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Archive for the ‘folk music’ Category

21 of my favorite popular music albums

Posted in Bruce Byfield, favorite albums, folk music, folk rock, music, Personal, punk folk, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 23, 2013| Leave a Comment »

In these days of iTunes, albums are probably obsolete. However, I still prefer to listen by albums, knowing how much care many musicians take to arrange material.

I have some thousand albums, all of which I’m slowly digitalizing while hardware like USB cassette players still exist to make the task easy. Choosing one over another is in many ways meaningless, since my favorites can differ depending on my mood and whatever song is running through my head when I wake up in the morning. However, if I had to choose my general favorites, in no particular order, the list would look something like this:

  • Breakfast in Bedlam by Malcolm’s Interview: Also known as “God’s Little Monkeys,” Malcolm’s Interview was a short-lived punk band in England during the 1980s. Hard-driving lyrics, strong song-writing, and the occasional reinterpretation of folk standards make this first album worth hunting down if you weren’t around when it was released.
  • Celtic Hotel by Battlefield Band: Anything by Battlefield Band in its innumerable incarnations is worth hear. But in this album, the lineup included songwriter Brian McNeill, and the group soars above its usual lofty standards. Standouts include “The Roving Dies Hard,” a romantic overview of Scottish history,“Seacoalers,” a bitterly defiant soliloquy about an independent beachcomber, and a cover of Sting’s “We Work the Black Seam.”
  • Titanic Days by Kirsty MacColl: Dubbed MacColl’s divorce album, this album is full of breakup angst, defiance, female fantasy, and even a chilling look into the mind of a serial killer, all backed up by MacColl’s characteristic wall of sound. Listen to this album, and you’ll understand why she was once described as “the Dorothy Parker of pop.”
  • Waiting for Bonaparte by The Men They Couldn’t Hang: Using a name that The Pogues discarded, TMTCH sound in this album like a Mersey-side rock band with a historical perspective and a political conscience. Especially strong numbers include “The Crest,” a father’s last words to his son about the family tradition, and “The Colors,” an account of the great English naval mutiny at the turn of the 19th century.
  • Hat Trick by the Mollys: Tex-Mex punk folk sounds like it should be a disaster. Somehow, the Mollys made the combination work, combining original songs that sound like their lyrics were written by a female Sean McGowan with cheeky re-working of folk standards like “All Around My Hat” and “Myrshkin Derkin.”
  • Small Rebellions by James Keelaghan: James Keelaghan is one of Canada’s major song writers. This album is a mixture of unionism (“Hillcrest Mine” and “Small Rebellions,” Canadian history (“Red River Rising,” and “Rebecca’s Song” local patriotism (“Gladys Ridge”), humor (“Departure Bay”) and quiet lyricism (“Country Fair”) – something for anyone who prefers intelligent lyrics with their music.
  • Love, Loneliness and Laundry by Leon Rosselson and Roy Bailey: England’s answer to Tom Lehrer, Leon Rosselson also has a quieter, if no less satirical side. He is joined here by the rich voice of Roy Bailey, and occasionally feminist folk singer Frankie Armstrong. Warning: “Standup for Judas” should not be played if you have invited Christian friends over. The same goes for “Abezier Coppe.”
  • Mothers, Daughters, Wives by Judy Small. Australian’s premier feminist folk singer in the 1990s, Small has one of the most expressive voices I have ever heard. The title song is a description of the lives of her mother’s generation and the roles available to them, so moving that it could probably reduce the most confirmed misogynist in the world into tears at the waste.
  • Angel Tiger by June Tabor: June Tabor’s voice sounds like that of a survivor, sad and depressed, but still struggling, with one of the most expressive voices ever to come out of England. This album includes her gut-wrenching version of “Hard Love,” a story of hard-won maturity, and “All This Wasted Beauty,” the song that Elvis Costello wrote for her voice. Expect to be literally moved to tears.
  • Elemental by Loreena McKennitt: With her harp and an expressive voice that can glide effortlessly up and down the octaves, Loreena McKennit is not heard so much as experienced. This is her first album, a collection of folk standards plus an arrangement of W. B. Yeat’s “Stolen Child” that has to be heard to be believed.
  • The Shouting End of Life by OysterBand: This album catches OysterBand in its electric rock phase. Opening with the pro-environmental “We’ll Be There,” the album waxes lyrical in “By Northern Light” and “Long Dark Street,” switches into comedy with “Don’t Slit Your Wrists for Me,” and ends a rock version of Leon Rosselson’s anthem, “The World Turned Upside Down.”
  • Frivolous Love by Pete Morton: With a punk voice but a quiet sound, Morton specializes in enigmatic but moving lyrics, such as “The Sloth and the Greed” and “The Backward King.” The album also includes one of the best ever recordings of “Tamlyn.”
  • Memento: The Best of Maddy Prior by Maddy Prior: Frequently the lead singer for Steeleye Span and the occasional collaborator of June Tabor, Prior is one of folk rock’s best-known vocalists. This album covers a few folk standards, as well as Prior’s own considerable song-writing skills, which are on display in such numbers as “Commit the Crime” and “Face to Face,” as well as “Rose” and “Alex,” her odes to her children. But by far the most interesting song on the album is “The Sovereign Prince,” which contrasts Elizabeth I with the frivolous English girls who live in the world that she created.
  • The Texas Campfire Takes by Michelle Shocked: While I’m dismayed by Shock’s recent anti-gay sentiments, I have to admit she still writes effective music. This album is her version of the bootleg album that launched her career without her permision, The Texas Campfire Tapes, after she had regained the rights. It contains both the originally released songs and the unedited versions she rightly prefers.
  • Growl by Ray Wylie Hubbard: To his frequent regret, Hubbard is best-known for the outlaw country hit, “Up Against the Wall, You Redneck Mothers.” However, this album shows Hubbard is more complicated than that old hit would suggest, offering a unique combination of blues and rock, and songs that are vignettes of the American South that could have come from the pages of a William Faulkner novel.
  • Red Roses for Me by the Pogues: This early album shows The Pogues at their best. Their musicianship is displayed in instrumentals like “The Battle of Brisbane” and “Dingle Regatta,” and the strength of their lyrics in “Boys from County Hell” and “Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go.” The Pogues even take the time to cover Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilida” and fellow Irish rakehell Brendan Behan’s “The Old Triangle.”
  • From Fresh Water by Stan Rogers: Stan Rogers never released an album that was uninteresting, but this is by far his strongest. Part of his Canadian region recordings, it focuses on songs about Ontario. As might be expected from Rogers, many of the songs are about ships on the Great Lakes, including “White Squall” and “Lock Keeper.” Others are about Canadian history, such as “McDonnel on the Heights” and “The Nancy.” Still others are about the dreams of ordinary Canadians, including “Flying,” which is probably the only memorable song ever written by hockey.
  • Amnesia by Richard Thompson: The English guitar legend has dozens of albums to his credit, but Amnesia has a claim to being the best of them all, with all ten songs being winners. Its ballads include “Gypsy Love Song” and “Waltzing’s for Dreamers,” its had-edge material, “Yankee Go Home” and “Jerusalem on the Jukebox. It ends with“Pharoah,” a metaphorical social commentary unlike any you’re likely to have heard.
  • Singing of the Times by Tommy Sands:A peace activist in Irelands, Sands starts this album with, “There Were Roses” about The Troubles. Other songs like “Children of the Dole” and “Your Daughters and Your Sons” sound like activist anthems. However, some of his works, like “Humpty Dumpty” and “I’m Going Back on the Bicycle” display a sly sense of humor, and “Peter’s Song,” an elegy for a fiddler, is simply beautiful.
  • All Used Up by Utah Phillips: Nobody ever went to a Utah Phillips concert for his guitar playing. But if you like story telling or want to hear about the Wobblies and the great North American labor movements through their songs, this album is a great place to start.
  • Restless by Sam Weis: With her twelve string guitar and husky voice, Weis was a standard on the folk circuits of the Pacific Northwest in the early 1990s before she retired to small town Washington to paint abstracts. Restless show her ability to write moving, original love songs, such as “Rubicon” and “Moment to Moment,” as well as her outstanding guitar work in songs like “Train to Big Sur” and her cover of Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot.”

You probably haven’t heard of most of these performers, especially if you live outside of Canada or the United Kingdom, and maybe not even then. But that’s why I list them – because if you do take the trouble to track them down, you’re unlikely to regret the effort.

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My re-discovery of Sam Weis

Posted in Bruce Byfield, folk music, music, Personal, Rogue Folk Club, Sam Weis, twelve string guitar, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , on March 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »

One benefit of digitalizing my music is the rediscovery of artists. Thanks to the digitalizing, I’ve tracked down at least a dozen artists and found what they’ve been doing since I first heard their music, including The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Michelle Shocked, Kirsty McColl, and Mark Graham. My latest re-discovery is Sam Weis, a twelve-string guitar player and writer of original songs from Washington State.

I don’t remember the first time I heard Weis, but it must have been at a Rogue Folk concert at the WISE Hall in East Vancouver. Possibly, I’d run across her previously at regional science fiction conventions; if not, it was someone remarkably similar. She had a vaguely punk sensibility that appealed to the front-row lesbians who seemed to attend every local folk concert in those days, and a twelve-string guitar that seemed almost too big for her and with which she could do almost anything. I especially remember the audience joining on the “Ride, ride, ride” chorus of “Til We’ve Seen It All,” and many of those around me crying at the longing expressed in the song.

At some point, we bought her Restless album, and over the years I played it often. But the CD lost its cover, and Weis seemed to be performing less, perhaps concentrating on her painting, which she also does professionally. Occasionally, I searched the Internet for her, but never found anything.

It was only last week, as I searched through my digital collection, that I realized that I had been looking for “Weiss,” adding an erroneous “s” to the end of her name. Having grabbed a clue, I located and downloaded her other three albums, and have been enjoying them for the past six days.

Finding an analogy for Sam Weis’ work isn’t easy, because it appeals in a number of different ways. Listening to her cover of “Dancing Barefoot,” I might compare her to Patti Smith with a stronger voice and better guitar work. Listening to “’55 Ford,” you might mistake her for a rocker. Her instrumental “Helix” is reminiscent of the Scottish harp duo Sileas. Another instrumental, “Train to Blue Sky” sounds like something the Allman Brothers might have recorded in their heyday, while “Breakfast with Bob” has an acoustic quietness. Philosophical pieces like “Why Not Utopia?” are reminiscent of Tori Amos in expression, while “Seven Sisters Road” suggests Michelle Shocked feeling nostalgic. Some critics have compared her to Joan Armatrading because of her probing relationship songs.

All these comparisons have a grain of insight, and none is accurate by itself, if only because Weis’ versatility is always supported by her strong guitar skills and a voice that, while ordinary in range, has a husky vibrato that suggests ambiguity and repressed emotion, making it second to very few in expression.

At times, her lyrics teeter at the edge of triteness, often as she finds herself boxed in by a scarcity of non-cliched rhymes. Such low points are especially likely to happen when she waxes philosophical in songs like “Why Not Utopia?” or “Shape of Time.” Not that such songs aren’t redeemed by the arrangements, but tackling such topics in a three or four minute song is only slightly easier than doing so on Twitter.

By contrast, Weis’ lyrics are at their height when she deals with personal emotions, whose complexities and ambiguities she expresses better than almost anyone. For instance, in “Seven Sisters Road,” she talks about youthful sessions with friends “where we invented destiny / And traded rage for poetry.”

Her lyrics are at their best when describing the intricacies of love in plain language. In “Restless Heart,” for example, she pleads, “Open up and let me come in / My lessons have been learned and I want to try again” and invites her lover to “slow dance on the back porch.” Similarly, in “Moment to Moment,” she expresses the obsessiveness of love with:

I don’t want to spend one more night
With you on my mind,
I’m going to be so tough when I pretend
I can leave this love behind.

However, my personal favorite remains “Til We’ve Seen It All.” I suppose you might argue that, in modern times, a song about cruising the highways with a lover isn’t environmentally correct. All the same, the poignancy remains despite such quibbles:

This is how I see
The golden American Dream,
Three thousand miles of asphalt,
Four wheels and a holy machine;
I’ve been chasing the illusion
Like an astronaut running down a star,
The dream to go fast, go hard,
Go now and go far.

I’m sure that the only way that any listener can fail to be moved by the longing is if they’ve completely given up their own ambitions and dreams.

None of this is to dismiss Weis’ instrumentals – just to say that I’m more qualified to discuss her words. Instrumentals like “Cosmo and Peanut” and “Helix” from her just-released album Paradox have already kept me sane while riding public transit, and I plan on them doing the same many times in the future. The fact is, all Weis’ albums have a permanent place on my music player, and I”ll happily listen to whatever other music she releases.

The only question I have is: Why isn’t this artist better known?

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Oysterband at St. James Hall, 13 August, 2009

Posted in Bruce Byfield, concert, folk music, folk rock, music, oysterband, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on August 14, 2009| 1 Comment »

Do you get the sense of history repeating,
Have you made the same mistakes again?
Can’t you see me smiling in the bathroom mirror?
It’s a greeting from the beast within.
– Oysterband, “Walking Down the Road with You”

Over the years, Oysterband has provided some of my more memorable concert experiences. A few days after hearing their rocked-up version of an old Morris song, I heard them in a pack-to-the-limits concert at the Savoy. I’ve heard them shake the mirrors at the Commodore, and, on one especially memorable occasion with June Tabor at the Plaza of Nations, where they ended by covering the Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit,” complete with dry ice. Having missed them last year when they were in town, I wasn’t about to miss them this year.

Saints are drawn to the desert,
Moths to the candle flame,
You know there’s going to be trouble,
But you go there just the same.
– Oysterband, “Meet you there”

Rock (so far as the term has any meaning any more) is supposed to be a young person’s music, but you wouldn’t know that by the band or the crowd. Bass player Chopper (who I persist in thinking of as the new member of the band although he has been playing in it for decades) is solidly into middle-age, and drummer Dil Davies, the real newcomer, is hardly into middle-age at all, but the three originals band members must each be hovering a year or two on either side of sixty. Guitar player Alan Prosser looks leaner than in earlier years, violinist Ian Telfer more like a bearded Scottish sailor than the Presbyterian elder or aging punk of previous visits, while John Jones looked like he dyes his hair, but all of them looked immensely fit and focused. As for the crowd, it varied from ten to seventy year olds, with the median age somewhere in the mid-fifties.

The spirit of a troubled life
Is all I have to give to you,
The simple curse of a wayward life
Is all that I can bring to you.
-Oysterband, “Over the Water”

The first half of the night was dedicated to recent albums. In fact, the first three or four songs songs were the opening tracks of Meet You There, the band’s latest album of new material, which is some of the strongest twenty minutes of folk rock I’ve heard in years. Starting with “Over the Water,” the band quickly moved on to “Meet You There,” “Walking Down the Road with You,” and “Here Comes the Flood,” which I’ve always thought was an apt summary of the band members’ generation of Brits, as well as their free-thinking leftist politics.

I haven’t prayed since God knows when,
My teeth are unAmerican,
Socialism’s orphan child,
Unimpressed, unreconciled,
Some people think I’m crazy, but I’m not:
Here comes the Flood.
– Oysterband, “Here Comes The Flood”

The rest of the fifty minutes was filled out with material from other recent albums, as well as John Jones’ signature song, “Native Son.”

For I was born to tell the truth and run,
Remember me, remember me,
It was all for love, the crazy things I’ve done,
Remember me, I’m still your native son.
-Oysterband, “Native Son”

People were dancing by the third song, and nine out of ten bands (if not ninety-nine of one hundred) would have counted the first set as a success. Oysterband never seems to have forgot that it started thirty years ago as a dance band, because it never fails to orchestrate its playlist, building the energy and alternating fast numbers with just the right number of slow ones, while encouraging the audience to sing the choruses (although, with last night’s partisan crowd, I suspect that the audience could have song all the songs with the band if given the chance).

Maybe we don’t know right from wrong,
Maybe we don’t know what we’re here for,
Maybe it’s time to sing along:
This is an uncommercial song.
-Oysterband, “Uncommercial Song”

However, the first set didn’t quite reach the highest level of energy that the Oysters are capable of, and I suspect that the band was aware of it and spent the interval overhauling its playlist. When the band took over the stage for the second set, its members had plainly come prepared to do battle with their own expectations of themselves. Without waiting to be announced, they launched into Meet You There’s “Dancing as Fast as I Can.”

You can trust in the power of music,
You can trust in the power of prayer,
But it’s only the white of your knuckles
That’s keeping this plane in the air.”
– Oysterband, “Dancing as Fast as I Can”

Then, barely leaving room for applause between songs, it dove into a history of its own career – one inspired, I suspect, by the recent re-recordings of some of its past songs to commemorate its thirtieth anniversary. Much of the material was political and social commentary, and all of it hard-driving musically. Audience participation, already high, rose even higher, orchestrated by a grinning John Jones.

In the middle of a good time,
Truth gave me her icy kiss,
Look around, you must be joking,
All that way for this?
-Oysterband, “All That Way for This”

I seem to remember the energy at previous Oysterband concerts rising even higher than it did last night. But if the first set was more than most groups could aspire to, the second set was one that most couldn’t imagine. By the time the band returned for an acoustic version of “Put Out the Lights,” both the musicians and the crowd were happily exhausted, and more than content to call it a night.

Everywhere that I have been,
Leaves its message on my skin,
So many prophecies and signs,
So little time, so little time.
– Oysterband, “Put Out the Lights”

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Converting our old vinyl

Posted in Bruce Byfield, folk music, music, Personal, Uncategorized, USB turntables, vinyl records, tagged , , , , , , on July 9, 2009| 2 Comments »

I’m old enough to have live through four formats for home music: vinyl records, cassettes, CDs, and computers and portable devices (I’m excluding 8 Tracks, which I never used). With each change of formats, some of my music has been left behind, especially since much of my music collection is from small distributors, some of which no longer exist. That’s why I was delighted to buy a USB turntable recently. As I convert my old records to electronic formats, I’m rediscovering music I haven’t heard for years.

Of course, I could have dusted off our old turntable, and jacked it directly into the computer. But, as I wrote in a how-to article I submitted yesterday to Linux.com, a USB turntable has features that, twenty years ago, would have cost ten times what I paid now. The result is a vast improvement in sound-quality, including a reduction of all except the worst hisses and squawks from damaged vinyl.

On a personal level, my first recordings have been a sustained bout of nostalgia. Ordinarily, I regard nostalgia as a middle-aged disease to which I refuse to succumb, but what I’m recording is the music of my youth. If, as Frank Zappa said, the music that you listen to is aural wallpaper, then the first vinyl I’ve converted is a direct reflection of what I used to be.

The closest these first recordings come to Top 40 are several albums by Alain Stivell, the virtuoso Breton harpist, and some early releases by the folk rock-group Steeleye Span. Otherwise, most of them are by solo singer-songwriters. Most, too, have a more or less leftist political perspective, although it’s sometimes covert. They include, for instance, Pete Morton’s first album, Frivolous Love, a couple of albums by the Australian singer Eric Bogle, early albums from OysterBand when the group was still in the process of converting from a folk dance band to the more activist group it is today, and lots of satire and political commentary from the English songwriter Leon Rosselson.
I see several common threads running through this list. First, most of these artists pay a lot of attention to the words, something I still value in music today. Ditto the political perspective.

But the strongest influence on me, I think, is that all of these performers insist on never letting their convictions dominate. They aren’t just activists; the music is as important to them as their messages. Just as importantly, they deliver their message with a good deal of humor and wit. Looking back, I think that their example has been as important as any literary influence in determining the sort of writer I would like to be.

So far, I’m enjoying being re-introduced to my young self. I find him naive and short-sighted, but not entirely unlikable. I wonder what I’ll think a few hundred recordings later, when I finish converting all my old music?

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Utah Phillips’ railroading on the Great Divide

Posted in anarchism, Bruce Byfield, folk music, Personal, Uncategorized, Utah Phillips, vancouverfolkfestival, tagged , , , , , , on June 18, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Railroading on the Great Divide,
Nothing around me but the Rockies and sky,
It’s there you’ll find me as years go by,
Railroading on the Great Divide.
– Traditional

Reading The Globe and Mail a couple of days ago, I learned that folk-singer Bruce “Utah” Phillips had died on May 23. He had been ill since last summer, so the news wasn’t exactly a surprise. And with his unkempt gray beard, he had always looked a decade or two older than he was, so I had been expecting to hear of his death for some years. But I suppose that one of the consequences of growing older is that you have to watch your heroes die off one by one. And Utah Phillips was certainly once of mine.

As we come marching, marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient cry for bread.
Small art and love and beauty their drudging spirits knew.
Yes, it’s bread we fight for — but we fight for roses, too.

I first heard Utah at one of the early Vancouver Folk Festivals. In fact, except for a concert or two, most of the places I heard him play or talked to him (casually, and so little I would have been surprised to hear that he remembered me) were at one Vancouver Folk Festival or another. He was never the greatest guitar play – no one came to hear him on the guitar, Kate Wolf is supposed to have said when she coaxed him out of retirement when his fingers were stiff – and his voice was never more than adequate. But he was one of those people who know how to put a song across. There was a sincerity and passion in his voice that was infectious. Just hearing it could inspire you.

We have fed you all for a thousand years,
And we hail you still unfed,
Though there’s never a dollar of all your wealth,
But marks the workers’ dead.

Another part of his appeal was his material. Few people today know or perform the old Wobbly songs – the material used by the Industrial Workers of the World in their agitation. But, to the extent that anybody does know or perform them, they do so because of Utah Phillips. Often reworkings of popular hymns (“so they made more sense,” as Utah liked to put it), and inevitably attributed (often dubiously) to Joe Hill, they were a glimpse of the past outside the one provided by official history, and often wickedly humorous. “The Popular Wobbly,” “Where the Fraser River Flows,” “We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years” — there was a time when those were the songs I played several times a week, whose words I memorized and whose tunes I went around humming.

I spent my whole life making somebody rich,
I busted my back for that son of a bitch,
And he left me to die like a dog in a ditch,
And he told me I’m all used up.

Occasionally, these forgotten songs would be joined by Utah’s own compositions, such “Enola Gay” “All Used Up” and “The Goodnight Loving Trail.” No doubt influenced by the material he was keeping alive, they were examples for me as a young man of the attitudes I needed to survive and think well of myself. For better or worse, I am who I am today in some part because of Utah Phillips’ songs.

What will I say when my children ask me,
Where was I flying up on that day?
With trembling voice I gave the order
To the bombardier of Enola Gay.

Then there were the stories that he came to tell with increasing frequency as he grew older. Some were tall tales with a hilarious, sometimes political point to them, but the best were stories about his life on the road. Early on, I inferred that Utah was not a natural anarchist or pacificist, but that he had done his best to reshape himself into something like the man he wanted to be. Not being naturally those things myself, I was fascinated to hear the bits and pieces of his life story that he had worked into stage material.

I have lead a good life, careful and artistic,
I will have an old age, coarse and anarchistic.

I remember, too, the outrage at one folk festival, when Utah’s children concert involved stories about how to get meals for free at a restaurant. Somehow, I’m sure that he delighted in shocking the trendy leftist parents as much as he enjoyed talking to the kids.

Hallejuah, I’m a bum, hallejuah, bum again
Hallejuah give us a handout to revive us again.

For about a decade now, whenever we tired of the second and third rate poets and dub artists that the Vancouver Folk Festival seems determined to inflict on us in the name of attracting a younger audience, we could always count on one of Utah’s sessions to provide both solid entertainment and inspiration.

Are you poor, forlorn and hungry,
Are there lots of things you lack?
Is your life made up misery?
Then dump the bosses off your back.

That’s gone now, but that’s not why we’re not going to the festival this year. The reason we’re not going (or one of them) is that we can’t stand the thought of the mythologization of Utah that will undoubtedly be going on. In the process of remembering him, the festival officials are likely to try to turn him into a kindly old eccentric, and, while I can’t say I knew him well (or even at all, really), I know that he was more than that. He was an original, and someone who tried to live what he believed, and he deserves to be remembered with all his human imperfection. I’d like to remember him as he was, so I’ll leave others to the creation of comforting lies about him and remember him by putting on one of his old LPs instead.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me,
Says I, “But Joe, you’re ten years dead,”
“I never died,” says he.

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Eternal and lowdown

Posted in blues, Bruce Byfield, folk music, music, Personal, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Texas, Uncategorized, vancouverfolkfestival, tagged , , , , , , , , on October 10, 2007| Leave a Comment »

After several years of online journalism, I thought I was inured to comments about my work. When you’re praised as an unsung genius and as pond scum for the same article a few times, you start to get cynical. But I admit that I was a little overwhelmed when my use of a quote by Ray Wylie Hubbard in my entry entitled “Sweat and grace” brought a friendly comment from Hubbard himself.

Somehow, when I quote somebody, I never consider the possibility that they might reply. The fact that the comment popped up in my inbox while I was listening to Hubbard’s “The Way of the Fallen” made the event all the synchronicitiously spooky.

Depending on your musical taste, that may not mean too much to you. But there are exactly three musical acts I’ve fallen for after hearing less than a single song. The first two were Stan Rogers and OysterBand. Ever since I first heard Hubbard at the Vancouver Folk Festival a few years ago, Hubbard has been the third. His CDs get a lot of play time around our house.

You want to know how much I like Hubbard’s music? Completely inappropriately, Hubbard’s music is filed under Country and Western in most stores. Around Vancouver, C&W still carries overtones of ignorant rednecks. Yet I have been known to search the C&W racks, without even a paperbag on my head to hide my shame, on the off chance of finding another Hubbard album.

That’s how much I like his music.

Hubbard is best known for “Up Against the Wall, You Redneck Mothers,” a humorous work he wrote in the early 1970s. It’s a song that he has since had the occasional regret about, although, as he says on a live album, when he wanders down to the mail box and gets a cheque for it, he feels pretty good about being responsible for the piece. And he has since written songs in much the same vein, such as “Screw You, We’re from Texas.”

But such songs represent only a small part of his range. Even his humor tends to be wryer and dryer these days, as in “Preacher,” when a sinner dumbfounds a minister who has called seeking his repentance points out his woman hanging clothes in the yard and tells him, “I ain’t missing nothing / When she stoop down low,” or in “Mississippi Flush,” a song named for the ultimate hand in poker: “A small revolver and any five cards.”

In a more serious vein, Hubbard is a storyteller, telling gritty stories of the American south with a strong strain of legend and the lore of the blues throughout. It’s no wonder that at least one of his songs, “This River Runs Red,” was partly inspired by a Flannery O’Connor story – there’s more than a little of the Southern Gothic in his work. In “Younger Son,” the narrator is a man with an unwelcome supernatural power; and, in more than one song, he refers to the crossroads where bluesmen like Robert Johnson struck a deal with the devil. And, even when the story is more mundane, there’s often a hint of desperation and long-endured pain in Hubbard’s songs.

If this atmosphere and collection of metaphors was all there was to Hubbard’s work, he would still be one of the great original song writers. But, within these confines, Hubbard manages to slip in a surprising amount of intellectual content and spirituality. In many other songwriters, these elements would seem self-conscious or trite, but Hubbard talks about the Aztec deities in “The Wild Gods of Mexico” or reincarnation in “Stolen Horses,” or the role of the writer in “Knives of Spain” and “The Ballad of the Crimson Kings,” or Rilke in “The Pilgrim” with such naturalness that it’s only afterwards that you do a double-take. Did Hubbard really write about those things in the genre of a popular song? But look at the liner notes, and you’ll see that he did. What’s more, he does so with such casualness that you know that they’ve become part of his thinking.

There’s also a note of what I can only call maturity in his work of the last ten years or so, which is all that is available from his career. I know nothing of Hubbard’s life, and I would hesitate to take references to cocaine and Alcoholics’ Anonymous as based on his personal experience without more details – after all, just because Hubbard writes about such things doesn’t mean they form a major part of his biography.

But unless all powers of observation fail me, I suspect that, somewhere along the line, Hubbard has been through some traumatic times. I also suspect that he has lived through them and developed an existential or stoic philosophy. Listening to Hubbard’s recent songs, you soon realize that they aren’t a young man’s songs – and how rare such perspectives are in popular music, and how much is lost when such voices are banished from one of our culture’s most popular art forms.

So far, I haven’t said much about Hubbard’s music. That’s partly because I’m a writer and tend to respond to words first, and partly because Hubbard is such a strong lyricist.

But I’d be only telling half the story if I didn’t at least mention that Hubbard’s music is as versatile as his words. It’s a little bit country, although far less than you might expect. What’s even more obvious are the strong shots of rock and roll and blues in his work. Some of the blues might be the influence of Gurf Morlix, Hubbard’s producer and sometimes collaborator, but, having listen to both of them working apart, I suspect that their alliance is more a meeting of like minds than a question of influence. And, wherever it comes from, Hubbard’s music is a carefully crafted fusion that is both consistent with its roots and something different than the sum of its parts.

In a just world, a singer-songwriter like Hubbard would have the reputation of a Woodie Guthrie or a Bob Dylan. But perhaps it’s a small consolation for those of us who dislike such unfairness that a corollary of the fact that Hubbard is currently only comfortably successful is that we can still hear him in relatively small settings, where we can properly appreciate his music.

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A fanatic of the festival

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, folk music, Personal, Uncategorized, Vancouver, vancouverfolkfestival on July 15, 2007| Leave a Comment »

So here I am at home, propped up in a pool of my own indolence, my skin alive with the ultra-violet of a day outside and blissed out from ten hours of hearing some of my favorite music live. This weekend marked the 30th anniversary of the Vancouver Folk Festival, one of the few times in the year that I genuinely relax as opposed to running errands or fulfilling social obligations in my spare time. The folk festival is the nearest thing to religion we have,” a friend once said, and, over the years, I’ve found that true. And, after this weekend, how I’m going to reconcile myself to another week of heavy keyboard pounding is a bit of a puzzlement to me just now.

What makes the folk festival so special in my year? Partly, it’s the timelessness of the event. We live far enough away from Jericho Park, the beach-side venue for the festival, that we usually only get there on the weekend of the festival. The few times we have, the park has seemed ghostly and deserted. We’re used to seeing it full of thousands of people: the straights, the activists, the lesbians, the families, the hippies-for-the-weekend, and all the rest, all dancing and staggering from stage to stage while the ducks collect in the remotest corner of the marsh, quacking nervously at the invasion and the crows and gulls gather, seemingly delirious at the unexpected smorgasbords.

In my mind, Jericho Park is always that way, so that I can barely distinguish one year from another. If I look closely, I notice that the average of attendees is rising (but not mine, naturally). And, if I strain, I can remember a few days when we huddled under umbrellas and wore toques, grimly determined to get our money’s worth even if we froze or caught colds.

Mostly, though, the festival leaves the impression of one continuous long day of sunshine and salt-ridden air and plants. Sometimes, like this year, the sky is full of the billowing clouds that I sometimes think only exist on the ceilings of Renaissance palaces. Other times, the sky is an unbroken stretch of blue glimpsed through the branches of the trees as I lie back in the grass a short distance from a stage, or an oven that seems to flash-bake the grass as we make weary dashes between the too-few scraps of shade, feeling like survivors of a trek across Death Valley.

At times, we’ve frankly chosen a workshop to attend on the basis of whether it was in the shade — and that, too, adds to the feeling of timelessness. Several times each year, I gaze up a stage, half-unsure what year it is. And with the people around me looking the same, and sometimes the same performers on stage, that’s hardly surprising.

Another thing I appreciate about the festival: It’s not Top 40, and you won’t find most of the performers on iTunes, either. You may hear a sarcastic reference to Led Zeppelin in a group’s between-song patter, or hear someone like Billy Bragg explain that he plays the festival “because even hippies deserve to hear good music,” but that’s about as close as you get to mainstream mediocrity at the festival.

Rather, one of the most enduring aspects of the festival is the discovery of new performers. It was at the folk festival that we first saw Stan Rogers, with his brother Garnet playing the fiddle and dancing as the sunset turned the sky red. It was the folk festival where we first heard the sardonic lyrics of Leon Rosselson and learned to appreciate the lyrics of Eric Bogle. We first saw OysterBand inject a bit of hard rock and showmanship at the festival, and heard Ray Wylie Hubbard’s bluesy mix. Some years are better than others, but every year leads to one or two minor discoveries. And if there’s ever an hour when the workshops seem less than intriguing, we can always choose at random to broaden our minds.

From the traddest of the trad to hard driving punk-folk, the entire spectrum of alternative music is available. You might suffer from musical overload, but boredom isn’t a problem.

And, if this is not enough, the festival is one of the few places where you can hear alternate political views taken for granted. Folk music, as the name implies, is about people and their problems. You don’t hear anyone singing about the joys of capitalism or the pleasure of wielding a CEO’s arbitrary tyranny, because these subjects would only seem suitable to those with a lack of empathy or imagination — and such people don’t become artists of any sort. And should you think that sounds humorless, just drop by one of the sessions where Utah Phillips, the emeritus of the festival, is holding forth about riding the rails or talking about old union figures like Joe Hill or British Columbia’s own Ginger Goodwin. If he doesn’t leave you simultaneously rolling on the grass with laughter, angry at what the history books and newspapers leave out and matter-of-factly convinced of the simple righteousness of his opinions — well, give your address so I can send flowers to your funeral. You can only be dead and too busy to have noticed.

None of this is to suggest that the festival is flawless. I could do without running the gauntlet of ticky-tacky hucksters to get to the gate (although they’re no fault of the festival, to be fair). Inside, the food is over-priced, and, at times, the festival staff picks acts more for their activist credentials than for artistry (I prefer to have both, or neither). And, this year, the outdoor atmosphere was marred by the addition of a giant screen to one side of center stage, which was used to run commercials (excuse me, I mean “public service announcements”) between sets at the evening concerts.

Yet, although I grouse about such things, all of them are too petty to actually spoil the festival. Despite such things, the Vancouver Folk Festival rises effortlessly above all misgivings, as much through luck as any planning by the organizers. Perhaps it’s simply big enough that I can avoid most of what I dislike, even, when, like this year, it’s crippled by debt and on a reduced budget.

But, one way or the other, the festival remains a bubble of timelessness that I return to again and again. It does me good — and, perhaps, makes me good, too.

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The day Loreena camped over

Posted in Bruce Byfield, folk music, harps, Loreena McKennitt, Personal, Uncategorized on May 30, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Last fall, when Loreena McKennitt’s An Ancient Muse was released, I felt the satisfaction of the world sliding back into its proper place. For one thing, McKennitt is one of the few modern musicians whose work can literally be described as uplifting, simultaneously relaxing and inspiring. Really, it’s a sense of spirituality set to music. For another, she camped overnight on our futon many years ago, an experience from which I emerged with the conviction that, if anyone deserved to have success on her own terms, it was McKennitt.

At the time we met, McKennitt was a cult figure about to hit the big time. Trish and I were part of the organizing committee for the Mythopoeic Conference, an annual mixture of fantasy convention and academic conference that we had discovered through Paul Zimmer of Greyhaven. A west coast booking agent contacted us through our friends at a local bookstore, and asked if we wanted McKennitt to play at the conference.

Some considerable hemming and hawing later, punctuated by our pleas of extreme poverty on behalf of the conference, the agent was gone and McKennitt had agreed to play in return for the right to sell albums at the conference and transport to her next gig at the Mission Folk Festival the same day. Nothing was signed; it was all on trust.

The arrangement brought screams of outrage from our nominal committee chair. Our contract with the University of British Columbia, where the conference was being held, didn’t allow us to sell anything. However, at that point, the rest of the committee had spent the better part of a year working around the chair, so we went ahead. We knew that the conference would be full of harp-mad people full of the yearning for the Celtic Twilight, and the opportunity was too exciting to pass up. Besides, we wouldn’t be selling anything ourselves, so, even if a campus official did check on us on a Sunday afternoon, we figured we were still legal.

After a day of rushing around staving off catastrophes at the conference, at 2AM on Sunday, we met McKennitt at the airport. Knowing her image mostly through promotional pictures, we expected an ethereal and delicate creature wafting dreamily though the airport. Instead, we encountered a small but sturdy woman with a brisk stride trundling a harp. Although she was obviously tired from catching the red-eye from Toronto, she was clearly practical and well-grounded in the here and now.

As we went to the car, I made a mental note to myself: Never mistake a public image for the real person. It’s not that McKennitt didn’t have a spiritual side; it’s just that she was a much more rounded person than her stage persona suggested. I perceived, too, that, while she was friendly and polite, she only revealed so much, and would defend her privacy if it was threatened. Years later, when she sued a colleague for writing a book that violated her privacy, I wasn’t the least surprised. That fitted my sense of her when we first met.

To our surprise, we found that McKennitt had made no arrangements for a place to stay. Somehow, the matter had never come up, and we were too inexperienced to anticipate it. Unable to think of any suitable hotel, we invited her home, and started along Southwest Marine Drive. She collapsed on our futon, and, five hours later, when we rose to return to the conference, she was drawing aside the covers on the cages for a peak at our parrots, dressed in a sensible-looking white nightgown. I wondered if it was the same one she wore on the cover of Elemental, but I didn’t like to pry.

Still, for all the sense of how strong her personal boundaries were, we learned a little about Loreena ferrying her back and forth. Possibly, the fact that we were all functioning on too little sleep made her more forthcoming than usual. At the time, she was making some important career decisions, like whether to sign with a big label or continue on her own. Control of her own material and career, she made clear, was her chief concern, and we quickly came to admire her mixture of determination and ethics.

She talked, too, of the difficulties of travelling with her favorite harp, and how she usually paid for a second plane ticket, since she couldn’t trust the baggage handlers with it, no matter how it was crated. If I remember correctly, she had had some nasty experiences doing otherwise.

We entered the conference quietly, but as McKennitt looked around the lobby for the best place to play, several fans quickly gathered. She was obviously psyching up for the performance, but, for a while, she chatted with them, deftly deflecting one man’s wish to enter a correspondence about religious beliefs and another one’s enthusiastic praise of her work. Somehow, without ever looking abrupt or flustered, she managed to satisfy them and detach herself from the crowd to set about her business.

Attended by about two hundred people, the concert was nothing short of magical. The lobby acoustics were almost those of a cathedral, and McKennitt had the audience entranced from the start. At one point, the sun burst through the clouds and the skylight, spotlighting some of the crowd, and I heard an audible sigh of happiness from everyone. Later, many people told us that the concert was one of the highlights of all the Mythopoeics they had attended.

After the concert, I stood at a table, selling CDs. For at least ten minutes, all I could hear was the slap of jewel cases as we unpacked them from the boxes and placed them on the table.

Then the conference chair began squawking like a goose at our alleged breaking of the rules. My thesis supervisor took her aside, while we handed McKennitt the money and spirited her out the door. I didn’t think I had the right to count the money, but most of the audience had bought two or three CDs, so she had made a tidy bit of extra money from what was really a side gig for her. I do know that the roll of bills I handed her just before Trish drove her to Mission was so large that I couldn’t pinch its ends together in one hand.

Since that day, we talked to McKennitt only once, although we kept track of her career and often attended her concerts. We were delighted at how she managed to stay successful without giving up control, but, the truth is, we didn’t want to presume. Over the years, she must have stayed with hundreds of people, and I have no idea whether she would remember us — probably not.

And, to an extent, I don’t care. For me, McKennitt is a living example of how to combine practicality and artistic integrity. While I wouldn’t mind sitting down with her for a long talk, the fact that she showed me that possibility is in some ways more important than having a personal connection.

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To welcome in the May-o

Posted in Bruce Byfield, folk music, may day, oysterband, Personal, Uncategorized on May 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Hal-an-tow, jolly rumbelow,
We were out long before the day-o
To welcome in the summer time,
To welcome in the May-o,
Summer is a-coming in,
And winter’s gone away.

These words are part of an English May Day song. They’ve been sung for so many centuries that some of the original words have been forgotten; “hal-an-tow” may be “heel and toe,” but “rumbelow” is a term for sung nonsense syllables like “la, la, la,” and apparently replaces some older words. The words have been with me every May 1st for some years, but not because I’m a student of Morris dancing. Rather, I remember the words because they were my introduction to Oysterband, one of my favorite groups of musicians.

Take the scorn and wear the horns,
Was thy crest when you were born,
And your father’s father wore it,
And your father wore it too.

The scene was the Vancouver Folk Festival, the moment the evening concert. Picture a grassy park by the ocean, with thousands of people blissed out and tanned by a day of wandering between six stages in the throbbing sunlight. I was sitting on our blanket in front of the main stage, leaning back and steadily munching cherries and swilling raspberry juice when a group of middle-aged, punk Englishmen started to play a fast song with a strong drumbeat. Abruptly, I realized that the group had rockified a traditional song, something like what Steeleye Span had done with “Thomas the Rhymer” way back in the 1970s, but with a harder-edge. I sat up and laughed in delight at the unexpectedness of it, the sheer chutzpah. And, in that moment, I was hooked. It was one of only two moments in my life when a band entranced me with a single verse. The only other time was my first encounter with Stan Rogers and his band, a few years previous at the same festival.

Robin Hood and Little John,
They’ve both gone to the fair-o,
We shall to the merry greenwood
To hunt the buck and hare-o.

Oysterband played other songs in that set: “Just Another Quiet Night In England,” a song about the post-industrial collapse in England under Margaret Thatcher; “The Early Days of a Better Nation,” based on a phrase from the “Civil Elegies” of Dennis Lee (best known for his “Alligator Pie”poem for children); “The Generals Are Born Again,” a denouncement of Christian fundamentalism, and “Oxford Girl,” in which the voice of the victim in a murder and an imaginary media scandal is allowed to answer her detractors. Each song was infused with a humanistic, left-wing sensibility, and consummate writing and musicianship. And if that wasn’t enough, the band had designed a set that built and built until most of the crowd was up dancing and everyone was applauding wildly.

A day or two later, at the crowded Savoy in Vancouver’s Gastown, they did it again. I was so excited that I had limped down there with a toe swollen by gout because I didn’t want to miss them. I felt the couple of hours well worth the discomfort.

What happened to the Spaniard
Who made so great a boast-o?
He shall eat the feather-goosed quill,
We shall eat the roast-o.

Since then, Oysterband has only grown in my estimation. Band members have come and gone, although the core creative group of John Jones, Allan Prosser, and Ian Telfer has remained constant, and in recent years the group has stabilized with the addition of Chopper and Lee. To date, the band has released at least a dozen albums: There’s the bluesy “Ride,” the hard rock of “The Shouting End of Life,” the acoustic “Deep Dark Ocean” and more – all different, and all treasured parts of our music collection. Then there’s Oysterband’s supergroup sessions, like “Freedom and Rain,” a collaboration with legendary singer June Tabor (which featured on tour, although not in the album, a send up of Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” with middle-aged Tabor in a leather mini-skirt outvamping Grace Slick) and their recent “Big Session” jams featuring such contemporary masters of English folk like Show of Hands and Liza Carthy. I have my favorites, but Oysterband remains one of a handful of groups whose work I will buy no matter what new direction it takes. I’ve even hunted down rarities like its early albums “Liberty Hall” and “Lie Back and Think of England” or its twenty-fifth anniversary EP.

God bless Aunt Mary Moses
With all her power and might-o,
Send us peace in England,
Send peace by day and night -o.

To others, May 1 might be a day for getting up to dance in the dawn or engage in pagan rituals, or a day to celebrate labour. But, for me, May 1 is also a day when I remember my discovery of Oysterband. So excuse me if I don’t write more – I’m going to play “Hal-an-tow” for the fifth time today, with the volume cranked to 11.

Hal-an-tow, jolly rumbelow,
We were out long before the day-o
To welcome in the summer time,
To welcome in the May-o,
Summer is a-coming in,
And winter’s gone away.

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