"Red River Shore" and "Hanna Lee"

This is a half post, really. I'm working on something rather more involved for this week, but these two songs are ones I loved as a youth many a decade ago, and though there aren't many different takes on the tunes, I thought it might be fun to take a brief look at each.

The inception of this page was, as noted at left, in posts that I had made for the wonderful Kingston Crossroads message board, a great site for discussing all topics folk and roots related, though of course the prime focus is on the Kingston Trio, its 55 year history and recordings, and the doings of its current incarnation, which has just released the first CD in decades of all-new material by the group, Born At The Right Time - more on this to come. Most of the more than 140 songs discussed on this site have been recorded at one time or another by the KT, including many now very familiar tunes first waxed by the Trio years before the later hit versions.

A fair number of the more than 250 songs that the group has put on albums, though, are unique to them, as I had thought that both "Red River Shore" and "Hanna Lee" might have been. Not true, as it turns out - and both numbers have an excellent pedigree as folk-flavored pop tunes.

The copyright for "Red River Shore" is assigned as "Adapted by Jack Splittard and Randy Cierley." The former is the pseudonym that the KT adopted for copyrights that the three musicians wanted to claim jointly, much as "Paul Campbell" had been for The Weavers - albeit with the KT-ish humor of splitting the jack, a now nearly archaic term for money. Cierley, however, is a very real person who figured in the late stages of the Trio's first decade; he has had a fascinating and somewhat harrowing life and musical career that he chronicles in a great website HERE. It's certainly worth a look: Cierly has worked with some of the greats and has endured more than most of us ever will. In his youth, though, he worked as a musician and arranger on some of the cuts on the Kingstons' failed attempt at folk-rock, Something Else - though this arrangement of a traditional song works somehow mysteriously for me:



The organ and military-styled snare drum are rather less obtrusive than the rock instrumentation is on most of the album's other cuts. John Stewart has the lead spoken vocal, as he did on a number of other KT songs.

Cierley's and the Trio's changes to the original song are apparent when you listen to a version from five years prior by the Norman Luboff Choir, a wonderful chorale that I remember most for supporting Harry Belafonte on a number of his 1950s and 60s albums:



Aside from the alterations to the tune and some creative shifts in the chordal accompaniment, the biggest difference is clearly in which of the doomed couple dies, and why. It's an easy inference that Cierly and the Trio were adapting the song under the long shadows of Marty Robbins' "El Paso" (though Randy remarked recently that he was "pretty sure that 'El Paso' had nothing to do with it" directly) and the Trio's own last Top 10 singles hit, "The Rev. Mr. Black", a number also with verses spoken by Stewart. Thus, we get a shoot-out and some dying words instead of a suicide and accompanying note. Except for its clearly derivative nature (and its clear inferiority to Robbins' classic), I prefer the KT arrangement here.

"Hanna Lee" was co-written by Richard Mills, about whom I can't find anything, and the rather higher profile Stan Jones, who wrote "Ghost Riders In The Sky" and the theme song for the old Warner Brothers western Cheyenne, both of which are enough to endear Jones to any child of the 50s. In case you've forgotten -



Jones is a member of the Western Music Hall of Fame, and his page there is, like Cierly's, a fascinating look at the man's life in and out of music.

"Hanna Lee" is a bit of western fluff, reminiscent of the much superior Wilkins/Dill "Long Black Veil" though HL preceded LBV by several years. The Kingstons had had great success with earlier recordings of hanging-after-murder-for-love songs; though this is a decent cut, the band may have gone to the well once too often:



Other versions were recorded by major 50s pop star Guy Mitchell:



I like the "reckless lovers/pretty devil" line - and Johnny Western is also in the Western Music Hall of Fame as both a performer and as a radio personality:



Next up - something more traditional.

"Parchman Farm," Mose Allison, And The Real Blues

It seems a bit odd (to me at least) that I am nearly three and a half years into this blog and haven't yet even begun to plumb the depths of the great American catalogue of blues songs. That isn't because I don't have an appreciation for that tradition; it is rather more that I have very particular tastes in it, and those tastes seldom find much play in the recording industry, having been washed away by the red tide of electrified pseudo-blues purveyed by everyone from British Invasion rockers to contemporary "roots" groups.

Are my prejudices showing a bit here? Allow me to explain. My first childhood exposure to anything like the blues came from my parents' love of blues-infused jazz, especially Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. While both are always more particularly and properly identified as jazz artists, you're going to hear a lot more of the roots of real Delta blues in their work than you will in much of what is marketed as blues today. Armstrong especially seems to capture the essence of it all and often slyly underpins his jazz riffs with some trumpet lines that Robert Johnson would have appreciated.

My young adult interest in folk music led me (through my oft-cited in this blog love of Vanguard's Newport Folk Festival, 1960 records) to the great John Lee Hooker - who with Robert Johnson epitomizes for me the real sound of American blues. One of the songs that Hooker performed at Newport was his classic "Tupelo," presented here in a TV performance from roughly the same era. Watch his left hand:



Segovia or Carlos Montoya could appreciate that left hand work.

One good Hooker cut deserves another - "Serves Me Right To Suffer":



The harder edge of the Delta blues is personified in the great Robert Johnson, dead at 27, largely unknown in his lifetime, and resurrected with a series of 1961 reissues of the few recordings he made in 1936-37. As a point of comparison - the original blues as opposed to the popped-up, modified contemporary version, here is Johnson's often-adapted "Crossroad":



Now, modern audiences tend to think of blues as sounding something rather more like this - Eric Clapton and Cream's 1960s rockification of Johnson's classic:



That is a great, great cut - worth another listen just to hear what Clapton is doing on guitar and Jack Bruce's amazing bass line.

But it's not what I'd call blues. It's white-guy blues as imagined by British Invasion musicians - meaning, finally, that it's rock. Nothing at all wrong with that - my own propensity to like commercial folk groups suggests that I have a high degree of tolerance for adaptation - but it has morphed far afield from what it originally was.

There has been a kind of intermediate group of musicians whose adaptations have been perhaps truer to the music's roots, white musicians like Elvis Presley and today's composer Mose Allison, who grew up with the music, imbibed it with their mothers' milk, and learned to play it naturally and not as a respectful study of someone else's music. Presley grew up in Hooker's Tupelo and Allison in Tippo, Mississippi where both heard black musicians everywhere except perhaps in church. Their free-hand adaptations of the music originated because they were trying to sound like the singers whom they had actually heard growing up - singers virtually unknown to the larger mass white audience because of the segregation that existed in radio station programming and in the records carried in music stores. The earliest Presley recordings show perhaps the greatest influence - for Allison, the blues burst out of him after he had made a name for himself as a jazz musician, playing with greats like Stan Getz and Gerry Mulligan. When Allison began recording with his own trio in 1957, he began to write in blues style and sing what he had written. Here is his '57 original recording of his "Parchman Farm":



Don't know about you, but I hear a lot of Hooker's vocal style in what Allison is doing here, and a lot of Hooker's uptempo guitar work in the piano accompaniment to the verses (but with a full-on jazz instrumental break).

Parchman Farm was the correctional facility that evolved into the Mississippi State Penitentiary - and temporary home to great bluesmen-to-be Bukka White (who wrote the original but different song "Parchman Farm Blues") and Son House. There is a bit more on prison farms and the music that came out of them in my article on "Ain't No More Cane On This Brazos".

Probably the best-known version of Allison's tune was waxed by British Invasion blues legend John Mayall in 1966:



Mayall may not be imitating Allison here, but he isn't going all Clapton on us either. I hate to sound like a broken record (ask your parents if you don't know what that means) - but this has strong elements of Hooker's style in it too.

Another great white blues-rock performer also gave "Parchman Farm" his own distinctive treatment, the Texas Tornado himself, Johnny Winter:



Winter and his contemporary John Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival were clearly listening to the same records when they were growing up.

Popped-up blues were the specialty of Baton Rouge's Johnny Rivers, who presents the song with that distinctive cool Whisky-A-Go-Go Sunset Strip mid-60s sound:



Rivers does an entirely creditable job here, keeping the vocals well within the range of his own style - which brings us to our final and most curious cut, that of the Kingston Trio. By 1965 the KT, which had for a time in the late 50s and early 60s been the top record sellers and most popular act in U.S. music, had been pushed aside in sales and popularity by the British Invasion, folk-rock, and more politically-oriented folk performers. In an unsuccessful attempt to stay relevant, the group recorded a folk-rock styled album called "Somethin' Else" for Decca Records, the group's third on that label and 24th original LP overall. The record was a dismal failure commercially, becoming the first KT album not to hit the "Billboard Magazine" charts, and a serious misstep according to critics as well - the group's upbeat, clean-cut image and sound just did not morph easily into the newer styles. Judge for yourself:



Taken by itself, it's not a bad cut at all, and as a single it reached #30 on Billboard's easy listening charts. The Trio's Nick Reynolds often observed that the group had made the conscious decision, like Rivers maybe, to sound like who they were - suburban white college guys, not sharecroppers or sailors or convicts. So far, so good - the Trio isn't trying to be John Lee Hooker here. What they sound as if they are trying to be, though, is Bob Dylan - and they ain't he, babe.

I have always absolutely loved Clapton and Rivers and the KT, which may seem contradictory to the thesis of this article presented at the outset. Not so. I love them - but I wouldn't call what any of them are doing the blues. Maybe because of politics and mass media and a hundred other factors we have failed to realize just how debased our use of language has become, where things are what we say they are because we say them (a form of solipsism for you philosophy majors). But again - not so. Words have meanings - meanings that always morph and change but that also have an original and primal integrity. Or as Hooker was once quoted as saying - "The blues is just the blues. Ain't nothing else."

Tom Paxton's "The Last Thing On My Mind"

Tom Paxton is on the short list of the greatest singer/songwriters of the folk era, and I have always had the sneaking suspicion that his songs may well outlast those of some of the more topical writers of the period. If he has never been as highly regarded (to the point of adulation and near-idolatry) as Bob Dylan has, and if he never generated the record sales of John Denver or James Taylor, he nonetheless has created a body of work that in its elegant simplicity, its humor, its trenchant politicality, and its sincerity is more deserving to be called "folk" than that of the writers above and most others who have worked under that banner

I'm assuming that most readers here know the basic facts about Tom Paxton - raised primarily in Oklahoma (though born in Chicago and lived for a few years in Arizona), he was a fixture at and bona fide member of the Greenwich Village folk scene starting around 1959 or 1960, when he was in his early 20s. Paxton could be even more directly political in his songwriting than the other enfant terrible of the scene, Bob Dylan, though Paxton never seemed as angry, was far wittier, and in most respects a better singer. Paxton is also just plain folkier - the cost of which is that his lyrics make their cases with the direct simplicity of Woody Guthrie but do not soar to the heights of poetry that Dylan sometimes achieved. And as much as I like Dylan in all his guises and appearances - I think I'd rather spend an afternoon chatting with and would certainly prefer listening to a few hours of Tom over Bob.

"The Last Thing On My Mind" is hands down Paxton's best known and most often covered song - its discography and YouTube videography are genuinely stunning in their scopes. And with good reason, I think - just as "Early Morning Rain" (the other candidate for most widely covered folk type song of the era - throw In "Blowing In The Wind" as well) is unmatched in its evocation of the desperate loneliness of the hung over abandoned moments of life, I'm not sure that I've ever heard another song that so simply yet profoundly expresses the sense of impending loss of love, the realization of one's own foolish failures, the quiet desperation of hoping that it's not completely over. We've all been there (I hope) - and Tom Paxton is the guy who captured it the best. Now 71 and still writing and singing, he was justifiably honored this year with a Lifetime Achievement award from the Grammies.

I assume everyone knows that Tom was considered to replace Mike Pugh in the original CMT, the position that went to Joe Frazier (see below). It was said that Paxton's voice didn't blend well with Mitchell's and Mike Kobluk's. Listening to this great artist do his greatest song - I don't think so. I think his range was just too close to Chad's. Certainly he is one great singer :



Joe Frazier of the Mitchell Trio (the later name for the CMT) gave a reading of the song on the group's Typical American Boys album that even Paxton was said to regard as the second best recorded version of his composition. Frazier's baritone takes Paxton's rendering and gives it a slightly darker tone:



I have thought since I first heard this album cut nearly 45 years ago that it was the single best solo by any member of the many folk groups of the time and one of the best recorded performances of the folk era.

The Kingston Trio, at the time late in their initial ten year run, took an experimental and radically different tack with the song. They included it in their Somethin' Else compilation, which included a back-up band with electrified instruments. The KT was trying to catch the folk-rock wave that was threatening to bury them, and if the album itself failed to do so ( as the 24th album of the KT, it was the first that failed to make any sales chart), certainly individual cuts on it caught some attention. There is in their version here an almost Nashville or country sound, several full years before the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and the Eagles (and even trio member John Stewart) began the fusion that came to be known in the 70s as country rock:



Here is another a great group doing an arrangement very close to the Trio's, complete with a quiet banjo (oxymoron, anyone?) and that is none other than the wonderful Cumberland Trio, shown here in their 2001 reunion concert. After I posted their "Chilly Winds" here in January, C3 moving force Jere Haskew posted on Xroads and emailed me, mentioning that they used the Trio's arrangement for the latter song because they couldn't improve on perfection. I think you'll agree that they render the KT a similar compliment with their performance here:



Superior musicianship and singing - gotta love that dobro - a great version!

Now I'm running out of characters in this post - so I'm going to present simply a number of other really fine versions of this classic.

From The Blue Grass: Doc & Merle Watson, Earl and Randy Scruggs



Hardcore Pop Country: Porter Waggoner and Dolly Parton



Really Fine Pop Version: Neil Diamond




A phenomenal song, one that I'm convinced will still be around in yet another century.

Addendum - July, 2012

Since leaving the Chad Mitchell Trio in 1966, Joe Frazier (whose solo version is above) has been an Episcopal priest and is currently vicar at St. Columba's Church in the mountain community of Big Bear, California, where for the last three years the parish fundraiser has included a hootenanny show featuring Fr. Joe, George Grove of the Kingston Trio, Art Podell of the New Christy Minstrels back in the day, CMT bassist Ron Greenstein, and myself. Here is Joe taking the lead on a 2012 rendition of "Last Thing," rather more like the Kingston group or Porter and Dolly:

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: