When I heard this, I kept thinking of Chumbawumba’s English Rebel songs. Chumbawumaba managed the entire history of dissent in England from the 14th century to the 20th in 14 tracks, 2 tracks a century. Songs of America tries for the history of the American folk song in 50. That it is a track a state, that the cover comes with a worn American flag, that the three compact discs are called The Red Album, The White Album and The Blue Album, plus the sepia toned historical photos in the linear notes, indicate a pattern of earnestness that even the great Anglo anarchists couldn’t manage. The 50 songs have a lot of repetition and dross, without much effort one could make the three volumes, one.
The Red Album (1492-1860)
The Lakota Song—Earl Bullhead
The first song is given to the first nations. It is a mournful, undulating sequence of vocal powerful, and suggests a deep understanding of what was lost and killed to create America. The pessimistic introduction makes the listener sure that we will not get the usual huzzzahs. That it is sung in Lakota, and that it is one of the few songs sung in a language other then English, is a great testament to Bullhead’s continuing effort as an elder, with the preservation of song, music, and dance. It would have been nice to include more first nation work, the riotously erotic He’s an Indian Cowboy in the Rodeo by Buffy St Marie or some more traditional Cree Rabbit Dances or the like. To have the best work by an Indian be an elegy seems a little too symbolic.
Let Us Break Bread Together—Blind Boys of Alabama
The NPR ubiquity of these five set aside, they are lovely enough, with elegant five part harmonies, and one of the loveliest baritones in history.
John Wesley Harding—God Save the King
As a prairie Anglophone growing up with a United Empire grandmother, I actually heard this as a child, and am fond of it. Making an Anglo folk singer who named himself after Dylan’s cowboy sing it adds several layers of identity and multi-directed irony. I appreciated that they sang all the verses, including the infamous one about knavish tricks. The music includes some kick ass snare drums, but I keep listening to, and thinking, it might be kind of awesome if it was less polite—can you imagine if they asked Me First and the Gimme Gimmes?
Young Ladies in Town—Elizabeth Foster
I love her voice, with the slightly artificial slight lilt, and how it extends gently the vowels in words like ribbons, or where or even silk. She also under plays the rhymes, and the little chorus of horns has an underpinning of elegance. The subtlety of the work reinforces the text that calls for thrift, and for the refusal of ornament.
The Old Woman Taught Wisdom—Malcolm Holcombe
The only real murder ballad on the three discs, and for discs that are supposed to be about American history, they are oddly bloodless. The singing is self-consciously ugly and rough, with a single acoustic guitar, and one of those onomatopoeic folk choruses Tom Leher mocked 40 years ago, but this one sounds sinister.
Yankee Doodle—Harper Simon
Paul’s son tackles a work that was obligated to be on an album like this. It is excellent how he makes it into a kind of camp rave up, which resulted in me thinking about it at all, for the first time since grade school. There is a nice musical coda, just whistling. More things should be whistled out.
Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child—Beth Neilson Chapman
One of the minor key dirges, it is a frightened and delicate work, whispered in places, that has none of the false fronted bravado of more famous versions, in fact it is the exact opposite of Odetta’s. There is much care in how she sings each word, but it is attentive without being a showpiece to her own exactitude. (The best example of this is how she rhymes lonely with long way. This is a heart grindingly beautiful reworking of a standard.
Peg and Awl—Freedy Johnson
The whole thing would be repetitive and ridiculously out of date, sort of like camp town races as sung by animatronic rabbits, in a Wobblie theme park, except Freedy Johnson can play the dobro, and a well-played dobro is one of life’s great pleasures.
Trail of Tears—Trail of Tears
There is no notice of he language that it is spoken of, and what the translation of the words is, and for a song about the Trail of Tears, this is a major oversight. There was also no translation of Bullhead’s Dakota. The combination of traditional western choruses sung in what I think is Cherokee, stentorian spoken word, and traditional percussion, including a hand drum that is so sacredly close to the human heart, it is the only moment of transcendent holiness in the three hours of music contained here.
Go Down Moses—Fisk Jubilee Singers
If God, in Her infinite mercy, allows me past the holy gates (and the chances of that are about as good as Falwell getting in), the Fisk Jubilee Singers will be there to greet me there. This is a perfect example of a minor key not having to be sad or mournful, but resonant. The voice of YHWH must sound like the basso profoundo here, especially when he sings, "No more in bondage shall they toil". This the song about slavery, no matter how coded.
Dixie’s Land—The Maverick’s with Thad Cockerill
Thad Cockerill has a great voice—butch, sad and mournful, perfect for cowboy ballads, and I cannot wait for him to sing Laredo. That he made this song sound like Laredo is a clever rhetorical trick, and a necessary one, how else would you deconstruct the power of this hymn to racism. Turning it into a minor key, and turning everything down an octave makes the listener sympathetic for Dixie. When he sings look away, it is like Abraham being exiled from Sodom, and there is an understanding of how desperate Lot’s Wife would have to be, to look back. The burning of Atlanta, now mostly remembered, as Scarlet and Tara, looks back to Sodom and looks forward to Dresden. Singing it like this does not make the south legitimate, but like Nick Tosches writing about the great minstrel in Where Dead Voices Gather, it makes it understandable.
The White Album (1861-1945)
John Browns Body—Marah
I wonder how many people remember the crazed prophet John Brown, and his martyrdom for justice, and I wonder if the song will cause people to look him up…what the track reminded me of, was how sing able the anthem was, I found myself yelling the chorus in the bath, walking down the street, even on the subway, I can imagine marching to it "as a solider in the army of the lord"
Battle Hymn of the Republic---Joana Smith
By making these two tracks abut each other, Peterson reminds us that the first borrows heavily from the second, and also that their was a thin line between the messianic rhetoric of Brown and the real Messiah. I am also reminded of Sarah Vowell’s rousing essay on the history and meta-text of the original text, published in the Greil Marcus’ anthology on ballads—The Rose and The Briar, the controversy that Vowell documents, is what the last line should be: "As He died to make men holy/Let us die to make men free/While God is marching on." Or "As He died to make men holy/Let us live to make men free"…Smith uses Howe’s original words, which makes more sense, I think, because of its historicism, but it kind of took guts, because when Joan Baez sung the original at Birmingham in 1962, it was prophetic, to the deaths of the four young girls a year later, to the deaths of Dr King, or Medgar Evans…now when we think of martyrdom, we think Jihad. The sweetness and gentility of Joana Smith’s voice, singing about dying to make men free, almost goes under the radar, until history creeps in.
Johnny I Hardly Knew You—Janis Ian
When I first heard this, on one of those Smithsonian collections of folk songs, I was maybe 6, and incredulous. How could a war destroy all limbs, and eyes, it was bathetic overkill. On January 2007, Esquire put on the cover, a handsome young man, with no legs, and one arm, holding out his purple heart. One of the terrible ironies of the Iraq War is that increases in medical technology means that men who would have died on the battlefield have now survived maimed. This war has the largest number of amputees, since the civil war. Listening to Janis Ian singing, "they are rolling out the drums again/they’re stirring up the boys and men/and I fear we’ll never see the boys and men", with no drums and nothing stirring, was the only moment on the three hours of music that brought me to tears with ruthless efficiency. (It is the shortest track on all three albums)
Sleep My Child (Scholf Mayn Kind)—Judith Edelman and Neilson Hubbard
The mother, who is weeping, because her husband, and the child’s fathers, is in America, sings this lullaby. Another one of those songs, that gains credence and power by being put in reflection next to another with a similar theme. Hopeful, especially in lines like "in that far off land, everyone is blessed" or "he will send us 20 dollars and his picture too"; less hopeful by lines like "someday you will understand why your mama weeps" or "if he is living, sure he’ll fetch us". It is marred by obvious travel sounds and production trickery during the first verse. It would have been better sung a Capella, and frankly, in the original German.
Brother, Can You Spare A Dime—Andy Bey
Sung like a torch song to capitalism, with a smoky tone in the voice, and a very slow, cocktail piano. About half way through, he snaps his fingers and sings huh huh huh, like he hasn’t learnt his lesson about the bitch who betrayed him, once you get to the hi hat heavy percussion, you are searching youtube to see if Peggy Lee has ever sung it. (She hasn’t but Tom Waits has)
Seven-Cent Cotton and Forty-Cent Meat—Jim Lauderdale
Though it showed up on Pete Seeger’s anthology of Industrial songs, it is the rural mirror to Brother, Can You Spare a Dime, and like most farmers, it is specific in the economic details that lead to impoverishment—egoless, and reduced to an almost perfect banjo and field worn voice of this bluegrass master.
Deportee—The Old Crow Medicine Show.
Woody Guthrie did this first, and it’s the details, the death in the field, the namelessness of those who work for our food, and the genius of casting a song of racial and economic isolation, into a love song of profound loneliness. That the Old Crow Medicine is capable of getting this much information, this much wordiness, into a song, and not make it leaden, actually make it fly, indicates how talented they are at basic information processing. I do not have to belabour the connections between this and the current immigration situation for a large amount of latino/as in America, but I wonder why they didn’t get Los Lobos or even Jae-P to work through it, a little horn wouldn’t hurt either.
Reuben James—Folk Family Robinson
Can’t be a folk album without a ship sinking track, this is a good one, with a solid chorus, the un-ironic use of clichés like "dark watery grave", and the best picking yet, which is saying something, considering how much mandolin, dulcimer, guitar and banjo permeate these songs.
The Blue Album 1946-Present
The Great Atomic Power--Elizabeth Cook and the Grascals
The only attempt at kitsch, and the song about atomic fear that is still deeply optimistic, in claiming that the apocalypse of the h bomb could lead to a religious revival, is a genuine element of the American response to the existential panic of mutually assured destruction. This strange curiosity is the beginning of a new kind of folk religion, one that genuinely believed "When the mushroom of destruction falls, all its fury great, god will surely save his children from that awful, awful fate." more sheer denial then optimism. If it interests you enough, Bear Mountain issued a compilation called Atomic Platters, of 5 CDS, One DVD, and a 250-page book, of material like this from the 40s and 50s.
Scott Kempner, Apache Tears
As much as I believe in Johnny Cash’s commitment to first nations justice (and anyone who doubts it, just has to hear The Ballad of Ira Hayes), the song leads to questions of how should tell the narratives of oppressed people, especially since it is about genocide, and it does feature the word squaw. I almost feel bad about recommending it then, especially since it is very much of that weird 70s blip that produced Cher’s Half-Breed and Iron Eagle Cody—t but he aesthetic arguments wrestling with the political ones, but a project like this leads to that kind of frisson. The percussion is solid beats, the guitars are coruscating, and Kempner’s voice manages the balance of terror, exhaustion and anger with great skill.
Say it Loud, I’m Black and Proud-The Dynamites
This is the song where all of the soul, the funk, the hip-hop, goes. The song that describes African American musical and political heritage, and one that is not about the past, about gospel, etc or about slavery and the like. It could stand to be a bit louder, but no one, no matter how effective they are at fuck or gutbucket, can live up to the glories of James Brown. They get an A for Effort, though.
Ohio, Ben Taylor
Neil Young put all of his pop energy into this song, that’s the dirty secret—it is why the protest song works so much better then any of the ones before (or after), is that Young realizes that the politicized and earnest can be made sticky by a definitive pop sensibility. Listening to Taylor’s copy, I am made aware of how Young wrote about Kent State as a metonymy of the whole late 70s mess, the four dead in Ohio being the dead of Vietnam, the national guard being the police in Chicago a few years earlier. There is a great intimacy to this version, and at 2:40, not quite long enough to make the impression he desires.
I Am Woman—Martha Wainwright
She puts it across like a supper club hippie, someone who knows Blossom Dearie as much as she knows Joan Baez, and so when she sings lines like "I can bend but never break", you recognize and wish to reward the suppleness of her delivery. The problem is that the stridency is a little bit tempered by the gorgeousness of her alto. The advantage is that all of the rah rah encounter group bullshit is more easily ignored. I am still having trouble imagining something so processy being number one, but the 70s was a strange time.
Youngstown—Matthew Ryan
Did we really need 2 Springsteen tracks, aren’t there enough coal mining works in the American song book that we could choose one written by people who actually mined coal for a living? "16 Tons" comes immediately to mind. All of the rhetorical questions aside—the track has an apocalyptic, working class universality about it—the narrative of one community being the death of industry for the rest of us. The thermion sounds like wind through the slag yards, and Ryan’s voice is on the edge of a melt down.
Wave—Gary Heffern and Chris Eckman
With bass like bubbles from the swamp, and a strange choir about half way through, and psychedelic pseudo-mysticism, it’s like Carlos Castrada but shorter and less self-indulgent. The choir is what makes it though, heavenly, triumphant, and used to convey wordless sounds; it makes the piece literal, and thus stranger. (The track is obsessed with golden hair though, mentioning it a half dozen times, with lines like "the sun only shines on golden hair"—this is significant to mention, but I have no idea what it means.
The Message—Shortee Wap
Obligatory hip-hop track, conscious, and highly aware of poverty, makes the retrogressive argument in favour of Giuliani’s disastrous Broken Window policy. I find it interesting they allow a song that uses the word fag, but do not have any queer voices or songs on the tracks. Shortee can flow, quickly, seamlessly, the sound effects are useful, and the whole track has a paranoid, legitimate disgust for cities in the midst of decay, though.
Streets of Philadelphia—Betty Levette
The second Springsteen track, but Levette makes it her own—she has known poverty, and the strangled pride in her voice, moving through the urban isolation, turns something so sentimental, into a hymn.
Where Were You When The World Stopped Turning—The Wrights
The obvious 9/11 song, and there had to be a 9/11 song, but nothing has made new country sound so ignorant, the signifiers are corny, and the mourning forgets other emotions that seem more obvious. I know most readers of this will hate Toby Keith’s Courtesy of the Red White Blue, but he knows the difference between Iraq and Iran, he knows that the world didn’t stop turning on September 11th, and he knew that wanting to destroy his enemies was a legitimate response, a response that I don’t agree with, but one that seems less market driven to patriotic piety or false modesty of lines like "I am just a singer of simple songs". There is nothing simple about this song—to make a folk text—to make sure that your folk text is enshrined in the national discourse, in the national mourning, requires a very high level of sophistication. This song is a cagey, and clever simplification of a song that is already artificially simplified. It is like the New Christy Minstrels.
This Land Is Your Land—John Mellencamp
Woody Guthrie’s’ commie last verse, the one that you didn’t sing in school, is included here, which is nice. That it is a call for economic justice, to feed the starving, is against private property—sort of gutsy for the former attorney general to sign off on.
That would be the last song on the set—and I think it is a set worth picking up, even with its politics, and its lack in inclusion, the desire to record all of America this way is an ambition that should be rewarded. Patterson’s skills as a producer, curating meanings through choices of texts and interpreters is sometimes a little ham fisted, and not as adventurous as it could be, but one can tell this project took nine years—his skill towards epic, is something that is profoundly American. It would fit perfectly next to the Red Box, which every music owner should have anyways.
