Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Tuesday October 11, 2022: Remembering Loretta Lynn and Mary McCaslin

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/595/57903.html

Themes: Remembering Loretta Lynn and Mary McCaslin.

Legendary country singer Loretta Lynn (1932-2022) died on October 4 at age 90. Loretta Lynn came from humble beginnings as a coal miner’s daughter from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky. Her autobiography, the feature film that was based on it, and her signature song are called “Coal Miner’s Daughter.”

Loretta Lynn- Coal Miner’s Daughter

All Time Greatest Hits (MCA/Decca)

Eilen Jewell- I’m a Honky Tonk Girl

Butcher Holler: A Tribute to Loretta Lynn (Signature Sounds)

Ian & Sylvia- After the Fire is Gone

The Lost Tapes (Stony Plain)

Little Willies- Fist City

For the Good Times (Milking Bull)

Loretta Lynn- Whispering Sea

Full Circle (Sony/Legacy)

Rhiannon Giddens- She’s Got You

Tomorrow is My Turn (Nonesuch)

Emmylou Harris & The Nash Ramblers- Blue Kentucky Girl

Ramble in Music City: The Lost Concert 1990 (Nonesuch)

April Verch- You Ain’t Woman Enough

Once a Day (Slab Town)

Loretta Lynn- Who’s Gonna Miss Me?

Full Circle (Sony/Legacy)

Mary McCaslin (1946-2022) was a folksinger, songwriter and pioneering open-tuning guitarist, who died on October 2 at age 75 following a seven-year battle with progressive supranuclear palsy. Mary was an old friend who I first met, circa 1973, when we both became part of a circle of friends centered around The Barn in North Ferrisburgh, Vermont, then the headquarters of Philo Records.

Mary McCaslin- Music Strings/Oh Hollywood

Way Out West (Philo)

Caroline Doctorow- Way Out West

I Carry All I Own: The Songs of Mary McCaslin (Narrow Lane)

Stan Rogers- Down the Road

From Coffee House to Concert Hall (Fogarty’s Cove)

Sneezy Waters- Circle of Friends

Sneezy Waters (Sneezy Waters)

Mary McCaslin- Young Westley

Way Out West (Philo)

Mary McCaslin & Jim Ringer- The Bramble and the Rose

The Bramble and the Rose (Philo)

Mary McCaslin- Suzanne

Rain: The Lost Album (Bear Family)

Mike Regenstreif & Mary McCaslin (1999)

Mary McCaslin- Ballad of Weaverville

Prairie in the Sky (Philo)

Caroline Doctorow- Back to Salinas

I Carry All I Own: The Songs of Mary McCaslin (Narrow Lane)

Tom Russell- Prairie in the Sky

Song of the West: The Cowboy Collection (HMG)

Mary McCaslin- My Love

Prairie in the Sky (Philo)

Mary McCaslin- Someone Who Looks Me

Broken Promises (Philo)

Mary McCaslin- Old Friends

Old Friends (Philo)

Next week: Songs of Jimmie Rodgers.

Find me on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Martin Grosswendt & Susanne Salem-Schatz – Old Songs, New Hats

MARTIN GROSSWENDT & SUSANNE SALEM-SCHATZ

Old Songs, New Hats

martingrosswendt.com

Martin Grosswendt, whose recordings over the years have appeared all too rarely, has been one of my favorite blues artists for about four decades. He is also rather accomplished at various other traditionally based roots styles and his eclecticism is more than evident on this seven-song, 22-minute EP marking the first release from his duo with Susanne Salem-Schatz as they draw on blues, real deal country music and contemporary folk music.

Martin and Susanne are a self-contained unit with Martin on guitar and banjo, Susanne on guitar and mandolin, and both trading lead and harmony vocals. Among my favorite tracks is Martin’s version of Larry Murray’s great song about an old Cajun barroom singer, “Mama Lou.” I’m sure I must have heard Martin backing up our mutual friends Jim Ringer and Mary McCaslin on “Mama Lou” at some point back in the 1970s.

Other highlights include “How Can You Have the Blues,” with Martin as Georgia Tom and Susanne as Kansas City Kitty, and Susanne’s take on the classic blues “After You’ve Gone.”

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Martin Grosswendt – Payday!

MARTIN GROSSWENDT

Payday!

martingrosswendt.com

In 2004, reviewing Call and Response, Martin Grosswendt’s second album in Sing Out! magazine, I wrote, “Hey Martin, I surely do not want to wait another 25 years for your third album.” Yes, that superb sophomore album came out a quarter-century after Dog on a Dance Floor, released by Philo Records in its pre-Rounder Vermont era.

Well, the wait for Payday! Martin’s third album, was considerably shorter at only a decade, but still too long – but, like its predecessor, it was well worth the wait.

The Philo studio in Vermont was about a two-hour drive from Montreal and it was one of my main stomping grounds for much of the 1970s. I first met Martin there, circa 1973 or ’74, when he was recording with artists like Bruce “Utah” Phillips, Mary McCaslin, Jim Ringer, Tom Mitchell and many others. I don’t think he’d turned 20 yet, but I knew from the first time I heard him play that he was already one of the finest interpreters of traditional country blues (and other kinds of music as well).

Coming about 40 years after that first encounter, Payday! is the work of a masterful musician who performs songs drawn from the great blues legends – and from several contemporary songwriters, including himself – with a deep-from-the-well authenticity and intensity that is rarely achieved by contemporary interpreters. And that authenticity applies to his singing as much as it does to his playing.

While it’s a completely solo album – Martin plays guitar on most tracks but switches to banjo or fiddle occasionally – there is a fullness to Martin’s arrangements that makes other musicians unnecessary.

While he can growl with the best of them – as on his own song “Liquored Up and Twisted,” where his solo guitar seems like a full Chicago-style band – Martin is one of those too-rare artists who can be tender in his singing and bring an appreciation of the real poetry of the blues. This is particularly evident in his masterful interpretations of such songs as Mississippi John Hurt’s “Payday,” “Delia,” and Uncle Dave Macon’s “Mournin’ Blues,” a slowed down, sorrowful version of “Morning Blues,” that brings new meaning to the song.

Martin’s inventive use of the banjo on Muddy Water’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and J.B. Lenoir’s “Down in Mississippi,” gives those songs such a different spin from the originals that I hear them, too, in whole new lights.

And the instrumental fiddle medley of his own “Blues for Danny Poullard” and Joseph “Bébé” Carriere’s “Blue Runner” beautifully combines Cajun and blues influences.

Two of my favorites on the album are contemporary songs I first heard Martin perform live decades ago. His versions of Richard Thompson’s “Down Where the Drunkards Roll” and Bobby Charles’ “Tennessee Blues” are both definitive and beautiful.

Hey Martin, I surely do not want to wait another decade for your fourth album.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Tom Russell – Midway to Bayamon; Tonight We Ride; The Western Years

Tom Russell – who I’ve often referred to as the finest singer-songwriter of my generation, the songwriters who emerged 10 to 15 years after Bob Dylan – will release his latest folk opera, The Rose of Roscrae, next year. It’s an album I fully expect to be one of the major folk-rooted or folk-branched releases of 2015. This year’s three releases from Tom are trips into the archives – one of them an essential addition to the Tom Russell discography; the other two fine introductions or reminders of his contributions to contemporary cowboy culture.

TOM RUSSELL
Midway to Bayamon
Frontera Records
fronterarecords.com 

The essential release is Midway to Bayamon, a 25-song, 80-minute, collection of rarities recorded between 1982 and 1992. Most of the tracks on Midway are taken from two cassette-only releases that were sold at gigs back in the day, As the Crow Flies from 1985 and Joshua Tree from 1987, both featuring the Tom Russell Band, a crackerjack unit that included such great musicians as guitarist Andrew Hardin and multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin. There are also a couple of tracks released as 45s back in the day, a Kerrville Folk Festival campfire recording, and some previously unreleased recordings.

While I know many of these songs from other Tom Russell albums, it’s a treat to hear first versions of such great songs like “The Road to Bayamon,” “Navajo Rug” and “Mezcal,” and several songs I’d never heard before including “Common Strangers,” “A Cajun Lullaby,” “The Lady Loves the Gambler,” which could have been a sequel to Mary McCaslin and Jim Ringer’s “Ballad of Weaverville,” “Lights of Oslo,” which I hear as a different chapter in the story that gave us “St. Olav’s Gate,” and “Juarez, A Polka Town,” a cool Tex-Mex instrumental that foreshadows one of the musical directions Tom would go down years later.

Among the other highlights from Midway to Bayamon are a version of “Denver Wind,” a song from Tom’s duo years in the ‘70s with Patricia Hardin that he sings in duet with Nanci Griffith, and “Amelia’s Railroad Flat,” a song of Tom’s that’s best known through the singing of Katy Moffatt.

TOM RUSSELL
Tonight We Ride: The Tom Russell Cowboy Anthology
Frontera Records 
fronterarecords.com

 Cowboy songs have long been an important facet of Tom’s repertoire and Tonight We Ride: The Tom Russell Cowboy Anthology is a compelling 19-song, 78-minute collection including classics like “Navajo Rug” and “Gallo del Cielo,” both done here as duets with Ian Tyson, “The Sky Above, the Mud Below,” heard here as a duet with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the hilarious “Tonight We Ride,” “The Banks of the Musselshell,” “Zane Grey” and “Alkali.”

Also included are great versions of several great songs Tom didn’t write including Lillian Bos Ross and Sam Eskin’s “South Coast,” a song that likely inspired Mary McCaslin and Jim Ringer to write the aforementioned “Ballad of Weaverville,” Joe Ely’s “Indian Cowboy,” and the traditional “El Llano Estacado.”

The version of “El Llano Estacado” is a duet with Brian Burns I’d never heard before. There are also previously unreleased versions of several songs including “The Rose of the San Joaquin,” “Rayburn Crane” and “Alberta Blue,” a song inspired by the province of my birth that I don’t recall ever hearing before.

TOM RUSSELL
The Western Years
RockBeat Records
rockbeatrecords.com

The Western Years is a 2-CD, 34-song collection – including several overlaps from Tonight We Ride – that includes both cowboy songs and other songs set in the west.

Most of the recordings come from Tom Russell albums of the past 15 or so years including several from The Man from God Knows Where, Tom’s 1999 folk opera that I still consider to be the best folk album of the past 25 or more years. There are also live versions of several songs including the always exciting “Gallo del Cielo.”

While most of the songs are Tom’s originals, there are a number of definitive covers including Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” Woody Guthrie’s “East Texas Red,” Allan Fraser’s “Dance Hall Girls,” a classic from the Montreal folk scene of the early-1970s, Jim Ringer’s rewrite of the traditional “Tramps & Hawkers,” Steve Young’s setting of Steven Vincent Benet’s poem “Ballad of William Sycamore,” Mary McCaslin’s “Prairie in the Sky,” and a pair of great Bob Dylan songs: the relatively obscure “Seven Curses,” which feels like a traditional folk song, and the epic “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” on which Tom trades verses with Eliza Gilkyson and Joe Ely.

For the uninitiated, either or both of Tonight We Ride and The Western Years will make a great introduction to the cowboy and western sides of Tom’s writing and repertoire. Although not essential to Russell fans who have the original albums these songs are drawn from, they still make for great listening. And the alternate versions of some of the songs make them feel fresh even for folks like me who know these songs backward and forward.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif