The sincere integrity of this singer astounds me and humbles me to the point of crying sometimes. A warmer and wiser voice I have seldom heard in music and that says a lot. A couple of years back I was playing a three-day open air folk festival deep in the woods somewhere in Austria and amongst the beer and sausage stands there was a music stall; nothing caught my attention except this kind, wizened old face staring up at me from the album shelves. I had never heard the name Derroll Adams before and the album title, "Songs Of The Banjoman", struck me as a little dubious. I gave the album a listen and this was the first song I heard and I was in a different world where straight-forward, down-to-earth heartfulness reigned supreme. The voice and the face matched and I had the feeling I was listening to a singer who understood something about the nature of existence from existence itself; from a life lived and not a life imagined. Deroll Adams, I think, had a beautiful soul and souls like that are needed now:
There's a time when the truth is bad
And that's so very sad I know
When I was a kid, like a mother's sigh
I used to hear the freight train cry
They kept me on the go you know
Even now I stop to hear
The big freight-trucks a-shifting gear
They tell me what I want to know you know
There's a time when the past is past
Filled with things that never last, I know
The freight trains lonesome whistles cry
Becomes a song but there's the sky
Spring always comes again again
That old car it was Christmas time
Filled with kids and they all were crying
They had no place to go, I know
There's a time when you face your soul
To find if you are true and whole, you know
I remember your face so clear
Sometimes it seems I hear
The softness of your sigh
But remember another time
Autumn's here and summer's dying
You asked me not to go
There's a time when you face the sky
To find if you are here and why, you know
The freight trains far away cry
Or on the ground when the dew's not dry
And you hear a rooster crow
Just like a morning star
That you see so far
Through the clear sky the sky