Barking Dog: October 30, 2025
Alison Brown, Steve Martin - Friend of Mine
Brown is a Grammy-winning American banjo player
Martin has played the banjo since he was young, and has often incorporated his musical interests into his comedy routine
Since the 2000s, he’s turned more towards his music career, and he’s toured with a number of bluegrass artists, including Earl Scruggs
This is from their new album Safe, Sensible and Sane, which came out on the 17th and features artists like Aoife O’Donovan, Tim O’Brien, and Jason Mraz
Old Man Luedecke - Five and Ten
From Chester, NS
This is a new single that he released on the 22nd
He describes it as a “song that pairs the exuberance of the banjo with yearning sadness”
Bright Eyes, Leslie Stevens - Sharp Cutting Wings (Song to a Poet)
They’re a band from Nebraska formed in 1995 by songwriter Conor Oberst
Stevens is a musician known for her work as both a session singer and a member of the group Leslie and the Badgers, which she formed in 2006
This is from Bright Eyes’ new EP Kids Table, which consists of songs they recorded during the sessions for their 2024 album Five Dice, All Threes
It’s a cover of Lucinda Williams’ song from her 1980 album Happy Woman Blues
Jake Xerxes Fussell, James Elkington - Callie Rose
Fussell is a North Carolina artist who was raised in an artistic family and apprenticed with the blues musician Precious Bryant from a young age
Elkington is a musician and songwriter from Chicago who has collaborated with artists including Jeff Tweedy and Richard Thompson
This is a single from their upcoming soundtrack for the film Rebuilding
Ellen Stekert - The Ballad of Frankie Silver
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 her latest release, an American murder ballad that she learned from the Frank C Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore from 1952
Frankie Silver was found guilty for the murder of her husband and hanged in Burke County, North Carolina in 1833
This is one of very few murder ballads with a female protagonist, and Ellen states that the description of the murder is “among the most detailed and chilling I’ve heard”
She also writes that “the song never tells us why Frankie Silver committed the crime for which she, at eighteen years of age, will lose her life. Was it domestic abuse, jealousy, or something else? Folksongs have the characteristic of drawing in the listener to fill out the story. We never know why Lord Randall was poisoned by this sweetheart or why Sir. Patrick Spence had to sail to his death. If any story begged for an answer, this one does.”
Ballaké Sissoko, Piers Faccini - Special Rider Blues
Sissoko is a Malian kora player who has collaborated with artists including Toumani Diabaté and Taj Mahal
Faccini is an English musician and painter who’s been performing since the late 1990s
This is from their forthcoming EP When the Word was Song, which comes out on November 21st
It’s a song by Skip James, who recorded it in 1931
David Rovics - No One Is Illegal
He’s a musician and writer based in Oregon who’s been touring internationally since the 1990s
This is from his 2001 album Living in These Times
Roy Bailey - Perspectives
Bailey was an English sociologist and musician, known as a member of the group Three City Four
This comes from his 2013 album Sit Down & Sing
The song is by Bailey’s friend and collaborator Leon Rosselson
Si Kahn - Shines In The Light
Kahn is a community organiser and musician from Pennsylvania who moved to the south as an activist during the Civil Rights Movement
This is from Kahn’s 1997 album Companion
The song is dedicated to Ben Linder, an American engineer who was killed by the US-funded and CIA-trained Contra rebels in 1987 while working on a hydroelectric dam in rural Nicaragua
Bill Staines - The Black Fly Song
He was a folk musician from New Hampshire whose songs have been recorded by musicians including Peter, Paul and Mary, Nanci Griffith, and The Highwaymen
This is off his 1977 album Just Play One Tune More
The song is by Canadian songwriter Wade Hemsworth
The McMillan’s Camp Boys - Who’s That Walking in the Garden?
They’re a band originally from British Columbia, now based in Nova Scotia
This is off their 2023 self-titled album
It’s their own composition
David Francey - Hard Steel Mill
Scottish-Canadian folksinger who was a railyard worker for 20 years before pursuing a career in music at the age of 45
He’s now been performing for over 20 years
Many of his songs are influenced by his experiences of working-class life, including this one from his 1999 debut album, Torn Screen Door
It’s a remastered recording that just came out on his compilation album Maps
John Beecher - An Air That Kills
He was an activist, poet, writer, and journalist who often wrote about the southern United States
His father was a steel executive, and his family expected him to enter the same line of work, but his experiences in the steel mills caused him to become active in labour movement activities
This is from his 1977 album Report to the Stockholders and Other Poems
Margaret Christl, Ian Robb, Grit Laskin - The Barley Grain for Me
Laskin is an Ontario luthier and musician whose guitars have been exhibited in several art museums
Robb and Christl British-born artists who immigrated to Canada as young adults and recorded a collection of folk songs found in the eastern provinces of Canada in 1976, which they named after that song
This is an Irish-Canadian variant of the song “John Barleycorn Must Die,” the earliest known version of which was printed as a broadside in 1620
The song personifies barley, going through the process of planting, reaping, threshing, milling, and brewing of the grain
They learned the song from OJ Abbott of Hull, Quebec, whose version can be heard on his 1961 album Irish and British Songs from the Ottawa Valley
Scrüj MacDuhk - Roddy McCorley / Lost Gander
They were a folk band from Winnipeg that were active in the 1990s
This is from their 1999 album The Road to Canso
Irish writer Ethna Carbery wrote this song about Irish nationalist and outlaw Roddy McCorley in 1902 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the United Irishmen rebellion
“Lost Gander” is a traditional American tune
Gordon Lightfoot - Ghosts of Cape Horn
This is a live recording made at the PBS Soundstage in Chicago in 1979
Dean Gitter - Lost Jimmie Whelan
He was an American musician, record producer, and entrepreneur, and this is from his 1957 album Ghost Ballads
Gitter released his second album in 2014, the longest-ever gap between two consecutive studio albums
The song is possibly based on the death of James Phalen, a lumberman who drowned trying to break a log jam in Ontario around 1878
This version is a compilation of stanzas collected in Newfoundland and Michigan
Bob Dylan - Who Killed Davey Moore?
This recording was made on Halloween, 1964 at Philharmonic Hall in New York City
Dylan wrote the song in March of 1963 after the boxer Davey Moore was knocked down during a fight with Sugar Ramos and died of inoperable brain damage four days later
It follows a similar structure to the English nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin”
Hugh Campbell - Footprints Left Below
He’s a musician, songwriter, and carpenter from Maryland who’s been recording music since the 1990s
He’s a member of the Campbell family, to which well-known Appalachian musicians Alex Campbell and Ola Belle Reed also belonged
This one is from his first album, Way Too Serious, which he recorded at his cousin Dave Reed’s studio at Ola Belle Reed’s home
Mama’s Broke - How It Ends
They’re a duo from Nova Scotia who have been playing together for a decade
This comes from their 2022 album Narrow Line
Bruce Cockburn - King Kong Goes to Tallahassee
Singer-songwriter and guitarist from Ottawa who’s been playing professionally for over 40 years
This is a live performance from a fundraising concert for the parish of St. Stephens-in-the-Fields in Kensington Market, Toronto in 2005
He included the song on his album Speechless from the same year
Ollie Gilbert - The Dying Boy
She was a folksinger from the Ozarks, and the folksong collector Max Hunter recorded her singing over 300 folk songs
This is a field recording made by Hunter in Mountain View, Arkansas, in 1969
Wiregrass Sacred Harp Singers - The Dying Boy
They were an African American sacred harp group from Alabama
Sacred Harp is a type of traditional sacred choral music that originated in New England, and uses shape notes, a kind of musical notation that was designed to more easily facilitate congregational singing
This song was composed by HS Reese in 1859
Robert Pete Williams - Graveyard Blues
Louisiana blues musician born in 1914
He played at small community events after buying a guitar, and played in the lumber yards where he worked between the 30s and 50s
In 1956 he was discovered in Louisiana State Penitentiary by two ethnomusicologists, who recorded him playing songs about prison life
The ethnomusicologists, Harry Oster and Richard Allen, pressured the parole board into issuing a pardon for Williams, and in December, 1958, he was released into “servitude parole”, where he had to work 80 hours of labour a week with only room and board for compensation
His music was becoming popular by this time, and in 1964 he played at the Newport Folk Festival
He toured the US in 1965, and Europe in 1966
This song was recorded in Louisiana in 1972
Gordon Bok - A Most Unpleasant Way, Sir
Bok is a folklorist and musician from Maine who’s released almost 40 albums since the mid-1960s
This is from his 1983 album A Rogue's Gallery of Songs for 12-String
The song is by English musician, songwriter, dry stone wall builder, mountaineer, and railway fireman Dave Goulder
Prairie Ramblers - The Ghost in the Graveyard
They were a country band from Kentucky that first began performing in 1932
This recording was made in 1938 for Brunswick Records
Truett and George - Ghost Dance
They were Velma S Truett and Harry George, banjo and guitar players from California who developed their own distinctive tunings and playing styles
They recorded this one for Columbia Records in 1927
Beverly Glenn Copeland - Untitled (Make the Answer “Yes)
He is a musician who started as a folk singer in the 1960s, incorporating elements of jazz, classical, and blues music into his songs
He was also a writer on Sesame Street and a regular actor on the children’s show Mr. Dressup
This is from his self-titled album from 1970
Dave Van Ronk - Zen Koans Gonna Rise Again
This song is about MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, New York City, the hub of the east coast American folk scene in the 1960s, and it was influenced by the work of 15th century French poet François Villon, who often wrote in Parisian thieves’ slang
Van Ronk writes, “On MacDougal Street, when we were talking among ourselves, we used a kind of hipster-carny slang that most of the people in our audience would not have understood—which was one of the reasons we did it—and I tried to use this language to capture the feel of what was going down at that point”
He included the song on his 1966 album No Dirty Names
Jack Owens - Leavin’ Blues
Owens was a blues musician from Bentonia, Mississippi
He never really aimed to become a professional recording artist, and instead farmed and ran a juke joint for much of his life before being recorded during the folk and blues revival of the 1960s when the musicologist David Evans learned about him from other blues musicians from his region
He toured throughout the US and Europe during the last decades of his life, often with his harmonica-playing friend Bud Spires
This recording was made in 1981
Slow Spirit - Italo Calvino
They’re a duo from Winnipeg
This is a live acoustic recording of the song, which they included on their 2020 album Nowhere No One Knows Where To Find You
Lonnie Johnson - Lonesome Ghost Blues
American blues and jazz singer born into a family of Louisiana musicians in 1899
Pioneer of jazz guitar and jazz violin
Recognized as the first to play an amplified violin and as one of the originators of the single-string guitar solos that are so popular in contemporary rock, blues, and jazz
This recording is from 1927
Pharis & Jason Romero - The Dose
Married duo from Horsefly, BC
From their 2022 album Tell ‘Em You Were Gold
Richard Brautigan - The Pumpkin Tide
