Last Forever – Acres of Diamonds; Trainfare home

LAST FOREVER

Acres of Diamonds

StorySound Records

storysoundrecords.com

In 1997, I was highly taken with Last Forever, a self-titled album by Last Forever, a project centered around composer-arranger Dick Connette and singer Sonya Cohen that included highly reimagined versions of traditional folksongs like “In the Pines” and “Ain’t Going Down to the Well No More” and new compositions of Dick’s that seemed inspired and informed by folk music. I played the album a lot on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio program.

They did a second album in 2000, Trainfare Home, which I loved just as much. I played it a lot on the radio show, reviewed it in Sing Out! magazine (see below), and did phone interviews with Dick and Sonya for the show.

Fifteen years later, Acres of Diamonds is a new and equally wonderful release from Last Forever. It’s an EP-length release – seven songs, 30 minutes – of more wonderfully reimagined folksongs and some new, but seemingly timeless, compositions of Dick’s.

The tour-de-force is the finale – variations on the traditional “Boll Weevil Blues,” an amazing 13-minute performance that begins with a string section playing classical-style variations on the folk music theme before the folk-style instrumentation and Sonya’s lovely, but oh so powerful, voice come in. Eventually, the folk and classical elements blend seamlessly leading to a hair-raising ending of Sonya’s vocalizations on top of a single violin bowing the very highest notes.

Although each of the other songs could well be cited as a highlight, I’ll mention “Lady Franklin’s Lament,” a reimagined version of the traditional ballad in which Sir John Franklin’s wife laments his death while searching for the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean in 1845; “Mr. Olio,” a sad but beautiful set piece about an old vaudevillian co-written by Dick and Loudon Wainwright III; and “Acres of Diamonds,” a catchy, very folkish song, originally written by Dick for Loudon’s High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project.

Every time I’ve listened to this album, I’ve discovered something new in the music, the lyrics, the strikingly original arrangements, the beautiful singing, or the totality of it all. I’ve returned often to the early Last Forever albums over the past 15 years and I expect I’ll be returning often to Acres of Diamonds.

Sonya was born to a folk music family as the daughter of John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers and the late Penny Seeger. There’s a photo I recall – I’m sure it was taken by David Gahr – of Sonya being held as a small baby by her uncle, Pete Seeger, as he spoke on stage at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Sadly, Sonya died of cancer on October 9, a week before Acres of Diamonds was released. She was just 50 years old.

LAST FOREVER

Trainfare Home

StorySound Records

storysoundrecords.com

StorySound Records has also recently reissued Trainfare Home, the second Last Forever album, originally released by Nonesuch Records in 2000. My review originally appeared in the Spring 2001 issue of Sing Out! magazine:

Dick Connette spent much of his composing career working in neo-classical and avant-garde music before turning his attention to rearranging traditional folk songs and writing new songs inspired by traditional music. Last Forever was formed when he began collaborating with vocalist Sonya Cohen, the daughter of New Lost City Rambler John Cohen and niece of Pete, Peggy and Mike Seeger.

Their first album, released in 1997, was a fascinating blend of old and new music that quickly became a favorite of mine. This sophomore effort from Connette and Cohen is just as fascinating and is one of the best releases of the past year. Like Last Forever’s first album, this one mixes old songs recast in new ways with new songs based on old melodies or lyric phrases.

Among the already-familiar songs is “Louis Collins/Spike Driver Blues,” a medley of two Mississippi John Hurt songs that begins with Cohen’s voice multi-tracked to sound like a choir on a brief refrain from “Louis Collins” before the familiar guitar notes of “Spike Driver Blues” come pouring out of Connette’s spinet and the accompanying violins, saxophone, bass, harmonium, guitar and drums begin to emulate the sound of a train as Cohen sings the lyrics. It’s all so very familiar and so very different at the same time.

           

On most of the original material, Connette draws on traditional elements in his compositions. “Down the Road,” sung from the point of view of an emancipated slave in the 1860s, uses “Feather Bed,” the old jug band song as its melodic starting point. The upbeat arrangement features Connette’s spinet interacting with trombone, banjo and drums. Connette’s “Bachelor’s Hall” borrows the traditional melody from “Pretty Saro” for a drawing room arrangement.

           

One of the most ambitious of the original songs is “Oklahoma,” which encapsulates some of the history of the state stretching from the forced relocation of the Cherokee from Georgia to the devastating bombing by a domestic terrorist in 1995.

           

With the new music they are creating, Connette and Cohen are proving that there is much to learn from, and to be inspired by, in traditional folk music while they create something new and different.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Bob Dylan – Tempest

BOB DYLAN

Tempest

Columbia

bobdylan.com

Tempest, released 50 years after Bob Dylan’s self-titled debut, is the work of a master songwriter -- the master songwriter of our time – informed by half a century of his own work and by the music of what Greil Marcus called “old weird America,” the folk music and folk-rooted blues and country music which developed in various regions before spreading everywhere in the 20th century via recordings and migratory performers. Some of these songs tell stories as detailed narratives, others paint pictures of scenes, both connected and disjointed. Many are filled with scenes of violence and death, with love, hate, sex and sexism, and religion. It’s impossible to know, in most of them, if Dylan is singing from his own heart or from the heart of his characters – or some combination of both.

The album opens with “Duquesne Whistle,” a train song that swings a little like an old Bob Wills tune, but which really reminds me of the Memphis Jug Band’s “K.C. Moan,” which was included on the Anthology of American Folk Music (Smithsonian Folkways), the monumental collection of songs from “old weird America” assembled in 1952 by Harry Smith (and which Dylan undoubtedly heard sung back in the day by our mutual friend, Dave Van Ronk). There’s no real narrative to the song, which was co-written with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter (the album’s only writing collaboration), but in each verse the train whistle recalls another scene: a traveler on the train, of a love relationship, childhood, etc.

“Soon After Midnight,” in folk-like ballad form seems to be a late-night confessional that could be, at least at first, either religious or romantic in nature. As the song develops, Dylan refers to harlots and “Two-Timing Slim,” whose corpse he’ll “drag through the mud.” Is it a song of regret about betrayal of a lover or wife or of God? The lyrics, like so much of Dylan’s work are open to interpretation.

There’s a lot going on in “Narrow Way,” – religion, history, war, love, sex – which all unfold in a series of images set to an intense, Chicago blues arrangement.

 “Long and Wasted Years,” is seemingly written as an apology to a lover or former lover or judging from the line, “It's been a while, since we walked down that long, long aisle,” a wife or former wife. I don’t know – and we probably can’t know – whether Dylan is singing about a relationship from his own life or in character. However, the line, “I wear dark glasses to cover my eyes, there are secrets in ‘em that I can't disguise,” strikes me as perhaps as one of Dylan’s most revealing lines about himself in decades.

The images in “Pay In Blood,” like many of these songs are vague and seem to suggest different things at different points in the song. Sometimes they seem to be coming from a religious zealot, sometimes from a political skeptic. The tone is angry and accusatory but it’s hard to tell if they’re coming from above or below, let alone left or right.

In “Scarlet Town,” Dylan takes the setting and lifts several lines from the ancient folk ballad “Barbara Allen,” and weaves a rambling, contemporary portrait of a town whose citizens’ lives encompass various shades of good, evil, love, hate, greed, vice, lust, and more.

I’ve seen commentaries on “Early Roman Kings,” which uses Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy” as its template, which interpret the song to be about a New York City street gang out for blood and money. Maybe, but my read is that it’s about unbridled capitalists who will destroy the soul of society in their quest for figurative blood and real money. Of course, as with so much of Dylan's work, the interpretation is in the ear of the beholder.

“Tin Angel,” which also touches on the greed and the need for control of an unbridled capitalist type lifts lines and some of its story from “Gypsy Davy,” Woody Guthrie’s rewrite of the traditional “Gypsy Davy,” “Gypsy Daisy” or “Gypsy Laddie” ballad. Dylan’s contemporary folk-styled ballad is a richly detailed story of love, jealousy and betrayal that ends tragically with all three characters dead in a tale of murder and suicide.

“Tempest,” the title track is another long, richly detailed folk-like ballad that tells the story of the sinking of the Titanic, 100 years ago, that mixes fact with images and details from Dylan’s imagination – the references to a character in the song named Leo were supposedly inspired by actor Leonardo DiCaprio who starred in the Hollywood film version of the story. Through 14 riveting minutes – I believe it’s Dylan’s longest song ever* – and 45 verses without a chorus, the story unfolds with seemingly as much detail as the film (minus Leo's love story with Kate Winslet's character). There’s so much going on that you really need to hear it repeatedly to let the details sink in. (*Update September 26: “Tempest” is actually about 2.5 minutes shorter than “Highlands” from Time Out of Mind. Thank you to John Yuelkenbeck for reminding me of that.)

“Roll On John,” which ends the album is a tribute to the late John Lennon filled with details from Lennon’s life and lines from several of his songs. As a song title, it completes a 50 year circle for Dylan who sang a great version of the traditional song, “Roll On John,” on a 1962 radio program in New York City. You can hear that radio recording on the compilation There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs (Smithsonian Folkways), an album put together by John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers of songs by artists he photographed back in the day.

Listening to Tempest, I can’t help but be reminded of Bob Dylan at 70, an essay I wrote 16 months ago on the occasion of his milestone birthday. Almost everything about Tempest reinforces what I wrote in that essay – from the roots of his songwriting, to his gravitas, to our inability to know him.

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--Mike Regenstreif

The Dust Busters with John Cohen – Old Man Below

THE DUST BUSTERS with JOHN COHEN

Old Man Below

Smithsonian Folkways

thedustbusters.blogspot.com

In 1958, when he would have been 25 or 26 years old, John Cohen got together with Mike Seeger and Tom Paley and founded the New Lost City Ramblers. At a time when most of the folk revival-era groups – think Kingston Trio, etc. – were smoothing the rough edges out of folksongs to create a folk-pop music for pre-boomer college students, the New Lost City Ramblers dedicated themselves to reviving and preserving the rougher, decidedly rural old time country music recorded in the “golden age” of the 1920s and ‘30s – the kind of music assembled a few years earlier by Harry Smith on his monumental Anthology of American Folk Music.

With just one personnel change in 1962 when Tom Paley left and was replaced by Tracy Schwarz, the New Lost City Ramblers played together and recorded lots of Folkways albums for about half a century. All of the revivalist groups striving for that ‘20s and ‘30s authenticity playing old time music over the past half-century have followed in footsteps of the New Lost City Ramblers. (One of my favorite folk festival memories was being there for a rare reunion of the original group when John, Mike and Tom, all booked as solo artists, played together at the 1997 Champlain Valley Folk Festival in Burlington, Vermont.)

The Dust Busters, three young musicians in their 20s based in Brooklyn, are the latest group following that trail blazed by the New Lost City Ramblers in the 1950s and ‘60s.

Many of the old time artists whose 78 rpm recordings inspired the New Lost Ramblers were still alive and playing in the 1950s and ‘60s and they were able to learn directly from some of them in addition to the old records. That’s not possible for today’s young musicians in groups like the Dust Busters, but they can and have been learning from first generation revivalists like John Cohen and Peter Stampfel (whose Holy Modal Rounders played a bent and twisted version of old time music informed by beat poets and ‘60s culture) in addition to the old records (which have never been as easily accessible as they are now in the digital age).

Not only have they learned from John Cohen, John collaborates with them throughout  their first album, Old Man Below, an album that sounds like it just as easily have been a Ramblers LP from 50 years ago.

The Dust Busters – Eli Smith on banjo, guitar, mandolin, harmonica, jew’s harp, pump organ, manjo; Walker Shepherd on banjo, guitar, bantar, fiddle, manjo, piano; Craig Judelman on fiddle, piano; with John Cohen on guitar, banjo, mandolin; and Frank Fairfield on fiddle on two songs; and Eli, Walker, Craig and John trading lead and harmony vocals –repertoire on this entertaining CD is highlighted by such numbers as “Black Jack Daisy,” Dillard Chandler’s variant of “The Gypsy Laddie” and “Black Jack Davy,” “The Roving Gambler,” “Free Little Bird,” and “Baby, Your Time Ain’t Long.”

Another highlight, and the most contemporary song in that it dates from the 1940s, is Butch Hawes’ “Arthritis Blues.”

These are songs that have slipped into tradition because they’ve stood the test of time and because successive generations have brought their own sensibilities to them. I look forward to hearing more from the Dust Busters.

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--Mike Regenstreif

Mike Seeger & Peggy Seeger – Fly Down Little Bird

MIKE SEEGER & PEGGY SEEGER

Fly Down Little Bird

Appleseed

mikeseeger.info

peggyseeger.com

Siblings Mike Seeger (1933-2009) and Peggy Seeger (born 1935) came from one of the most important American musical families. Their parents were the pioneering musicologist Charles Seeger and the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger – both of whom became deeply involved with traditional folk music in the 1930s; their older half-brother is legendary folksinger Pete Seeger.

Both Mike and Peggy have had long, important careers in folk music. Mike was a traditionally-based solo singer and multi-instrumentalist, a member of the New Lost City Ramblers, a folklorist and collector, and a collaborator with countless artists ranging from Jean Ritchie to Bob Dylan. Peggy is a singer of both traditional and contemporary songs, an important songwriter, and was, for many years, the musical (and life) partner of the late Ewan MacColl, one of Great Britain’s most important and influential folksingers.

Growing up in the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, surrounded by traditional music and musicians, Mike and Peggy were each other’s first musical collaborators. Although they collaborated on a few occasions over the years, their musical careers – and bases-of-operation – diverged over the decades. But they still always looked forward to making music together and less than a year before Mike passed away from a fast-moving cancer, they recorded this set of traditional folksongs they remembered from their youth.

The album opens with Mike and Peggy’s a cappella sibling harmonies on “Old Bangum,” an old ballad about a hunter and a wild boar, the kind of animal whose accomplishments are purely the province of tales and ballads. Their singing sure sounds like it comes from a lifetime of familial harmonizing.

Save for “Red River Jig,” a Canadian fiddle tune and the album’s lone instrumental, the songs are all rooted in Southern Appalachian song traditions. They include versions – great performances all – of such familiar songs as “Cindy,” “The Dodger Song,” “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains” and “Little Birdie.” Mike and Peggy know just how to communicate the essence of these songs so that they seems as relevant now as they did 60 or more years ago when they first sang them, or in the lost times and places in which they were first sung in the kitchens and on the front porches of the rural South. 

In addition to their singing, both Mike and Peggy play instruments that vary from song to song. Mike is heard on banjo, harmonica, banjo-guitar, fiddle, Hawaiian guitar, cello-banjo, guitar and mandolin. Peggy variously plays guitar, piano, banjo and dulcimer. A bassist, Leo Lorenzoni, who plays on just one song, is the album’s only other musician.

I’ve always enjoyed both Mike and Peggy in their individual musical pursuits – this collaboration, though, is something very special. I know Peggy. I’ve written about her often and she was my guest on the Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio program a couple of times during her visits to Montreal. I also knew Mike a little bit and got to work with him several times over the years at folk festivals. I wish I’d had opportunities to hear them sing together in person.

--Mike Regenstreif