Tag Archives: Steve Earle

John Moreland: Appreciation and Anticipation

Photo from John Moreland’s Website.

In addition to writing a weekly column for No Depression‘s website, I also aggregate flotsam and jetsam from multiple sources that I post throughout each day on the Facebook page Americana and Roots Music Daily as a non-commercial service to share with fans of the music that falls into that ‘big tent’ descriptor. Some people like to collect coins or stamps, follow a sports team, donate their free time to helping others, or perhaps travel to faraway places seeking thrill and adventure. But I suppose if I had to define my hobby, it’s a never-ending search for music that I’ve yet to experience, staying on top of current news, and digging around the past.

An unintended consequence of this social media experience is that the roughly 3,000 people who have chosen to follow the page have created an interactive community of people who freely share their own thoughts, news, and commentary. In addition to making new friends and connecting with old ones, the greatest gift I get in return is learning things I did not know. An example of this occurred recently when I posted what I’d describe as basically a press release masquerading as a news article that announced Tulsa-based singer and songwriter John Moreland was planning to release a new album in February and will be going out on tour. (I bought my ticket for March 27 in Brooklyn.)

My first awareness of Moreland was his 2013 album In the Throes, and I’ve always considered him to be one of those absolutely amazing performers who exists in the shadows of endless Americana and folk music releases, a treasured secret of mine with a small but rabid fanbase. Nice to be wrong. Hundreds of people reacted to that Facebook post expressing their love of Moreland’s music and anticipation of the new music. He has already released a song from the album, called “East October,” on the various streaming sites.

Like many others participating in the current paradigm of creating, producing, and distributing music, Moreland has always taken the wheel with his career. In a recent interview with The Seventh Hex, he talks about the need for being hands-on:

“I still do as much as I can with regards to taking a DIY approach with my musical career, but I can’t really book my own tours anymore. Also, I used to do all of my own merch mail orders and I don’t do that anymore because I can’t keep up with it. Then again, I still record demos at home and my wife sells a lot of my tour posters on her online store so we run that out of our house together. I guess it’s always good to make stuff in my own way and to know that I can get out there and do stuff however I want to.”

That song is titled “You Don’t Care Enough for Me to Cry,” and it’s on the 2015 album High on Tulsa Heat. Appearing on the podcast Americana Music Show, he expanded on how the album was self-produced and fan funded.

“I did my last record myself too. I produced and engineered that one. I did that one more out of necessity. It’s what had to be done. But this time I was sorta stressing out about what studio to go to if I wanted to find a producer. Just make plans about how I was going to make the record. Kind of on a whim I just got a couple of friends together and we made the record ourselves. My parents were going out of town for a couple of week so we kind of took over their house and turned it into a studio and recorded for a few days. On less than a day’s notice we came in and did that. But I like doing it that way. Just getting some buddies together and pooling together all our gear. And you go, OK, here’s what we have, how do you make something cool with this stuff. And it gives you a direction to go in.”

The new album for February 2020 is titled LP5. It was recorded in Texas with Centro-matic’s Matt Pence producing and playing drums, and with other contributors including Bonnie Whitmore, Will Johnson, and multi-instrumentalist and longtime Moreland collaborator John Calvin Abney.

In many of the interviews he’s done over the years, Moreland talks about spending his teens playing with punk and hardcore bands — until he heard Steve Earle. It’s hard to not hear Earle’s influence (and I think there’s some Springsteen in there as well) on Moreland’s songwriting, and in the vocals as well. From the Americana Music Show podcast:

“I was probably 19 or so and I vaguely knew who Steve Earle was. I knew ‘Copperhead Road’ and ‘Guitar Town’ and stuff. But I heard one of his newer records that had just come out, The Revolution Starts Now, and it blew me away and I got my hands on everything of his I could find. That was kind of eye-opening. I realized that I had always been in bands and I realized that I had always been the guy that wrote the songs, kind of just by default. It was like, ‘We’re a band, we need some stuff to play, so I’ll make something up.’ Steve Earle opened my eyes to this whole different kind of songwriting where you could say something with it. So that led me to songwriters like Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and Rodney Crowell. I’d just get on the internet and do all the research I could. So that’s what led me here I guess.”

Moreland is married to Canadian visual artist Pearl Rachinsky, who you should search out because she does really exquisite work (she handled the album artwork for Big Bad Luv). They met several years ago at a Folk Alliance confab in Kansas City, which he describes in part as “a lot of white dudes in suspenders.” They live in Tucson, Arizona.

Moreland is not very active on social media; his Facebook and Twitter accounts are primarily used for announcing upcoming gigs. But I thought I’d check in before finishing this column just in case something new popped up. Sure enough, on Oct. 27 he tweeted:

“To the guy in Macon who told my wife he was gonna ‘slap the shit out of the bitch who broke my heart’ please don’t slap any women, and please don’t come to my shows anymore you redneck piece of shit.”

I love this guy.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboard and Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #11

R Crumb, cover art: Blues: Great Harmonica Performances of the 1920s and ’30s (Yazoo, 1976)

Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Release Spotlight

This week Steve Earle releases his tribute to mentor Guy Clark and Rolling Stone Country has published an interview. (Photo by Tom Bejgrowicz) Heres the intro but click this link to get to the full story:

Earle has been closely linked to Clark since 1974, when they first crossed paths in Nashville. The following year, he contributed backing vocals to Clark’s debut masterpiece Old No. 1 — singing on “Desperados Waiting for a Train” with Rodney Crowell, Emmylou Harris and Sammi Smith — and joined his touring band as a bass player. When Earle recorded his first-ever demo to shop around Nashville, he did so in the kitchen of Clark’s modest home in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, where Guy’s wife Susanna was busy frying bacon.

And here’s a video of three songs and an interview that he did at Paste Studio this week.

The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore

Sad news that Scott Walker has passed on. An American-born 60’s hitmaker who found much greater fame and respect in Britain through the decades, he’s remembered in this article from Amanda Petrusich for the New Yorker. Titled “The Weird and Vast and Periodically Devastating Music of Scott Walker”, I’ll start you off but do click this link to read it in full:

There are a handful of niche artists whom I love to play for friends who have never heard them before. Music critics are infamous for these sorts of overbearing displays—smugly dropping a needle to a record and then staring, expectantly. It’s awful! Yet the first time that a person hears the singer Scott Walker—who died on Friday, in London, at the age of seventy-six—a palpable transformation occurs, and it’s extraordinary to witness.

Praise The Lord…Here Comes Julie and Buddy Miller Again

NPR broke the news that there’s a new album and within the article they share two new songs. Here’s an excerpt but y’all need to click this link to get all the news and hear the tunes:

The public absence of the Miller’s singular, beloved dynamic — she the mischievous empath, he the soulful stoic — has been felt acutely, but their influence on multiple generations of artists in the Americana scene remains profound; it’s evident in never-ending new interpretations of songs from their catalog; in vocal harmonizing that generates warmly affectionate friction rather than a seamless blend; in repertoires that make room for rawboned strains of Appalachian folk and honky-tonk, unguarded, diaristic singer-songwriter confession and the lurching, rhythmic looseness of early R&B and rock and roll.

And just in case you’ve forgotten…

Do You Know What This Is?

Keaton Music Typewriter

It’s the Keaton Music Typewriter, patented in 1936, later updated in 1953 and marketed for under $300. If you’d like to learn more, click this link.

From Tejano To Polkas: Americana Lost and Found

Note: Shameless self-promotion. This is an article I wrote and published a while back for No Depression, and it’s right here on my site now should you care to read it.

Back in the fifties when I was just a little squirt, most Saturday nights were spent at my grandparents’ house, where we ate boiled chicken, played endless card games, and watched television on a small Dumont black and white. It was always the same routine: Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason, Gunsmoke, a bowl of cherry Jell-O and then off to bed. Not sure how my older sister escaped these tortuous nights, but while she was out at sock hops dancing with her friends and cruising the parking lot at Bob’s Big Boy on the boulevard, part of my musical DNA was being formed by the sound of Myron Floren’s accordion playing, an Amercan-ized, white-bread version of polka music.

The Story of Bonnie Guitar

Paul Sexton has written an excellent article on the late Bonnie Guitar for uDiscoverMusic and I suggest you go read it here. I’ll kick you off with this:

The woman born Bonnie Buckingham in Seattle on 25 March 1923 is remarkable not only for a recording career that took her into the Billboard pop top ten in 1957 with ‘Dark Moon’ but then into the country top ten on three occasions; then for a parallel executive career in which she co-founded the Dolton label, who made national and international stars of vocal trio the Fleetwoods and instrumental group the Ventures. What’s more, Bonnie was still occasionally playing live into her 90s (as you’ll see from the video at the bottom of the story), before her passing at the age of 95 on 12 January 2019.

The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily

You probably found this article on my Facebook page with the above name, but if not…please come over and follow me. Throughout each day I try and find interesting articles to post and at the close it’s always a video clip. This was one of the most popular over the last few weeks. Enjoy, and maybe I’ll try and keep this format going.

Just Who Is the Galway Girl?

Image from the video directed and produced by Kamil Krolak of KamilFilms.

Edmond Enright was born on the 19th of May in 1975 in the Irish village of Birr, County Offaly. A small town of less than 6,000 people, Birr has a castle that once was home to the largest telescope in the world, named The Leviathan of Parsonstown. There is a courthouse, several schools, a newspaper, a train station that shut down in 1963, and an abandoned workhouse. It has both rugby and hurling teams, the latter with the distinction of winning the All-Ireland. In August and September it hosts a number of festivals celebrating the area’s heritage, music, theater, educational activities, and hot air balloons. There is a theater and arts center that has been open since 1889 that presents music, dance, and plays.

While his given name may not ring any bells for you, Edmond Enright is a prominent singer-songwriter in Ireland who goes by the name Mundy. His first album, released in 1996, included a popular song used in the film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Four years later he was dropped by his record label as he was working on his second album, 24 Star Hotel. Using mostly his own funds, he started up Camcor Records, which he named for the River Camcor, a popular fishing spot that runs through the town of Birr, and released the album in 2002. It included a song titled “July” that received extensive airplay, and he appeared at a number of large festivals. The album earned triple platinum status in Ireland.

Up until a few nights ago, I had never heard of Mundy. Knowing it was just a few days away from this column’s deadline and without a clue nor a thread of inspiration to choose from, I took to meandering through the millions of images on You Tube in hopes of finding something old, new, borrowed, or blue. And this is what I found. Forty-nine seconds into it, I felt the tears rolling down my cheeks … a common occurrence when I’m in the company of incredible music.

On June 11, 2016, at 1 p.m. local time, Galway-based filmmaker Kamil Krolak recorded the world’s largest street performance of “Galway Girl,”’featuring a number of prominent Irish musicians that included Mundy; Sharon Shannon; We Banjo 3; Lackagh Comhaltas; Roisin Seoighe; the Galway Rose, Rosie Burke; and the widely known folk band Amazing Apples.

Steve Earle wrote and recorded “The Galway Girl” around 17 years ago while he was living and working for several months in Ireland. Sharon Shannon’s band, the Woodcutters, backed him on the track, and it appeared both on his own Transcendental Blues and on the great Sharon Shannon and Friends: The Diamond Mountain Sessions album in 2000.

In 2006, Mundy recorded his fourth album, Live & Confusion, at Vicar Street in Dublin, which covered his best-known songs along with an encore of “Galway Girl” with guest Sharon Shannon. According to Wikipedia: “The live version became a download hit in Ireland, and eventually a studio version was released, after it was popularized in a television and radio advertising campaign for Bulmer’s Cider. The studio version of the track reached number 1 on the Irish Singles Chart in April 2008 and stayed there for five weeks. It became the biggest single in Ireland two years in a row in 2007 and 2008.” This is the original video.

This quote from Earle sits on Mundy’s webpage:

“‘The Galway Girl’ [from Mundy’s live album Live & Confusion] is the one thing I’m sure to be remembered for. I owe a lot of that to Mundy … the biggest hit was his version. People probably won’t even remember who the hell I was, but they’re going to be singing that song in Ireland for a long time. I really do believe that. And that’s the only kind of immortality anybody can hope for.”

In an interview with Trish Keenan that he did for the Irish website meg back in 2010, Earle goes deeper into the details of the song:

“We recorded it with the agreement being that I could use it on my record and she (Sharon Shannon) could use it on hers, it was her band, you know, we did it in Dublin. It’s a huge thing for me. You know just for the record I haven’t had a drink in 15 years, and when I did cider never passed my lips. But it was one of those things. I normally don’t allow my music to be used in ads for drink but it was a lot of money for Sharon so I didn’t stand in the way of it. I could have stopped it but I didn’t, ‘cuz it was her. The peak of the whole thing was that we were asked to sing it at the All-Ireland final, it was the year that Galway played the draw with Kerry and then finally lost in the playoff. I couldn’t make it and you know I’m still pissed off about that!”

So who is the Galway Girl that Earle wrote about? Last year when Kamil Krolack was about to film the street performance, the Irish Music Daily ran a story about her. This is an excerpt:

“Shannon told the Will Leahy Show on the Irish radio station RTE2fm that Earle met the girl in question while he was working with Irish musicians. She said: “Steve wrote the song in Galway. He used to spend a lot of time there, just hanging out and writing songs and going to trad sessions. He made great friends with all the musicians there.

“We know who the girl is. I think Steve would like to have had a romantic liaison with her. She’s a great friend of ours but she doesn’t trade on it. She doesn’t want people to know.”

Mundy, who took part in the same radio interview, said Earle and the Galway girl still know each other and have met a few times since through work, but not in any romantic way, although some tensions may remain. “I was in the company of the two of them once and I was uncomfortable,” he said.

Although the identity of the girl had not been revealed, that changed last year. A book written by poet and musician Gerard Hanberry, On Raglan Road: Great Irish Love Songs and The Women Who Inspired Them, was published and included the story of Earle meeting singer and bodhran player Joyce Redmond, who was a regular at trad sessions back in Galway.

As reported by The Irish Sun, “She was in Quay Street when Earle approached her and asked if she could help him with a phone call he was trying to make. A few days later she met him again by accident on Dominick Street when he asked if she knew where he could find some traditional Irish music. She took him along to a few sessions.”

For the record, Joyce Redmond is not a Galway girl. She grew up in Howth, just north of Dublin. And to close it out, here’s Earle with Sharon’s band playing the song live at the Kennedy Center Gala for Irish Music.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #5

sandydyas_katy RPM5

New Music Rising: A Family Album of Close Harmony and Tasty Covers.

Barber Born in Mississauga, Ontario, Matthew Barber is three years older than his sister Jill. Over the years they’ve enjoyed separate music careers that have taken them down different roads. Each have released multiple acclaimed solo albums, but they are stylistically different with Matthew the more hyphenated folk-pop-roots-singer-songwriter, while Jill zigs and zags across the genre-landscape of jazz, pop, chansons, old school soul and torch ballad country.

The Family Album is their first album as a duo, and features three originals from Jill, two from Matthew and cover versions of songs written or recorded by Neil Young, Leonard Cohen, Townes Van Zandt, Bobby Charles, Ian Tyson and Gene MacLellan. In addition to an eclectc song selection, the sibling close harmony with arrangements and instrumentation in the roots-folk tradition make this an absolute standout.

The entire recording process took only a week at a Toronto studio, and for many in America this may be your first introduction to the Barbers. And while songs like ‘Comes A Time’, ‘If I Needed You’ and ‘The Patrician’ might seem to some as being endlessly reworked in the past, these arrangements come off sounding to my ears more as well done redefinitions and less the usual note for note reworking.

There are about a dozen tour dates scheduled in Canada over the next month or two, and June gigs in NYC and Boston. Hoping that The Family Album creates a big buzz so that these two will wander across the border a little more often, and fly over the ocean.

Every Picture Tells a Story.

Sandy 2 The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.

Jason and the Scorchers…Another in a Series of ‘Great Rock Bands From The Eighties’.

I happened to come across an article in The Guardian this past week from Michael Hann about Jason and The Scorchers, a band that for a brief moment in time back in the mid-eighties stood on the edge of immense possibility. Fronted by Jason Ringenberg who moved to Nashville in 1981 with the dream of starting up a high energy roots band, he found three musicians who were more interested in playing power-punk than twang. The blend was almost indescribable.

Hann’s memory is far better than mine, but like him I also got the chance to see them play during that summer of 1985 at Nashville’s Exit/In. I equate it to that moment when you tug on the seat belt as the roller coaster starts to climb and it’s too damn late to get off. It was a confluence of sound and energy that I’ve never seen before nor since.

Here’s just a few excerpts from Hann’s article. It’s really a great story, and so I encourage you to read it all here.

There are only ever a handful of names that get mentioned when the idea of “the greatest rock’n’roll band in the world” is raised. Actually, there have been dozens of greatest rock’n’roll bands in the world, but most of them never get recognised – because they were only ever the greatest band for a week, or a month, a summer.

Jason and the Scorchers made music that sounded like no one else, a berserk, overdriven racket, in which country covers and Ringenberg’s originals were played with Never Mind the Bollocks power by the other three.

As you’ll already have guessed, the moment of greatness was brief. The Scorchers became less Ringenberg’s band than Hodges’, as EMI ushered them towards big hair and big makeup, to go with the big guitars. If the Pistols at the Opry worked, Poison at the Opry most certainly didn’t. Their next album, 1986’s Still Standing, might have been better retitled Going Backwards. One more record, Thunder and Fire, and the Scorchers were no more.

Back in 2004 there was a documentary released called The Appalachians which tells the story of the people and the land of Appalachia. The film uses interviews with ordinary people, scholars, and musicians like Loretta Lynn, Marty Stuart, Rosanne and Johnny Cash, and others. Dualtone Records put out a soundtrack, and Jason, by then a solo artist, contributed ‘The Price of Progress’ which has always been my favorite from him.

Steve Earle On Getting Beat Up and The Importance of Merle Haggard To Him.

This was published on April 12, 2016 by The New York Times as an Op Ed, and I’ll cut and paste the first few paragraphs along with the link to the entire essay that was written by Steve. Not only does he have a way with lyrics and music, but Earle is a fine wordsmith.

In late 1969 and early 1970, when “Okie From Muskogee” was blaring from every jukebox in every beer joint, truck stop and restaurant in my hometown, San Antonio, I wanted, sometimes very much, to hate Merle Haggard.

I say blaring because that’s the kind of record “Okie” was. The kind that, when it dropped into place on an automated turntable or crackled from the speakers of an AM radio, you wanted to turn it up.

Well, not me. I was pretty much a rock-and-folk guy, but this was Texas at the height of the Vietnam War, and San Antonio was a military town boasting five Air Force bases and an Army post, so I’m pretty certain I was in the minority. There were kids in my high school who took pride in listening to nothing but country music. Whether Hag intended it or not, his blue-collar anthem became a battle cry for Vietnam-bound working-class youths with a snowball’s chance in Saigon of a student deferment. Music to kick some hippie butt by. Click here for the full story.

Heartworn Highways Deluxe

Light In The Attic Records put together a 40th Anniversary Edition Box Set of Heartworn Highways a few years ago with restored image and sound, and a whole bunch of extras. The documentary was shot in late 1975 through early 1976, and covers singer-songwriters whose songs are more traditional to early folk and country music instead of following in the tradition of the previous generation. Some of film’s featured performers are Guy and Townes as well as other ‘outlaws’ such as Steve Earle, David Allen Coe, Rodney Crowell, Gamble Rogers, Steve Young and The Charlie Daniels Band.

I think the best of the bonus items in this set is an 80 page book with exhaustive 20,000 word essay by Sam Sweet interviewing artists, documentary creators and crew, including ephemera and over 100 unseen photos taken during the making of the film. Oxford American posted an excerpt this week on their website titles From Houston to Long Beach to Old Hickory Lake and it’s one great story. Here’s just the opening, and I’ll link it below.

Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt met during what Clark later called “the great folk scare.” Houston in the early 1960s had a folk community that paralleled those in Cambridge, Minneapolis, or Los Angeles—only smaller and with better bluesmen. The musicologist John Lomax ran the Texas Folklore Society and would arrange for veterans like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb to play concerts at the Jester Lounge on Westheimer, where they would turn Kingston Trio fans onto something tougher. As Lomax’s son, John Lomax III, put it, “Lightnin’ was as electric as you could get with an acoustic.” Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt were among the room’s transfixed teenagers. Click here to read the rest.

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #4

Chevy in Air

Easy Ed’s Broadside weekly column is found at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising: Brennen Leigh Sings Lefty Frizzell

And when I say ‘new’ I mean new to me. There’s also good chance it might be new to you too. Seems like on any given week there are hundreds of websites all talking about the same three or four titles. I could follow that path, but it seems pointless. Sometimes I’d rather just offer up music that might have slipped through the cracks or is far from the beaten path.

This week I want to talk about an album that was released last November. Brennen Leigh Sings Lefty Frizzell is a project from an Austin-based musician and songwriter whom I admittedly had never had heard of until recently. Check this out.

A founding member of the band High Plains Jamboree, she tours throughout Texas and across America often with her frequent writing and touring partner, guitarist Noel McKay. In her travels and tours in Europe, Scandinavia and South America, she has slid into that cult status zone. Her songs have been recorded by Sunny Sweeney, The Carper Family, Norway’s Liv Marit Wedvik, and Lee Ann Womack. She has also collaborated with Jim Lauderdale, John Scott Sherrill and David Olney.

My friend, writer Terry Roland, did a story on her for No Depression last year, so I’ll let him do the heavy lifting:

Brennen Leigh is not a household name. Her 2009 solo album, The Box, stands as a classic of the form, with original songs that are as close to the bone of traditional country music as you’re likely to find east or west of the Mason-Dixon Line. It is among the best Americana albums of the decade, an overlooked gem.

In 2013, she released the critically successful Before the World Was Made with singer-songwriter Noel McKay. This album was compared by the Chicago Tribune with the duets of John Prine and Iris Dement and George Jones and Melba Montgomery.

Leigh’s new album demonstrates an unbroken line of the influence of Lefty Frizzell on this young, innovative artist. Here’s how she came to his music:

“Before this, I wasn’t that familiar with the bigger part of his work. I got a copy of his box set and I also stumbled onto a compilation on vinyl from the ’60s. I’ve imitated him vocally in a superficial way for years. There is just something in his delivery. He was able to express what was going on in his brain. He must have worked at it for years. It’s not only his voice, but in his approach. He changed the way I sing.”

I’ve dropped in a couple of audio samples here from the album, and below is from a concert she did with Noel. You can find this album to stream or buy from all the major digital platforms, but I’d bet Brennen would appreciate it if you head over to her Bandcamp page and do it there.

Every Picture Tells A Story

Sandy The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….including this one originally published back in January 2014 at No Depression dot com.

A Ray Charles Primer: 25 Great Tracks and Photo Gallery

Ray Charles

Martin Chilton, who is the Culture Editor for The Telegraph website, put together a list of his favorite tracks accompanied with really striking images from the collection of Joe Adams, Charles’ long time friend and manager. Taken from the book/DVD collection Ray Charles Yes Indeed! that came out in 2009, it features a forward by Bill Wyman and thoughts from Ray’s closest friends – including Stevie Wonder, Quincy Jones and Willie Nelson.

Here’s the link to Chilton’s list. And here’s Ray with Johnny Cash doing a Harlan Howard song y’all know.

A Few Words About Merle Haggard

As I was getting ready to hit the button and publish this week’s update, I heard the news that Merle had passed on. I recall seeing him at The Spectrum in Philadelphia around 1972, and we long-hairs got hassled first by the police and then jostled a little in the crowd when he broke into ‘Okie from Muskogee’. The Grateful Dead had released a version of ‘Mama Tried’ and that was my on-ramp to his music. Had a chance to meet him in Las Vegas about fifteen years ago give or take, but he was in a foul mood that night. He was struggling with his voice, and I think he just wanted to be anywhere but in the desert.

About a month or two ago, he was interviewed by Rolling Stone Country about politics and Donald Trump. Thought it might be of interest to share his thoughts:

He’s not a politician. I don’t think he understands the way things work in Washington, that’s what worries me about him. I don’t think he realizes he can’t just tell somebody to do something and have it done, you know. I think he’s dealing from a strange deck.

What a great line. I think he’s dealing from a strange deck.

I wanted to include an appropriate song or video of his, and came across this track from an album he did with his band The Strangers, Bonnie Owens and The Carter Family. The Land of Many Churches was released in 1971 as a double lalbum and collects four live performances: two are in churches proper, one at San Quentin’s Garden Chapel inside the prison, and one at Nashville’s Union Rescue Mission. The music offers a mix of country gospel and traditional hymns with preachers introducing some of the songs.

This is a favorite of mine and it sure fits this day.

Dori Freeman Melts My Heart With A Hank Williams’ Song

Last month when the Teddy Thompson-produced debut album from Dori Freeman was released, it was one of those titles that seemed to get picked up and reviewed by every media outlet who covers this type of music. Here’s just a few examples of:

The purity of Dori Freeman’s voice and the directness of her songwriting reflect not only her Appalachian hometown — Galax, Va. — but also a determined classicism, a rejection of the ways modern country punches itself up for radio and arenas. (Jon Pareles, New York Times)

It’s startling to hear such a fully formed singing and songwriting voice come out of nowhere. (NPR‘s ‘Songs We Love’)

A strong contender for Americana debut of the year. (Rolling Stone Country)

This week John over at Free Dirt Records invited me to see Dori at the City Winery NYC, where she opened up for her producer and Kelly Jones…whose new duets’ album I featured in RPM1. As Dori stood on that stage all alone with her guitar, I must admit I wasn’t expecting to hear a voice with such incredible strength and clarity that would soar above the din of the diners and drinkers. The crowd surely responded to her, and it seemed to me that this is a woman exceeds the accolades she’s been receiving and just exudes poise and potential.

Kelly McCartney did an interesting and short ‘Q and A’ with Dori for Folk Alley that ran last week, and you can click here to read it. And here she is doing Hank Williams’ “Cold Cold Heart” wayyyyy back from 2012 at the Henderson Festival in Mt. Royal, Virginia. You should hear how she does it now…it’ll melt your heart too.

Guitar Town (Or You Never Know When You’ll Bump Into Steve Earle)

Just as Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones stepped out onto the stage for their set, I looked up from my phone to find Steve Earle standing next to me checking out the gear on stage. I’m pretty sure Jones was using a Martin D-15M but I couldn’t recognize Thompson’s guitar, but I suspect it could have been a Lowden which his dad seems to favor. I was about to ask Steve but the lights went down and later in the evening I had to run out to catch a train before the encore was over.

A few days before I was on Bleeker Street and stopped at Matt Umanov’s guitar shop to buy some strings. Several years ago I stood there with Steve and Matt as I considered buying the Martin M-21 that they had designed together. It was one of the last ones for sale, but after counting my pennies I went for the much lower priced 000-15M. I still like playing it a lot, but I sure do regret my decision.

While Steve was touring Australia in March, he did an interview on The Music Shop with Andrew Ford and you can read it here or download the podcast.

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

From One-Hit Wonders to State Fairs…Guitar Contraptions to Steve Earle

As it approaches midnight, my thoughtful column on one-hit wonders and signature songs just took a hard left turn — my finger slid across the track pad and landed on a website that spoke of such things as two-chord songs, partial capos, and Liberty tuning. I seriously don’t have time to transgress from the storyline I’ve worked out in my head for the past five days, especially as a deadline looms and the image of an anxious editor refreshing her inbox is imprinted behind my blue eyes. Actually, hazel. And just an hour ago everything was so perfectly clear and linear, from point A to point B.

So as to not throw the baby out with the bath water, my original premise was more a question pondered and posed about whether if, within this big tent of roots music, we had songs that were either bigger than the musician(s) who wrote or performed them, or were so defining that they overshadowed everything else in their repertoire. I researched and studied, read and listened. I considered some examples mostly from the mid-1950s that included Big Mama Thornton, Johnny Bond, Hankshaw Hawkins, The Weavers, Johnny Lee Wills, and Ferlin Husky before I advanced the Wayback Machine and settled on Steve Earle’s “Copperhead Road.” I wanted to juxtapose it with Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Achy Breaky Heart.” Do not thank me for sparing you the anguish.

Have you ever been to the Minnesota State Fair? Earlier this week, I flirted with the idea of flying in for a couple of days to visit an old friend and search for deep fried pannekoeken on a stick. Thoughts of quilts, seeds, cows, hogs, and Princess Kay of The Milky Way’s butter sculptures clouded and obscured rational processing as I prepared to hit the buy button on a thousand dollar air-hotel-car package. When in doubt, I pause and play guitar.

Looking into my guitar case, I saw an old partial capo and it reminded me that I needed to get a new one. Amazon Prime whispered my name but I wanted to go one step beyond. The old “one click-two click” took me to the doorstep of Harvey Reid.

It is with fear of public embarrassment that I admit to not having come across this man before tonight, although I have since learned that he performed on a stage at Newport Folk Festival last year with his wife and fiddler Joyce Andersen, and I missed their set by mere minutes. Residing in York, Maine, Reid is master guitarist, multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, music educator, inventor, and innovator. He has released 32 albums on his Woodpecker Multimedia label, published dozens of instructional music books, and co-wrote the college textbook Modern Folk Guitar. He designed a new type of partial capo (if you don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, just go with it), and came up with a unique method for playing and tuning a six-string guitar.

One project that caught my attention as I surfed through what seems like an endless sea of Reid-Andersen websites was The Song Train: 56 Great Two-Chord Songs Anyone Can Play. An 80 page hardbound coffee table book that accompanies a four-CD set. It includes a wide range of music from songwriters such as Dylan, Guthrie, Lucinda Williams, J.J. Cale, Hank Williams, Chuck Berry, Merle Haggard, and Gillian Welch. Released in 2009, Acoustic Guitar magazine interviewed Reid and he shared about this concept that he and Joyce created together as a husband-wife project:

“We sensed a groundswell of interest from people wanting to play music, and we have children now, which really got us thinking about how musical knowledge gets transmitted. We wanted to help pass the torch, and realized that The Song Train was a valuable and unique missing piece in the puzzle of learning that suited our talents as performers and that really would help people get going. If you think really long and hard about it, the idea of The Song Train becomes obvious, though not everybody sees its value instantly. Boomer generation people don’t realize how many of the simple songs that enabled them to start playing music were present in schools and in mass culture, something that is no longer the case. We think it all starts with songs in people’s heads.

We wanted songs that we liked, that were alive and in circulation, and that covered a lot of styles and tastes. We probably could have made a whole bluegrass or gospel Song Train, but we wanted a cross-section, and tried to balance the country, folk, gospel, blues, rock, gospel, folk, etc. We wanted some famous songs, but wanted songs that had some durability, so we skipped topical things like ‘Okie From Muskogee’ and ‘The Beat Goes On.’ Our model was a single person with an acoustic guitar driving the song, so we did that with each song ourselves. Some rhythms are too complex, and we left out a lot of 1 and 2-chord songs that just are not one-guitar songs. ‘Sex Machine’ by James Brown and ‘Heroin’ by Lou Reed are 2-chord songs that did not make the cut, for example.”

Can’t tell you how happy I am that I abandoned that one-hit wonder theme and ended up finding this incredible tool for learning, teaching, and passing down music. Harvey and Joyce will likely be the beneficiaries of some hard-earned money from my wallet that would have otherwise ended up being spent on a day at the Mighty Midway. As far as Steve Earle and “Copperhead Road” goes … did you know it’s a song with only three chords and a capo used on just five of the six strings? Didn’t think so.

An afterword or two: I originally published this on the No Depression website as my Weekly Broadside column under the title Harvey Reid, Joyce Andersen and The Song Train. As it turned out, it didn’t get much traffic and for that I feel terribly sorry. One…because I happen to like this post. Two…Harvey, Joyce and their project create a vehicle to easily hand down tunes from one generation to the next, which I believe to be a worthy endeavor. So in the days that have past, I think that perhaps a new title and a small-budget marketing campaign on social media might help make more folks get to know this couple and their music. If you like this post or more importantly the Song Train project, please pass this on. Much obliged. EE.

Ana Egge and Why I Cry at 2:35

I was not unfamiliar with the name Ana Egge when, on the first of July, I received a communique from a friend of mine that new music from her was on its way. Four years ago I took notice of this woman with an album called Bad Blood, at first, admittedly, because of its connection to Steve Earle. He handled the production, recorded it at Levon Helm’s studio in Woodstock, had Ray Kennedy mix it, sprinkled in both his own and ex-wife Alison Moorer’s harmony vocals on a few tracks, and the backup band included Chris Masterson, Eleanor Whitemore, Rob Heath, and Byron Issacs. All that roots music star power aside, what jumped out of my headphones was Egge’s singular voice, clear as a bell, with intelligent songs that offered stories, structure, emotion, and power.

If you missed Bad Blood, you can thank the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t business paradigm that musicians face in this day and age as they try to be heard above all the noise in the aural soup kitchen. Too often great music arrives with so much promise, only to slide past us ever so quietly. We miss so much. It takes strength for an artist to stay the course, but Egge is one who has consistently delivered.

In 1997, when she was only 20 years old and living in Austin, Egge released her debut album, River under the Road. She has not stopped delivering great music since, and now we’re blessed with her eighth album, Bright Shadow.

Just to get you caught up, Egge was raised in a small town of about 50 people in North Dakota, and she also spent time in New Mexico. Her bio quotes her as saying:

“I was taught how to shoot a gun and how to enjoy alfalfa sprouts and tofu, raised by two back-to-the-land hippies. My folks loved the outdoors and eccentric people; I ran around barefoot and learned to ride a motorcycle when I was 5. I grew up with all the time and space in the world.”

While living in Texas, Egge had offers to go out on the road, and she opened for Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Iris DeMent, Shawn Colvin, and Ron Sexsmith. Later she got to share the stage with John Prine, Lucinda Williams, and – yes, this is sort of weird but it’s on her Wikipedia page – Sinead O’Connor. After spending time on the road. she moved back to New Mexico and settled in Brooklyn in 2002. She still lives there today with her wife of seven years and their young daughter.

Sifting through some of the marketing and biographical information about Egge, you start to find quotes like this one from Steve Earle: “Ana Egge’s songs are low and lonesome, big square-state noir ballads which she plays on a guitar she built with her own two hands and sings like she’s telling us her deepest, darkest secrets.”

Lucinda Williams said she’s “an exceptional songwriter, listen to the lyrics … the folk Nina Simone!”

“An artist’s ability to connect with an audience is frequently and disingenuously misrepresented in their marketing copy,” Mark Miller – a concert promoter and frontman of Spuyten Duyvil – told me. “Ana is a rare exception. She captivates a room and draws all eyes and ears with a combination of thoughtful and heartfelt lyrics, a heartbroken voice, and serious instrumental chops.”

As I’ve listened to this record over the past several weeks, I’ve come to think of it as a very special project. Egge has said she wanted to do an acoustic album with everyone sitting around a mic, and she self-produced this time around. While Bright Shadow is a collaborative effort with The Stray Birds – Maya De Vitry (fiddle, banjo, vocals), Charles Muench (upright bass, vocals), and Oliver Craven (mandolin, fiddle, slide guitar, vocals) – the cover lists only Egge’s name.

Over email, Egge recently told me: “The Stray Birds approached me as fans a few years ago wanting to back me up live at Folk Alliance [Toronto 2012]. We recorded the album two years ago and their success since then has been marvelous. I actually asked them about billing the album as ‘Ana Egge and the Stray Birds’ after we recorded it, but they didn’t feel that it was right. I had strong arrangement ideas going into it, and I think it would be different if we had co-written or recorded some of their songs.”

After they finished recording, Egge’s mother passed away and she also welcomed the arrival of her daughter. In retrospect, she says, the songs on the album mirror those intense and formative life changes. There is a very soft, warm feeling throughout the album, with layers of delicate textures in the instrumentation, and vocal lines that can go left when you expect them to go right. The tight harmonies that are a hallmark of the Stray Birds’ repertoire envelop and complement Egge’s voice. If you need an additional descriptor, I’ll sum up: stellar songwriting with sophisticated string band instrumentation.

Back in May, there was a video from Bright Shadow posted online for Mother’s Day. Egge wrote the song with Gary Nicholson, and in the description it says that it’s “a tribute to mothers everywhere as well as the divine feminine and possibility of redemption in all of us.” Filmed and directed by Paul Kloss and edited by Amy Foote, “Rock Me (Divine Mother)” features simply Egge and her guitar, interspersed with clips of moms and kids from what I imagine to be home movies.

Rock me in the arms of my divine mother.
Divine mother.
Rock me now.

It’s not very often that a song will come along that can repeatedly turn me into an emotional bowl of jelly at every listen, but this is the one: A tribute to mothers. Indeed it is. By the time the Stray Birds add their voices to the chorus toward the end, you can tip me over with a feather.

And I cry at 2:35.

This was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column at No Depression; The Journal of Roots Music.