Barking Dog: August 8, 2024
Fiver - Spinning Out & Going Nowhere
Solo project of Toronto-based artist Simone Schmidt
This is a brand new, not-yet-released song that Simone sent straight to us—thanks Simone!
It comes out officially on August 19
Pete Seeger - Those Three Are On My Mind
Seeger was a folk singer and an activist from New York who advocated for countless social causes through his music for 75 years
The song is about the murder of civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Shwerner in Mississippi in 1964, while they were helping African Americans register to vote
Pete Seeger was also working on the same project in Mississippi that summer, and Frances Taylor, who was a film critic for the New York Times, wrote the lyrics as a poem and asked him to put it to music, which he did in 1966
Rosalie Sorrels - The Money Crop
She started out as a folksinger and collector of folk songs, and left her husband in the 1960s to travel across America with her five children, establishing herself as a performer and making connections with other folk musicians, writers, and artists
This is from her 2000 album No Closing Chord, which is a tribute to Malvina Reynolds
Reynolds wrote the song in the mid-1960s
Pharis & Jason Romero - Oregon Trail
A Woody Guthrie song off the album Roll Columbia: Woody Guthrie’s 26 Northwest Songs
The songs on the album are performed by various artists but were all written by Woody Guthrie when he was commissioned by the Bonneville Power Administration to write songs promoting the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River in 1941
Pharis and Jason Romero are a married duo from Horsefly, BC
Joseph Spence - Sloop John B.
Joseph Spence was a Bahamian musician known for vocalizing and humming while playing guitar
While the Beach Boys’ 1966 adaptation of the song might be the best known version, this is actually a Bahamian folk song from Nassau
Spence’s version is from his 1972 album Good Morning Mr. Walker
Country Joe McDonald, Bernie Krause - Cetacean Visitations
McDonald is a musician from California who’s been playing since the late 1950s, when he began busking on the streets in Berkeley
He’s known as both a solo artist and as a member of the group Country Joe and the Fish
Krause began his career as a recording engineer, and later joined the Weavers for a brief period in the early 60s
He’s both a musician and soundscape ecologist, and he founded Wild Sanctuary in 1968, which records and archives the sounds of natural environments
In the 1980s, Krause and his colleague Diana Reiss lured a lost migrating humpback whale out of the Sacramento River Delta and back into the Pacific Ocean using recordings of humpback whales feeding
This is from the collaborative 2005 album Natural Imperfections
It captures the sounds of humpback and killer whales and guitar and harmonica played by McDonald
Gary Green - The Ballad of Broadside
Musician from Tennessee
From his 1977 album Gary Green, Vol. 1: These Six Strings Neutralize the Tools of Oppression
Green writes of this song: “This is probably the most important song on this album because it is a tribute to two of the most important (and most overlooked) people in the history of American music. Without Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen and their Broadside Magazine, we wouldn’t know the names of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Janis Ian and a few dozen others.”
Sis Cunningham, The Almanac Singers - Belt-Line Girl
Cunningham was the founding editor of Broadside Magazine, an important publication for the Greenwich Village folk scene
She was also one of the first people to be blacklisted as a communist sympathiser in post-WWII America
The Almanac Singers were founded by Millard Lampell, Lee Hays, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger in 1940
That song is by Cunningham, and they recorded it together in early 1942
Bruce Cockburn - Foxglove
Singer-songwriter and guitarist from Ottawa who’s been playing professionally for over 40 years
From his 2005 album Speechless
Bo Carter - The Law Gonna Step On You
Bo Carter was an early blues musician, born Armenter Chatmon
His brothers, Lonnie and Sam Chatmon, were also blues musicians, and they were all members of the blues group the Mississippi Sheiks
He recorded this one in June of 1931
Morley Loon - Wee Jee
He was a Cree musician and actor from Mistissini, Quebec
That one’s from his debut album, Northland, My Land, from 1981
The title translates to “Is It Over”
Vic Chestnutt - The Garden
He was a singer-songwriter from Athens, Georgia who released 17 albums over the course of his career
This one is from his 2005 album Ghetto Bells
Bob Dylan - The Times They Are A-Changin’
This is from the bootleg album Stadiums of the Damned, and was recorded in New Orleans in 1981
Jack Warshaw - Vanzetti’s Letter
He’s an American musician who moved to England in the 1960s to work as an architect, and stayed there because of the folk scene and his resistance to the Vietnam War
This is from his album Long Time Gone, recorded in 1979 and remastered in 2011
Sacco and Vanzetti were Italian immigrant anarchists accused of murdering two men during an armed robbery in Massachusetts in 1920, and later executed
Though they were sentenced to death, they appealed several times on several factors that seriously brought into question the guilt of the two men and raised questions about the biases of the jury that sentenced them
They were nonetheless executed in 1927, and 60 years later in 1987, the governor of Massachusetts finally issued a proclamation that the two men had been unfairly tried and convicted
Lee Hays - State of Arkansas
He was a folksinger from Arkansas who was a member of the Weavers, and is known for cowriting “If I Had a Hammer” and “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine”
Hays got a job at a library in Ohio in the 1930s, which led to his discovery of books that undid his fundamentalist southern upbringing and caused him to move back to the South, this time to assist in the fight for racial equality
This is from the Weavers 1959 album Travelling On
It’s a traditional American ballad
Richard Inman - Pictures
Folk and country artist from Winnipeg
This is from his 2022 album Come Back Through
Janet Russell, Christine Kydd - Do You Love an Apple
Russell and Kydd are both Scottish musicians who have been playing professionally since the 1980s
This is from their 1993 album Janet Russell & Christine Kydd
It’s a traditional song, possibly Scottish in origin, that was collected by folksinger and song collector AL Lloyd from barge captain Bob Roberts in England in the 1950s
Liam Clancy - Dowie Dens of Yarrow
He was an Irish singer best known as a member of the Clancy Brothers, which he formed with his older brothers and Tommy Makem, with whom he later performed as a duo
It’s a traditional ballad from the Anglo-Scottish border that has many variants
“Dowie” is Scots for sad or dismal, and a “den” is a wooded valley
Tommy Jarrell - Little Maggie
Fiddler, banjo player, and singer from Mount Airy, NC
Made his living in road construction but was an influential musician and received the National Endowment for the Arts' National Heritage Fellowship in 1982
“Little Maggie” is related to the songs “Country Blues” and “Darlin’ Corey,” and was first collected in the Appalachian region of the US in the 1800s
This is from his 1975 album of banjo music Come and Go With Me
Steve Ledford - 99 Years
He was an old-time fiddle player from North Carolina who began his recording career in the early 1930s with a group called the Carolina Ramblers
He first recorded that song with the Carolina Ramblers in 1932, and that version is from the 2015 anthology collection Legends Of Old-Time Music: Fifty Years Of County Records
Jesse Fuller - 99 Years
He was an American one-man band born in Georgia in 1896
He could play multiple instruments simultaneously, using a harmonica holder to hold a harmonica, a kazoo, or a microphone, playing guitar, and tap-dancing or soft-shoeing as he played
Though he had already learned two styles of guitar by the age of 10, he only decided to try making a living from music in the early 1950s
Started by working locally in clubs and bars in San Francisco and other nearby cities, but became better known by performing on TV, and in 1954, when he was 58, Fuller recorded his first album
This is his own song off the 1991 reissue of Fuller’s 1956 album Frisco Bound
Utah Phillips - “Anybody who doesn’t need a cop to tell him what to do”
He was an anarchist folksinger, storyteller, and labour organiser from Ohio
This is from his 1999 album Making Speech Free
Josh White - Bad Housing Blues
Extremely successful musician who started playing music in the late 20s and gained fame as a blues, jazz, and folk musician, as well as a film and Broadway actor
That song is from around 1940
Charlie King - Eat Meese
He’s a folk singer and activist from Massachusetts whose music has been recorded by artists including Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, and Chad Mitchell
This is from his 1986 album Feelings of Fire with Dave & Kay Gordon
Ed Meese was counsellor to president Ronald Reagan in 1983 when he made remarks expressing disbelief that children in America were going hungry and suggesting that people went to soup kitchens voluntarily
Golden Leaf Quartet - Sleep, Baby, Sleep
They were a vocal quartet from Alabama that recorded 14 songs between 1928 and 1930
They recorded this one in 1930 under the name the Whippoorwill Four
Group of school children - Jack, Can I Ride?
This is off the 2001 album Deep River of Song: Alabama, from Lullabies to Blues, which is a collection of field recordings made by John A Lomax and Ruby Terrill Lomax between 1937 and 1940
This one was recorded near York, Alabama in October of 1940
Cara Luft - He Moved Through the Fair
From Winnipeg
Off her album Darlingford
Traditional Irish folk song usually known as “She Moved Through the Fair”
Lyrics first published in 1909
David Rovics - Behind Barbed Wire
He’s a topical singer-songwriter based in Oregon who’s been playing since the 1990s
This is from a 2011 tribute album to the Scottish folksinger Alistair Hulett, called Love, Loss, and Liberty
The song originally appeared on Hulett’s 1996 album Saturday Johnny & Jimmy the Rat, which he released with Dave Swarbrick
The Kingfisher Trio - On the Jericho Road
From a 1994 album of Native American music, presented by the National Museum of the American Indian
Members of the Johnson Prairie Indian Baptist Church in Oklahoma
Both Cherokee people and missionaries adapted songs directly from English songs, but others are unique to the Cherokee language
This one is a direct translation by Joe O’Field of the 1935 Donald McCrossan song
Marie Hare - Green Grows the Laurel
Ballad singer from Strathadam, NB, known for her performances at the Miramichi Folksong Festival
The song is likely English or Irish in origin, though Hare’s version combines later Scottish and American variants
Kenneth Patchen - The Orange Bears
He was a poet and novelist from Ohio who was an influence for poets involved in the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation
This is from the 1959 album Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen: Read by the Author
The poem was first published in 1957
Alan Mills, Jean Carignan - Reel du Pecheur
