Barking Dog: August 8, 2024

  • Fiver - Spinning Out & Going Nowhere

    • Solo project of Toronto-based artist Simone Schmidt

    • This is a brand new, not-yet-released song that Simone sent straight to us—thanks Simone!

    • It comes out officially on August 19

  • Pete Seeger - Those Three Are On My Mind

    • Seeger was a folk singer and an activist from New York who advocated for countless social causes through his music for 75 years

    • The song is about the murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Shwerner in Mississippi in 1964, while they were helping African Americans register to vote

    • Pete Seeger was also working on the same project in Mississippi that summer, and Frances Taylor, who was a film critic for the New York Times, wrote the lyrics as a poem and asked him to put it to music, which he did in 1966

  • Rosalie Sorrels - The Money Crop

    • She started out as a folksinger and collector of folk songs, and left her husband in the 1960s to travel across America with her five children, establishing herself as a performer and making connections with other folk musicians, writers, and artists

    • This is from her 2000 album No Closing Chord, which is a tribute to Malvina Reynolds

    • Reynolds wrote the song in the mid-1960s

  • Pharis & Jason Romero - Oregon Trail

    • A Woody Guthrie song off the album Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie’s 26 Northwest Songs

    • The songs on the album are performed by various artists but were all 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

    • Pharis and Jason Romero are a married duo from Horsefly, BC

  • Joseph Spence - Sloop John B.

    • Joseph Spence was a Bahamian musician known for vocalizing and humming while playing guitar

    • While the Beach Boys’ 1966 adaptation of the song might be the best known version, this is actually a Bahamian folk song from Nassau

    • Spence’s version is from his 1972 album Good Morning Mr. Walker

  • Country Joe McDonald, Bernie Krause - Cetacean Visitations

    • McDonald is a musician from California who’s been playing since the late 1950s, when he began busking on the streets in Berkeley

    • He’s known as both a solo artist and as a member of the group Country Joe and the Fish

    • Krause began his career as a recording engineer, and later joined the Weavers for a brief period in the early 60s

    • He’s both a musician and soundscape ecologist, and he founded Wild Sanctuary in 1968, which records and archives the sounds of natural environments

    • In the 1980s, Krause and his colleague Diana Reiss lured a lost migrating humpback whale out of the Sacramento River Delta and back into the Pacific Ocean using recordings of humpback whales feeding

    • This is from the collaborative 2005 album Natural Imperfections

    • It captures the sounds of humpback and killer whales and guitar and harmonica played by McDonald

  • Gary Green - The Ballad of Broadside

    • Musician from Tennessee

    • From his 1977 album Gary Green, Vol. 1: These Six Strings Neutralize the Tools of Oppression

    • Green writes of this song: “This is probably the most important song on this album because it is a tribute to two of the most important (and most overlooked) people in the history of American music. Without Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen and their Broadside Magazine, we wouldn’t know the names of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Janis Ian and a few dozen others.”

  • Sis Cunningham, The Almanac Singers - Belt-Line Girl

    • Cunningham was the founding editor of Broadside Magazine, an important publication for the Greenwich Village folk scene

    • She was also one of the first people to be blacklisted as a communist sympathiser in post-WWII America

    • The Almanac Singers were founded by Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger in 1940

    • That song is by Cunningham, and they recorded it together in early 1942

  • Bruce Cockburn - Foxglove

    • Singer-songwriter and guitarist from Ottawa who’s been playing professionally for over 40 years

    • From his 2005 album Speechless

  • Bo Carter - The Law Gonna Step On You

    • Bo Carter was an early blues musician, born Armenter Chatmon

    • His brothers, Lonnie and Sam Chatmon, were also blues musicians, and they were all members of the blues group the Mississippi Sheiks

    • He recorded this one in June of 1931

  • Morley Loon - Wee Jee

    • He was a Cree musician and actor from Mistissini, Quebec

    • That one’s from his debut album, Northland, My Land, from 1981

    • The title translates to “Is It Over”

  • Vic Chestnutt - The Garden

    • He was a singer-songwriter from Athens, Georgia who released 17 albums over the course of his career

    • This one is from his 2005 album Ghetto Bells

  • Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin’

  • Jack Warshaw - Vanzetti’s Letter

    • He’s an American musician who moved to England in the 1960s to work as an architect, and stayed there because of the folk scene and his resistance to the Vietnam War

    • This is from his album Long Time Gone, recorded in 1979 and remastered in 2011

    • Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrant anarchists accused of murdering two men during an armed robbery in Massachusetts in 1920, and later executed

    • Though they were sentenced to death, they appealed several times on several factors that seriously brought into question the guilt of the two men and raised questions about the biases of the jury that sentenced them

    • They were nonetheless executed in 1927, and 60 years later in 1987, the governor of Massachusetts finally issued a proclamation that the two men had been unfairly tried and convicted

  • Lee Hays - State of Arkansas

    • He was a folksinger from Arkansas who was a member of the Weavers, and is known for cowriting “If I Had a Hammer” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”

    • Hays got a job at a library in Ohio in the 1930s, which led to his discovery of books that undid his fundamentalist southern upbringing and caused him to move back to the South, this time to assist in the fight for racial equality

    • This is from the Weavers 1959 album Travelling On

    • It’s a traditional American ballad

  • Richard Inman - Pictures

  • Janet Russell, Christine Kydd - Do You Love an Apple

    • Russell and Kydd are both Scottish musicians who have been playing professionally since the 1980s

    • This is from their 1993 album Janet Russell & Christine Kydd

    • It’s a traditional song, possibly Scottish in origin, that was collected by folksinger and song collector AL Lloyd from barge captain Bob Roberts in England in the 1950s

  • Liam Clancy - Dowie Dens of Yarrow

    • He was an Irish singer best known as a member of the Clancy Brothers, which he formed with his older brothers and Tommy Makem, with whom he later performed as a duo

    • It’s a traditional ballad from the Anglo-Scottish border that has many variants

    • “Dowie” is Scots for sad or dismal, and a “den” is a wooded valley

  • Tommy Jarrell - Little Maggie

    • Fiddler, banjo player, and singer from Mount Airy, NC

    • Made his living in road construction but was an influential musician and received the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship in 1982

    • “Little Maggie” is related to the songs “Country Blues” and “Darlin’ Corey,” and was first collected in the Appalachian region of the US in the 1800s

    • This is from his 1975 album of banjo music Come and Go With Me

  • Steve Ledford - 99 Years

    • He was an old-time fiddle player from North Carolina who began his recording career in the early 1930s with a group called the Carolina Ramblers

    • He first recorded that song with the Carolina Ramblers in 1932, and that version is from the 2015 anthology collection Legends Of Old-Time Music: Fifty Years Of County Records

  • Jesse Fuller - 99 Years

    • He was an American one-man band born in Georgia in 1896

    • He could play multiple instruments simultaneously, using a harmonica holder to hold a harmonica, a kazoo, or a microphone, playing guitar, and tap-dancing or soft-shoeing as he played

    • Though he had already learned two styles of guitar by the age of 10, he only decided to try making a living from music in the early 1950s

    • Started by working locally in clubs and bars in San Francisco and other nearby cities, but became better known by performing on TV, and in 1954, when he was 58, Fuller recorded his first album

    • This is his own song off the 1991 reissue of Fuller’s 1956 album Frisco Bound

  • Utah Phillips - “Anybody who doesn’t need a cop to tell him what to do”

    • He was an anarchist folksinger, storyteller, and labour organiser from Ohio

    • This is from his 1999 album Making Speech Free

  • Josh White - Bad Housing Blues

    • 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

    • That song is from around 1940

  • Charlie King - Eat Meese

    • He’s a folk singer and activist from Massachusetts whose music has been recorded by artists including Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Chad Mitchell

    • This is from his 1986 album Feelings of Fire with Dave & Kay Gordon

    • Ed Meese was counsellor to president Ronald Reagan in 1983 when he made remarks expressing disbelief that children in America were going hungry and suggesting that people went to soup kitchens voluntarily

  • Golden Leaf Quartet - Sleep, Baby, Sleep

    • They were a vocal quartet from Alabama that recorded 14 songs between 1928 and 1930

    • They recorded this one in 1930 under the name the Whippoorwill Four

  • Group of school children - Jack, Can I Ride?

  • Cara Luft - He Moved Through the Fair

    • From Winnipeg

    • Off her album Darlingford

    • Traditional Irish folk song usually known as “She Moved Through the Fair”

    • Lyrics first published in 1909

  • David Rovics - Behind Barbed Wire

    • He’s a topical singer-songwriter based in Oregon who’s been playing since the 1990s

    • This is from a 2011 tribute album to the Scottish folksinger Alistair Hulett, called Love, Loss, and Liberty

    • The song originally appeared on Hulett’s 1996 album Saturday Johnny & Jimmy the Rat, which he released with Dave Swarbrick

  • The Kingfisher Trio - On the Jericho Road

    • From a 1994 album of Native American music, presented by the National Museum of the American Indian

    • Members of the Johnson Prairie Indian Baptist Church in Oklahoma

    • Both Cherokee people and missionaries adapted songs directly from English songs, but others are unique to the Cherokee language

    • This one is a direct translation by Joe O’Field of the 1935 Donald McCrossan song

  • Marie Hare - Green Grows the Laurel

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

    • The song is likely English or Irish in origin, though Hare’s version combines later Scottish and American variants

  • Kenneth Patchen - The Orange Bears

  • Alan Mills, Jean Carignan - Reel du Pecheur

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Barking Dog: August 22, 2024

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Barking Dog: July 25, 2024