"Get Along Home, Cindy!"

It's always fun for me to find genuinely, even radically, different interpretations of a folk song - all of which still retain clear relationships both to each other and to the long-lost original or root song. That's what we have this week with a genuine old folk chestnut, "Get Along Home, Cindy."

That it's a really old song has certification from no one less than John A. Lomax himself, who speculates in his 1947 Folk Songs Of North America that "Cindy" predates the year of 1840 that he asserts as the invention of the five string banjo in North Caroline by one Joe Sweeney. (This, incidentally, is the first time I've stumbled across that note and definitely the first time I've ever heard so definite a claim for the invention of the instrument, though Lomax offers no documentation in the book. If anyone knew for certain, though....) What Lomax doesn't make clear, however, is whether he believes that the song is African-American in origin (and the first established publication of the piece in 1902 is in AA dialect) that was borrowed by Scots-Irish fiddlers and banjo players or vice versa. No matter at this remove, I suppose, and it is doubtful it could ever be established anyway.

In any event, the song breaks out of the valleys and hollers and into public consciousness in the U.S. first not from the Carters or other Appalachian pickers but in fact from the Southwest - from the King of Western Swing, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys (pictured above) in the following 1936 recording. Wills plays a mean country fiddle behind Tommy Duncan's vocal, and his lead guitarist playing an electrified guitar is Leon McCauliffe:



Gotta love that cross between honky-tonk and cowdy (as Mick Coates calls it) with spot-on harmony on the chorus. These guys were the best.

For a somewhat folkier take on the song, we go to America's resident folkie-in-chief, 90 year old Pete Seeger, here with Buffy Sainte-Marie from the 1960s Rainbow Quest:



The "commercial folk" version here is one of those signature, high-energy, syncopated Guard, Shane and Reynolds songs from Dinah Shore's TV show from April of 1959, just when the group is conducting an unprecedented assault on Billboard's album charts, with two albums in the Top Ten, one on the way there, and the summer release of Here We Go Again making it four in December of that year:



Dave Guard has been playing banjo for about two and a half years at this point. Discouraging to us mere mortals.

From later that same year - many will remember Rick Nelson, Dean Martin, and Walter Brennan doing a version of it from the Howard Hawks/John Wayne Rio Bravo:



Not at all bad, really. And whatever else, in the shadow of the Grammys with all that - stuff - they were doing - Rick(y) is really playing his own guitar here.

For the fun and strange - pop/jazz/comedy/what-have-you icon Jo Stafford does a version that straddles pop and jazz - earlier 50s:



But back to the roots with two fine closing versions - first, Duane Eddy's demi-rockabilly instrumental - I always loved his twangy guitar playing:



Anyone else hear the roots of Glen Campbell's later guitar work here?

And finally, The Man In Black - Johnny Cash in a duet with Aussie indie singer Nick Cave:



Weeks like this one are really fun doing this blog. I just may keep it going forever.....

Tom Paxton Redux: "My Ramblin' Boy"

Part I, of course, being last March's piece on "The Last Thing On My Mind" ...I can't believe that was 10 months ago...

(at left, Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger, Newport 1966)

Last July, National Public Radio (NPR) heralded and discussed a survey list developed by radio station WKSU's Folk Alley website and program. WKSU broadcasts out of Kent State University in Ohio, and with Jim McGuinn's Folk Den, Britain's Mudcat.org, Leslie Nelson-Burns' The Contemplator.com, and a handful of others, is one of the best-organized and most militant promoters of folk music on the web. The list was a listner's poll of the "100 Most Essential Folk Songs," so-called. The Folk Alley people didn't offer any strictures or requirements on selection, so the final list is an eyebrow-raiser for those of us of a certain age for whom the term "folk music" meant something quite different from what it seems to for Folk Alley's often younger-skewing audience. Here's the list:

Folk Alley's List

This list popped up for brief discussion last July on this and other websites. My own reactions included (but are not limited to) -

a. almost anybody who ever played an acoustic guitar seemed to have qualified;

b. the list is notable for its near-complete omission of real traditional songs (fewer than 15% of the total)

c. the Kingston Trio blows every other performing artist out of the water for output on this list. Though the Trio appears but three times - "Where Have All The Flowers Gone" at #5 as performers, "Tom Dooley" at #12, and "Chilly Winds" at #96 - they are the only artists to have recorded at one point or other in their long career 22 of the 100 songs, truly amazing and another little-known and unappreciated fact about the group, the extent of whose influence on pop and folk music has yet to be recounted (I'm a-workin' on that one).

d. Equally ironically, the absolute "folkiest" of all the writers in the genre from the 50s and 60s, Tom Paxton, only makes the list for two songs, "Can't Help But Wonder Where I'm Bound" at #62 - and at #32, "My Ramblin' Boy."

I call Paxton "folkiest" because only Woody Guthrie combines the simple directness of melody and disarming and apparent simplicity of the lyrics that Paxton does. I like Bob Dylan just fine, but half of his early stuff was simply taking real folk melodies ("Lord Randall" for "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," for example, or "The Parting Glass" for "Restless Farewell") and re-writing the words. The very qualities that are admirable about his later work - the imagistic and poetic lyrics and the rock musical settings - remove him completely IMHO from folkiedom.

But whether Paxton is writing political satire or angry lefty songs or cowboy ballads or quiet love songs - his compositions always sound like they are traditional. Or that they could be. Or that they will be.

And one of his absolute bests, straight out of the Woody Guthrie tradition, is "My Ramblin' Boy." As with last weeks's post, our first video explains how the song came to be in Paxton's own words, here from PBS' Rainbow Quest with Pete Seeger from 1965:



How wonderful is it to have both of these artists still alive and productive 45 years after this performance? We are truly blessed to be living in such a time.

Adroit song-finders that they were, the Kingston Trio recorded the song a year before this show, for their first album on Decca Records after seven years with Capitol. The group was easing toward an almost country-ish sound on some numbers by this time, and that drift is apparent here in the heavy bass rhythm:



Paxton above might have added Ireland to the list of countries where the song attained popularity, the most famous version over there being this bright, uptempo version by Irish country music legend TR Dallas (TR Dallas and His Band):



Leave it to the Scots to put a little more hair on the song's chest and an almost bluesy edge of melancholy to its sound - here John Barr, whose stage name was "Little" John Cameron from High Blantyre, Scotland and Torbay, Newfoundland, Canada (1943-2002):



Finally - I like to offer when possible some video versions of these songs that have some special meaning for me, and this one is of that number. It's Tom Ivey, folk musician, composer, union organizer, luthier par excellence, festival creator, and a good friend - as you can see, this is a video from Trio Fantasy Camp, 2004, with Tom joined actively by John Stewart and Nick Reynolds of the KT.

2004 was the watershed year for the Fantasy Camp, as most of the longterm attendees acknowledge. Earlier camps were informal and somewhat lightly attended. But the FC5 in '04 featured the first stage performance at the camp by Bob Shane; the arrival to great fanfare of Nikki Sherwin; a front page article in the Arizona Republic newspaper highlighting both Miss Sherwin and the camp; more than 400 people trying to get into the evening shows; and the last camp at which campers like Tom and me got to perform with just Nick and John - their age and accompanying troubles necessitated the addition the next year of wonderful stage musicians Tom Lamb and Jeff McDonald to fortify the accompaniment. That was a great addition - but I lived my fantasy, as Tom Ivey does here, twice - just Nick, John, Steven Donaghy on bass, and the camper. Tom's robust tenor is complimented by John Stewart's guitar lead lines and Nick Reynolds' harmonies:



Talk about melancholy. Tom's friend David Plummer died within six months of this taping, and Nick and John are also now gone. That last verse acquires a genuine depth of sadness at the passage of time and the changes that come to all things. So here's to you, all you ramblin' boys now gone....

A Trip Down To "Columbus Stockade"

One of the most widely covered and often-performed of the early country/old-time (and eventually bluegrass) tunes, "Columbus Stockade Blues" is, like most good folk songs, of uncertain origin. The earliest recorded version (below) was copyrighted by Tom Darby and Jimmie Tarlton in 1927, but they were almost certainly using an older and likely well-known tune as the basis for their song, because by the 1930s and through every decade since, a multitude of singers and groups have re-arranged and recorded this prison song. Like its Texas counterpart "The Midnight Special", "Columbus Stockade" (the real stockade today in the picture) works as everything from a Delta blues number to an Appalachian two-part harmony in thirds to a banjo-based bluegrass burner.

It's always nice to save time and space for the music, so I was delighted to find this YouTube video that gives the background of the building and the song better than I could hope to:



The few lines of the song heard at the end of that video are Darby and Tarlton, whose first recording of the song sold over 200,000 copies in 1927 and 1928, a truly amazing number for the day. Of interest here is that the original version is fairly slow and bluesy, and Tom Darby is using a technique on guitar called from his time until I learned it in the 1960s "bottlenecking" - called so because the originators of the style, African-American Mississippi Delta blues players, created that sliding, whining sound by using the broken-off neck of a whiskey bottle* across steel guitar strings in an open tuning. Native Hawaiian guitarists were doing somewhat the same kind of thing and were all the rage in 1927. Darby is the first white musician I've heard playing in this style, which becomes the ancestor of the dobro and pedal steel guitar guitars heard in country music today.



If for nothing else other than historical interest - from all places, The Lawrence Welk Show in 1956, before there was an actual pop-folk revival. This version is from Welk regulars Buddy Merrill and Buddy Hayes with guest star Mary Stadler:



The Kingston Trio recorded the song as "Columbus Stockade" for their 1964 Back In Town live album, their last release of more than 20 LPs for Capitol Records. Trio founder Bob Shane's 1981 edition of the KT included the late Roger Gambill on guitar and a talented and versatile banjoist, George Grove. Shane was within limits trying to reproduce the original sound and arrangements of familiar Kingston numbers, though here the addition of Oscar Cisneros on percussion seems to belie that - and though George Grove is following the basic banjo line of John Stewart, he provides some of his own original embellishments:



One great artist deserves another, and I've shown a predilection in these articles for posting Marty Robbins videos. Marty takes Trio manic and Darby/Tarlton original and blends it into that velvet-smooth pop country that he could do like no one else:



Now for a rootsy version from - talk about great artists - Arlo Guthrie, Donovan (Leitch), and Hans Theesink (in a tribute to "Banjoman" Derrol Adams):



More truly remarkable versions from Japan. The first is from Yoshio Ohno and dated 1960 - Ohno is apparently catching the country/bluegrass/cowboy wave that started in Japan in the 50s. Ohno's phonetic vocals are very good, and he's an excellent yodeler:



More recently, our friends from the group Back In Town in 2008 doing a letter-perfect replication of the '64 Kingston version:



Finally and just because I like the group and hope to see them out in Western Colorado some day - a group I featured on the "The Colorado Trail" post, the Bar D Wranglers with guest Cheryl Pickering:



Country Hall of Famer and Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis had a pleasant take on the song as well - :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3pSRVJ8Gv0

So many songs left to do, so little time.....

* My source was a beloved and long-lost book, Jerry Silverman's The Folksinger's Guitar Guide. It taught me, among other things, the rudiments of reading tablature, fingerpicking, bass runs - and bottlenecking.

Remembering John Stewart - "July, You're A Woman"

As we approach the second anniversary of the passing of John Stewart (1939-2008), it's a bittersweet pleasure to reflect back on all that his artistry has contributed to the musical lives of folk music devotees of many stripes. Stewart was one of the originators of the singer-songwriter movement (a "folk patriarch," said the Los Angeles Times obituary), a country folkie before Poco or the Eagles, an occasional rocker, and a poet with his lyrics first and last. He breathed new life into the Kingston Trio when it was on the verge of commercial extinction with the departure of Dave Guard, helped to alter its direction, and in his own modest words "kept a good thing going." His songwriting for the Trio supplied it with its own original material and helped to launch him into his own distinguished if under-appreciated forty year solo career.

At the Malibu memorial in May of 2008, it occurred to me that because of "Molly Dee" to start with, Stewart had been a presence in my own life for just under fifty years.

Folk fans in general seemed to turn Stewart on and off, giving sales boosts and attention to some of his albums (usually after a song on one of them had become a hit for someone else) but not to others. Among Kingston Trio fans, while there are many, many who followed all or part of Stewart's solo work, there is also a significant segment that either didn't pay attention to what JS did after 1967 or (and this was one of Stewart's peeves) didn't like it because he didn't sound like he did in the KT. Shades of Rick Nelson's song "Garden Party."

While as far as I know John Stewart always treasured his time with the KT, he was on stage at least through his long performing career at times ambivalent about it. In the early years of the 70s especially, I'd see him at venues around LA where a noticeable segment of the audience who had shown up to see a former Kingston stalwart seemed perplexed or annoyed at the electric and countrified sound he was producing at the time. JS would return the favor, at times with asperity, if someone asked him to do "The Reverend Mr. Black" or "New Frontier." "I don't do Kingston Trio songs," I heard him reply, curtly, on several occasions. An equal number of times he would laugh the suggestion off with one of his trademark quips, smiling all the while.

But he wouldn't do the song.

In the mid-80s when he reunited with Nick Reynolds for The Revenge of the Budgie album (which included only one former Trio song), there seemed to me to be the beginning of a shift that included a full solo album of songs he'd written for the Trio (The Trio Years), a brand new folk group in the 90s (Darwin's Army), the re-emergence of his banjo playing (including on the Pete Seeger tribute album) - and the frequent inclusion in his performing repertoire of re-imagined versions of songs he'd done with the KT like "Chilly Winds" and "Run The Ridges," to name two of many.

And the eight fantasy camps he ran from 2000 to 2007 seemed to unify it all, as Stewart would perform his own current songs while at the same time celebrating the life and times of the Kingston Trio.

So it's fitting, I think, that our song for this week should be one of Stewart's best and most popular numbers from the landmark California Bloodlines album - one that within a year of its release Bob Shane's New Kingston Trio had recorded - "July, You're A Woman," an ode to his lady and later wife Buffy Ford. Stewart performed the song a number of different ways through all those decades - but never better than on the Bloodlines recording here:



I have to confess getting a bit of a chill and a tear when I listen to this - it was the first solo JS number I heard, in August of 1969. It grabbed me right away and hasn't let me go since.

It must have grabbed Bob Shane, too - the New Kingston Trio performed the song, here in a track I cribbed from Rick Daly's FolkUSA, a concert bootleg from about 1970. Even through the fuzzy audio, the power of Shane's vocal shines through. It's got a fine banjo part (Jim Connor?) and good harmony as well:



And now, for the peculiar, the odd, and the seldom heard - the Pat Boone version. Uber-Christian Boone felt the need to sanitize the PG lyrics, to a slightly strange effect:



Probably the best-known version of the song after Stewart's own is that of alternate-country rock band Mickey and the Motor Cars. I find an weird charm in this - go figure:



Not surprisingly, the easy pace of the song converts easily to bluegrass, and two of the best versions out there are from bluegrass groups. First - Red, White, and Blue-grass:



I really like this version from a house concert by Frank Solivan and Dirty Kitchen:



There is so much more to be said about the legacy of John Stewart - I'll be posting some more links and videos over the next few days. For tonight, I'd like to give the last words of this piece to an anonymous YouTuber who on the day Stewart died posted a comment under our Chilly Winds performance of John Stewart's song "New Frontier" -

"Faith, pride and optimism. John you will always come back to us when we need you."

Amen to that.