This Land is Your Land, This Song is Your Song

I think it all started with Bob Dylan, or maybe it was my dad playing folk songs on his guitar for fun when I was growing up. I remember this family friend named Laura Campbell who used to come over for campfires sometimes with her guitar, and we would all sing “Puff the Magic Dragon.” I thought she was amazing. I don’t think I ever had a strong enough urge to play music myself. I played the piano when I was young, then the trumpet, and then the tuba. I didn’t like any of them enough to stay with it. I sang opera in high school, but that didn’t turn out to be a long-term thing either. I have always thought I would take up the banjo and harmonica so that one day when I’m old, I can play them on my front porch steps. But life is very full with other things right now, and learning an instrument isn’t really part of my immediate plans. What I really want to do is listen to other people play music. Nearly every day, I take time to practice the art of appreciating the tones coming out of guitars, banjos, fiddles, harmonicas and mouths. Every musician needs an audience to hear their songs, and that is where I fit into the whole picture. I have been fortunate in life to have a few friends who are musically inclined. Ever so often some travelling friend will come through town with a guitar or a banjo, and we have wonderful campfire singalongs. Those are some of the best times in life.

I have never been very interested in what’s playing on the radio. It’s never had much of anything to do with my life as far as I can tell. Sometimes I’ll hear something on an NPR station that I really enjoy, but it’s usually the independent folk musicians that I hear about through friends who create music that sets the background for this life I’m living. I have enjoyed a wide variety of music, just not much of it contemporary. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkle, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, The Who, and Led Zeppellin are all bands I have enjoyed greatly over the years, and none of them were current with my generation or what was being played on the radio. I guess I’m just old-fashioned by nature. Listening to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan’s traditional folk ballads and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman’s bluegrass tunes during college I felt like I was moving towards something more real for me and more reflective of life as I knew it. Many of the Grateful Dead’s songs, I also started to notice, were based in old folk tunes, or made a lot of reference to them. Then, a friend introduced me to British Folk. Pentangle, and their guitarist Bert Jansch, played all these amazing arrangements of old folk tunes, and I came to realize that I really love traditional folk music. It’s timeless. Many of the songs cross cultures, barriers, various musical traditions, and can be found at the root of much of the music being played today. In many ways, it’s also a music very rooted in place. If you want to get to know a landscape, listen to some of the local folk music. I’ve visited Great Britain, the Appalachians, California’s gold rush country, Michigan, and various towns of the old west without ever going there. Here I will share a few of my favorites.

Being that I live in the American west, I came to really love Mary McCaslin’s heartfelt western folk. I had never been one for country music, but there’s a fine line between folk, bluegrass and country. My mother listened to McCaslin a little when I was growing up, so it came to mind when I started listening to more folk music. This music really gives a sense of the vast, open prairies and the old wild west. Outlaws, gamblers, and frontier ladies come to life in the stories of her songs. She did some great Beatles covers too, like an old-western version of “Blackbird.” Here’s a great version of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” that she does on the banjo. I’ll also share a link here to a great slideshow on YouTube that someone put together to her song “Prairie in the Sky“, and here is one of my very favorites by her put to a slideshow as well, “Way out West.”

A few years later, I made the pleasant discovery of the late Kate Wolf’s folk tunes. This is the folk music of the California hills, the gold country and Sonoma. Her voice is so beautiful, and her open, honest, earthy songs are hard to forget. Old farmhouses, kitchens, mountains and rivers are some of the subject matter of her songs that make her music among my favorites. One of the things I find particularly amazing about her is that she didn’t start her musical career until she was 27, and after she had a family with two children. She played folk festivals all around the United States and Canada, and organized the Santa Rosa Folk Festival in California. Here she is singing one of my favorites about the golden rolling hills of California, “The Redtail Hawk.”

Laura Kemp is my favorite local folk singer, hands down. I don’t even know how many times I’ve gone to her shows over the past few years at farm festivals, bars, the Saturday Market, and the Oregon Country Fair. She always puts on a good show with talented musicians in accompaniment and tales of her garden between songs. Her music is very in-tune with the seasons, which I enjoy. She does a great Kate Wolf cover of “The Lilac and the Apple.” Here she is at Sam Bond’s Garage playing a banjo favorite of mine, “Swordferns and Salmonberries” and an autumn tune, “Hannah Branch.” I was at that show!

I found out about this Michigan duo, Seth Bernard and May Erlewine through another crafter’s giveaway on a blog I read. I had always wanted a beaded peyote stitch necklace, and I won a lovely blue and green one from Su Smith of Star Sunflower Studio, who sent me a two-disc live recording of these folks at Short’s Brewery. I loved their music the minute I heard it. My kids did too. To my eight-year-old daughter, Daisy May has become a folk singing hero. They combine some excellent guitar and string playing with some poignant messages about the importance of sustainability and care taking the earth.  “I travel for to know the land, to learn to speak for everyone, and I will work this broken world until my days are done.” These lines by Bernard remind me of something I’d hear from Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan, and carries on the tradition of folk music representing the land and the regular folks who live on it. Both have done their share of travelling around the country, and May even hitchhiked and hopped trains in her late teens. Through their music, I’m getting the impression that Michigan is a pretty happening place that I’m going to need to visit one day. You see, folk music can take you all sorts of places. Here is a recording of the duo singing one I have been really enjoying, called “Seeds,” and another favorite of mine, “Tend Your Mind.” Here’s “Sassafrass” at a house concert in Colorado, and another recording from the same concert of May telling the story behind her fishing song from a fresh perspective, “Big Mama Brown.” And here’s one more, from the roots of rock and roll, a modern folk cover of Pink Floyd’s “Fearless.”

Being the Grateful Dead fan that I am, it was good news to find out that members of the band, Tongue and Groove, from my hometown up in Washington State, had started an old-time band called Deadwood Revival, doing traditional songs and Grateful Dead covers among other wonderful things. Even better news is that they have family in Eugene, and come through frequently on tours, so we get the opportunity to catch a live show every now and again. Some of the band members are friends of friends, so I get lots of good updates on when shows will be coming up. Jason Mogi does some seriously skilled banjo playing, and their fiddle player, Julie Campbell is smoking hot! Kim Trennery, the lead female vocalist has become another guitar playing hero in my daughter’s world. We’ve taken the kids to a couple of shows that weren’t at bars, and they dance their little tails off. We will never forget the show we went to at the Drain Civic Center last year when an intoxicated woman in a red dress got up on stage and started dirty dancing by the bass player. I’m sure the band will never forget it either! Here they are in Corvallis playing an awesome rendition of  “Cold Rain and Snow.” You should hear them do “Brown Eyed Women” at the Axe and Fiddle in Cottage Grove. I think I even like their version better than the Grateful Dead’s! Here they are doing one of their newer songs, “When I’m Gone,” and another favorite, performed at the Axe and Fiddle, “Come See Me Sometime.” I love it.

Nothing makes you feel like this land is your land more than listening to the music that comes right from it, from the people that are travelling and getting to know it, and appreciating it. I think the messages that come out of this music are important ones that are worth paying attention to. It’s good to be reminded that the human experience is something universal, timeless and well travelled. Aside from that, you’ve gotta love a little toe tapping, foot stomping fun every now and then. Through all of these old traditional songs, I’ve “dug some songs out of the mud” as Jason Mogi of Deadwood Revival puts it, and thoroughly enjoyed them. When I went to the public library this week, I checked out Roscoe Holcomb’s “The High Lonesome Sound,” some John Hartford fiddle tunes, “Traditional Fiddle Music of the Ozarks,” “Kentucky Old-time Banjo,” and “Songs From the Mountain” which turned out to be a collection of old-time music from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina referred to in the Novel, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (made into one of my favorite movies ever). I even found one called “Songs and Stories of Early Oregon.” None of it is disappointing. So, my advice is to step out of the mainstream sometimes and see where it takes you. You might end up closer to home than you had imagined.