Jim Kweskin & Geoff Muldaur – Penny’s Farm

JIM KWESKIN & GEOFF MULDAUR

Penny’s Farm

Kingswood Records

jimkweskin.com

geoffmuldaur.com

When I started collecting records obsessively in the 1960s, the LPs by Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band were – and remain – among my favorites. Drawing on folk songs, blues, jazz and early pop and novelty songs, the LPs were filled with fun, deceptively sophisticated, and an entrée into the older traditions and source artists they were drawing on. Well over 50 years after the Kweskin Jug Band got together and 40-something years since they broke up, Jim Kweskin and band stalwart Geoff Muldaur have reunited for the sublime Penny’s Farm, an eclectic collection of folk-rooted and folk-branched songs played by a couple of masters whose interpretive skills have aged like fine whiskey. Jim and Geoff each take the lead vocal on about half the tracks.

The album opens with Jim’s version of the traditional “Diamond Joe,” a song Alan Lomax collected from Big Charlie Butler at the Parchman Farm prison in Mississippi in 1939, and that has become familiar through countless interpretations by artists ranging from Cisco Houston to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan. Jim begins singing a cappella and is then joined by Suzy Thompson’s powerful fiddling, Jim and Geoff’s guitars, Cindy Cashdollar’s Weissenborn guitar and Geoff’s harmonies.

Jim continues to shine whenever he takes the lead vocal. Among his highlights are “Down on Penny’s Farm,” one of several songs on the CD drawn from Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music, on which Jim plays banjo and Geoff is heard on pennywhistle; the infectious African song “Guabi, Guabi,” which he first recorded on a solo LP, Relax Your Mind, in 1965; a haunting version of “The Cuckoo,” also drawn from the Harry Smith Anthology and also a reprise from Relax Your Mind; and a couple of Mississippi John Hurt songs, “Louis Collins (Angels Laid Him Away) – which Philadelphia Jerry Ricks once told me was John Hurt’s very favorite of his own songs – and “Frankie,” a variant of “Frankie and Johnny (or Albert).”

Geoff’s first lead vocal is on “The Boll Weevil,” another folk song collected by Lomax that has become a folk music standard in countless versions. This version is among the best I’ve heard. Geoff is playing six-string banjo and is ably supported by Jim on harmony vocals and guitar, Suzy on fiddle, Cindy on Dobro and Kevin Smith on bass.

Geoff, too, shines, whenever he’s at the lead vocalist’s mic. His highlights include Henry Thomas’ “Fishing Blues,” also drawn from the Harry Smith Anthology; “Just a Little While to Stay Here,” a New Orleans funeral song Geoff recorded earlier on his wonderful album, The Secret Handshake; a couple of Beale Street Sheiks numbers, “Sweet to Mama” and “Downtown Blues” (Geoff first recorded “Downtown Blues” in 1967 on the Kweskin Jug Band LP See Reverse Side for Title); and a fun version of Mississippi John Hurt’s “C-h-i-c-k-e-n.”

My very favorite of Geoff’s tracks, though is his version of Bobby Charles’ beautiful “Tennessee Blues,” a song he recorded more than 40 years ago on Geoff Muldaur is Having a Wonderful Time. Van Dyke Parks joins the ensemble on accordion on this version of the song.

And while Geoff may have been having a wonderful time on that long-ago solo LP, I’ve been having a wonderful time listening to Jim and Geoff both having a wonderful time on Penny’s Farm.

I’ll also mention that the CD package includes an appreciation of Jim and Geoff and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band by John Sebastian and informative song notes by Mary Katherine Aldin.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Theodore Bikel – While I’m Here

THEODORE BIKEL

While I’m Here

Red House Records

redhouserecords.com/artists/Theodore-bikel

(This is an expanded version of a review published in the September 26, 2016 issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin.)

There is no doubt that Theodore Bikel – who died last year at age 91 – was one of the greatest Jewish actors and folksingers of our time. This new 2-CD collection highlights both aspects of Theo’s distinguished career.

The first CD is a compelling 62-minute set of spoken word pieces, recorded not long before he died, in which Theo – with his actor’s skill – tells stories from his long life and career. Among other stories, we hear about his relationship to Judaism, his move as a young man to pre-state Palestine, his early years as an actor in Israel and London, his move to America, his passion for social justice causes, his love of Yiddish language and culture and more.

The second CD is a collection of folk and Broadway songs – more than half of them specifically Jewish folksongs sung in Yiddish, Hebrew and Ladino – drawn from various sources recorded over many years. Many of them are recent recordings, which show that Theo never lost any of his ability to communicate the essence of a song, while some date back to the 1960s.

“Partizaner-Marsh,” “Erev Shel Shoshanim,” “Un Az Der Rebi Tantz,” and “Oh Freedom,” the African-American civil rights anthem Theo recorded at a 1965 synagogue concert, are just a few of the many highlights from these songs. Others include “Wasn’t That a Might Day,” Theo’s song about Hurricane Katrina that he based on “Wasn’t That a Mighty Storm,” a song about the hurricane and flood in Galveston, Texas in 1900 that killed thousands of people, and “When I’m Gone,” Phil Ochs’ song about needing to get things done and living life to its fullest while we can. The album’s title, While I’m Here, comes from the refrain to Phil’s song.

Theodore Bikel accomplished so much while he was here and these two CDs are a wonderful summation.

Kudos to producers Michael Stein, Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer for assembling this excellent set and to music historian Mary Katherine Aldin for her excellent notes.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Dave Van Ronk – Hear Me Howl, Live 1964

DAVE VAN RONK

Hear Me Howl

RockBeat

rockbeatrecords.com

As I’ve noted before, the late, great Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) was one of my teachers. I never took a guitar lesson from him but I learned a lot from him about the history of music – about Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt, Bertolt Brecht and many other seminal figures, and about a Greenwich Village scene that was happening about a dozen years or so before I first got there.

I first met Dave sometime around 1970 when he played at the short-lived Back Door Coffee House in Montreal. He was more than gracious in chatting with the teenaged me and in answering any and all the questions that this fascinated kid could throw at him. He also pointed me in some interesting directions in music to listen to.

A few years later, an actual friendship developed when we’d meet regularly at folk festivals, on trips that I took to New York City in the mid-‘70s to early-‘80s, and on his trips to Montreal to play at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I ran in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I spent a few late nights sitting on Dave’s couch in New York, and a few more when he sat on my couch in Montreal, as we listened to music, talked about music and occasionally argued about politics.

More than the history of music, Dave taught me how to listen to music – I mean really listen to music. How to give the music I was listening to the attention it deserved. I remember one night in the 1980s when he was staying with me during a visit to Montreal to play at the Golem, he had me listen to a Lester Young saxophone solo on an LP that I had over and over again until I fully understood and appreciated some point Dave wanted me to understand about the solo.

Hear Me Howl, Live 1964 was recorded in concert at Indiana State University in Bloomington about six years before the first time I heard Dave live. By then, though, Dave was already hugely influential and a Greenwich Village legend known as “The Mayor of MacDougal Street.” As Bob Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, about his own early days in the Village a couple of years earlier, “Van Ronk could howl and whisper, turn blues into ballads and ballads into blues. I loved his style. He was what the city was all about. In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the street, he reigned supreme.” Although I’ve listened to all of Dave’s albums from those days countless times, and have Dave’s studio (and live) versions of almost all of these songs  – in fact, multiple versions of some of them – it’s still a treat to hear this never-before-released concert recording.

The 2-CD set includes such signature songs as “Green, Green Rocky Road,” “Cocaine Blues,” “He was Friend of Mine,” “Candy Man” and “St. James Infirmary” – numbers that I think Dave included in almost every concert I ever saw him do (and there were many in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s).

The set also shows just how varied Dave’s repertoire already was by 1964. Along with the expected doses of blues – Dave was one of the earliest and always one of the best of the blues revivalists – there are masterful performances of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song”; a setting of William Butler Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus” learned from Judy Collins; “St. Louis Tickle,” a ragtime piece adapted by Dave for the guitar; and Billie Holiday’s classic “God Bless the Child.”

Some other favorites on Hear Me Howl include Jelly Roll Morton’s “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” (that I have a decent collection of Morton’s recordings on my shelves is because of Dave), two songs – “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” – learned from Bessie Smith recordings, the traditional folksong “Tell Old Bill,” and “One Meatball,” picked up from Josh White.

In addition to the 1964 concert recording, the second CD ends with a second previously-unreleased, and powerfully poignant version of “He was a Friend of Mine,” recorded in 1977 at the New York City memorial concert for Phil Ochs. 

The CD package also includes an excellent essay about Dave and the recordings by the always erudite Mary Katherine Aldin who co-produced these 50-year-old recordings for release with James Austin.

Like many other Dave Van Ronk collections, Hear Me Howl is an album I know I’ll return to often in the years to come.

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--Mike Regenstreif