Barking Dog: August 24, 2023
Lonesome Ace Stringband - Praying for Rain
Contemporary stringband based in Toronto
This is from their forthcoming album Try to Make it Fly, which comes out October 13th and is their first album of all-original songs
Bassist Max Malone wrote this song after the Lytton Creek wildfire destroyed the village of Lytton in 2021, shortly after he had moved to the region
Gordon Lightfoot - Long River
From his 1966 album Lightfoot
Bruce Cockburn - Going to the Country
Singer-songwriter and guitarist from Ottawa who’s been playing professionally for over 40 years
From 1970
Lonzie Thomas - Rabbit on a Log
He was a musician from Lee County, Alabama who was recorded at his home by music historian George Mitchell in the early 1980s
This is a traditional American folk song
Mississippi John Hurt - Pay Day
American country blues singer and guitarist from Avalon, Mississippi
He made a couple of recordings for OkEh Records in the late 1920s but they were commercial failures, and when OkEh Records closed shop during the Great Depression, Hurt returned to his work as a sharecropper, continuing to play music at local events
His OkEh recordings were included on the incredibly influential 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, and in 1963 a copy of his song “Avalon Blues” was discovered, which led the musicologist Dick Spottswood to find Hurt in Avalon
Hurt performed at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, which brought further attention to his music, and he toured extensively throughout the US and recorded 3 albums
This was recorded at the Library of Congress in 1963 by Dick Spottswood and Joe Hickerson
This is his own song, though he takes a bunch of lyrics from the songs “Red Rocking Chair” and “Rabbit on a Log”
Bridget St John - Many Happy Returns
She’s an English musician who’s been playing professionally for over 50 years
This is from her 1969 debut album Ask Me No Questions
Lisa Null - Ash to Ash
Null was a folk musician who performed around the Washington, DC area for more than 40 years
This is from her 2015 album Legacies, released by Folk Legacy Records
She wrote this song after she returned to school to finish her undergraduate degree in her late 30s, and took a course on the principles of ecology
The course taught her about the long line of thinkers throughout history who thought seriously on the origins of life, both from religious and scientific perspectives
She says: “The principles many discovered while observing the natural world seemed to ratify their sense of the divine. Eventually I concluded that I too felt the same way.”
Null is joined by Karen Ashbrook on hammered dulcimer
Ken Whiteley and the Beulah Band - The Lone Pilgrim
Ken Whiteley is a musician from Toronto who’s been playing folk music since the early 1970s
He formed the Beulah Band in 2015 with his son Ben, Rosalyn Dennett of the band Oh My Darling, and Frank Evans of the Slocan Ramblers
This song is from their 2015 self-titled album
It’s a Sacred Harp song that was composed by BF White, and it seems to have been popularised through the Watson Family’s 1963 recording
Simon & Garfunkel - Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream
From their 1964 album Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.
This song is by Pennsylvania musician and songwriter Ed McCurdy, who Simon & Garfunkel knew through his position as host at the Bitter End, a folk coffeehouse in Greenwich Village
JC “Jake” Staggers - Garfield
From a 1984 album of traditional music from northern Georgia, recorded by folklorist and musician Art Rosenbaum
Staggers was the only black banjo player Rosenbaum had recorded in Georgia at the time the record was released
He was born in 1899 in South Carolina, and learned the banjo from his older brother and others in the community, acquiring a strong repertoire of songs over the years that made him a popular musician at local gatherings
Bob Dylan - Railroad Bill
This was recorded during the Self Portrait sessions around 1970 but not included on the album
It was first released in 2013
The song is about Morris Slater, a former circus hand and turpentine worker who lived a life of danger and became Railroad Bill, an African American outlaw remembered through folklore and folk song
Heavenly Gospel Singers - You’d Better Run On
Gospel quartet with members originally from Spartanburg, SC, though they largely formed in Detroit in the 1920s
Many popular doowop groups of the 50s were musically descended from prewar groups like the Heavenly Gospel Singers
This was recorded in 1937 for Victor Records
It’s a traditional gospel song, though this version also takes some lyrics from “Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed”
Tzo’kam - Quenqwant
Tzo’kam are a family band from what is now British Columbia
They’ve been singing together at community events for over half a century, and they started performing and recording publicly in 1997 to share their traditional and contemporary culture
Tzo’kam means “chickadee” and “visitors are coming” in the Stl’atl’imx language
This is from their 2004 album Songs of the Lillooet
Ian & Sylvia - Four Strong Winds
Ian & Sylvia performed together from 1959 until their divorce in 1975
Known for performing a number of songs including “Someday Soon,” “Early Morning Rain,” and this one
Ian Tyson composed this song in about 20 minutes while at his manager’s apartment in NYC in 1961
It’s from their 1964 album of the same name
Si Kahn, Charlotte Brody - Boxes of Bobbins / Time to Organize
Kahn is a community organiser and musician from Pennsylvania who moved to the south as an activist during the Civil Rights Movement
Brody was his wife, a registered nurse and, along with Kahn, a full-time organiser for the Carolina Brown Lung Association
These song was recorded in 1973 for the “What Now People” series that advocated song as political movement
Brody wrote them as organising tools for the campaign to unionise JP Stevens, one of the largest textile corporations in the US at the time, which had done everything in its power to avoid the creation of a union
Unions were particularly important in the textile industry because of the health issues that could be caused by unsafe labour practices—particularly “brown lung,” a respiratory condition caused by the clouds of cotton dust that blew around the mills
Mississippi Joe Callicott - Fare Thee Well Blues
He was a Delta blues musician from Mississippi
It seems as though this song is related to the Memphis Jug Band’s “I’ll See You in the Spring, When the Birds Begin to Sing” from 1927
This version was recorded in 1930
Uncle Sinner - Milk Cow Blues
Winnipeg musician
From his 2015 album Let the Devil In
This is a version of Kokomo Arnold’s 1934 song of the same name, which made Arnold a star and has been adapted into many different genres
Hobart Smith - Cuckoo Bird
An old-time musician who was rediscovered in the 60s after performing throughout the first half of the 20th century, often with his sister Texas Gladden
This is from the 1964 album Hobart Smith of Saltville, Virginia
A traditional English folk song commonly found in the Appalachian region of the US, though also popular in Canada, Scotland, and Ireland
David Rovics - We Are Everywhere
He’s a musician and writer based in Oregon who’s been touring internationally since the 1990s
This is from his 2002 album Hang a Flag in the Window
He says of the song: The phrase “we are everywhere” was popular in the anti-capitalist movement around the world around the turn of the 21st century.
Eric Bibb - This Land is Your Land
He’s an American musician who grew up around well-known musicians like Peter Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Bob Dylan, because his father, Leon Bibb, was a musical theatre singer who was part of the 1960s New York folk scene
Woody Guthrie wrote this song in 1940 after he heard the patriotic song “God Bless America” during his travels throughout America and felt that it didn’t speak to the things he had seen and the people he met as he travelled
For better or worse, the song has since become almost a second national anthem for the States
Unfortunately, the song in its simplified version sometimes seems to go against Guthrie’s original intentions
This version includes all the lyrics, including commentary about Great Depression bread lines and a verse against private property
Bibb included it on his 2017 album Migration Blues
Old Man Luedecke - I Quit My Job
From Chester, NS
Off his album Hinterland from 2006
Tony Schwartz - Learning a Language
He was an agoraphobic sound archivist who spent much of his life documenting the sounds of his neighbourhood in New York City, though he also collected recordings from around the world by corresponding with international musicians
From the 1962 album “You’re Stepping on My Shadow”, which was originally broadcast on WNYC’s “Around New York” program
Phil Ochs - Ballad of Alferd Packer
He was an American protest singer from the 1960s Greenwich Village folk scene
Packer became known as the “Colorado Cannibal” after he confessed to eating his five companions while on a trip through the San Juan Mountains in the winter of 1874, and was later convicted of voluntary manslaughter
Sam Amidon - Dry Bones
Contemporary folk artist from Vermont
This is from a 2019 tribute to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, an incredibly influential album for the American folk revival of the 1950s and 60s, released in 1952
Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 version of the song was included in the Anthology
William “Do Boy” Diamond - My Babe
He was a blues musician from Canton, Mississippi who was recorded in 1978 by Gianni Marcucci, who travelled from Italy to the United States five times during the 70s and 80s to document blues music in the country
This is a blues standard written by Willie Dixon and first recorded by Little Walter in 1955
The song is based on the traditional gospel song “This Train”
Larry Penn, Darryl Holter - The Wreck of the Carl D Bradley
Penn was Wisconsin’s Labour Poet Laureate, a songwriter, toymaker, activist, and union man
Holter is a musician and historian from Minneapolis
This is from their 1989 album Stickin’ with the Union: Songs from Wisconsin Labor History
The Carl D Bradley was a limestone carrier owned by a subsidiary of US Steel, and was the largest of the Great Lakes boats of its time
The ship broke in two sank in November of 1958 during a gale, and the liner notes for the album say, “It’s impossible to read accounts of this shipwreck and the events leading up to it and not come away with the feeling that it could have been avoided.”
Kenneth Peacock - Green Shores of Fogo
He was an ethnomusicologist from Toronto who was on the staff for what is now the Canadian Museum of Civilization
His projects for the museum covered practically every part of Canada, and he seems to have learned this song while researching the folk music of Newfoundland in the 1950s
He’s remembered for the impact this research had on the folk music revival in Canada in the mid 20th century
This is a Newfoundland folk song from the area around Fogo, which has strong Irish ancestry
It’s based on the Irish-American emigrant ballad “The Country I’m Leaving Behind”
The Wailin’ Jennys - Bright Morning Stars
Folk group formed in Winnipeg in 2002
From their 2011 album of the same name
The song is likely from Kentucky, and it was not widely known before Ruth Crawford Seeger included it in her 1953 book American Folk Songs for Christmas—it later entered into the common repertoire when folk musician Robin Christenson found it in the book and arranged it to be performed at the 1968 Fox Hollow Festival
David Laing - Silver Brook
He was a geologist, singer-songwriter, and educator from New Hampshire who recorded 2 albums for Folkways records in the 1970s
His father was a novelist and his mother was the poet Dilys Laing, and he inherited his love for nature and humanity from both of them
Laing wrote songs about places that were special to him, which resulted in the album this song comes from, called Magic Mountain
This one was written while in Pepperell, Massachusetts
The Weather Station - Chip on My Shoulder
From Toronto
Off the 2011 album All of It Was Mine
Malvina Reynolds - God Bless the Grass
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
Had received a doctorate from the University of California in 1938, but went back to university in the late 1950s to study music theory
She’s known particularly for writing the song “Little Boxes,” though she wrote and recorded a large catalogue of music during her career
This one is from her 1967 album Malvina Reynolds Sings the Truth
Sons of the Pioneers - So Long to the Red River Valley
One of the earliest western bands in the US
They formed in 1933 and are still together as a band but there have been countless changes in membership since the band’s beginning
This was released in 1941
Cecil Barfield - Sun Goin’ Down
Barfield was a blues musician and farmer from Georgia who George Mitchell recorded in 1976
Norman Rosten - Ballad of the Visiting Firemen
He was a poet, playwright, and novelist from New York City
This is from the 1963 Folkways album The Poems of Norman Rosten
Bryan Bowers - I’ll Fly Away
