Barking Dog: July 25, 2024

  • Jake Xerxes Fussell - Cuckoo!

    • He’s a musician from Georgia who was raised in an artistic family and apprenticed with the blues musician Precious Bryant from a young age

    • This is from his new album, When I’m Called, which came out on July 12

    • The text for this song is by English poet and novelist Jane Taylor, who also wrote the words for “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”

    • The music is by the English composer Benjamin Britten, who set the poem to music in the 1930s to teach children about music

  • Kate & Anna McGarrigle - Swimming Song

    • They’re sisters who learned piano from village nuns when living in the Laurentian mountains as children

    • They started writing and performing their own songs in Montreal in 1960s

    • This is from their 1974 self-titled album

    • The song is by Loudon Wainwright

  • Mance Lipscomb - Shine On Harvest Moon

    • Texan blues artist who worked as a tenant farmer in Texas most of his life, but came to prominence in 1960 during the resurgence of country blues

    • This led to him recording an album in 1961, called Trouble in Mind, and appearing at the first Monterey Folk Festival in 1963

    • This is a popular song that was written in the early 1900s by the married Vaudeville duo Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth

    • Lipscomb recorded this version live at the Cabalo in Berkeley, California in 1964

  • Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl - The Ballad of Accounting

    • They were a well-known married duo

    • MacColl was a British folksinger and labour activist known for his involvement in the 1960s folk revival

    • Seeger is an American folksinger and member of the Seeger family who’s been living and performing in the UK for over 60 years

    • MacColl originally wrote the song as the theme song for a BBC radio series called Landmarks

  • Malvina Reynolds - Overtime

    • Malvina Reynolds came to folk music later in her life, when she met Pete Seeger and other folk singers when she was in her 40s

    • She’s known particularly for writing the song “Little Boxes,” though she wrote and recorded a large catalogue of music during her career

    • This is her own song, which was only first released in 2007

    • She wrote the song in support of a bill introduced in the California Assembly in March of 1977 that outlawed mandatory overtime

  • Seamus Heaney, Liam O’Flynn - The Given Note

    • Heaney was a Nobel Prize-winning poet, playwright, and translator from Ireland

    • O’Flynn was an Irish Uilleann piper known as a solo musician and as a member of Planxty

    • This is from their 2003 album The Poet & The Piper, which combines traditional and contemporary music with lyrics and poetry

  • Roscoe Holcomb - Willow Tree

    • Was a construction worker, coal miner, and farmer much of his life

    • He was an older artist who became popular during the folk revival of the 1960s, and didn’t have a music career at all before then—though he was born in 1912, he was first discovered by John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers playing on his front porch in Daisy, Kentucky in 1958

    • This is a traditional Appalachian folk song that is closely related to “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies,” a version of which we’ll hear after this

    • The song also shares similarities with the murder ballad “Silver Dagger

  • Bob Dylan, The Band - Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies

  • Okkervil River - Willow Tree

    • They’re a band from Texas that was formed by the musician Will Sheff in 1998

    • This is from the 10th anniversary edition of their 2005 album Black Sheep Boy

  • Joni Mitchell - Ten Thousand Miles

    • Recorded at her parents’ house in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan in 1965

    • This is her version of the 18th century folk ballad “Ten Thousand Miles,” also known as “The Turtle Dove” or “Fare Thee Well”

    • The earliest published version of the song appeared in England in 1710

    • She likely got it from Joan Baez’s version from her 1960 debut album

  • Ed Trickett - The Telling Takes Me Home

    • He was a psychology professor by day and a guitarist, pianist, and hammered dulcimer player the rest of the time

    • He’s known for performing both on his own and in a trio with Gordon Bok and Anne Mayo Muir, and his music career spanned over 50 years

    • This is off his 1972 album of the same name

    • The song is by Utah Phillips

  • Alice Stuart - One Too Many Mornings

    • She was a musician from Washington who got her start in folk music at the Berkeley Folk Festival in 1964, when she was 22

    • She also toured with musicians like Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Van Morrison, and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott

    • Dylan wrote the song in 1963 and included it on his 1964 album The Times They Are a-Changin’

    • Her version is from her 1999 album Crazy with the Blues

  • Lonesome Ace Stringband - Don’t Get Trouble in Mind

    • Contemporary stringband based in Toronto

    • This is an American old-time tune of uncertain origin

    • From their 2014 album Old Time

  • The Texas Drifter (Goebel Reeves) - Railroad Boomer

    • He was a folk and country musician from Texas who played in the style of Jimmie Rodgers He’s known particularly for writing the song “Hobo’s Lullaby

    • This one was recorded in Los Angeles in 1931

  • Sammy Walker - The Grand Coulee Dam

    • He’s a folksinger from Georgia who recorded his first albums in the mid 1970s

    • This is off his 1979 album Songs from Woody’s Pen, a collection of 11 covers of Woody Guthrie’s songs

    • Written by Woody Guthrie when he was commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs promoting the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in 1941

  • Star Thistle - Dragon Eyes

    • From Winnipeg

    • This is a song by Adrianne Lenker of the band Big Thief, released on her 2020 solo album Songs

  • Hitoshi Komuro

    • He’s a Japanese folksinger known as a member of the folk group Rokumonsen and as a composer for TV and movies

    • This is a live recording from a concert he gave in 1974

    • The title of the song translates to “Hard Work”

  • Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger - My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains

    • Seeger was a folklorist and musician who co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers in the 1950s

    • This is off their 2011 album Fly Down Little Bird, which they recorded in 2008, just a year before Mike’s death

    • The album was an attempt to record the traditional songs from their childhood as closely as possible to the way they originally heard them

    • Peggy notes that the recording was “like old times,” and was “the first time in 50 years that [they] had taken time to just sit back and sing”

    • They learned the song as “My Home’s Across the Smoky Mountains” from the singing of Bascom Lamar Lunsford

    • The song was first recorded by the Carolina Tar Heels in 1929

  • Caravan - Distant Gunfire Sounds

    • This is off the 1978 album Thailand: Songs for Life

    • Caravan are a folk-rock band that formed in 1975 during the Thai fight for democracy

    • The verse the title comes from translates to “Distant gunfire sounds / Waking slaves to freedom / Thus a new life comes”

  • Steeleye Span - My Johnny Was a Shoemaker

    • They’re a British folk rock band that formed in 1969 and remain active, though they’ve undergone several changes in membership over the years

    • This one is from their 1970 album Hark! The Village Wait

  • Cara Luft - My Johnny Was a Shoemaker

    • Artist from Winnipeg

    • This is a sea ballad, or “forecastle shanty” from England that is either traditional or was written by WJ Florence in the 1850s—we aren’t sure whether Florence truly wrote it or just claimed it as his own

  • Taskiana Four - I Shall Not Be Moved

    • A gospel vocal quartet that recorded for Victor Records between 1926 and 1928

    • “I Shall Not Be Moved” is a spiritual that became popular as a protest song during the Civil Rights Movement and as a union song

  • Marie Hare - Maid of the East

    • Ballad singer from Strathadam, NB, known for her performances at the Miramichi Folksong Festival

    • Relatively rare ballad

    • Hare learned it from her friend, who learned it from her father who was a woodsman and likely learned it in a lumber camp in the 1870s

  • The Moving Star Hall Singers - The Rabbit and the Partridge

    • The Moving Star Hall Singers were all lifelong residents of Johns Island, South Carolina, their ages ranging from 25 to 65 years old

    • Though the island was poor and younger generations weren’t as involved with preserving cultural traditions, the group of islands that Johns Island is part of has been referred to as one of the heartlands of American music

    • This comes from the 1967 album Been in the Storm So Long

    • Jane Hunter tells the story

  • Robert Mitchum, Gary Gray - Just Like Me

    • Mitchum was an American actor known for films like Cape Fear, Night of the Hunter, and River of No Return

    • Gray was a child actor who continued his career on TV as an adult

    • This is from the soundtrack to the 1948 film Rachel and the Stranger

  • Old Man Luedecke - Wait a While

    • This is from his 2015 album Domestic Eccentric, which he recorded in a cabin he built himself in his own backyard in Chester, NS

  • Bernice Johnson Reagon - Give Your Hands to Struggle

    • Reagon was a song leader, activist, scholar, and composer who was a founding member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee’s Freedom Singers in the 1960s, and with them recognized the potential in collective singing to bring diverse groups together

    • This is from her 1975 album of the same name

    • The liner notes state: “Without struggle there is no friction, there is no movement, there is no life, and no future.”

  • Alonzo Burks - Will the Circle Be Unbroken

    • This is a field recording from Mississippi

    • Gianni Marcucci travelled from Italy to the United States five times during the 70s and 80s to document blues music

    • He found Burks in Flora, Mississippi, through the nephew of blues artist William “Do Boy” Diamond, and recorded several of his songs in the summer of 1978

    • Well-known Christian hymn written around 1907 by Ada R Habershon and Charles H Gabriel

  • Juan Sequndo Mamani, Eugenio Challapa Challapa - Solo on the Bandola / Romero, Romero / Sahsalye

    • This is off a 1975 album of music by the Indigenous groups of Chile

    • The songs we heard were performed by Aymara people, who inhabit the Andes and Altiplano regions, and each of the songs was about llamas and performed during the Floreo festival, which celebrates the llama

  • Cliff Scott - Long Wavy Hair

    • He was a country blues musician from Georgia who was recorded by the folksong collector George Mitchell in 1969

  • Margret RoadKnight - Living Legend

    • She’s an Australian musician who’s been performing for over 50 years in a variety of genres

    • This is a live performance from 2006

    • The song was written by Shel Silverstein and Bob Gibson in 1978

  • Totta Näslund - Farewell

    • He was a Swedish musician and actor who was active from 1975 until his death in 2005

    • This is a Bob Dylan song written in 1963 and only first officially released in 2010, though several recordings were circulated on bootlegs over the years

  • Pharis & Jason Romero - Cumberland Gap

    • From Horsefly, BC

    • Appalachian folk song likely from the late 19th century

  • Richard Brautigan - The View from the Dog Tower

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Barking Dog: August 8, 2024

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Barking Dog: July 11, 2024