"You Don't Knock"

Personally, I prefer spirituals over gospel music for roughly the same reasons that I like traditional music over most singer-songwriter numbers. There is a kind of almost democratic populism in real old time folk songs - the best tend to survive and come down to us, and that "best" is determined largely by a kind of collective popular will, expressed over generations of time by the simple fact that people have sung and keep singing them, at least until the advent and then domination of electronic media converted music from something that people made - that virtually everybody made - to something that people consumed, like any other commodity hawked by marketing hucksters.

You could draw a parallel to the spiritual/gospel relationship. Real spirituals, several of which like "Good News" (profiled a year ago this week) and "My Lord, What A Mornin'" (with a longer discussion of spirituals in general) have appeared in these posts, arose from the suffering and longing engendered by slavery and express a collective dream of a brighter day, in this world or the next. Gospel music, which sometimes grew out of spirituals and is the proper category in which to place this week's song selection, "You Don't Knock," has a definitely commercial aspect to it. That of course in no way denigrates it - Bach to Bernstein and everyone in between also created sacred classical music for pay, too.

But I think that "Shenandoah", for example, is unsurpassable for its sheer, flat-out beauty, a beauty that has embedded within it a kind of truth that very, very few individual songwriter efforts have ever matched, a beauty refined and enhanced by the generations of ordinary folk who have sung it. Good spirituals share in the same nature, I think.

Gospel music, on the other hand, is largely performance music. It may invite participation from a congregation, but its power is derived from fine and professional performances of it. Gospel songs are the visions of individual writers; spirituals are the collective voice of the people.

All of this makes "You Don't Knock" an ideal song to consider, because evidence points to a derivation from a lost spiritual while its current form comes from the legendary Roebuck "Pops" Staples, the patriarch of the family singing group that he founded in 1948 with his children. The earliest copyright anyone seems to be able to find for "You Don't Knock" is 1949, assigned to Cedar Walton and Wesley Westbrooks, though the name R. Staples was added to it later in the '50s. Certainly one of the earliest recorded versions of the song belongs to Roebuck S. and his children - the Staples Singers:



Most subsequent recorded version seem to riff off of this one, and the near-identicality of lyrics in other artists' version certainly points to a single origin for the song.

The New Grass Revival (here from Austin City Limits) is certainly one of the highest-calibered assemblages of country/bluegrass musicians put together in recent decades , with Sam Bush, John Cowan, Pat Flynn, & Bela Fleck:



I love the fact that they have converted the basic African-American sound and rhythm of the number into their own idiom, a kind of old-timey mountain music sound that skirts the edges of rockabilly.

The Kingston Trio translates the song into another idiom entirely - just a whisker on the folk side of rock:



It's hard to believe that this is from Dave Guard's last album with the group. He sounds like he is having a heck of a good time, whaling away as he is on his still-new jumbo Gibson 12 string guitar and vocally going Elvis-on-steroids in his treatment.

The Gaither Vocal Band, which includes the famous brothers, does a fine country-gospel rendition:



One of the better and more interesting pop collaborations in recent years has been Led Zeppelin rocker Robert Plant with roots music superstar Allison Krause:



Who would ever have thought that Dave Guard would out-rock Robert Plant? Clearly, though, Plant and Krause are going back to rock's deep roots in blues - interesting to compare this to the Staples.

The Detroit Cobras are a covers band that nonetheless brings an original approach to the song - almost country-rock, I'd say, sort of the Staples Singers as imagined by the Joe Walsh-era Eagles:



And two final versions for fun. First, home videos from a group only known as Anthony, Isaiah, and Dallas:



Regular readers of this blog know how much I love videos of folk music well-performed at home by amateurs who love what they are doing - as with these young guys.

Finally, what may be the weirdest version of a song I have ever posted in 132 articles - the young ladies of Alpha Xi Delta at the University of North Carolina Wilmington:



Here's what they are chanting:

Dont knock dont knock
just walk right in
the door the door
to the alpha xi den
there's love theres love
theres joy for you
to share to share
your whole life through
i know i know
my friends are there
the golden quill we'll always wear
the gold the quill
the double blue
the doors wide open just waitin for you
dont knock
just walk right in
dont knock
just walk right in

I'd say that that removes all the spiritual/gospel elements from the song most effectively. Guess that's just part of the folk process.

Will Holt, Part I - "Lemon Tree"

I have to say at the outset that the charms of this particular song have eluded me for half a century, though I am certainly an admirer of its composer Will Holt and of the artists whose renditions are presented below. But "Lemon Tree" is one of those songs that falls into the odd cracks and fissures that characterized the folk revival, not unlike some of the early songs of Rod McKuen or possibly even Irving Burgie - not quite really full-blown pop music but hard to categorize as folk, though tunes like it were popularized by guitar-strumming acts that were identified in the popular imagination of the time as "folksingers."

Holt (who will turn 82 on April 30th) is a man of considerable talents, though it might be said of him that no single one of them was so dominant that it became an immediately identifiable signature, like Sinatra's phrasing or Bob Dylan's songwriting. But an outstanding singer Holt has been (as we will see below), and though his early 1960s albums on Elektra might be loosely termed folk, his likely most enduring performances on vinyl were his duet efforts with Martha Schlamme interpreting the dark musical theater vision of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. He wrote a few dozen songs, several of which like LT were widely covered; he acted on Broadway and on television - and following the stuttering end of the pop folk fad in the late '60s turned with great success (and a few flops) to writing book and lyrics for Broadway shows such as The Me Nobody Knows (1970), Me and Bessie (about blues legend Bessie Smith) in 1976, and A Walk On The Wild Side (1988), for which he also wrote the music. Holt is still performing, and as recently as 2005 recorded yet another album of Brecht/Weill numbers with Gisela May, overdubbing some original Weill-supervised tracks by the legendary Lotte Lenya.

Like McKuen, Holt seems to have been less interested in actual folk songs than he was in the worldly cabaret style of music (French for McKuen, German for Holt) that fascinated post-war Americans rather more in the '40s and '50s than it seems to today. European music appeared more urbane and knowing than either American pop or folk, and even when Holt ventured into pure folk, he did so with a polish and sophistication generally not seen in the genre before him - as here with his rendition of "Shenandoah":



"Lemon Tree" is probably the best-known of the compositions that carry Holt's name on the copyright, but he has always been open about the fact that he was creating a free-hand translation of the melody and lyrics of a 1937 Brazilian composition called "Meu limão, meu limoeiro," based on a traditional song in Portuguese. The original has the lost love theme and the mention of the lemon tree, but the father's advice and the son's bitter lesson are pure Holt. The first version of it that I (and about 3 million other Americans) heard of it was on the 1962 first album by superstars-to-be Peter, Paul and Mary - whose version here is so well-crafted that it remains after 50 years probably the definitive rendition of the song:



Intentionally or not, PP&M are preserving just a hint in their syncopation of the Brazilian origins of the tune. But their version, with the pause before the change of key that leads to the chorus, also emphasizes just how far the number is from traditional Euro-American folk, where such shifts are fairly rare.

A number this mellow eventually just had to be covered by the masters of mellow folk-type music, the Brothers Four:



This version is from the group's 1997 Greenfields And Other Gold album; Bob Flick is the sole remaining original member of the group on the recording, though Mark Pearson and Bob Haworth each had spent more than 20 years with the group by the time this was waxed.

It probably should not be surprising that the Kingston Trio also recorded "Lemon Tree," actually some months before PP&M or nearly anyone else. It appeared on Goin' Places, their ninth and final album with original member Dave Guard, released almost exactly 50 years ago in April of 1961:



The superior recording techniques of producer Voyle Gilmore and engineer Pete Abbott just aren't sufficient to cover the essential weaknesses of this perfunctory performance, which takes most of the affect out of the lyric. Perhaps the Trio went to the well once too often: they had previously successfully recorded Holt's "Raspberries, Strawberries" and the "MTA" song that they had first heard from him, and those two both became top 40 singles for the group. But the gleeful, uptempo arrangement presented here suffers in comparison to what PP&M did with the tune.

Britain's semi-folky Chad and Jeremy seemed to split the difference between the versions of the two giant American folk groups: they take the essential PP&M arrangement with its gentle verses but blast the chorus up to KT speed:



Trini Lopez, who IMHO never gets sufficient credit for introducing rock elements into folk-styled songs years before McGuinn or Dylan, puts his distinctively Latin syncopation into his rendition:

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No article of this nature would be complete without presenting the version of Australia's Seekers for just about any tune that they recorded:



This is one of the few Seekers' songs I can think of where the distinctive vocals of Judith Durham are mixed down into the blend rather than featured prominently.

Will Holt is a protean artist, changing genres and styles with an easy virtuosity. It seems as if today few people remember his contributions to pop folk music, which may not be such a bad thing. He is a wonderful and engaging vocalist, and I still listen to his Brecht/Weill albums from time to time. But the fact that rockers Fools Garden have recorded a completely different song with the same name (often covered around the world) has served to bury this number even deeper into 1960s obscurity. Holt deserves a better fate than to be remembered mainly as the composer of this slight and pleasant bit of fluff. _____________________________________________
Appendix - The Original Song, "Meu Limão, Meu Limoeiro"  

The source song whose melody Holt adapted closely is sung here by Inezita Barroso, one of several Brazilian singers who popularized the tune in the 1940s and 1950s. The title translates as "My Lemon, My Lemon Tree," and while Holt's lyrics are his own, they follow the sense of the original tune as well.

Hell Hath No Fury - "You're Gonna Miss Me/Leaving Home/Frankie & Johnny"

Two weeks ago, we looked at a song about a poor girl murdered by her lover; last week, we met two young women unfazed by men. This week, the logical progression proceeds to a lady who just will not be trifled with..."he was her man, but he done her wrong."

Both of my grandmothers played piano and sang, reflecting what was considered a proper social education for girls born as they were in 1892 and 1900. While most of their repertoires consisted of often long-forgotten popular songs from their childhoods, both occasionally drifted into performing what might be called a kind of derivative folk music, often Irish airs with rewritten American lyrics. Occasionally these ladies were capable of some surprises. My maternal grandma - a rather prim and conservative woman - would occasionally slip into a bit of honky-tonk or ragtime, and it was from her that I first remember hearing "Frankie and Johnny," a honky-tonk/ragtime classic if the genres ever produced one.

Most of the major folklorists like John A. Lomax and Carl Sandburg believe that F&J is very old for an American folk tune, probably pre-dating the Civil War, though others maintain that the spate of published versions in the first decade of the 20th century points to a later origin. It seems like a good bet, though, that the 1831 murder of Charlie Silver by his wife Frankie Stewart Silver (with an axe - ouch! - and in North Carolina again!) might well be the song's inspiration, since in the folkways of the region Mrs. Silver did in her husband in a jealous rage. In actual fact, Mrs. Silver (all of 17 at the time of the killing) pleaded self-defense in the face of an imminent threat from her drunken husband. While the jury initially refused to believe her, eventually seven of the members signed a petition to commute her death sentence on the grounds that she had in fact been abused. It didn't work, and Frankie Silver was hanged for the crime. A good brief summary of the case appears HERE.

An early version from 1927 of what has become the standard songbook version of the song is done here by Frank Crumit:


Now Crumit's lyrics are for the most part the old honky-tonk song, but fans of the "You're Gonna Miss Me/Leaving Home" version will recognize that Crumit interpolated some of those lines into the middle of his arrangement.

A chronological digression here. Around 1962, the great Bob Gibson rearranged F&J on his Where I'm Bound album that I profiled a few weeks back. Now the Bob Gibson Legacy site has uploaded a fine performance video of Bob doing the number HERE, but it can't be put on this page - so here is a trio called Dirty Dishes doing Gibson's arrangement:


In 1908, Frank Leighton and Boyd Bunch copyrighted a F&J version whose lyrics (some in Crumit's record) are very close to what banjo legend Charlie Poole and the North Carolina Ramblers came up with, again in the 20s:


I ran across of video of Fiddlin' John Carson doing this version at about the same time but lost it. If I find it again, I'll re-post it.

In turn, John Cohen, Mike Seeger, and Tom Paley of the New Lost City Ramblers adapted (and copyrighted) Poole's lyrics with a respectful vocal and instrumentally skillful version in about 1959:


Mike Seeger of the group next introduces (1980s vintage, I'd say) The Stillhouse Reelers doing a rendition that they adapted directly from Charlie Poole* with one difference that I believe to be significant and will deal with below - they do it a lot faster:


It was the NLCR version of the song that was the clear and direct inspiration for the Kingston Trio's re-named "You're Gonna Miss Me." We know this because Dave Guard copyrighted the song, including the names of Cohen, Seeger, and Paley. There is a YouTube video of a fragment of the KT rendition (again, non-embeddable) HERE; the full studio version sounds like this:


The KT gives the number its trademark full-speed, hell-bent-for-leather treatment (with an able assist from producer Voyle Gilmore, who brings up the musicians' instruments at the precise moment of their vocal solos before nicely re-blending on the choruses). Perhaps it was this that excited some of the distaste that NLCR John Cohen expressed for the group. In fact, Cohen once remarked (on the Woodsongs radio program, I believe) something to the effect that the only tradition that the KT seemed to have any respect for was that of a frat party. That leaves open the question, for me at least, of why a similar adaptation of the song by The Stillhouse Reelers above does not come in for similar censure - or why all these versions are using unattributed material that clearly came from Poole (who in turn seems to have heard and used the Leighton version). It's not really important because all of these versions are enjoyable. Just wondering.

"Si Me Quieres Escribir/Coast Of California"

Imagine, if you will, that you are touring around western Canada by car - highly recommended, by the way - and you stop for the night in some small town in western Alberta or BC or along the AlCan Highway in the southern Yukon, all places where acoustic folk music is alive and well and performed frequently in cafes and bars (which above the 60th parallel and Arctic Circle are invariably one and the same place). You wander into one such cafe and an earnest-looking young performer is doing his best to catch the attention of the sometimes noisy crowd. He has yours because he's talented and clean-cut and just plain good.

After a couple of familiar-sounding songs, say by Tyson and Lightfoot, the young artist announces a composition of his own. He begins with a stirring and complicated guitar intro and starts to sing -

"I'll sing a song of Albert John -- son
He was bold and brave and free -
He fought the law and Moun --ties
Just to keep his liberty..."

and on from there.

You look to your left and right, a bit disconcerted, to see that he's finally won over the crowd. They're tapping their feet and pounding on the tables as he runs through verse after verse. They like the song a lot. But you're knocked a bit off center because the tune he's using for this piece about the sociopathic Mad Trapper of Rat River who was hunted down and killed in 1932 - is the "Marine Hymn."

If the thought of that is just a bit upsetting, then you'll understand my reaction to the Jane Bowers/Dave Guard composition "Coast of California," which takes its melody from a patriotic Republican anthem of the Spanish Civil War, "Si Me Quieres Escribir." As we'll see in the videos below, the song is alive and well in Spain to this day, and putting the bogus, faux-folk lyrics to it that Guard and Bowers did borders, perhaps, on the sacrilegious. Unless, that is, you wouldn't mind our Canadian neighbors doing exactly the same thing to a song of ours which will bring any Marine and half our population to respectful attention. Just such a song is "Si Me Quieres Escribir."

A brief historical refresher is perhaps necessary. This Spanish Civil War, the last of several, lasted from 1936-1939 and pitted two coalitions against each other, the Republicans (including socialists and communists, who favored a generally democratic government along parliamentary lines) versus the Nationalists or Falangists (many of whom favored a monarchy and a church-state coalition but whose most militant supporters were Fascists supporting Gen. Francisco Franco). The war was bloody to the point of barbarism, not least because the Republicans were armed by Stalin's USSR and the Falangists by Hitler and Mussolini. Massacres were commonplace, the most famous illustrated by Picasso's painting "Guernica." Franco's Falangists won and thus began the generalissimo's dictatorship of nearly 40 years.

"Si Me Quieres Escribir" was one of several Republican songs that was based on older flamenco tunes and that found its way to the U.S. via the left-leaning People's Songs groups that included Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, the Almanac Singers, and many of the other folk artists that we remember from the 1940s. "Venga Jaleo" was another such song. (An early Kingston Trio audition for Capitol Records of that song can be heard on Rick Daly's FolkUSA HERE. I believe that Warren Barreiss quotes Guard in his article that the Trio was attracted to the song because it was "wild" in the same way Tahitian songs were and not because of its political content.)

Seeger's Weavers of course featured "Si Me Quieres Escribir" prominently in their concerts, and it appears on their landmark 1957 album The Weavers At Carneige Hall:



More on Seeger's banjo work below - note also Fred Hellerman's excellent guitar work. This is undoubtedly the immediate antecedent of the Bowers/Guard tune. About fifteen years prior, in the early '40s, Seeger had recorded the number with the Almanac Singers:



In both of these, Seeger makes the radical musical decision to accompany a Spanish flamenco-styled song with the very American banjo. Both arrangements clearly demonstrate from where Seeger's banjo acolyte Dave Guard derived his ideas for the banjo work on the Trio's "Coast of California" from the group's 1961 album Goin' Places:



More on this song below.

A modern Spanish group called B.S.O. borrows the Seeger banjo idea (may be two banjos, one possibly a tenor banjo) and Hellerman's guitar part for this stirring version:



Finally, a syncopated version from Quetzal, a contemporary Chicano group who cut an album of Spanish Civil War songs:



We could, I suppose, cut Guard, Bowers, and the Kingston Trio some slack for transforming an anthem to which men marched to battle and death into a dramatic show piece. The folk process often involves such transformations. The British national anthem becomes an American patriotic song; the Irish lament "Bard of Armagh" becomes the cowboy lament "Streets of Laredo"; the feisty Irish "Rosin the Bow" becomes the feisty American "Acres of Clams," "Lincoln and Liberty," and fifty other songs.

As a Californian with a love of history, I dislike "Coast of California" because it has less authenticity even than the Zorro tales (20th century inventions) in depicting Spanish California, Alta or Baja. The golden treasures of Aztec Mexico passed largely through Vera Cruz on the Gulf and thence to Spain. That's why treasure hunters still scour the Gulf and the Carribean for sunken Spanish galleons and largely ignore the Gulf of California and the Pacific Coast of Baja. There just isn't much treasure to be found there and never was.

But for me the real problem is the analogy that I made at the head of this article. "Si Me Quieres Escribir" is a song that the people who wrote it and have sung it revere, much as Americans do "The Marine Hymn." You just don't trivialize a song like that, not tastefully at least. The dramatic performance by the Kingston Trio and outstanding banjo work by Guard strike me, as does the version by the KT of "A Worried Man," as a great arrangement in service of an inferior lyric. Unlike "Worried Man" (which I maintain the Trio could have done with an adaptation of the original prison lyric as a great "Hard Travelin'" type of number), the apolitical Kingston Trio could never have transmuted a leftist anthem into the kind of song that they could have been comfortable with. For my money, it would have been better left undone.

Appendix - The Spanish Lyric And English Translation

Si Me Quieres Escribir
(lf You Want To Write Me)

Si me quieres escribir, ya sabes mi paradero,
Si me quieres escribir, ya sabes mi paradero,
En el frente de Gandesa primera linea de fuego.
En el frente de Gandesa primera linea de fuego.

Si tu quieres comer bien, barato y de buena forma. (2x)
En el frente de Gandesa, alli tienen una fonda. (2x)

En la entrada de la fonda, Hay un moro Mojama (2x)
Que te dice, "Pasa, pasa que quieres pata comer." (2x)

El primer plato que dan, son grenadas rompedoras (2x)
El segundo de matralla para recordar memorias (2x)



If you want to write me a letter, you already know my whereabouts.
I'm on the Gandesa Front, in the first line of the fighting.

If you want to eat your fill, good food and not too many pesos,
On that bloody battlefield stands an inn where you are welcome.

At the entrance of this inn there waits a moor by name Mohammed,
Who warmly greets you, "Hurry, hurry, rare and spicy food awaits you."

The first dish which they serve is hot grenades in quick succession,
Followed by a burst of shrapnel, makes a meal you'll all remember.

"Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo"

Two of the facets of earlier folk music albums that I loved were the number and variety of foreign language songs, most of which were at least rooted in the traditional music of their respective countries. The leader of the pack in this regard was the Weavers, who included songs from around the world in both their recording and performing repertoires from the start to the finish of their career. Bud and Travis and the early Kingston Trio are probably in second place, with the Trio emphasizing Spanish, Mexican, and Polynesian songs but also including French, African songs from different languages, and those two odd German language numbers that never made it on to an American album until the CD re-issue era. One of the things that I missed in the later KT records as they moved from what had been at least traditionally termed "folk" to singer/songwriter and pop music was their abandonment (largely) of sea chanteys and "world" folk songs, both of which had been strong components on their early albums.

There was a risk inherent in singing songs in a non-native language, not the least of which was the necessity for at least one group member or another to learn the lyrics phonetically, even given the possibility of the other singers actually knowing the language or at least the meaning of the song. Both Bud Dashiell and Travis Edmundson were fluent in Spanish, and that fluency lent an air of authenticity to the largely Mexican songs that they recorded. Bob Shane and Dave Guard both grew up in Hawaii and attended Punahou School, where classes in Hawaiian culture were mandatory; they sang a number of Tahitian songs by ear but seemed to have known the Hawaiian songs from the inside out.

I always suspected that at least Guard and Shane knew some Spanish, and given Nick Reynolds' Coronado, CA roots (near the U.S.-Mexico border), I'd be surprised if he did not as well. Their pronunciation of the language is usually good, if not quite native quality (listen to Shane's pronunciation of "Jesus" in today's recording - it ought to be "hay-ZOOS" and not "JAY-zoos"), and their feel for the music is also good (I have in the past pointed to the distinctively Mexican flavor to the guitar work on "Deportee" and could do so on other songs like "En El Agua" and even "Coplas" as well).

But even with that, the group is taking quite a risk in recording "Guardo Del Lobo"(the correct title, according to a commenter from Spain on YouTube) because of the song's age and because it is the only number I can think of at the moment that they ever recorded a capella. The actual title of the song is from the first line, "Riu Riu Chiu," said to be Spanish nonsense syllables that attempt to replicate onomatopoeiacally the sound of a nightingale. The liner notes on Goin' Places (the KT album on which it appeared) correctly indicate that it goes back to at least the fifteenth century and is a "villancico," or religious festival song, most but not all of which are associated with Christmas. It is attributed to Catalan composer Mateo Flecha, who died eleven years before Shakespeare was born.

I always thought that the KT recording was haunting and different, and its utilization of the reverb in Capitol Studio B adds to the effect. The meaning of the lyrics, usually updated into modern Spanish, appear here with our first version from the dwsChorale [sic] - which is David W. Solomons multi-tracking himself - amazing use of technology:



The Kingston Trio's version adheres to the traditional accompaniment format of the villancico - a capella except for percussion:



That's a lot of sound coming out of three guys and a bassist playing tambourine. It's also three-part harmony throughout, with Bob Shane on a low harmony.

My favorite live performance video of the song is here, from Flauto Dolce("Sweet Flute"), a chorale group from Serbia:



The costumes may not be quite exactly right for the time, but the feminine voices and mixed chorus I find fetching.

And now two remarkably good versions from teeny-bopper pop idols from whom you'd least expect it. First - the Monkees (!):



I see a distinct KT influence here - the harmonic arrangement is almost identical.

Next, American Idol runner-up and teen heartthrob David Archuleta - not half bad for an AI contestant:



Nice to end with a bang, though - so here's the version from Kalenda Maya, a mixed voice ancient music group from Norway:



Addendum 1/09/10

I see from the comments that the "Fans Of David" site picked up this blog post, and thanks for that and stopping by. I should probably clarify that -

a) most of us over on Kingston Crossroads (the message board where I first post these blog entries) are not generally fans of American Idol and its styles of music and singing, but

b)most everyone there, including me, were very impressed with DA's treatment of this song and his vocals in general. You all are right - he's an excellent singer.

All he needs to do now is get past the AI stage and grow into his voice. He could be another Sinatra - and that's saying a lot.

A Touch Of Bluegrass : "Molly And Tenbrooks"

Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart remarked in a 1964 decision that although he was unable to offer a clear and concise definition of what constitutes pornography - "I know it when I see it." I am not about to divert this PG-13 blog into NC-17 territory - it's just that Stewart's phrase is so very applicable to the less volatile topic of bluegrass music. No one has ever been able to define precisely what it is - but I know it when I hear it.

It's not a traditional folk form at all and really isn't very old, going back as it does no earlier than the 1930s or 40s. Not quite country and not quite folk, bluegrass derives some of its character from both - twangy vocals and the prominence of the fiddle in most bluegrass bands from country, the five string banjo and general Scotch-Irish Appalachian tone from folk. The music is usually played at supersonic speed with breaks for each of the principal instruments.

The name bluegrass itself is derived from the band name of the genre's first superstar, Bill Monroe, whose most successful band was called The Blue Grass Boys (above) and in its most famous incarnation in the late 40s included the instrumental line-up most common in bluegrass bands since - guitar and vocals by Lester Flatt, banjo by Earl Scruggs, Chubby Wise on fiddle, and Monroe himself on mandolin and often doing very high harmonies a fifth (rather than the more usual third) above the melody line. This band's success on national radio's Grand Ole Opry (propelled in part by the electrifyingly original sound of the three-fingered rolls that Scruggs was doing that have since become known as Scruggs picking) led to a string of hits, many off from the 1947 recording sessions that yielded a number of huge 45 rpm hits - including "Molly and Tenbrooks." The Monroe video has been pulled from YouTube, but Allison Krause and Union Station do a fine replication:



Fourteen years later, the Kingston Trio with characteristic brashness decided to do their own version of the song, simplifying the lyrics, folkifying the tone - and not surprisingly changing the banjo part to something that Dave Guard could handle. Guard's growth as a banjoist from the first album to this cut from his last with the Trio is stunning, and DG acquits himself well here - but it's not quite bluegrass even though Guard seems to be doing some three-fingered picking here as opposed to his earlier thumb/forefinger instrumentals (maybe not - comments/speculations welcome). The KT called it, of course,"Run, Molly, Run" from Goin' Places:



This is a classic KT banjo blaster, performed with their trademark verve and just that little bit of vocal "acting" that made their concerts a delight. I always thought that this would have been a great concert opener for the Trio - and one that John Stewart would just absolutely have nailed had they kept it in the repertoire.

Most of the other bluegrass versions of the song are pretty direct derivatives from Monroe's recording, but the next two videos are worth a look for different reasons. Peter Rowan and Tony Rice's version showcases Rice's unbelievable bluegrass flatpicking:

.

Lester Flatt was a great, great flatpicking artist - but has anyone ever been better than Rice?

Tony appears again with another great instrumental here with the Manzanita Band. This superstar group has Sam Bush on the Monroe-styled lead and mandolin, but what makes this performance different is - no banjo. You won't exactly miss it, though, because its position is filled by dobro guitar played by Jerry Douglass, the greatest who ever touched the instrument and one of the great musicians America has produced:



KT fans may recall the liner notes from the Live At Newport CD from a few years back. Flatt and Scruggs had left Monroe to form their own band and like the Trio had been invited (in both cases against the wishes of folk purists) to play at the 1960 Newport Folk festival, which was in desperate need that year of an infusion of cash, as its very existence was threatened. Bringing non-traditional artists like Flatt and Scruggs and the KT caused some bitterness in the Greenwich Village crowd but saved the festival. (BTW - Flatt and Scruggs performance of four or five songs including "Salty Dog" is on the Vanguard two album set from the festival that year - one of the first records I ever bought. They were great!) The fans were so raucous demanding a KT encore that they drowned out Flatt and Scruggs until guard came back on stage and assured the crowd that the KT would return after the bluegrass set, and urged the crowd to listen to his own personal favorite banjo player of all time. The crowd complied.

I've often wondered how many of them recognized Scruggs distinctive style seven years later in the monster hit "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" that had been in the film Bonnie and Clyde....

Appendix

How about some pure bluegrass? What better song than "Cripple Creek," and what better band than Flatt and Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys?



And ole Earl is still picking away - I hope everyone saw this wonderful performance of "Foggy Mountain Breakdown" from the David Letterman show a couple years back:



And why not? The scene from 1972's Deliverance with possibly the most famous bluegrass-styled number ever, "Dueling Banjos" played by the great Eric Weissberg of The Tarriers:



Beyond the music - Burt Reynolds...Ronny Cox...Jon Voight...Ned Beatty...script by James Dickey (who wrote the novel) and directed by John Boorman - will I be forgiven for saying they just don't make any movies this great any more?

Another Woody Guthrie Classic: "Pastures Of Plenty/Pretty Polly"

I guess it was Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen's "This Land" at the pre-inaugural concert that got me thinking even more about Woody Guthrie than usual. The fact that they did all the verses and gave just that bit of edginess to the song that Guthrie intended reminded me of another of his great "Dust Bowl Ballads," "Pastures of Plenty."

Protest songs are almost by definition topical, and you'd think that their usefulness would be limited to the life spans of the issues that engendered them. And yet - will "Blowin' In The Wind" or "The Times They Are A-Changin'" or "Deportee" or "If I Had A Hammer" ever truly be out of date? I doubt it. The best of these songs protest the fundamental injustices of the human condition that, like the poor as the Good Book says, are always with us. So it is, I think, with "Pastures of Plenty" - a song that, like "This Land," makes its point forcefully but without bitterness or recrimination.

Guthrie's song was published in 1941, two years after The Grapes Of Wrath, and it could be argued that the Steinbeck novel and subsequent movie created with Guthrie's song and photographer Walker Evans' pictures our enduring impression of the displacement and suffering caused by our last great economic nightmare. Though Steinbeck and Guthrie may have overstated the extent of the disaster in terms of numbers (migrants from Oklahoma and Texas to California numbered likely in the tens of thousands, not the hundreds of thousands that the book alleges), they capture and illuminate poetically the truths of the suffering as only art can.

We have an all-star lineup for Weekend Videos this week, starting with Woody's own recording:



Guthrie derived the tune from the old murder ballad "Pretty Polly." Of all the outstanding versions recorded over the decades of that song, I always thought that Ralph Stanley's blazing bluegrass banjo version, with its mournful moaning vocals, was among the best. Here's Stanley with Patty Loveless about ten years ago:



The legendary Dock Boggs, though, goes in for the traditional mountain clawhammer style:



Now, the Kingston Trio's version from Goin' Places illustrates the original group's considerable strengths of inventiveness and musicianship - the chord structure here is really unexpected, especially the Gm7th (if you're playing in Dm) that they throw in where you expect a C chord, or maybe an Am - this would be on the word "mountains" in the first verse and the same position in the rest. Dave Guard playing that jumbo 12 string is also a nice touch here:



Arlo Guthrie has an interestingly different take on the song from that of his father, one whose minor chords echo the Trio a bit more:



With all respect to Arlo, I believe that the greatest living interpreter of Guthrie's songs is Pete Seeger, who traveled with Woody and was around when many of them were written. Here is Pete not so very long ago, well on in years. This is absolutely 200 proof pure folk:



And would you believe the Jefferson Starship doing this? Believe me, this one is worth a listen - they do a fine, fine job:



Emphasizing my point above about the universality of a good protest song, here is the sadly recently-departed Odetta - doing beautifully a white migrant farmer's song,



Finally - maybe the most unique version out there. I do not know who Peter Tevis (who sings here/ was. He has a fine voice, maybe more suited to musical comedy or operetta. But the real gem here in this dramatic reading is that the number was produced and orchestrated by Ennio Morricone in 1962, or about five years before he began to score Clint Eastwood's "spaghetti" Westerns. Listen to this version and you will hear definite foreshadowings of Morricone's famous theme from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly:



There are also excellent YouTube videos of Ramblin' Jack Elliott and others doing this one. Guthrie was able in this song to use his considerable poetic powers to express a passionate plea for justice that is both timely and timeless.

For You And Me: Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land"

Our "one nation, under God" has from its first years been a hotbed of contentious, bitter partisan brawls. Most of us can't even conceive of an election as violent and nasty in its rhetoric as that of 1800 (or 1824 or 1828), and if George W. Bush finds himself aggrieved by the shots taken at him by both sides in our recent plebiscite, he can find some comfort in reading just how much more terribly, personally, and negatively was lampooned the winning candidate of 1864 both by his own party and by his opponents - that of course would be one Abraham Lincoln.

Yet from this contentiousness has emerged a country that somehow manages both to function and to reform itself on a regular basis better than just about any other - and I do not mean that in any shallow jingoistic way but rather as a close student of history. Our polarized factions - and take your pick from any era of U.S. history, be it federalists vs. states' rightsers, or slavers vs free staters, or Populists vs. mainstream parties, or are modern right wingers vs. left wingers - seem to function in an almost dialectical manner, keeping our politics in a perpetually uncomfortable state of imbalance that somehow works.

While it has always been a favorite pastime of every party and faction to accuse its rivals of a lack of patriotism (as defined of course within the narrow confines of one's own beliefs), the objective fact remains that the country has been well-served by a wide variety of its citizens of every political and religious stripe. As JFK observed in his speech to the Houston convention of ministers in 1960 asserting that his Catholicism did not cast a shadow over his patriotism and should not disqualify his presidential candidacy, "Nobody asked my brother Joe about his religion when he boarded the bomber that exploded and killed him; nobody asked for my religious affiliation when I took command of a PT boat."

That's why I often wonder what Irving Berlin and Woody Guthrie might have had to say to each other had they ever sat down and discussed their respective compositions, "God Bless America" and "This Land Is Your Land." As most people know, Berlin was a Russian Jewish immigrant (as a child) who achieved likely the longest-running successful career of any American songwriter, and his "God Bless America" was his fervent anthem both of love for his adopted country and a proud statement that patriotism was not limited to the native born.

Most also know that Guthrie, populist/socialist./radical rabble rouser, took exception to what he saw as the shallow and superficial banality and essential falseness of Berlin's song and penned "This Land" as an angry leftist retort. Where Berlin's song is, like "America The Beautiful," a prayer - as in may God bless America - for continuing guidance toward a millennial perfection, Guthrie's piece, especially with the now usually omitted verses, was a cry for reform, for a land that did not belong implicitly to the shadowy image of an elite but rather to The Common Man. The verses not often sung today are here:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple;
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

Ironically, perhaps, neither composer seemed to see that there respective songs were two sides of the same coin, essentially making the same assertion, albeit with different emphases.

Both songs, of course, are crown jewels in our country's catalog of patriotic songs.

And that is why this week's videos of Woody's masterwork are all from absolute musical heavyweights. Here is Woody's own recording, an exquisite piece of simplicity and understatement::



Here is the KT version from Goin' Places, still my favorite for its stately, unrushed, majestic rhythm and pacing - and I love the way Dave's voice breaks at the end:



For many, the PP&M version was the first one that they heard, and that trio did a fine, sincere uptempo reading of the song on (I believe) their first album [4/12/09] - original recording of PP&M was removed for CopyVio - so many years later, here's the group in Japan in 1990]:



Johnny Cash could turn any song into classic rockabilly, as he does here with the Guthrie tune:



Finally - while I wasn't a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen's "Seeger Sessions" interpretations of folk songs - he has always had a way with "This Land," and the Boss's version from his 1985 "Born In The USA" tour is I think his best and one of the best I've ever heard:



And an update here on 1/19/09 - yesterday on the National Mall in the concert celebrating the imminent inauguration of Barack Obama - Bruce Springsteen, Pete Seeger, and Pete's grandson Tao Rodriguez perform a stirring version - using all of the verses:


In whatever version one prefers, I have always felt that this is the quintessential American modern folk song. It doesn't matter how much of cliche it may have seemed to become - it is American idealism at its purest and simplest, whatever patriot is singing it, of whatever political persuasion.
And further...May 1, 2013 I discovered this video recently; it was uploaded to YouTube six months after this article first appeared. From 1976, an assemblage of folk royalty - former Weavers Pete Seeger and Fred Hellerman, Woody Guthrie's son Arlo, now an elder statesman of folk music, Judy Collins (who turns 74 today) with an introduction by the irrepressible writer, scholar, and gadfly Studs Terkel, singing all the verses that WG retained in his final version of the song.