Wednesday, August 24, 2016

*Average Folk- The Second Tier Of The Folk Revival Of The 1960's

Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Arlo Guthrie Doing "Buffalo Skinners"



CD REVIEW



Here is a late addition to the course, from Folk 101



Folk Classics: Roots Of American Folk Music, various artists, CBS Records, 1989



I have spent a fair amount of time recently reviewing, individually and on various artist compilations, performers from the 1960’s urban folk revival. You know, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Dave Van Ronk, Eric Von Schmidt and the like. I have also reviewed the earlier performers who influenced them on the more traditional folk side like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. There was another component of that search for roots that entailed heading south to the Mississippi Delta, the Georgia Sea Islands, the hills and hollows of Southern Appalachia, the prairies of Texas, the plains and the Mountain West to get ‘religion’ on the rural roots musical scene.

This compilation reflects the results of that search with a selection maybe not of the best versions, best done or best representative of the genres but a good sampler nevertheless. Stick outs here include Lead Belly’s "Alberta" (although his has done that song under other female names); Pete Seeger’s "Jesse James" (although it is long past time to correct the historical record concerning this craven outlaw who, moreover, for this Northern unionist and abolitionist was on the wrong side in the American Civil War); Ramblin’ Jack Elliot’s “Buffalo Skinners”; Carolyn Hester’s “Swing and Turn Jubilee” (what a voice she projected when she was on); and, an interesting combination of Johnny Cash and the Carter Family on “The Banks Of The Ohio”. Not filled with a lot of my folk favorites but very good as a cross-section of what the 1960’s folk revival was all about.

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