New Year's Eve is fast approaching, and for lots of folks that means... drinking. Plenty of drinking. And since there's no shortage of singers and songwriters who've had a little something to say about that particular topic, maybe some of the following tunes can serve as an appropriate soundtrack to your own joyous (or not?) imbibing of spirits. For example, there's... Jimmy Liggins with his succinct rendition of
Drunk, and there's...
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2011 -
67 comments
Maggie and Terre Roche started performing professionally in the late '60s, just a little late for the folkie boom but also a bit too distinctive to blend easily with the singer-songwriters of the early '70s, even when they became acolytes of Paul Simon and recorded backup vocals on There Goes Rhymin' Simon
. By 1975, they had their own album on CBS, with tracks produced by Simon (and backed by the Oak Ridge Boys and the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section) and ex-Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith... Seductive Reasoning is not completely a folk nor a country album, which no doubt hurt its commercial potential... Songs such as "West Virginia", "Down the Dream", and "The Mountain People" touch on early joy and disillusionment/disappointment, while "Jill of All Trades" and "The Burden of Proof" reflect a few more years of life under one's belt and the smoothing out that can come with them. "Underneath the Moon" and "Wigglin' Man"... are more straightforward getting-laid songs, funny as hell... while several of their albums have been as good as Seductive Reasoning
, none were better. Nor did they have to be. -
Todd Mason (previously) [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Dec 16, 2011 -
29 comments
Toward the Within is the only official live album of the eclectic music group,
Dead Can Dance.
Recorded in one take in November of 1993, the performance was later released as an album and video. The latter includes short interviews with the heads of the group, Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry, interspersed with the songs.
Video track list:
[more inside]
posted by Brandon Blatcher
on Dec 8, 2011 -
44 comments
Folk-punk,
Orgcore (
UD definition) and
Dadpunk are all names for a
new wave of earnest, authentic rock that draws its roots from The Clash,
Billy Bragg, The Pogues, Social Distortion and Bruce Springsteen. In England, its best represented by
Frank Turner, the former singer of hardcore band
Million Dead. His anthemic songs about
life on the margins of fame,
poetry,
death,
inspiration and
the power of rock and roll have made him famous in England, leading to an upcoming
show at Wembley Arena. He follows in the footsteps of British folk-punk pioneers
Leatherface.
[more inside]
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Oct 23, 2011 -
92 comments
There's a new crop of Australian bands that take inspiration from old blues, but twist the music in a strange fashion. The trend may have started with
CW Stoneking (Jungle Blues,
Love Me Or Die), who channeled the old bluesmen despite being a
young man. Its continued on to Sydney's
Snowdroppers, who started out as a
house band for burlesque shows and kept that dirty sensibility up with songs like
Rosemary ,
Do The Stomp, and their signature tune
Good Drugs, Bad Women (lyrics NSW). Frequent Snowdroppers touring partners
Gay Paris add a Southern horror twist (
House Fire In the Origami District, My First Wife? She Was A Foxqueen! ) and an antic stage energy. Some of the bands relay on gimmicks, like Adelaide's
The Beards, who sing about how
you should consider having sex with a bearded man and point out that
if your dad doesn't have a beard, you've got two moms. The Beards recently performed at the
World Beard and Mustache Championships. Horror-country-rockers
Graveyard Train have picked up the torch dropped when Sydney psychobilly masters
Zombie Ghost Train (
Graveyard Queen) disbanded. Graveyard Train tunes like
Mummy,
Ballad for Beelzebub ,
Tall Shadow and
Dead Folk Dance combine cheerful Misfits horror theming with stompy country. Most of the singers from this loose scene are joining forces in Sydney this week to
pay tribute to Tom Waits.
posted by Lovecraft In Brooklyn
on Oct 4, 2011 -
32 comments
"I decided I wanted to buy the Dorsey Brothers’ mambo record. However, I did not have the required 39 cents." Over at
The Comics Journal, cartoonist
Kim Deitch (previously), son of animator Gene Deitch
(previously), has been posting a wonderful, rambling memoir about the music in his life.
Part 1: The Dorseys and Beyond "Watch for Russ Columbo playing some hot violin in
this one."
Part 2: An Early Education - Jazz, folk and the ’40s - Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton and jazz fandom
Part 3: Our hero stumbles on the birth of television, specifically,
music on televisionPart 4: Rock ‘n Roll - "
For a lot of Americans it was like the whole damn African jungle had landed in the middle of Ed Sullivan’s stage"
Part 5: Rocking Forward [more inside]
posted by mediareport
on Aug 7, 2011 -
3 comments
AFSAD: On June 24, 2010 – Midsummer’s Day – the acclaimed British singer Jon Boden launched an ambitious new project –
A Folk Song A Day. Every day for (nearly) a year now he's been posting his performance of a traditional song free online or as an audio podcast. He's now got just eight of his 365 songs to go, so now's your chance to catch up before it's too late.
posted by Paul Slade
on Jun 16, 2011 -
2 comments
Within that small and very specific sub-genre of musical Americana identifiable as the
train imitation, there is one amazing performance, from 1926, that set the standard:
Pan-American Blues. The man who recorded it did a fine and fanciful job of evoking the sounds of a
fox chase as well, and his rhythmically compelling solo rendition of
John Henry stands as testament to the potential for musical greatness achievable by one man and a humble harmonica. He was an African-American who was a founding member of the Grand Ole Opry, a musical institution that we rarely (as in,
never) today associate with black people, and his touching and tragic story, documented
here, is one that will be of interest to those concerned with the racial, economic and socio-cultural history of American popular music. He stands at one of its more unexpected intersections: his name is
DeFord Bailey.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Dec 30, 2010 -
15 comments
Full Utah Phillips concert from 2007:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6,
7,
8. If you don't know who Utah Phillips is, be prepared to meet one of the great performers of our age, telling funny stories and cracking jokes, singing great songs, and generally being a world treasure. If you want to know more about this great singer, songwriter, and peace and labor activist, you can watch
an hour long documentary on him from Democracy Now that was made after he passed away in 2008.
[previously]
posted by Kattullus
on Dec 15, 2010 -
26 comments
It’s maybe a
little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares:
we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley
on Dec 3, 2010 -
30 comments
Peter Grudzien lives in New York and makes psychedelic country music or at least used to, since only two albums of his material ever came out,
The Unicorn in 1974, and
The Garden of Love, which is mostly a collection of demos. His songs are varied, ranging from noise music to straight up country, and their subject matters are equally wide-ranging, from strange fare, such as
lyrics about his clone being at Stonewall, to
straight-up love songs. His best known original is probably
The Unicorn, a beautiful song whose
lyrics recast the early 70s New York gay demimonde in terms of a barren zombie-filled wasteland which will be reborn when the titular unicorn is found by the queen. Other songs on YouTube are
White Trash Hillbilly Trick,
New York Town and an instrumental cover of the Georgia Gibbs hit
Kiss Me Another. Finally,
here's a lovely cover of The Unicorn by Calgary folkie Kris Ellestad.
posted by Kattullus
on Nov 21, 2010 -
16 comments
She's been called "the greatest posthumous success story in music history." But when she died of melanoma at age 33, few people outside of the Washington DC-area had heard of
Eva Marie Cassidy.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 17, 2010 -
62 comments
Born in Big Sandy, Texas in 1874,
Henry Thomas was one of the oldest black musician who ever recorded for the phonograph companies of the 1920′s and his music represents a rare opportunity to hear what American black folk music must have sounded like in the last decade of the 19th century.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 11, 2010 -
21 comments
Showing Off is a series of videos, audio clips and articles in which noted music journalist and Frankie Goes to Hollywood mastermind Paul Morley explores various facets of music. Each month has a theme,
[warning: most links have autoplaying video] Michael Jackson,
Kraftwerk,
classical music,
disco,
The Beatles,
folk music,
The X Factor,
the Noughties,
the next big thing,
UK hip hop,
jazz, and
dance. Here is some of what's on offer:
MeFi faves Dan Le Sac and Scroobius Pip on hip hop,
These New Puritans' Jack Barnett, Johnny Marr on folk (parts
1,
2), but isn't all just interviews, there are also a lot of performances, e.g.
Michael Nyman and David McAlmont,
Badly Drawn Boy,
Susanna Wallumrød covers Thin Lizzy's Jailbreak, and
Cornershop cover Norwegian Wood.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 26, 2010 -
8 comments
Music! - A 1968 documentary by the National Music Council of Great Britain, featuring folk singing, The Beatles, and even early electronic music produced by tape splicing.
Part 1,
part 2,
part 3,
part 4,
part 5.
posted by Artw
on Mar 7, 2010 -
8 comments
Bobby Charles 1938-2010. Songwriter, musician's musician and cultural treasure, he died on last Thursday in Abbeville,Lousiana. In the 1950s, he wrote Fats Domino's
Walking to New Orleans, Bill Haley and the Comet's
See You Later, Alligator and recorded for Chess records. His
eponymous Bearsville album recorded in Woodstock in 1972 has been described as the best Band album released under another name.(Check out
Small Town Talk there.) He appeared as well in the Band's farewell concert filmed as The
Last Waltz. He made an enormous contribution to American popular music.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Jan 19, 2010 -
25 comments
Boys dared to grow their hair and girls dared to wear mini skirts and in Korea indecency officers patroled the street with scissors and rulers, publicly cutting hair too long and checking if skirts were too short. Shin Joong-hyung, was there with his 70s hit,
Beauty, as were other musicians and artists like
Sanullim and the
Key Boys.
[more inside]
posted by kkokkodalk
on Nov 5, 2009 -
12 comments
Fiddle, accordion, and a singing drummer. Seven minutes and fifty seven seconds of Gypsy music from Ukraine, live in Budapest. The real thing. Totally wailing. Kickass.
Técső Banda at Kertem.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 10, 2009 -
23 comments
Mike Seeger, folk musician and folklorist, passed away on
August 7, 2009. Half-brother to Pete Seeger, Mike Seeger was self-taught at banjo, fiddle, guitar, autoharp, and dulcimer, among other instruments. Additionally, Seeger spent decades traveling the country to collect and document American folk musicians, many of whom would have been forgotten were it not for his efforts. In the late 50's, Seeger, Tom Paley, and John Cohen founded the old-time string band
The New Lost City Ramblers. The Ramblers countered the rising tide of bluegrass music with a return to old-time traditionals and were a significant influence on the mid-century folk revival. Seeger's death coincides with the upcoming release of an
Arhoolie Foundation documentary about the Ramblers (warning: the documentary link contains an embedded video). On Youtube:
1,
2,
3,
4,
5.
[more inside]
posted by signalandnoise
on Aug 11, 2009 -
20 comments
...The narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s ''Woman Woman Blues,'' his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, ''She got coal-black curly hair.'' Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.'' It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological thinking; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor-white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the kind of people who don’t stop to wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.
From
Unknown Bards: The blues becomes apparent to itself by one John Jeremiah Sullivan. I came across it while browsing
Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers On The Albums That Changed Their Lives. For Sullivan, that album was
American Primitive, Vol. II: Pre-War Revenants (1897 - 1939), which is my favorite CD of the year. Which came out in 2005 while I just got around to buying it this year. Foolish me. It is a piece of art in itself in every respect--all CDs should have such production values.
[more inside]
posted by y2karl
on Aug 6, 2009 -
50 comments
Stan Hugill, often known as "
The Last Shantyman," authored a
book called
Shanties From the Seven Seas, based on his own work experiences in the last days of sail. Influential in the folk revival, the book is one of the most important written sources for music sung aboard ships in the 19th and early 20th century,
the "Bible" of sea music. Decades of chanteying in pubs and at festivals have kept many of the songs alive, but in most cases they've strayed stylistically from the verses and versions Hugill collected, or dropped out of popularity entirely. Now,
one musician is returning to the source and creating a new audio archive for the original versions of the songs as written, by
singing through the more than 400 songs in the book, one song each week, and posting the songs on YouTube, with commentary.
[more inside]
posted by Miko
on Jun 15, 2009 -
28 comments
Pilgrim Productions Presents: Voices Across America, an archive of gospel music in a variety of genres, submitted for free play and download by church groups and folk and traditional groups across the country and beyond. Style, age, and quality vary greatly, but fans of noncommercial music will enjoy hunting for the gems of blues, Cajun, bluegrass, choral, shapenote, country, vintage, and mountain gospel and more.
posted by Miko
on May 24, 2009 -
15 comments
The
foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the
ankle bone connected to the leg bone, the
leg bone connected to the knee bone, the
knee bone connected to the thigh bone, the
thigh bone connected to the hip bone, the
hip bone connected to the back bone, the
back bone connected to the shoulder bone, the
shoulder bone connected to the neck bone, the
neck bone connected to the head bone, now
hear the word of the lord...
and be sure to check the hover-overs for link details on all this bony business,
posted by flapjax at midnite
on May 2, 2009 -
24 comments
