and then shifts into the 1960s and the kid who was the young Tom Russell listening to and being inspired by the troubadour kid singing “Don’t Think Twice” on his uncle’s record player. “Sterling Hayden” is a tribute, of sorts, to the tough guy actor, author and raconteur who mostly lived life on his own terms, famously expressing one major regret: naming names before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era. “I don't think you have the foggiest notion of the contempt I have had for myself since the day I did that thing,” Sterling Hayden wrote years later. Tom brings a variation of that quote into the song, which he sings as both a third-person narrator and as Hayden himself. Tom’s song refers to seeing Hayden interviewed on the Johnny Carson show. I can also vividly remember a series of fascinating interviews he did in the ‘70s with Tom Snyder on the Tomorrow show.

Two songs are from Aztec Jazz – Tom’s sublime live album with a chamber orchestra, the Norwegian Wind Ensemble – both of them originally released on Blood and Candle Smoke. “Guadalupe,” done beautifully with some gorgeous guitar lines by Thad Beckman and an orchestral arrangement highlighting the oboes, is a song that reveals more every time I hear it. And I’m not necessarily referring to new layers of understanding of what Tom was thinking when he wrote it. I mean what I hear and understand about my own truths and my own quests filtered through Tom’s words and the gorgeous melody. “Finding You” is a beautiful love song written for Nadine Russell, Tom’s wife, and is lushly arranged for the orchestra.

Four songs follow from 2015’s The Rose of Roscrae: A Ballad of the West, the third in Tom’s series of extraordinary concept albums (following The Man from God Knows Where and Hotwalker). In the Irish-influenced “The Rose of Roscrae,” the protagonist, Johnny Dutton, recalls leaving Ireland for America in the 19th century after a conflict with his lover’s father make it impossible for them to stay while in the folk-rocking “Hair Trigger Heart,” he reflects on his life as an outlaw in the (brief) time and place that was the old west. “He Wasn’t a Bad Kid When He was Sober,” deconstructs the myth of Billy the Kid and “Resurrection Mountain,” with vocal harmonies by the McCrary Sisters, is a gospel song that reflects on matters of life and faith.

The CD ends with two more songs I’d never heard before. The undated “Iron Eyes Cody” reflects on the life of an actor who played Indian roles in hundreds of western movies and TV shows – and was, perhaps, most memorably, the crying Native American in the anti-littering public service TV spot in the 1970s. Iron Eyes Cody, who died in 1999 at age 94, always claimed to be Native American but turned out to have been the son of Italian immigrants to the United States. Then Tom ends the set with “Where Do All the Cowboys Go?” a beautiful and fitting finale, sung as a duet with Eliza Gilkyson. The song was written for The Rose of Roscrae but not ultimately used on that project.

Mike Regenstreif & Tom Russell in Montreal (2012)

These songs on The Tom Russell Anthology 2: Gunpowder Sunsets leaves me in anticipation of whatever might be coming next from the best songwriter of my generation.

Note: Comments on some of the songs in this review have been taken from reviews I’ve written about the albums from which they originated.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Various Artists – Tulare Dust: a songwriters’ tribute to Merle Haggard (Expanded Edition)

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Tulare Dust: a songwriters’ tribute to Merle Haggard (Expanded Edition)
RockBeat 
fronterarecords.com

Tulare Dust: a songwriters’ tribute to Merle Haggard, co-produced by Tom Russell and Dave Alvin and originally released in 1994, was one of the very finest tribute albums of that era and featured a great collection of 15 roots artists singing their favorite songs from Merle Haggard’s impressive catalog.

Tulare Dust has recently been reissued as an expanded 2-CD set; the first CD is the original album while the second CD is live tracks taken from the CD release concert which featured about half the artists each doing their Haggard selection plus one of their own.

Dave Alvin nails the significance of Haggard in the liner notes to this new edition when he writes that Haggard “has always been one of the great American songwriters in the folk music tradition. Being in this folk tradition doesn’t necessarily just mean strumming an acoustic guitar in a coffee house, it can also mean learning your musical craft from your elders, then taking what you’ve learned and finding your own voice inside that musical and community tradition. It’s what Muddy Waters and Bill Monroe did. It’s what Hank Williams, Sam Cooke, Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan and Curtis Mayfield did. It’s exactly what Merle Haggard did.”

Haggard himself has paid tribute to some of those musical elders – notably Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills – who influenced him. But, as becomes obvious in listening to some of these songs, the influence of Woody Guthrie is also strongly felt in Haggard’s work. Listen to Tom Russell’s great medley of “Tulare Dust/They’re Tearing the Labor Camps Down” to understand that Haggard’s own family were among the waves of Okies who risked all of their do-re-mi trying to find a better life in California during the Dust Bowl era.

That Guthrie influence can also be heard in such songs as “Kern River,” sung from deep-in-the-traditional-well by Dave Alvin and “A Working Man Can’t Get Nowhere Today,” sung with conviction by Peter Case.

Some of my other favorite tracks include Iris DeMent’s world-weary version of “Big City”; Lucinda Williams’ heartbreaking version of the heartbroken “You Don’t Have Very Far to Go”; Marshall Crenshaw’s rendition of the separation song “Silver Wings”; and Steve Young’s sad version of “Shopping for Dresses,” Haggard’s portrait of loneliness.

Another highlight is R&B singer Barrence Whitfield’s very affecting take on “Irma Jackson,” Haggard’s poignant song about inter-racial love – a song that was taboo-breaking in the world of early-1970s country music.

Among the best of the songwriters’ original material on the second CD are Tom Russell’s always exciting “Gallo del Cielo,” Dave Alvin’s “King of California,” Billy Joe Shaver’s “Georgia on a Fast Train,” and Peter Case’s “A Little Wind (Could Blow Me Away),” about Elvis Presley's comeback concert, which was co-written by Tom Russell.

Tulare Dust: a songwriters’ tribute to Merle Haggard was a great album 20 years ago and is made even greater by the inclusion of the second live disc.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif