Barking Dog: January 8, 2026
Ellen Stekert - Golden Apples of the Sun
Stekert is a folklorist, musician, and scholar from New York (now based in Minnesota) who began her career in Greenwich Village in the 1950s
In the last couple of years, she’s been working with the producer Ross Wylde on cleaned up archival recordings, and with writer Christopher Bahn on a website where they share music, writing, and photography from her archives
This is a William Butler Yeats poem called “Song of the Wandering Aengus,” (Angus) put to music by Stekert’s friend Dave Van Ronk
She writes, “When you sing a song that you love, you absorb it and it becomes impossible to think that there ever was a time when you did not know it. That was true for me of ‘The Golden Apples.’”
Old Man Luedecke - My Status is the Baddest
From Chester, NS
This is a banjo version of a track from his most recent album, which came out in 2024
It was released on the deluxe version of the album in November
Uncle Sinner - Roll and Tumble
From Winnipeg
Off his new album Everybody Wants to Know How I Die, which came out on December 11th
It’s a version of “Roll and Tumble Blues,” first recorded by Hambone Willie Newbern in 1929
Uncle Sinner attributes his version to Newbern, Sleepy John Estes, and Eddie “One String” Jones
Nora Brown, Jackson Lynch - 8th of January
Brown is a contemporary banjo player and singer from New York City
Lynch is a guitarist and banjo player and a member of the Down Hill Strugglers
This is off Brown’s 2021 album, Sidetrack My Engine
It’s a popular American reel that was apparently originally named “Jackson’s Victory” after Andrew Jackson’s defeat of the British in the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815
Sid Hemphill - The Eighth of January
He’s known as a fife and drum bandleader, and he was described as the “musical patriarch of the Mississippi Hill Country” and "the best musician in the world”
The roots of Black fife and drum music have been traced back to the American Revolutionary War, when the bands accompanied local militias, though by the mid-20th century they played exclusively for entertainment at local events
This recording was made by Alan Lomax of Hemphill and his band, Will Head, Alec Askew, and Lucius Smith, on August 15, 1942
Tony Furtado - 8th of January
He’s a musician from California who’s been playing banjo since he was 12 and has played with musicians including Alison Krauss, Tony Trischka, and Tim O’Brien
This is from his 2015 EP Copper and Tin
Penny Lang - Ain’t Life Sweet
She was a folk musician from Montreal who was part of the folk revival of the 1960s
She first began playing professionally in 1963, and later began touring North America, playing folk festivals and coffeehouses throughout Canada and the US
This is the title track from her 1993 album
Bob Dylan - Hard Times Come Again No More
This was recorded live at Willie Nelson’s 60th birthday concert in 1993
It’s a parlour song written by American composer Stephen Foster in 1854
Ed Askew - Oh The Lovely Face
He was a musician and painter from Connecticut who began recording in the 1960s
This is from his 2017 archival album A Child in the Sun, a collection of radio recordings from 1969 and 1970
Lee Hunter - Song of Social Significance
Hunter came from Georgia and was a university instructor, an organizer for the Baltimore Workers’ Heritage Music Festival, and a founding member of the Labor Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC
This is off the 1989 album The Face on the Dime: A Musical History of the FDR Years
The song is by Harold Rome, from the 1937 Broadway musical Pins and Needles, the cast of which featured members of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union
Steve Goodman - (Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such As I
Goodman was a folk musician from Chicago
He studied at the Old Town School of Folk Music, where he met his friend John Prine, and they frequently performed together until Goodman’s death in 1984
In 2007, the governor of Illinois named October 5 Steve Goodman Day in the state, and a bill was introduced and signed by President Obama in 2010 to rename a post office after him
This song is by Bill Trader and was first released by Hank Snow in 1953
Eugene Chadbourne & Evan Johns - George Bush’s Bones Jig
Chadbourne is a musician from New York who plays guitar and banjo, but is also recognized as the inventor of the electric rake
Johns was a guitarist from Texas
This is off their 1993 album Terror Has Some Strange Kinfolk
Pete Seeger - Miss Pavlichenko
Seeger was a folk singer and activist from New York who advocated for Civil Rights, environmental causes, and peace through his music for over 70 years
This is from the 1968 album Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie, a collection of live recordings
Pete will give some background to the song, which is about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet sniper who killed over 300 Nazis during the Second World War
Guthrie wrote it to commemorate her visit to the United States and Canada in 1942
Lou Reed - The Debt I Owe
This comes from the 2011 album Note of Hope: A Celebration of Woody Guthrie
Reed adapted the song from an essay of the same name that Guthrie wrote in 1946
Odetta - Rambling Round Your City
Born in Birmingham, Alabama
Had operatic vocal training from the age of 13 and studied music at Los Angeles City College
While on tour with the musical Finian’s Rainbow, she fell in with some San Francisco balladeers and began to focus on folk singing
This is from her 1963 album One Grain of Sand
The song is by Woody Guthrie, who took the tune of Lead Belly’s “Irene Goodnight” and sped it up a little to fit this song
He wrote it while living in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1940s
CA & Sonny - Rosin the Beau
They’re an Ottawa-based duo, and this is from their 2022 album The CA & Sonny Show: Vol. 1
The tune is regularly referred to “Rosin the Beau” on this side of the Atlantic, but it was written by the Irish poet Riocard Bairéad (anglicised as Richard Barrett) in the 18th century with the title “Eoghan Coir” (“Owen Core”)
“Rosin the Beau” was first published in Philadelphia in the early 19th century, though it’s likely older than that, and it’s been found throughout North America, Ireland, and England
Canray Fontenot - Hey, Hey Blues
He was considered one of the greatest Creole fiddle players
He first learned to play on a fiddle he made out of a cigar box
Fontenot was a member of several string bands throughout the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, though he worked primarily as a rice farmer during his life
In the 1960s, he performed outside of Louisiana for the first time, at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island
It was there that he recorded an album for the producer Dick Spottswood, and from there he began appearing at festivals around the world
This is from the 1992 compilation album Louisiana Hot Sauce, Creole Style, recorded between 1971 and 1991
Lawrence Ferlinghetti - Dog
He was a poet, artist, and activist from New York who founded City Lights bookstore in San Francisco
Though he didn’t consider himself a Beat poet, he published many of the Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg, and is often aligned with members of that movement
This poem appears on his 1958 album Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote the Impeachment of President Eisenhower and Other Poems
Ferron - The Cart
She’s a musician and poet from British Columbia
From her 2009 album Boulder
Joe Hickerson - Joe Hill’s Last Will
He was a folk singer, songleader, and folklorist from Illinois, and served as Librarian and Director of the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress for 35 years
He’s known for his work as a lecturer, researcher, and performer
Joe Hill was a Swedish-American labour activist and songwriter known for songs like “There is Power in a Union,” “Casey Jones, the Union Scab,” and “The Preacher and the Slave,” through which he coined the phrase “pie in the sky”
Hill was wrongly convicted of the murders of a former police officer and his son in 1914 after a controversial trial and was executed in 1915
The lyrics of this song are a poem by Hill, who wrote it as his will on the night before his execution
Ethel Raim put it to music in 1961
Howard Zinn - Class Consciousness
He was a historian from New York City who focused on labour history, civil rights, and the anti-war movement, and is known particularly for his 1980 book A People’s History of the United States
This is from a 1995 lecture at Reed College in Portland, Oregon
Pattie Rosemon, Frank Rosemon, Odie Rosemon - I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say
This recording was made by Cheryl and David Evans in Senatobia, Mississippi in August of 1973
Pattie was best known in her community as a quilt maker, though she agreed to record some church songs, along with her husband and son Frank and Odie
The lyrics of this song were composed by Scottish clergyman Horatius Bonar in the mid-19th century
Rosemon sings the song in the “long meter” style, in which the song leader sings each line, followed by a slow repetition by the congregation
Dave Van Ronk - Dink’s Song
A member of the Greenwich Village folk scene in New York City, known as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street”, MacDougal Street being where practically every coffeehouse was located in New York in the 60s
This song is also commonly known as “Fare Thee Well,” though it was originally recorded from a woman named Dink by John Lomax in 1909
David Campbell - Time Was When
He’s a Guyanese-Canadian musician based in Vancouver who began playing professionally in the 1960s
This is off his 1972 album Sun Wheel
Box Fox - Black Mountain Blues
He’s a musician from New York City who began playing the blues in the 1950s
This is from the 1994 album Primarily Blues
The song was written by Chicago pianist JC Johnson for the blues singer Bessie Smith, with whom he often collaborated
She recorded it in 1930
Steve James - Bye Bye Baby Blues
He was a blues musician from New York City who began learning guitar at the age of 12 and later moved around the States, hosting a radio show in Tennessee, where he played with Furry Lewis and Lum Guffin, and performing in Texas as a solo artist
This is from his 2003 album Fast Texas
It’s a song by Little Hat Jones, who released it in 1930
Cara Luft - Someday Soon
From Winnipeg
This is an Ian & Sylvia song first recorded in 1963
Nancy Richardson - Lizard, His Song
From the 1995 album Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women
Richardson is an Indigenous singer and language specialist from California
This is a Karuk song associated with the creation story, which tells that the lizard was once told not to make human beings because they wouldn’t get along, but the lizard did anyway
The liner notes for the album state that the song encourages people to settle disputes and live in harmony with one another
Muddy Waters, Son Simms Four - Pearlie May Blues
Son Simms was a Delta blues fiddle player who also accompanied Charley Patton and Robert Nighthawk during his career
Waters was a well-known blues musician who grew up on a plantation in Mississippi, and later moved to Chicago in the 1940s to pursue a career in music, where he began performing electric blues
This recording is one made by the folklorist Alan Lomax at Waters’ home in 1941, when Lomax travelled to the Mississippi plantation to record the various musicians who lived there
They’re also joined by mandolinist Louis Ford and guitarist Percy Thomas on this one
The Quilter's Guild - Texas Gals
They’re an Ontario-based duo formed by guitarist Mike T Kerr and multi-instrumentalist Lotus Wight a few months ago
This is a traditional tune associated with southwestern Virginia and northwestern North Carolina
It was first recorded by the Hillbillies in 1927
Lonesome Ace Stringband - Crowe River
Contemporary stringband based in Toronto
This is from their latest album, Big Wing, which came out in October
This is one of three fiddle tunes celebrating the three rivers that flow into Belmont Lake in Havelock, Ontario, and it was written and recorded while on the shores of the lake
Claude McKay - If We Must Die
