Barking Dog: August 10, 2023
Kacy & Clayton - The Dalesman’s Litany
Contemporary duo from Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan
English song by Frederic William Moorman
From their 2013 album The Day is Past and Gone
Verdell Primeaux - Old Tee Pee Back Home
An Indigenous musician based in Arizona
This is from his 2009 album Lost and Lonely
Boubacar Traoré, Ali Farka Touré - Diarabi
Traoré is a Malian musician who became very popular in his country as a symbol of their recent independence in the early 1960s
His popularity declined through the 1970s, but interest in his music was revived in 1987 after a TV appearance
A British record producer discovered a recording of one of his performances during that time, and he signed a record deal, releasing his first album in 1990
Since then, he’s released 10 more albums, had a film made about him, and has toured internationally
Touré was an internationally known Malian musician who blended traditional Malian music with North American blues
He collaborated with many other musicians, including Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal
This is from Traoré’s 2002 album, Je Chanterai Pour Toi
Kenichi Nagira - Like Someone
He’s a Japanese folksinger, actor, storyteller, and essayist, and is also an expert on traditional Japanese pubs
He was inspired by slightly earlier Japanese folk artists like Tomoya Takaishi and Wataru Takada, both of whom we’ve played before on the show
Since the late 1990s, much of his music has been influenced by bluegrass and country music
Off his 1972 album Man'nendoko
It uses the same tune as “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore” by Woody Guthrie
Colter Wall - Thirteen Silver Dollars
From Swift Current, Saskatchewan
This is his own song, based on a run-in he had with a police officer in Swift Current, which is sometimes called “Speedy Creek”
Bob Dylan - Rambling, Gambling Willie
A studio outtake from 1962
Sis Cunningham - Strange Things Happenin’
Important member of the folk community for many years
Founding editor of Broadside Magazine, an important publication for the Greenwich Village folk scene
One of the first people to be blacklisted as a communist sympathiser in post WWII America
She adapted this song in 1976 from John Handcox, who was a union organiser
It’s about the plight of dispossessed sharecroppers in Arkansas
Kemuli String Band - What We Said
Off a 1999 album of 25 years of selected field recordings from a rainforest community in Papua New Guinea
A member of the band nearly married another woman before marrying his wife, but her parents refused, and she quickly moved on
He wrote this song about that situation
The liner notes for the album state that the message of the song is essentially, “when you are married to someone else, if that person fights with you, then you can think back to what we said to each other”
Gordon Lightfoot - Pride of Man
Written by Hamilton Camp in 1964, released by Lightfoot on his album Lightfoot from 1966
Moses Williams - The Train
He was a blues musician born in Mississippi who moved to Florida to work in the citrus groves after travelling with several acts in the 30s and 40s
He played the diddly bow, essentially a plank of wood with a single string nailed onto it
This is from an album of field recordings made in Florida between 1977 and 1980, called Drop On Down in Florida
Uncle Sinner - Old Rub Alcohol Blues
From Winnipeg
This song is by Dock Boggs, an influential old-time musician from Norton, Virginia who worked as a coal miner much of his life
Bruce Cockburn - King Kong Goes to Tallahassee
Singer-songwriter and guitarist from Ottawa who’s been playing professionally for over 40 years
This is from his 2005 album Speechless
Sarah Wood - Shady Grove
She’s an old-time banjo player and traditional ballad singer from Kentucky
This song is off her 2017 album 25 Tunes for Old Time Banjo and Singing, Vol. 1
Traditional Appalachian folk song
There are many variations of this song, with at least 300 stanzas recorded by the early 21st century
Sunny War - Soul Tramp
Folk-punk artist based in LA who taught herself to play guitar and write music at the age of 13
Off her 2019 album Shell of a Girl
Joy Harjo - I Am a Dangerous Woman / Crossing the Border Into Canada
She’s a poet, author, playwright, and musician who was the first Native American to serve as Poet Laureate of the United States
This is from the 1980 album Poets Read Their Contemporary Poetry, compiled by the Before Columbus Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the promotion of contemporary American multicultural literature
Nathan Hatt - His Jacket Was Blue
This is from an album of folk songs from Nova Scotia collected by Helen Creighton and released in 1956
Nathan Hatt ran a lumber mill in Lunenburg County and the lumbermen would sing him their songs when they came down from the woods
He was illiterate but committed songs to memory very easily, and knew 87 songs at the age of 87
This song originated in England
James Shorter - Home Going
Recorded by field researcher and festival curator George Mitchell in Senatobia, Mississippi in August of 1967
An uncredited female singer, likely Jessie Mae Hemphill, joins him on that recording
Irvin Cook, Leonard Bowles - Momma Don’t Allow
This is from an album of non-blues secular African American music from Virginia
Cook and Bowles were from Henry County, Virginia
Cook played the banjo, and his father taught him the two-finger picking method that he uses on the song
Bowles was a fiddle player
This is dubbed from a video of the two playing together from 1984 (another video of them can be found here)
Joseph Spence - Won’t That Be a Happy Time?
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
This track was included on the 2021 Smithsonian Folkways album Encore: Unheard Recordings of Bahamian Guitar and Singing
It’s a hymn that came from a hymnal called Harmony Heaven, which was popular in the Bahamas
It was sung at Spence’s funeral service in 1984
Mississippi Fred McDowell - Fred’s Worried Life Blues
He was a hill country blues musician originally from Tennessee, though he moved to Mississippi in 1928 and continued to farm there full-time while playing music on the weekends
His music caught the attention of producers and blues fans in the early 1960s due to recordings that Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins made of him while on a field recording trip through the southern states
Within a couple of years of this attention, he became a professional musician and recording artist who played at folk festivals and toured clubs around the world
This is his own song from 1965
Lum Guffin - Rolling and Tumbling
Tennessee musician born Columbus Guffin Jr in 1902
This was recorded in 1978
The song is by Hambone Willie Newbern and was first recorded in 1929
Stanley Triggs - Sandy Morgan’s Gin
An anthropologist and photographer who worked in logging camps, construction camps, in forestry, with survey crews, and on railroad gangs in BC
He also played in coffee houses in the 1960s
Triggs learned this in a logging camp in the Kootenays, though he knew nothing about its origin
Selah Jubilee Singers - I Feel Like My Time Ain’t Long
An American gospel vocal quartet active from 1927-1953
This was recorded in February of 1941
BF Shelton - Darling Cora
American singer and banjoist who made his living as a barber in Kentucky and travelled to Bristol, Tennessee in 1927 to record at the Bristol Sessions, also known as the “Big Bang” of modern country music
He recorded four songs for these sessions, and did record again in 1928 for Columbia Records, but the second set of recordings did not survive, so these four songs are all we have of his
“Darling Corey” is an American folk song, based on verses from the song “The Gambling Man”
It’s pretty new, with the earliest version from 1918
Cindy Mapes - Buffalo Holler
Words and music by Peggy Seeger
Mapes was a full-time preschool teacher in Ohio at the time this was recorded in the 1970s
This song is about the time a giant coal waste dam broke in 1972, which sent 130 million gallons of water down Buffalo Hollow
It killed 150 people and left 4,000 homeless
The mine companies then stalled efforts by families to gain compensation until 1974
Mabel Cawthorn - The Dying Girl
She was 82 when she recorded this song in 1983
She was from Georgia, and grew up in a musical family--she even surprised her brother by learning to play “Corrina, Corrina” on his banjo when she was a toddler
She later sold produce from her truck and was known in the area as the “Old Vegetable Lady”
She also worked in cotton mills when she was older, and continued to play banjo, harp, and piano throughout her life, even playing banjo at the 1983 Georgia Folklife Festival
This is a nineteenth century literary piece that entered the oral tradition
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 Montréal in the 1960s
This is from their 1974 self-titled album
The song is by Loudon Wainwright
Mississippi Joe Callicott - Lonesome Katy
He was a delta blues musician from Nesbit, Mississippi who began his recording career in 1929
Traditional American freeform blues song also known as “Worried Blues”
Furry Lewis - Casey Jones
American country blues artist from Memphis, Tennessee
Popular traditional American song about how Casey Jones and his fireman Sim Webb raced their locomotive to make up for lost time on April 30, 1900, not knowing that there was another train ahead of them on the line
Jones’s friend, Wallace Saunders, started singing the song soon after Jones’s death, to the tune of a popular song known as Jimmie Jones
Lewis recorded it in 1968 in Memphis, TN
Harry McClintock - Casey Jones (The Union Scab)
American hobo singer and poet from Tennessee who’s known for writing “Big Rock Candy Mountain”
The labour activist Joe Hill wrote this song in San Pedro, California, after the first day of a walkout of 40,000 railway employees during the Illinois Central shopmen's strike of 1911
The Wailin’ Jennys - Wildflowers
Folk group formed in Winnipeg in 2002
This is from their 2017 album Fifteen
It’s a Tom Petty song from 1994
Tom Waits - Rockin’ Chair
Waits a very well known American musician, composer, and actor who’s been playing professionally for 50 years
Recorded in 1971 and included on his album The Early Years, Volume One
Lightnin’ Hopkins - Mean Old Frisco Blues
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
He continued to tour and record throughout the 60s and 70s, and was Houston, Texas’s poet in residence for 35 years
This was recorded live at the Swarthmore College Folk Festival in Pennsylvania in 1965
The song is by Mississippi delta blues musician Arthur Crudup
Old Man Luedecke - Quiet Creek
From Chester, NS
Off his 2005 album Hinterland
The Weather Station - Waltz (Part 2)
Adam Hurt - Fire on the Mountain
