Rory Block – Keepin’ Outta Trouble: A Tribute to Bukka White

RORY BLOCK

Keepin’ Outta Trouble: A Tribute to Bukka White

Stony Plain Records

roryblock.com

In 1974, when I was 20-years-old, I was a stage manager (area co-ordinator) at the Mariposa Folk Festival and one of the artists I got to work with that year at Mariposa was Booker “Bukka” White, a 68-year-old legend of the Delta blues. I wasn’t yet familiar with White’s recordings, but I knew some of his songs via recordings by Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk and Tom Rush. What I remember most, more than 40 years later, was White’s imposing presence sitting on stage with his steel-bodied National guitar, and the authority and power in his singing and slide playing. That June weekend in Toronto was the only time I got to see him play live. He died less than three years later.

Rory Block, who grew up in the folk music community in Greenwich Village, met White there in 1965, when she was about 15. “Watching him perform was transformative. Bukka had absolutely no mercy on the guitar and slammed it like Paul Bunyan wielding an axe,” she writes in the notes to Keepin’ Outta Trouble: A Tribute to Bukka White, the latest in her series of tribute albums to legendary blues artists she had the opportunity to know and learn from as a kid. Earlier releases in the series include tributes to Son House, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James.

While Rory has often included a song or two she wrote about those artists on these Mentor Series tribute albums, along with her versions of their classic songs, she brings many more of her own songs to this project than ever before. Of the 10 tracks, half are Bukka White classics and half are Rory’s original songs inspired, in some way by him.

She opens the album with a pair of original tracks. In “Keepin’ Outta Trouble,” she gives us a couple of scenes from (or imagined from) White’s life: a fight in a Mississippi barroom that gets him in trouble and a prison term at Parchman Farm that ends when he impresses the governor with his music. Then, in the gospel-influenced “Bukka’s Day,” we hear about his hard life of work growing up, the influence of the church, his becoming a musician and again, of that fight that put him in prison. Ultimately, it’s a piece of blues philosophy about the saint and the sinner in all of us.

Rory’s songs later in the album include “Spooky Rhythm,” in which she pictures White as an itinerant musician, “Gonna Be Some Walkin’ Done,” which was inspired by White’s guitar part to his song “Jitterbug Swing,” and by an off-hand comment he made on a record, and “Back to Memphis,” a tribute to the music White played in Memphis so many decades ago.

Booker "Bukka" White

Bukka White’s songs – covered with equal doses of respect for his original versions and Rory’s own creativity – include “Aberdeen Mississippi Blues,” “Parchman Farm,” and the often-covered “Fixin’ to Die Blues.”

My favorites of White’s songs in the set are the train songs, “New Frisco Train” and “Panama Limited,” a description of a train trip with the slide guitar duplicating the various sounds of the train as it makes it journey through the south.

Rory is the only musician and singer on the album but she sometimes fills out the sound by overdubbing more guitar parts, harmony vocals and creatively improvised percussion effects.

Like she had with the other albums in her Mentor Series tribute, Rory inspired me to pull Bukka White’s own recording off the shelf and listen again to that powerful musician I encountered at Mariposa so many years ago.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Garnet Rogers – Night Drive: Travels with My Brother

Night Drive: Travels with My Brother

A Memoir by Garnet Rogers

Tickle Shore Publishing

751 pages

garnetrogers.com

I first met and became friendly with the late Stan Rogers at the Mariposa Folk Festival in June 1975. We were friends for eight years – until he lost his life, along with 22 others, on June 2, 1983 in an airplane fire that forced an Air Canada flight en route from Texas to Toronto to make an emergency landing at the Cincinnati airport as Stan was returning home from the Kerrville Folk Festival. Over those eight years that I knew him, Stan rose from relative obscurity to become one of Canada’s greatest folksingers and songwriters.

About a decade after his death, a highly disappointing biography called An Unfinished Conversation: The Life and Music of Stan Rogers (now renamed Northwest Passage) by Chris Gudgeon was published. As I noted in 1993 in Sing Out! magazine, “As a friend, colleague and admirer of Stan Rogers, I looked forward to this book. I've long thought that someday someone will write a great book about his life and music. Unfortunately, despite its good intentions, this book isn't it.”

Well, it took another 23 years, but that great book about Stan’s life and music has finally arrived in the form of Night Drive: Travels with My Brother by Garnet Rogers. There is no one who knew Stan better. They grew up together – Stan was about six years older – and spent the last decade of Stan’s life constantly traveling together back and forth across Canada and through the United States, usually with a bass player in tow, as bandmates. On many occasions over the years, both publicly from the stage, and privately over late night beers in various locales when we’d talk about how things were going, I heard Stan say that Garnet was his best friend and most important musical influence.

Garnet Rogers and Stan Rogers (stanrogers.net)

In 85 short chapters, each a story in its own right, Garnet describes his years with Stan – from their youth in a working class family to their years on the road when there wasn’t much of a folk circuit – in vivid detail, with sometimes brutal honesty, and often laugh-out-loud humor. Despite its length (and the actual weight of holding up such a long book as I read), Night Drive: Travels with My Brother remained a compelling page-turner from start to finish.

I knew Stan and Garnet during the years when most of the book takes place. I was there for a few of the incidents Garnet writes about (not just in Montreal, but also in Philadelphia, Toronto, and at various folk festivals in Canada and the U.S.). I also knew (know) many of the people who weave in and out of the story and so many of them come to life on these pages with great authenticity. Reading the book put me right back in those years.

In the years after his death, Stan became a sort of mythologized hero figure. And while Gudgeon’s earlier book fed some of the myths, Night Drive: Travels with My Brother tells the real story of how hard it was to build and sustain a folk music career. Stan, and Garnet – and their parents, Valerie and Al Rogers, who put up their life savings to bankroll an independent record company that they ran from their home – as well as many peers who come and go through the story, cobbled together careers that may have included some terrific folk festivals in the summer months but also included long periods of almost no work or months of travelling from small coffeehouses to shitty bars and nobody-cares college gigs.

There are great stories about so many of those gigs (one of which concerns Stan’s first Montreal gig at the Golem, the folk club that I ran in the 1970s and ‘80s; more on that later) and there are so many stories about them, and about the road trips in getting to them, and the adventures and misadventures along the way.

Garnet writes with great affection about many friends who became part of the story – including fellow performers and folk music presenters. There were, of course, others who don’t come off well and in some cases he left them nameless, or in at least one particular case, used a thinly disguised anagram of the fellow’s first name. I recognized some of the unnamed people as people I knew and understood why Garnet left them unnamed.

While many of the negative depictions in the book matched my own memories of the individuals – including a well-meaning but incompetent agent I had warned Stan about before he began working with her on his early U.S. tours – one negative depiction in Night Drive: Travels with My Brother that made me somewhat uncomfortable was of Paul Mills, the CBC radio producer and guitarist (a.k.a. Curly Boy Stubbs), who produced all but one of Stan’s albums. For whatever reason, Garnet and Paul never got along and that is reflected in Garnet’s descriptions of the recording sessions and of the occasional live gigs when Paul became part of the onstage band. While I wasn’t actually at any of the recording sessions and have no dispute with Garnet’s own impressions, Stan always seemed enthused about his recording projects when I’d chat with him about what he’d recorded and what was coming out next. Back in the day, I only heard Stan speak glowingly about Paul, as a producer, as a musician and as a friend. I still listen to and appreciate the records they made together.

Earlier, I mentioned the brutal honesty employed by Garnet in telling the story of his years on the road with Stan. This is reflected in his descriptions of the inevitable conflicts borne of too many hours in a day and too many days of the weeks, months and years they spent cooped up travelling long distances on the road, too many nights in cheap motels, and too many bad gigs along the way. Garnet also writes honestly of the copious amounts of substance abuse (mostly alcohol) used to both alleviate the boredom of life on the road and to self-medicate for personal problems including Garnet’s clinical depression and Stan’s marital tensions.

As I mentioned earlier, one of the early chapters in Night Drive: Travels with My Brother is about Stan’s first gig at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I took over running in 1974. I met and first heard Stan at the 1975 Mariposa Folk Festival and booked him to play at the Golem on the first open date that fit both of our schedules. That turned out to be a weekend in February of 1976 on what turned out to be the coldest weekend of that winter (and, perhaps, the coldest weekend of all the years I ran the Golem). The description of coping with the cold in a car with no heat is classic.

Garnet did make a mistake in talking about the format of Golem gigs in the 1970s. Noting that the Golem was in Hillel House – the Jewish student centre at McGill University – he described the gig as being two nights: Friday and Sunday nights with a night off on Saturday because shows could not take place there on the Jewish Sabbath. It was actually a three-night gig: Thursday, Saturday and Sunday nights. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Fridays and ends after sundown on Saturdays – so Friday was the night off.

In early-1976, Stan was still a relatively unknown artist. Fogarty’s Cove, his first LP was still a year-and-a-half away. So the lack of fame and the intense cold combined to keep the crowds tiny over those three nights. Garnet remembers 13 people over two nights while I think it was closer to 20 people over three nights – numbers, I guess, that are close enough for folk music.

Garnet also tells a tall tale about Frank Wakefield playing at the Golem. A pretty funny story but totally apocryphal.

Mike Regenstreif and Garnet Rogers in Montreal (2006)

I had two stints running the Golem, from 1974 to 1976, and from 1981 to 1987. I had inherited the Thursday-Saturday-Sunday format from Saul Markowicz, who had founded the Golem in 1973. When I returned in 1981, it was for one-night gigs with popular artists doing two concerts in one night. When Stan played his final gig at the Golem in December 1982, he was selling out two shows a night. He was scheduled to return to the Golem again the following fall. Garnet, himself, played the Golem regularly as a solo artist after Stan's death.

Night Drive: Travels with My Brother made me laugh frequently and made me cry occasionally as it brought back some memories of my own and let me share in the so many more memories of the man who knew Stan Rogers better than anyone.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Stan Rogers – Fogarty’s Cove (reissue)

STAN ROGERS

Fogarty’s Cove

Fogarty’s Cove/Borealis

borealisrecords.com/artists/stan-rogers/

This review discusses the newly remastered and reissued version of Fogarty’s Cove, Stan Rogers’ first album.

As I noted in my review of The Very Best of Stan Rogers, Stan and I were friends for the last eight years of his life after meeting at the 1975 Mariposa Folk Festival. I invited him to come and play at the Golem, the Montreal folk club that I ran in the 1970s and ‘80s, and he played his first three-night gig there in February 1976.

Stan and I talked a lot that weekend about his artistic vision and the kind of records he’d like to make given the opportunity. As it happened, he got the opportunity to record his first LP later that year, thanks in no small part to the efforts of producer Paul Mills – who would go on to produce all but one of Stan’s albums – and the financial backing of Mitch Podolak, founder and then-artistic director of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, who bankrolled the production and release of Fogarty’s Cove.

Stan was, in my opinion, the finest folk-rooted songwriter that Canada has yet produced – and that was already more than obvious to me from the songs on Fogarty’s Cove – many of which he performed that February weekend at the Golem.

When he died at the so-very-young age of 33, Stan left behind a formidable body of work including several themed albums capturing specific regions of Canada and their distinctive people. He started that ongoing project with Fogarty’s Cove, about Atlantic Canada and its people. Along with several other albums, Stan went on to record Northwest Passage about the prairies and From Fresh Water about the Great Lakes region of Ontario. Eventually, he would have done projects about most, if not all, of Canada’s regions.

Stan’s parents both grew up in Nova Scotia and he spent much time there himself visiting relatives. No contemporary songwriter has captured Maritime life as genuinely as Stan did on Fogarty’s Cove (and in other songs that would later turn up on Turnaround, and two live recordings: Between the Breaks…Live and Home in Halifax). Whether it’s the lives of fishers and their families in songs like “Fogarty’s Cove” and “Make and Break Harbour,” the transformation of modern day Halifax in “Fisherman’s Wharf,” the played-out mining area in “The Rawdon Hills,” or the 18th century story he tells in “Barrett’s Privateers,” a song that seems so real and authentic you’d swear it was a time-tested traditional sea chantey.

Another highlight on the album is “Forty-five Years,” a beautiful love song inspired by his wife-to-be and “a day in Cole Harbour.” It would turn out to be one of Stan’s best-loved and most venerable songs.

I’ve listened to this album countless times. Stan played a cassette for me before it was released and I wore out at least a couple of copies of the original LP before moving on to the first CD version. But Fogarty’s Cove has never sounded as great as it does on this newly remastered version. It’s like hearing these amazing songs for the first time. Stan and accompanists Garnet Rogers and David Woodhead, his touring band of the time, and Curly Boy Stubbs (Paul Mills), Grit Laskin, Ken Whiteley, Bernie Jaffe and John Allan Cameron sound glorious.

Click here to read my first review of Fogarty’s Cove from the May 7, 1977 edition of The Montreal Gazette.

--Mike Regenstreif