The Water Is Wide

In The Kingston Trio On Record, Ben Blake and Jack Rubeck's comment on the original Kingston Trio's ninth album Make Way was that it lacked "the spark of vibrant enthusiasm" of earlier LPs, that its jacket suggested a "brooding aura" of "dark tones" - and their estimate that many fans regarded it as the "least effective" of the NBD efforts. While the album lacks the all-out banjo blaster that became the Trio's hallmark, it does in fact have some outstanding cuts: the song that in a faster version became the show opener for the NBJ trio's last two years (Guthrie's "Hard Travelin"), one of Bob Shane's best solos - one that really showcases the range and color of his voice ("Blow The Candle Out"), two fine and original versions of English folk songs ("Hangman" and "Fair And Tender Ladies"), and three nicely-turned Celtic songs in "Bonnie Heilan' Laddie," "The Jug of Punch," - and "The River Is Wide."

"River" is copyrighted by the Trio as a Nick Reynolds arrangement, and in the best KT tradition, Nick simply changed the rhythm and a few words of a very old Irish (or Scots - no one is sure) song entitled "The Water Is Wide," also known as "O Waly Waly." Authoritative websites like The Contemplator [a treasure chest for traditional music lovers - here's his "Waly" page: The Contemplator] suggest the song dates to 1734 - but they're not entirely correct - I found a version of it in the crumbling leaves of a Renaissance song book from about 1590 in the Rare Book Room of the University of Illinois many years ago.

The song has a multitude of variants - the Irish "Carrickfergus," which to me sounds little enough like the original until the very end, and with distant echoes in Ray Hannisian's choral number "I'm Moving On" and even Rod McKuen's "Isle In The Water" (this last not surprising since most of McKuen's lyrics are derived directly from a poem by William Butler Yeats, who was steeped in his own Irish folk traditions).

The sheer plaintive beauty of the song, with its older-but-wiser and lost love themes, is given a simple, direct, and effective reading by the Trio in their album cut - which is here from Make Way:



The song has been re-interpreted scores of times in scores of ways by a plethora of really famous and talented musicians.

Speaking of whom - I believe my earlier posting of golden-voiced New Zealand soprano Hayley Westenra's "Shenandoah" scored some points with a few Xroaders who hadn't heard her before, and she has several performance videos of her interpretation:



The most traditional-sounding version I could find - and interestingly, the one closest in some ways to the KT's - is not surprisingly Liam Clancy's solo effort:



Back to the ladies - I alluded above to an Irish song called "Carrickfergus" - which I knew as a child through the rough voice of Tommy Clancy. Well, before Hayley W. there was Charlotte Church, to whom Hayley is often compared. Here Church sings "Carrickfergus," and you can hear the extent to which it echoes "The River is Wide":



A search on YouTube will yield many more female singers giving it a go, from the sublime version of the late Eva Cassady to the disappointingly awful bluesed-up version attempted by Sheryl Crow. Bob Dylan gives it a shot - a rather poor one, I think, even with Joan Baez trying to help. But Joan B's solo rendition is, as you would expect, sublime:




Of the many instrumental versions out there (often over-done - something about the simplicity of the melody seems to encourage guitarists and pianists to start riffing all over the place), the most unique I found was this slightly syncopated yet still traditional sounding one - by a chorus of harp-guitars:



The last word for this post will be a blast from the past, black and white, sung in mid-Sixties syncopated pop fashion by a great pop singer of the era, gone now for nearly a decade from cancer - Dusty Springfield:



It's a great song that keeps getting reinvented - many more versions out there on YT.

Addendum 6/11/10

The late actor Pernell Roberts (1928 - 2010), most famous for TV roles on Bonanza in the '60s and Trapper John, M.D. in the 80s, was also a trained and professional singer whose ten years on the boards in NYC included a number of musical comedy roles. He released one album of folk songs, and his rich baritone on "Water" is a revelation to those who knew him only as an actor:


Addendum II - July 2012

The explosion of popularity of YouTube over the last four years has led to the posting of dozens of more quality versions of this and most any other good song. Here are a few of the ones that I regard as the best.

2009 - Emmylou Harris & Ensemble At Pete Seeger's 90th Birthday Celebration



Australia's Seekers, About 1966



Judy Collins, 2005



Fred Neil From His 1965 Debut Album - The Only Song On The Record That He Did Not Compose

"A Lovely Shade Of Red, But A Naughty Boy": Hoyt Axton And "Greenback Dollar"

Hoyt made a mere $800.00 from the song. "After I got ripped off as a writer on 'Greenback Dollar', I didn't go into a blue funk and walk around crying that everyone's crooked," Hoyt says of the experience. "I've always been an optimist, and I'm going to stay that way until I die. I think I get that from my mother, who could go up to the devil himself, and she'd say 'Hello, young man, you're a lovely shade of red, but you're a naughty boy'. With 'Greenback Dollar', I had a crooked publisher, and that was when I'd only been in the business a year, so I didn't know anything - I was just a kid with a guitar living in a car... How could I sue when the whole point of the song was how I didn't give a damn about a greenback dollar?"
- Mark Weierman

Hoyt Axton was a character and a half. Voice, personality, physique, creative success - he was a sort of a larger than life latter-day Burl Ives on drugs. If Axton was never either quite the singer or actor that Ives was - and he wasn't, as Ives could range from "The Blue Tail Fly" to "Long Black Veil" as a singer and from melodrama to Faulkner and Miller as an actor -
Burl never wrote a succession of iconic songs as Hoyt did - "Joy To The World" (Three Dog Night), "Sweet Misery" (John Denver), "The Pusher" (Steppenwolf and the opening song in Easy Rider ), "Never Been To Spain" (Waylon Jennings and Three Dog Night) - and of course, "Greenback Dollar."

As most fans probably know, Axton was the son of "Heartbreak Hotel" co-writer Mae Boren Axton and came to the LA/San Francisco folk scene somewhat late in the game - around 1962, making GD a relatively quick if not quite golden financial success for a 24 year old singer/writer who was just about a year older than John Stewart.

Axton, however, was seduced by the music business drug culture that took off roughly simultaneously with Axton's career, and Hoyt's ongoing battles with addiction to alcohol and cocaine likely contributed to his premature death in 1999 at 61.

I saw him solo several times at the Troubadour and the Roxy in LA, and he gave no outward evidence of those problems. He was a large bear of a man with an engaging personality, ready wit, and utterly no pretension about him. He just didn't fit comfortably into any niche - too throaty and rough edged for the smoother 70s singer/songwriters like Simon, Taylor, Denver, and so on - but neither rocked out enough to appeal to the metalheads nor pseudo-country enough to appeal to the Flying Burrito-Poco-Eagles crowd. But he kept plugging away, a workman-like actor, performer, and songwriter who stayed on the job til the end.

Axton related somewhere I can't find that he met cowriter of GD Ken Ramsey in a laudromat, and that Ramsey had some of the words and part of a chorus for the song that became his first writing hit. Ramsey and Axton finished the song in an afternoon, did a demo, and sent it to the abovementioned publisher, who promptly bought their rights to the song for $800 each.

I'll bet it looked like a lot of money at the time........

You might think that the Kingston's version was all that there was to the song.............but not at all so. The enduring appeal of the KT version, though, is reflected on its continually self-renewing popularity, most recently as we know at the end of the film Thank You For Smoking - and in the fact that a weak video montage of the Trio that includes photos of many KT troupes (but not the one that sang the song!) would garner more than 370,000 views:



A YT video of Hoyt doing his own song was yanked for CopyVio - but another YouTube phenom - Fretkiller performs a version close to Axton's own. He did not permit his videos to be embedded - a stricture I evaded for nearly two years by using an international site that permitted embedding. The web cops caught up with that site though...and with Fretkillr, whom they banned for unspecified reasons (probably copyvio complaints from rights holders of some of the songs he covered). Some intrepdid YouTubers, however, managed to rescue some of FK's work from the dump - here is his excellent "Greenback Dollar":



Speaking of Mama Mia - here are Sweden's famous Hootenanny Singers with future ABBA star Bernie Ulvaeus - a real KT tribute:



For the just plain strange, how about surf guitar/singer/legend Dick Dale giving it a try - with the DelTones, sax, drums - but no Dick on guitar:



Finally - of all the straight-on rock versions on YouTube, the benchmark performance is probably 80s neo-folk group the Washington Squares:



Nostalgia moment: I still have stored somewhere a beautiful vinyl album with my favorite KT album cover - New Frontier. A red sticker is affixed to the upper right of the record - an ink drawing of a genie with a crystal ball and the legend "Preview Album! Hear 1963's Music Today!"

Of time and the river.............

2011 Addition

Johnny Rivers, who never gets enough credit for his pop-rock-folk-blues contributions, - live from 1965:




...and Barry McGuire of "Eve Of Destruction" fame - a good friend of both Axton and Ramsey and an uncredited co-writer of this song,

Generic Uptempo Folk Song: "This Little Light Of Mine"

One of the delights of the Hassilev-Daugherty-Zorn incarnation of the Limeliters (as on 2002's This Land Is Your Land PBS special) is their "Generic Uptempo Folksong," which manages simultaneously to satirize the genre, deliver an excellent example of it, and credit its most successful exponents ("the one we stole from the Kingston Trio"). [In the unlikely event that someone hasn't seen/heard this, I'm including it in an appendix below.]

As effectively as the Trio could deliver a ballad or quieter number (see the "Shenandoah/Across The Wide Missouri" discussion below - and "Flowers" of course, and many more), they set themselves apart from their host of imitators with their nearly inimitable delivery of strong, usually banjo-based fast songs with an energy approached IMHO only by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem (in their distinctive style) and maybe CMT and PP&M on some numbers. But the Kingston's 50,000 watt performances just embodied the old saw of "often imitated, never duplicated."

Oddly, that golden Capitol T-996 that Bert mentions below does not open with one of these - "Three Jolly Coachmen" isn't "Hard Ain't It Hard" (which we know became their concert-opening staple) or "Little Maggie" on that same album. Most - but not all - of their subsequent albums, however, do open with a toe-tapper, if not always with a banjo number.

Now while At The Hungry i is often listed as the Trio's top-selling album (with no hit single but opening with generic UTFS "Tic Tic Tic") [KTOR lists [The Best of the Kingston Trio, there is no doubt that for many fans, College Concert is at or near the top of the list for either favorite album or favorite live performance album. And it, of course, opens with the Trio's stirring rendition of "This Little Light Of Mine," presented here as our benchmark for comparison:



The Trio always seemed both comfortable with spirituals, and after "When The Saint Go Marching In " (whose arrangement down to lyrics, pauses, and inflections is borrowed directly from The Weavers) had an interesting and original way with them - think about the key shifts in "Good News," or the modulations of volume in "Round About The Mountain" or the antiphony in "To Be Redeemed." They also stayed within themselves, to use the sports phrase, and didn't try to be something they weren't - like a gospel choir. For that - the roots version, I guess you could say, sounding probably a little bit closer to the way that the song actually was sung in the 19th century - here is the Sydney Ellis Gospel Quartet:



It's hard to say at this distance in time where the Trio got the idea for doing "Little Light," but certainly one of the highlight performances of the number pre-CC was by Bob Gibson as the Bob Gibson Trio (with master guitarist Dick Rosmini, whom our own Mr. Roadie knew, and legendary jazz bassist Herb Brown) at the Newport Folk Festival of 1960, the two Vanguard albums of which are personal treasures of mine. Gibson was the best damned folksinger that you may have never heard and had three albums of popped-up folk songs including a Carnegie Hall concert before the Trio hit Capitol Studio B.

No video of Bob is currently available - but Australia's Seekers are definitely doing Bob's arrangement in both lyrics and chord structure here:



For an interesting alternative take, here is Leontyne Price, one of the great American operatic sopranos of the last century:



I suppose I have to acknowledge that Bruce Springsteen did a creditable job with the song during the 2006 Seeger Sessions recording and tour - here he is in Italy closing his show with the Trio's opener:



If you do a YouTube search for the song, you will find literally scores, including many from European gospel choirs, clearly singing in a language and idiom not familiar to them in some cases.

As the Trio's version of this classic shows - they created their own idiom and performed brilliantly with in it.

Appendix

The Limeliters "Generic Uptempo Folk Song":

(Yanked for CopyVio - so here are The Limeliters Who Never Were - current Lime Gaylan Taylor in the center flanked by former Limes Bill Zorn (L) and Rick Daugherty (R), currently in the Kingston Trio. Though all three had been Limeliters, they never played together until 8/10 at the KT Fantasy Camp. This one is not copyvio - this is just three guys playing a song):



And finally - I used to say that YouTube was over-populated by teenage girls lip-syncing and undulating in their rooms to various pop songs (leaving one to wonder about parental monitoring of online activity....another question).

I'm not a fan of that so this last may seem odd - but a) the girls aren't teens, b) they're in the driveway, c) the sound is surprisingly good, and d) they do a bang-up job. Here are Jenny and Kathy:

"Across The Wide Missouri/Shenandoah"

I've always had the strongest affinity for the NBD (Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, Dave Guard) portion of the 51 years of the Kingston Trio, sadly a mere 3 1/2 of that total. I liked the first few NBJ (Nick, Bob, John Stewart) albums (and became a huge fan of JS' solo career) - but I just never wore out the grooves on any of those records the way I did on especially the first half dozen or so of the original Trio releases (excepting Stereo Concert, which I never saw any point in getting until it came out on CD with a few extra songs - mono is mono and unlike many of my fellow Xroaders, I thought the studio albums were far superior to the live recordings and represent some of the best professional recordings of that or any other era). Just IMHO of course.

What I came to miss about the original Trio sound and formula is represented brilliantly by their "Across The Wide Missouri" from Here We Go Again. First, the NBD albums relied much more heavily than the NBJ albums on real folk songs, adapted sometimes tastefully and with startling originality (I always nominate "Bay of Mexico" and "Sloop John B" here ) sometimes with fidelity to their sources ("Goober Peas" is pretty much a straightforward rendition of the Civil War song, and "Tom Dooley" is right out of the Lomaxes' Folk Songs of North America - and after the comedic intro, "Wimoweh" is a more than decent attempt), and less often with forgettable and for me failed transformations into 50s pop numbers (list available upon request )

Second, again as "Missouri" attests, the NBD trio knew how to sing quietly - and slowly - and for pacing and atmosphere. Consider "Gue, Gue" (another melodic classic), "Senora," "San Miguel," "Fast Freight" [not slow, but almost hushed], "Mountains of Mourne," and many others - many more and much better, I think, than all but a handful of NBJ songs of the same stripe ("The First Time" is great, maybe "Rusting In The Rain," though that's not slow, and a few others).

So, to start - to remind us all of just how stunning that original troupe could handle legitimate three part harmony, my friend Tom Salter of Stonewall Studios in Niagara, Ontario created this video poem for the Trio's classic:




The song itself, of course, is a derivation of the sea shanty "Shenandoah," which has more variants in its lyrics/story than many other folk songs. The Shenandoah Valley (from a Rapahannock word meaning "daughter of the stars") is one of the scenic highlights of the Appalachian mountains, and the eponymous river is sparkling and clear for most of its length - seeing it join the muddy Potomac at Harper's Ferry is a real sight). The song likely originated among the voyageurs of the fur trade era ( missing the beauties of the landscape of the East and possibly an "Indian maiden" of the same name) but was adapted and promulgated worldwide by American deep water sailors, who used its stately rhythm as a "capstan shanty" - a song to accompany the back-breaking labor of weighing anchor.

The immediate ancestor of the Kingston's version is this rather odd recording below - two KT influences, Terry Gilkyson (of "Fast Freight" and the Easy Riders) and the Weavers joining together under the direction of arranger Gordon Jenkins (a brilliant arranger, for Sinatra, Nat Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and many more) with his over-done for folk orchestrations (conducted here by Vern Schoen) - this isn't much of a video, but if you have never heard it - listen to a few bars and whisper a quiet payer of thanksgiving for the brilliance of Voyle Gilmore, who put his foot down and defied Capitol's wish to add orchestration to that first album:



Another early version here, from the legendary operatic bass-baritone Paul Robeson:



That the song has had legs for its two hundred year history is evidenced by the incredible number of variations on it, and the great number of brilliant interpretations of it - to wit, first, Tony Rice's instrumental version of sublime technique and taste:




The song is a treasure for the vocally gifted and seems especially well-suited to the ladies - for example, the just-turned 21 Kiwi soprano Hayley Westenra (seen widely on the second Celtic Women show):



and here, equal time for the guys - Tennessee Ernie Ford - one of the comments on YT says, "Oh Man, I'd forgotten how good he was."



A full choral version brings out some of the subtleties of the tune - here the St. Petersburg College choral group:



and to close - a Civil War era brass band arrangement (I've always loved these bands):




In nearly any version, I have always thought this the #1 loveliest of American folk songs and am thoroughly delighted that the Kingston Trio does one of the best versions of it ever.

Addendum

In 2010, the Kingston Trio released some of the earliest tapes from 1957-58 of their rehearsals and performances on a CD called Above the Purple Onion, named for the loft above the site of their first serious professional engagement, where they honed their skills and developed their repertoire. One of the songs included is "Shenandoah," a recording notably different from the "Missouri" above that came along two years later - among other differences, the lead here is sung by Dave Guard, not Bob Shane as on the latter:



Addendum 2 - May, 2013

The comment below is from my brother Larry - a couple of years after this piece was published and Larry recommended Van Morrison's version, some goodly soul uploaded Morrison and The Chieftains to YouTube:

Long Black Veil

As all true Trio fans know and are quick to point out, the members of the first two troupes were what critic Richard Corliss of Time Magazine called them, "gifted song sleuths" - the evidence for which is the number of fine songs first recorded by the group (or first among high profile mainstream acts) that were later covered and made major hits by other interpretive artists.

THAT list, of course, is amazingly long, and it would be difficult to winnow out which are the most prominent - The Beach Boys' "Sloop John B"? Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever"? Sinatra's "It Was A Very Good Year"? (no inference or apocrypha here - Frank is on film in the Capitol Records studio acknowledging that he heard the Kingston Trio singing it on the radio and immediately loved it - in PBS' Sinatra: A Man And His Music) The Tokens "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"? even Terry Jacks' "Seasons In The Sun"?

It would be hard to find a song that the Trio "discovered" that has had more different subsequent lives than "Long Black Veil" from late 62/early 63 New Frontier.[Parenthesis: an extraordinary discography compiled by a Springsteen fan of the recorded versions of the song is HERE].

And why not? Though it is what Corliss calls "faux folk" - a song written to sound traditional (in this case of course like one of those many murder ballads) but which was crafted deliberately by (in this case again) two skilled songwriters, it has a cleanness of line and lyric and a musical vocabulary and lyrical resonance that both effectively echo real folk songs.

Plus, of course, it has a great Trio arrangement. Does music get better than a fine Shane lead vocal, a soaring Nick tenor harmony, and an amazingly tasteful Stewart banjo arrangement that is, well, neither bluegrass nor folk but just pure John Stewart?

June, 2013 - An Interpolation

As detailed in the margin note to the left, Capitol is now permitting playback of Kingston Trio videos on YouTube that had been blocked on copyright grounds for several years, including the Trio's very early and very fine rendition of this song. It is with great pleasure and thanks to Capitol/EMI that I now can add it here:



What is hard here is to select the best or most interesting of the scores of other versions up on YouTube - and where to start? Well, the most recent high-profile version has been presented by Bruce Springsteen on the Seeger Sessions tour of 2006:




For a really interesting musical version - how about Mick Jagger joining with The Chieftans? (and people thought Robert Plant/Alison Krause was strange!)Yes that Jagger - surprisingly good here. And the Chieftans were widely regarded as "pure" Irish folk music (as opposed to the KT/popularizing canard lodged against the Clancys and the Dubliners) and create a singularly eerie background:



Until Springsteen put the song into his Seeger Sessions package in 2006, the most prominent contemporary artist covering the number has been Dave Matthews, who since 1999 has done it with about ten different collaborators (all on YT). I'm not a huge fan of Matthews on this number - but in my next life I will keep company with the angelic Emmylou Harris, who duets with him here:



I think four videos should do it for a single post - so I'll put links to Springsteen and others below. For a conclusion, though - I just don't think you can improve on Johnny Cash in his prime singing it as a duet with Joni Mitchell in her prime:



And a selection of other famous folks:

The Band
The Seldom Scene

Addendum, 10/12/11
Clearly more to add to this post but for now, I just saw on Facebook this fine version done by country superstar Marty Stuart:

Early Morning Rain

The song that gave Gordon Lightfoot an entry into Big Time Show Business (remember the liner notes to College Concert?) is one of the most elastic of all of the major pop folk numbers of the 60s, having been covered innumerable times (according to some sources, second only to "Yesterday" as the most often-covered song of the decade) in almost as many different arrangements.

Talented interpreters from Elvis Presley to Johnny Cash to Eva Cassady have taken a shot at it, and the song is just so good that for me each version has its merits.

The Trio recorded it early in its life, though it was buried on the first KT album that sold so poorly that it never appeared on any of the many Billboard charts, and consequently the song has never been regarded by the public as a Trio song, as fine a version as they did of it.

The 1967 Shane-Reynolds-Stewart trio version is on YouTube



...and one of the many videos made of the Elvis cover is here:



Ian and Sylvia from their 1984 reunion - they were the first to record and popularize it:



Watch this one quick - before Sylvia's lawyers catch that its embeddable.

No one does it quite like the master himself, though....



here from the late 70s.

Likely the most familiar version to U.S. record buyers of the day was PP&M's fine and melodic take on the song:



Classic country legend Jerry Reed delivers a superior reading of the song, here from 1971:




I think my favorite non-standard version of the song, by Paul Weller with guitar in an open D tunng - it's got much of the grit as in Gordon's own version and that I think he intended for the song: