Barking Dog: March 10, 2022
Willie Dunn - Metis Red River Song
Was a Mi’kmaq musician, film director, and politician who often highlighted Indigenous issues in his work
This is off his fourth album The Vanity of Human Wishes, from 1984
Paul Clayton - The Greenland Whale Fisheries
Clayton was an American folksinger and a folklorist who specialised in traditional music
The Davis Straits and other areas off Greenland were common whaling grounds for Dutch and British whaleships as early as the seventeenth century
For that reason, many of the British whaling songs produced in the next three hundred years were set in and around Greenland
This is one of the most famous whaling songs, and it provides a pretty universal description of the occupation, especially the whaleship owners' and captains' disregard for the welfare, safety, and lives of their crews
Clayton recorded it in 1956
Mike Seeger - When Sorrows Encompass Me Round
Mike was a folklorist and musician and a member of the well-known musical Seeger family, who co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers in the 1950s
This is an old Baptist hymn from at least 1844
From his 2003 album True Vine
Karen James - Every Night When the Sun Goes Down
A folksinger and daughter of Spanish musician Isabelita Alonso, who grew up in England, Spain, and France, and moved to Canada as a teenager
From her 1962 album Through Streets Broad and Narrow
Traditional Appalachian hymn
Pete Seeger - Well May the World Go
He was a folk singer and an activist who, though blacklisted during the McCarthy era, remained a prominent public figure who advocated for Civil Rights, environmental causes, and international disarmament through his music
This is his own song, set to the tune of the Scottish song “Well May the Keel Row”
This recording features two five-string banjos, the other played by Fred Hellerman
Bruce Springsteen - I Ain’t Got No Home
From the Grammy award-winning 1988 compilation album Folkways: A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie & Leadbelly
A Woody Guthrie song based on the old gospel song “Can’t Feel at Home”
It reflects more specifically the plight of those made homeless by the Dust Bowl that afflicted prairie states and provinces in the 1930s
Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder - I Shall Not Be Moved
Taj is a Grammy-award-winning blues musician from New York City whose career has spanned over 50 years
Cooder is also a Grammy-award-winning musician with a career spanning over 50 years
This is a new single from the two, both of whom are known for their collaborations with other musicians
It’s from their forthcoming album, Get on Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee
This is a spiritual that became popular as a protest song and a union song during the Civil Rights Movement
Terry and McGhee recorded their version in 1960
The Golden Gate Quartet - Take Your Burdens to God
They are a vocal quartet formed in Virginia by four high school students in 1934
They are still active today, but have obviously undergone multiple changes in membership
Recorded for Montgomery Records on January 24, 1938
Joseph Spence & The Pinder Family - Take Your Burden to the Lord and Leave It There
Joseph Spence was a Bahamian musician known for vocalizing and humming while playing guitar, and he influenced artists like Taj Mahal, The Grateful Dead, and John Renbourn, who recorded versions of his gospel arrangements
The Pinders were his sister’s family
The song is a spiritual composed by African American minister Charles A Tindley in 1916
Uncle Sinner - You Got to Die
From Winnipeg
Off his 2008 album Ballads and Mental Breakdowns
This song is by Blind Willie McTell, and it’s also very similar to the traditional gospel song “Climbing High Mountains”
Lisa LeBlanc - Katie Cruel
A New Brunswick musician
Traditional American folksong, likely of Scottish origin
Her version is from her 2014 EP Highways, Heartaches, and Time Well Wasted
EC Ball, The Friendly Gospel Singers - Way Down in My Soul
Estil C Ball of Virginia who often performed as a duo with his wife, Orna, with whom he owned and ran a general store and service station
He met Alan Lomax in the early 1940s at a fiddler’s convention, who recorded him and his wife several times in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, and opened the door for them to record their own albums for County and Rounder Records in the 60s and 70s
He’s joined by the Friendly Gospel Singers on that one, who he performed with in churches and on the radio between the mid 1950s and 1975
Seems to have been written by Floyd E Hunter in 1947
Art Samuels and the Montreal Youth Singers - Status Quo
Montreal
This song is from a 1956 album that includes both "songs of peace and protest" and "songs of fun and impudence”
Sir Lancelot - Atomic Energy
He was a Trinidadian calypso singer and actor who played a major role in the popularization of calypso music in North America
He moved to the States as a young man to study medicine, but after he attended a concert by the African-American lyric tenor Roland Hayes, he gave up his medical studies to focus on music and singing
By the 1940s, he was known nationwide
This one is from 1947
Fred Hellerman - Pity the Downtrodden Landlord
He was a folksinger from Connecticut and an original member of The Weavers
Recorded this song under the pseudonym Bob Hill in 1950
The 1948 People’s Songbook says of it, “This song, which originated in England during World War II, was caught up by thousands of United States tenants threatened by eviction when Congress lifted rent controls. To be sung with a fine sense of sarcasm!”
Gary Green - The Hammer
A Tennessee folksinger
Off his 1977 album Gary Green, Vol. 1: These Six Strings Neutralize the Tools of Oppression
Red Allen and Frank Wakefield - Little Maggie
Allen was a bluegrass musician from Kentucky who began performing professionally in the late 1940s
He discovered Frank Wakefield, a teenage mandolin virtuoso from Tennessee, in Dayton, Ohio 1952, and he joined Allen’s band, the Blue Ridge Mountain Boys
Recorded in 1964 for Folkways Records
“Little Maggie” is related to “Country Blues” and “Darlin’ Corey,” collected in Appalachian region in 1800s
Possible that it was brought to Beech Mountain, NC by men who had been cutting timber in West Virginia
Joe Hickerson - Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down
Is a folk singer and songleader from Illinois
Was Librarian and Director of the Archive of Folk Song at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress for 35 years
The song is attributed to songwriter and preacher Claude Ely of Virginia
He claimed to have written it when he was twelve while he was sick with tuberculosis
Daniel Romano - She Was the World to Me
He’s an artist from Welland, Ontario who has already covered a wide range of genres during his relatively short career
From his 2010 album Workin’ for the Music Man
Old Man Luedecke - Yodelady
From Chester, NS
This is from his 2015 album Domestic Eccentric, which he recorded inside a cabin he built in his backyard
Brownie McGhee - I’m Gonna Tell God How You Treat Me
McGhee was a folk and Piedmont blues musician from Tennessee, best known for his collaborative work with Sonny Terry
Recorded this one for Folkways in 1957
This song is more commonly known as “I’m Gonna Cross the River of Jordan”
It’s a traditional American gospel song likely written by an enslaved person
The song later became an anthem of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 60s
Lightnin’ Hopkins - Honey Babe
Was a country blues musician from Texas who gained a broader audience with the folk revival of the 1960s after recording and performing around Texas in the 40s and 50s
His debut performance was at Carnegie Hall in October of 1960, and he shared the bill with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez
He continued to tour and record throughout the 60s and 70s, and was Houston, Texas’s poet in residence for 35 years
From 1958
Howard Bursen, Jay Ungar, Molly Mason, Bob Pasquarello - June Apple / Train on the Island
From the 2001 album Banjo MANikin
This seems to be a traditional song from the Appalachian region of the US
They use the tune “June Apple”
Furry Lewis - I’m Going to Brownsville
American country blues artist from Memphis, Tennessee
This song was written by Sleepy John Estes
Lewis recorded it in 1959
Kacy & Clayton - The Downward Road
Duo of second cousins Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum from Wood Mountain, SK
From their 2013 album The Day is Past & Gone
Tom Waits, Keith Richards - Shenandoah
Waits a very well known American musician, composer, and actor who’s been playing since 1971
Richards is the guitarist for the Rolling Stones
This is from the 2013 album Son of Rogues Gallery
Traditional American folk song and sea shanty, traced back to the early 19th century
Likely came from American and Canadian voyageurs who traveled down the Missouri River
Ferron - Ain’t Life a Brook
She’s a Canadian musician and poet from the same generation and on the same level as people like Leonard Cohen and Bruce Cockburn, though she’s less widely known even within Canada
This is one of her better-known songs off her 1980 album, Testimony
Josh White & His Carolinians - Trouble
Extremely successful musician who started playing music in the late 20s and gained fame as a blues, jazz, and folk musician, as well as a film and Broadway actor
His Carolinians were his brother Billy and his friends Carrington Lewis, Sam Gary, and Bayard Rustin
This one is from 1940
Harry Dean Stanton - Tennessee Whiskey
He was a musician from Kentucky, though he’s probably better known for his acting career, which included credits in films like Cool Hand Luke, Alien, Pretty in Pink, and Paris, Texas among many others
This is from the 2014 album Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
The song was written by Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove and first recorded by David Allan Coe in 1981
Tom Brandon - Muskoka
He was a second-generation Canadian from Peterborough whose grandparents emigrated from Ireland in the 19th century
The folklorist Edith Fowke recorded his album, The Rambling Irishman, for Folk Legacy Records in 1962
He can also be found on Fowke’s albums of field recordings from Ontario and from the Ontario lumber shanties
You’ll notice his Irish lilt, which managed to survive two generations outside of Ireland
This song is an adaptation of the American song “The State of Arkansas,” and mispronounces Muskoka to rhyme with Arkansas
Brandon learned his version from a neighbour
Kaia Kater - The Right One
Grenadian-Canadian artist based in Toronto
Off her most recent album, Grenades
Dink Roberts - The Coo Coo
From an album of black banjo music from North Carolina and Virginia
He learned this song when he was 16 from a man who came to the mill town of Glen Raven, North Carolina to play at parties
The lyrics of this song are found in many others, including “Ruben” and “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet”
Woody Guthrie - Wiggledy Giggledy
A nonsense song from Woody Guthrie, the Oklahoma dustbowl balladeer
Jean Carignan - La Bastringue
