This has long been one of my favourite Irish folk songs and has been one of my favourite road tunes for when I am travelling around. It never fails to get my blood well and truly pumping around my head and body. It helps that Luke Kelly is also one of my favourite male vocalists of all time (easily in my top five), but what gets me every time I hear this song and often sends my mind boggling, is the rarity of breath that comes between each vocal line. You can literally count the breaths Kelly takes on your hands and will be perhaps as bewildered as me as to how this genius was able to push out line after line of utter raw, unbridled awesomeness. The song itself is so frantic and relentless that it cannot fail to put rhythm and urgency into your step when you're walking down the street; I would even bet that having this on your headphones during a brawl might put the odds well and truly in your favour too, although don't see that as a recommendation by any means. I have some other, lesser known, material sung by Luke Kelly I would like to share with you in the near future to illustrate his ability to hold down the more delicate folk numbers with ease and rough grace, so visit again during the week for more. In the meantime, treat yourself to music that makes your soul want to jump out of your skin:

I have recently been listening a lot to the kingston Trio, having acquired an absolute wealth of their early material and am surprised that I love it as much as I do. The reason I never gave them much time before was because of the commercial nature of their sound; they lack the edge and graininess of some of their contemporaries. They (along with acts like the incredible Clancy Brothers) brought folk music to a whole new generation so the sound was never quite as rough as one might hope for when dealing with this kind of material. This turns out to be far from a fault, however; it adds a new sheen to many of the songs I have known for years and the harmonies and musical arrangements employed by the trio are very beautiful. It is easy to forget that comparing commercial music by fifties standards to commercial music from today is totally unrealistic. Commercial music from the fifties and sixties didn't automatically mean pigswill for the masses and I believe the Trio are a fair example of what it means/meant to be a commercial act with a lot to offer to even the more cynical listener. While they may never touch me as deeply as other more grounded and rustic acts, they were masters of their particular domain and can be thanked for inspiring many of the folk greats who came after them to pick up banjos and guitars and keep weaving the folk tapestry. With a plethora of songs from so many folk traditions to choose from (English, Irish, Scottish, American, Caribean etc etc), I have simply chosen one of the many I currently love. Enjoy:

To follow on from my previous two posts, I thought I'd post what I consider to be country folk. I bought a double album by "Hearts and Flowers" about ten odd years ago and loved it as much as I still do now. It is a unique mixture of country, folk and psychedelia (Ode to a Tin Angel is the stand-out psychedelic track) with a whole bunch of beautiful, sincere hippy sentiment thrown in. One thing that really intrigued me was that they did a cover version of the song "Two Little Boys" by the Australian artist Rolf Harris, which seems to me quite an obscure thing for a folk country band from the U.S. to consider (or even the fact that they heard of it to begin with). The beginning poem of my double album sets a nice tone for what's to come:

In this time of ours
We wonder if an end to hate we'll ever see
As we stand and hold in our hands
The unrhymed lines of our destiny

We face a race
We must rest before we run
Now is the time for hearts and flowers
And golden hours beneath the sun

There is a connection to the Eagles with this band but I forget what it is exactly. I vaguely recall that a couple of the members went on to form said band (It is written in my album liner notes but I'm not at home at the moment). There is little of the sound of The Eagles in Hearts and Flowers, however. This is just down-to-earth, simple, straightforward, organic music to forget about the city and allow whatever trace of innocence there is left residing inside you to bubble to the surface and make you feel good. 

I said I would talk about Hank Williams some more in future posts but it turns out that this particular song won't give me any rest at the moment and that's fine by me. This is one of those songs that puts me in a really good mood although I am not somebody who requires "feel good" music in order to feel good (actually quite the contrary; I derive a lot of joy and inner peace and calm from music that others tend to describe as meloncholy). Sometimes all the labels are in the right place and I guess this is one of them. When listening to Hank Williams (Senior by the way), I can't help but think about Woody Guthrie and this makes me wonder again about that link between folk and country and if anyone has a satisfactory defintion of the differences between the two. Usually I would say that folk takes more melodic and structural risks and is, lyrically, less afraid to venture into unexplored territory, and country has a certain rhythm, structure and instrumentation that it adheres to rather more strictly in order that it can still be labelled country. Of course, I am assuming that I can say with any certainty what folk music is and that is also open to debate and is a term which is often very lazily interpreted. An interesting experiment would be to give the same song to two different musicians but have them play it and sing it in exactly the same way except one with a southern state or mid-western American drawl, the other with a regional British accent. Very likely the former would be labelled by the lay-person country and the latter folk although, stylistically, nothing sets the two apart. Those with a passion for either genre, on the other hand, may be able to instinctively group both into the same genre but not really be able to explain why it is either folk or country. I fear the incoherent ,rambling beast of inarticulation rearing it's ugly head in my blog post now so I'll just leave you with a great song to enjoy and not care about how it's labelled 

That brings me to the end of my posts in the "where it all began feature"; at least for the time being. In the meantime, I stumbled upon this record by The Blue Velvet Band earlier in the year and loved it from the first bang of the drum on the first song. Rough and wonderful it is with an old school feel (old school by my standards), especially considering it was made in 1969 and it could easily be mistaken for something a good ten years earlier. A couple of months later I was in the cinema watching a movie (obviously) and I heard Ramblin' Man as part of the score and thought it was pretty darn cool that they were using such an obscure soundtrack. However, upon watching the end credits, I realised that it wasn't this band but Hank Williams himself doing it, so similar are the versions, although I would say that this is the meatier of the two and, therefore, perhaps more likely to satisfy. This band, coupled with the movie, (Moonrise Kingdom I believe it was; nice movie) compelled me to invest in as much Hank as I could on a budget, and I have a new found respect and admiration of him as a result. On listening to Hank, many pieces of my musical jigsaw have fallen into place and the borders between folk and country have become, perhaps temporarily,more comfortably blurred than they ever have been before. Williams version of Ramblin' Man is pretty easy to find but I'm not sure on the availability of this one so I thought I'd share it as it is too good to miss. Do expect some Hank Williams in future posts though, by which time I hope to have let a bit more of his raw beauty seep into my soul.

P:S:The fella on the video photo right at the back with the bald head and tash looks remarkably like Tom Paxton. Will have to find out if it is!

As these blog posts are always written off the top of my head, I never know when a connection to a previous post will occur so it's always nice when you're just about to write something and a connection occurs to you. This is one such occasion; I was halfway through writing a piece on the Harry Chapin song, "The Road To Kingdom Come" when another song, "The Parade's Still Passing By" launched itself into my cloudy sphere of consciousness. If you have been following the blog for a while now, you may recall the "guy Dylan threw out of a limousine" post and the follow-up post which was a cover version by the Vacels of the song which caused said incident. Well, Harry Chapin who was introduced in yesterday's blog happened to write a tribute to Phil Ochs, the limousine offender, which provides us with more insight into Och's own career as a folk-singer. Oh I do like it when that happens!

I purchased a complete box-set of all Harry Chapin's early material and it is intriguing stuff. Chapin is the traditional story-teller for the most part with epic ballads like "The Mayor Of Candor Lied" and a joker for the other part like "30,000 pounds of bananas". There is something charmingly sincere about his approach, though, whose style I feel will grow on me more and more over time. For the generation that grew up thinking Ugly Kid Joe wrote "Cats In The Cradle", Chapin's original is a beautiful, organic, home-grown surprise and impossible not to like actually. I will let you know more when I have given everything a fair old listen, but in the meantime, this is one of my favourites for the time, "Laugh Man" :

"Did you ever hear the one about...

The first time I heard this fella last year, I was pretty much gob-smacked. There was me thinking that there were no true "voices" left to be discovered (ever the optimist you see). Thankfully I was very, very wrong and Baby Gramps not only proved me wrong but had me rejoicing, nay revelling, in my wrongness. This voice is up there with Luke kelly et al for sheer lived-in and weathered beauty. Voices like this compel me to listen to them; there is something ancient in them which demands attention and makes the music that much more authentic. I hope to see Baby Gramps live one of these days but I find it unlikely he will be swinging round my way for a while. We'll see. In the meantime let's listen to "Cape Cod Girls":

I was on the search for the album with this on it for a long time, David McWilliams' "Days Of Pearly Spencer". It was another of those that I ended up settling on the c.d. version when it was finally reissued. I always had a great fondness for this song, especially the strings that lead to the echo, "......the days of pearly spencer....". I know someone, maybe Marc Almond, did a cover version of it in the eighties, but as is with many covers of this kind, I thought it a little pointless as the original could never really be topped. The album, from 1968, whilst being good doesn't have anything that stands out for me quite as much as this, but I guess that is the curse of the hit; if this song hadn't been on it, the other songs may have shone in a different light. Alas, the song.......

I got switched onto this album earlier in the year. It had been a while since I'd heard a truly great singer/songwriter album and when Ray Materick's 1972 album "Sidestreets" penetrated by unexpectant brain, I cried for the first time in years, such was it's magnificence. This is a true obscurity and tragically so; every song on the album is so honestly and heartfeltedly (if that's a word) performed that it turned my guts inside out and left me longing for more sincerity in a world of superficial values. The unselfishness with which the album's love songs are sang to it's recipient gave me hope that the love song in general has not died a shallow, egoistic death like I feared it had: "....but if you leave when winter's song is sung, one thing I'll never ask is why...". His voice immediately shot into my top male voices list, too, the main reason being that I believe him. This is the album of this year for me and has already brought me such an intense joy and connection to life that I am emotionally very much indebted to it. Hopefully this album will ,eventually, get the larger audience it deserves, but in the meantime, it is our amazing secret to thoroughly enjoy.

This guy is one of the most soulful country singers that has ever graced my weather-worn ears. He is the rough in a field of overpolished country diamonds and hopefully he will play your heart-strings the same way he played mine. Townes Van Zandt lived a far-from-typical life (he is dead now) and his life is evident in his music; he sold his soul to music in the grand old mythological way, sacrificing any normality he might have known in the process (you learn more in a truly great documentary about him, "Be Here To Love Me). This song is the title-track of the album, "Flyin' Shoes" and I chose it as an introduction because it is by far the most commercially produced of all his albums, and therefore a great stepping stone into the rest of his career. Ten-gallons off to the late, great Townes Van Zandt.

This is certainly not an obscurity but it does rank all the way at the top of my favourite Van Morrison's tunes. Don't know why this should come up now but the song has been echoing through my head all day. I fell in love with "Madame George" from Astral Weeks the first time I heard it some ten years back because of the simplicity and clarity of imagery it projected into my mind. The song really took me away to another place and I felt like I wasn't here, now, but reflecting on some past that felt like my own though it obviously wasn't. I have often pondered on why a song this long should endear at almost ten minutes and not get boring: I guess it's because it is just damn brilliant and the imagery manifests itself so clearly in the mind that it presents no obvious reason to want to escape it's charming grasp. Enjoy.

I guess I expressed my feelings about the music of Deroll Adams in enough detail in the last post so what I would like to do is present my personal favourite track from him. Before I do that, I would like to share an observation I made some time ago; I was watching the Bob Dylan tour documentary "Don't Look Back" (1965), and there was a scene where Dylan, being particularly nonchelant , ignored almost everybody (mostly there to fawn over him) gathered in the room in which they were filming except for this guy sitting on a sofa smiling peacefully. Dylan made a beeline over to him and I can say shook his hand with utter sincerity of admiration. I always wondered who the hell it was and then I found out it was none other than Deroll. Maybe not the most fascinating information in the world but it tickled me : ) Anyhows, enjoy:

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: 

This was another band that became apparent to me after attaining a compilation album many years ago. For the life of me I can't remember which one but I'm sure it's still in somebody or another's garage somewhere, maybe back in Blighty. After having searched for the best part of fifteen years for a decent copy of the album "Kip Of The Serenes" by the band Dr. Strangely Strange, I was more than happy to settle on a c.d. copy when they finally got round to re-issuing it. The band reminded me of The Incredible String Band as featured in the last two posts, but these similarities turned out to be only in passing. The album as a whole hasn't yet worked any particular magic on me although it certainly is a very unique and strange curiosity, but then I haven't given it that much time as yet. This song, "Strangely Strange But Oddly Normal", is an absolute joy though, and was the song that drew my attention to them all those years back. It oozes good vibes and does so simply with undertones of a psychedelic nature (during the bridge for example). This is one to listen to when you need a little perk in life and remember that everything's probably not as bad as you think it is.

To follow up on my Incredible String Band Post, I decided to present October Song after all. This time I thought I'd let the lyrics do the talking with their simple and elegant beauty:

I'll sing you this October song.

My first contact with The Incredible String Band was as a teenager when I "borrowed" an LP from an ex-girlfriend's dad. I absolutely love the freedom of writing this band employs. They were one of the least self-conscious bands I have ever had the pleasure of listening to; there is no sense that the music is cool or fashionable in any kind of way and I don't believe Mike Heron or Robin Williamson concerned themselves with such banalities either. It is just beautiful and free and from the eight or nine albums I now curently own, I can honestly say I really love each one in it's own strange way. The self-titled first album lead to Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan both naming October Song as their favourite song of that year (1966 I believe); both were admirers of the bands accomplished playing styles and seemingly simplistic melodies. Hidden under this simplicity , however, were virtuosos of every stringed instrument they ever laid their hands on from classical guitar to sitar. Their voices, far from being perfect, were often stretched to the limits and defied their technical ability and in thus doing, became something wondrous and unique. I will listen to this band forever because they have brought me so much joy and never fail to put a positive glint on any negative situation. It was almost impossible to choose an introductory song and I was tempted to use the aforementioned October Song but I have chosen Mercy I Cry City from The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter album because it creates a very obvious bridge between other, more commonly recognisable forms of folk, and the String Band's usual epic universal meanderings into the sublime unknown. Oh lord, how happy I am!

The first time I discovered calypso music was purely coincidental. I had picked up a hand full of albums in a record shop that were going for about a fiver each and Growling Tigers "Knockdown Calypsos" was amongst them. It was love at first listen; everything felt right about it from the philosophical nature of the lyrics to the strange untypical rhythms and musical timings. I can't really compare calypso to anything as it is as unique as any other genre but it seems to be influenced by Latin American music to a certain degree. Lyrcically, I find calypso to be not dissimilar to folk music in it's choice of themes: it is music about everyday life. It comes from Trinidad and Tobago and is sung in english with a broad Caribean accent that adds so much colour to the music. Many of the great artists (often named "Lord" somebody or other) were pre-nineteensixty so sound quality of the recordings are not always as dynamic as they could be, but this album by one of my favourite minor calypso singers, Growling Tiger, is a relatively modern recording (1979), and it is basically a reworking of many of the songs he had previously recorded. Calypso is honest, sincere and beautiful music and a million miles away from the common misinterpretation that it is only steel-drummed party music. I hope you love it as much as me. Enjoy.

This is a nice song by an obscure artist called Roger Rodier who sounds very very very vaguely like some other artists who made this kind of music and it's coincidentally good
 

Despite Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs not seeing eye to eye, Phil Ochs made more than his own mark on the sixties folk scene. This song shows him as being more than simply a protest singer; he had a way to paint beautiful pictures with words. I remember singing this song back in the days when I used to slug it out round the folk clubs in England and still have a recording somewhere (though my voice was a tad higher back in then). Enjoy this song 'cos it's a keeper.

In 1965, Paul Simon produced the one and only album by this fella, which is said to have influenced not only Simon himself but also other characters on the folk-scene like the legendary Nick Drake (This song alone, "Blues Run The Game" , has been covered by a whole bunch of great folk artists including Paul Simon). Just one beautiful, soulful album but this guy understood his art. I read a comment by someone (xermaster 123) at the top of the YouTube comments page beneath this video which pretty much says it all: "Lost 15 of his school friends in a fire, was severely burnt, lost his son to cystic fibrosis, lived on the streets alone drifting in and out of institutions, he lost everything, then just as he felt ready to come back for one last run he was shot in the eye and blinded. If pain can be used to create good music it explains why frank is the most soulful and meaningful artists of the last half a century".

Picked this album up a couple of months back and haven't been able to shake it out of my head ever since. It is so damn catchy and superbly performed by Eddie Rabbitt. I think I bloody-well love it to smithereens.

 As far as I am aware, this is a one off album. I picked it up from a small back-street record shop in England about fifteen years ago (not the version in the video as that was a YouTube find). I loved the epic grandiosity of the minimalist set-up and lyrical content. Essentially it was just Valente with a twelve-string singing in the first-person to whichever girl (although more from the friend perspective it seems), and what a sound it is. I chose this song as it is one of the shorter, more instantly accessible and so damn positive tunes; the others are growers and perhaps require several listens before they start infiltrating your mind, but you won't be able to shake them out when they do. I love that his band, Quicksilver Messanger Service, waited loyally for him to serve a prison sentence on a drug charge before reintegrating him into the group; they must have thought it was worth the wait too.

 A detour from the more familiar west-coast country-pop harmonies, here are the Byrds spitting out venom in luridly glorious style: "I cooked the bat in the gumbo pan, drank the blood from a rusty can, I'm the lover of the Bayou", or words to that effect. Gross and abstract; this be real good boy.