Barking Dog: September 29, 2022
We start the show today with music from three people who were born on this day, September 29:
Ian McShane - The Unfortunate Rake
He’s an English actor known for his work in Deadwood and, more recently, American Gods and John Wick
He’s 80 today!
This one is a version of a traditional song, which he recorded for Deadwood
It’s a member of the song family that includes “St. James Hospital”, “The Cowboy’s Lament”, “One Morning in May”, and “The Young Sailor Cut Down in His Prime”
Clarence Ashley - The Coo Coo Bird
He was born 127 years ago today
Clarence Ashley a musician from Tennessee originally known for his performances at medicine shows in the 1920s
He retired from medicine shows in 1943, and interest in his music was revived in the 50s through his inclusion on the very influential Anthology of American Folk Music, released in 1952
Ashley was nowhere to be seen, however, until the folksinger Ralph Rinzler met him by chance in 1960 at a fiddler’s convention
Rinzler set up a recording session in Ashley’s home, and over the next few years, he played at many folk festivals across the country
A traditional English folk song that was adapted into a banjo tune as it continued to develop in the US
Also popular in Canada, Scotland, and Ireland
Recorded and released in 1929
Gene Autry - Frankie and Johnny
Born 115 years ago today in Tioga, Texas
He was a very famous country musician known as the Singing Cowboy who began his career in the 1920s and retired in the 60s
Traditional American song inspired by multiple murders in the late 1800s
Also known as “Frankie and Albert”
This recording is from 1929
Mississippi Joe Callicott - Lonesome Katy
He was a Delta blues musician from Mississippi
Traditional American freeform blues song also known as “Worried Blues”
Sam Amidon - Pretty Fair Damsel
Contemporary folk artist from Vermont
This is his version of “Pretty Fair Maid in the Garden”, a ballad that’s likely British in origin
From his 2010 album I See the Sign
Mrs. William Towns - A Fair Maid Walked in Her Father’s Garden
From an album of Ontario folk songs collected by Edith Fowke and released in 1958
One of many, many songs about a lover who returns in disguise to test his sweetheart’s love then reveals his identity by showing her a ring they had broken together
The song family also includes songs like “John Riley”, “The Dark-Eyed Sailor”, and “The Plains of Waterloo”
This version has appeared in many parts of the United States and Canada under titles like “The Pretty Fair Maid” and “The Broken Token”
Other versions are similar to the Ontario variant, though most North American versions are about a sailor or a soldier instead of a gentleman
She learned it from her father, Michael Cleary, who was the first traditional folk singer Fowke recorded
The song before it, by Sam Amidon, is a related ballad
Chris Coole - Thinking About Home
He’s a musician from Toronto who’s currently a member of the Lonesome Ace Stringband, though he’s played with the Foggy Hogtown Boys, Sylvia Tyson, and David Francey
This is from his 2017 album The Tumbling River
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 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”
Ernest Stoneman, Mike Seeger - I’m Alone, All Alone
Ernest Stoneman was one of the most prominent country musicians during the genre’s first decade, and was raised by his father and three musically inclined cousins, who taught him the instrumental and vocal traditions of Blue Ridge mountain culture
Mike was a folklorist and musician who co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers in the 1950s
Stoneman learned the song from a childhood friend from the Galax, Virginia area, who also played autoharp
It’s a rare song
Mable Hillery, John Hunter - That’s All Right
From an album of spirituals, folk tales, and children’s games from John’s Island, South Carolina, released in 1967
Mable Hillery and John Hunter were members of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, a folk music ensemble that’s been around since the early 1900s
“That’s All Right” is a traditional gospel song that’s likely a simplification of an older spiritual
William Carridine - When I Lay My Burden Down
More commonly known as “Cat-Iron”, though that wasn’t a formal nickname but a mishearing of his last name by folk music collector Frederic Ramsey Jr.
This song is also known as “Glory, Glory” and it’s a traditional American spiritual that has been recorded in a number of genres
The melody is very similar to “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”
Daniel Viglietti - A Desalambar (Tear Down the Fences!)
From the 1973 album Tear Down The Fences! by Uruguayan folk musician Daniel Viglietti
He was one of the main figures in the Nueva Canción or “New Song” movement of the 1960s
This is one of his best-known songs
It starts with the lyrics, “I ask you people, did you ever stop to think / that this land is ours, and not his who ‘owns’ so much of it?”
Blind Boy Grunt - Train A-Travelin’
Here’s Blind Boy Grunt, I’ll let you guess his true identity
He wrote this around 1962
Abe McNeil - Drink Drink Drink
An American musician who folk song collector and festival curator George Mitchell recorded in Mississippi in 1967
Donald Crowder - Hambone
From a 1980 album of traditional music from Union County, North Carolina
This is an example of hambone, also known as buckdancing, Juba dance, or patting juba
It was used to keep time for other dancers at parties, and involves stomping, slapping and patting one’s legs, arms, chest, and cheeks
The tradition was originally brought by enslaved people to the southern United States
Lyrics and music were added in the mid 19th century, and the tradition was publicly performed
Morley Loon - Nee Dumphs
He was a Cree musician and actor from Mistissini, Quebec
This one’s from his debut album, Northland, My Land, from 1981
The title translates to “I Wish To See Her”
Kacy & Clayton - Over the River Charlie
From Wood Mountain, Saskatchewan
Originally a Scottish song, though also popular in Ireland and the US, especially Appalachian region
From at least the early 1700s
Related to “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss”
Jake Xerxes Fussell - Raggy Levy
Durham, NC artist who grew up travelling across the Southeast with his folklorist father
He says of the song: "I first heard it from a younger generation of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Doug & Frankie Quimby, who sang with Bessie Jones. Bessie and Doug and Frankie were close friends of my parents. Doug died a few years ago… he was one the best singers I ever heard and he used to sing this all the time so it's pretty special to me. It's a stevedore worksong from the Georgia coast. Years before Lomax recorded the piece it appeared in Lydia Parrish's (ethnographer wife of the painter Maxfield Parrish) 1942 songbook Slave Songs of the Georgia Sea Islands. I took some liberties by putting in the dramatic minor key chord changes but somehow they seem to work. The song kind of plays itself, in a way."
Vatulawa Trio - Kauti Au Ena Vakacegu (Lead me gently to my resting place)
From a 2014 album of string band field recordings from Fiji that were made in 1986
The title of this one translates to “Lead me gently to my resting place”
It was composed by Iliesa Koroi, who is the lead singer of this group
It’s an example of older Fijian popular music, a tradition which is called sere ni cumu
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”
Stan Rogers - The Witch of the Westmorland
Born and raised in Ontario, but known for his maritime-influenced music that was informed by his time spent visiting family in Nova Scotia during the summers of his childhood
This song is by English folksinger Archie Fisher, who first recorded it in 1976
Rogers recorded it for his 1979 album Between the Breaks Live!
Roscoe Holcomb - Coal Creek
Holcomb was a construction worker, coal miner, and farmer much of his life
Holcomb was first discovered by John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers playing on his front porch in Daisy, Kentucky in 1958, and became popular during the folk revival of the 1960s
Song likely in reference to one of several historical mine explosions in Coal Creek, Tennessee
George Davis - Little Lump of Coal
Davis was known as the Singing Miner, and he became a disc jockey in Hazard, Kentucky, after working as a miner for 38 years
He started playing music when he was 27, when the mines were being organised by the United Mine Workers Union
He would practice on his front porch every evening, and the miners would come and stand on the railroad tracks to listen to him
That same year, his arm was seriously injured in a mining accident, and he had to reteach himself to play the guitar in a new way
He continued to compose and perform his songs about life in the mines, because he knew they were important to the miners
In 1947, he was invited to do his first radio show, and at one time had at least three radio shows in three different towns, driving 480 km a day to record them, since these were the days before tape recorders were common
This is his own song that depicts a miner’s daily life
Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick - Benjamin Banneker
Kirkpatrick was a civil rights activist who was an associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where he was the director of folk culture
From the 1972 Folkways Records album Ballads of Black America, which was inspired by a performance Kirkpatrick gave at an elementary school book fair in Brooklyn, NY, in 1969, where he noticed a lack of books and music available for teaching children about the contributions Black people have made to the States and the world
He decided to write songs dedicated to this purpose, which resulted in the album
Benjamin Banneker, as we hear, was an African-American astronomer, mathematician, and naturalist who assisted with the city planning for Washington, DC
Pete Seeger on banjo, Jeanne Humphries on bass
Raimon - Societat De Consum
From a 1971 album of Catalonian protest songs by the Spanish singer Raimon, performed entirely in Catalan
“You buy a little bit / I buy a little bit / And he a little bit more / And later they'll call this consumers’ society. You work rather hard / And I work when I can / And he works all year long / And they always say the same: consumers’ society. You travel very little, I travel quite a lot / He's never left his village. Stores are full / Pockets are empty / Mine, yours, and his / But it is time to find out / Who it is whose pockets are full.”
Abner Jay - I’m So Depressed
A one-man band from Georgia who began playing at medicine shows at the age of 5, survived throat cancer in his 20s which resulted in his bass voice, and was even the agent and manager of Sister Rosetta Tharpe for a short period
Claimed he was (in his words) "World's Champion Cotton Picker and Pea Picker, World's Fastest Tobacco Crapper, World's Greatest Jaw Bone Player, World's Fastest Mule Skinner... THE WORLD'S WORSE BUSINESS MAN" in a leaflet he handed out at shows
Marchers - Come By Here
This is off a 1965 album of songs sung by protestors in Selma, Alabama during a march to the capital, Montgomery, to demand fair access to voting registration
Selah Jubilee Singers - Traveling Shoes
An American gospel vocal quartet active from 1927-1953
Many popular doowop groups of the 50s were musically descended from prewar groups like the Selah Jubilee Singers
A traditional African American spiritual
We hear another version after this
Rev. Gary Davis - Got On My Traveling Shoes
Was from SC but he moved to Durham, NC, in the 20s, which was a centre of Black culture at the time, where he collaborated with a number of other Piedmont blues artists
Was ordained a Baptist minister in 1933, and began to play gospel music instead of the secular music he was previously known for
Was first recorded in 1935 for the American Record Company
Moved to New York in the 40s, career revived in the 1960s with the American folk revival
Played at the Newport Folk Festival and was an important figure in the Greenwich Village scene, teaching artists like Dave Van Ronk, Bob Weir, and Tom Winslow
This is from an album of recordings John Cohen of the New Lost City Ramblers made of Davis in his home in 1953
Kinny Peebles, a New York City street singer, also provides vocals on that one
Pete Seeger, Guy Carawan, Garrett Morris - Liyashizwa (It Is Burned)
From a 1960 album called South African Freedom Songs, recorded during a time of mass evictions and resettlements in apartheid South Africa
The performers learned the songs from a tape recording made by leaders of the African National Congress in 1959
This song is from the women’s anti-pass campaign
For years, all African men had been forced to carry pass cards wherever they went that were designed to control the movement of Black Africans, and in 1956, the government of the Orange Free State decided that women had to carry them too
The women decided that they would bring their passes back instead, and burn them, for which they were arrested
Willie Dunn - Pontiac
Was a Mi’kmaq musician, film director, and politician from Montreal
From the 2021 anthology of Dunn’s music called Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies
Unspecified - Ibande Nge Lami (The Belt Is Mine)
From a 1965 album of South African freedom songs recorded by South African refugees
Leo Spencer - Turner’s Camp
From the 1961 album Lumbering Songs from the Ontario Shanties, collected by the folklorist Edith Fowke
Spencer from Lakefield, ON
This is an American ballad that was brought to Canada by American shanty boys
It was supposedly composed by a boy from New York for Charlie Turner in the winter of 1871
It belongs to a large group of songs that describe life in the lumber camps
This particular one wasn’t well-known in Ontario
Stanley Triggs - The Mad Trapper of Rat River
An anthropologist and photographer from who worked in logging camps, construction camps, in forestry, with survey crews, and on railroad gangs in BC
Also played in coffee houses in the 1960s
He learned this one at a logging camp near Creston, BC in 1945, from a cook named Mannie
It’s about the famous search for the trapper Albert Johnson in the 1930s
The song was widely circulated around the province
Fred Cockerham - Roustabout
Fiddle and banjo player from North Carolina
This song is essentially “Hop High My Lula Gal”
He learned the song from Mal Smith, a banjo player who lived near him
Nora Brown - Rye Whiskey / Little Birdie
She’s a 17 year-old banjoist and singer who carries on the old-time tradition
This is off her new album, Long Time to Be Gone
“Rye Whiskey” is also known as “Way Up on Clinch Mountain” and “Jack of Diamonds”, and “Little Birdie” is a traditional song popular in the south, which has many variations
Pharis & Jason Romero - Lady on the Green
From Horsefly, BC
Off their recent album Tell 'Em You Were Gold, which was recorded live over six days in a 60-year-old barn beside the Little Horsefly River
It’s a banjo-centric album, created to highlight the sound of the banjos that Jason makes
He plays a gourd banjo they call Gourdo on this one, which he built in 2019
They first heard it from Rafe Stefanini
Lonesome Ace Stringband - Green Sleeve
