Show Me Your Folks, and I'll Show You My Girlfriend (ISYMIYSMY W/O)
Written: Jun 07 '03
Product Rating:
Pros: A diverse selection of big and small names in folk music
Cons: overall, too diverse - no musical "center" to this collection
The Bottom Line: Big fans of folk music will definitely find something to like on this collection, but more casual fans will probably want a collection with more musical focus
DrFaustus's Full Review: Celebration! The Philadelphia Folk Festival's 40th...
For the first time, I'm participating in MattA75's annual "I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours" write-off. For those unfamiliar with the concept, writers who signed up were paired off at random and asked to send each other albums to review, preferably something that the other person might not normally review. My partner, jay1051971, has some pretty diverse music reviews posted, ranging from classical to bluegrass to hair metal, but doesn't have much in the way of pop, so I sent him a copy of Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend, which helped to re-launch the power-pop genre back in the early nineties. In exchange, Jay sent me a copy of Celebration: 40th Philadelphia Folk Festival Highlights, featuring the best moments of a festival he himself had attended.
Ah, what a confusing, vague, and all-encompassing term "folk" is for the music world. There was a time, albeit long before my days on this earth, when you could mention folk music, and everyone would know exactly what you were talking about. In the last few decades, though, the idea of folk music has been fractured, splintered, and scattered to the four winds. These days, you could ask twenty people what folk music is, and get at least two dozen definitions.
Frankly, I blame Bob Dylan. Make no mistake, I have nothing but respect and admiration for Dylan, but before he came along, folk musicians pretty much stuck to traditional arrangements of regional songs that have been around for hundreds of years and whose original authors had long since been forgotten. (Sure, there was the occasional artist like Woody Guthrie who broke the mold, but no one managed to redefine the genre before Dylan came along.) Once Dylan arrive on the scene, he brought an element of original songwriting, a mixture of electric instruments, and a sense of superstardom to the genre that every folkie since has tried to emulate in their own way. Some brought elements of rock, some brought elements of blues, some focused the energies on the vocal harmonies of the songs, and other struck out in a purely instrumental direction. In the end, I suppose the resulting diversity is a good thing for the genre, but it makes the musical heart of folk music deceptively hard to pinpoint.
The variety and diversity in today's folk scene bring about the biggest weaknesses in Celebration: 40th Philadelphia Folk Festival Highlights. Before I first heard this album, I was unaware of the Philadelphia Folk festival, but apparently this celebration has been going on since the early 1960's, and the music featured on this collection was recorded during 2001's three-day festivities. There are big name acts mixed with little known artists, quiet songs in between raucous numbers, and heavy blues influenced numbers alongside European traditional tunes. Overall, the album never seems to gel together into a cohesive whole. Spread over a three-day period with periodic breaks between acts, it would be simple to digest this much musical variety. When you try to pack three days worth of diversity into an hour and ten minutes, though, we run into that "too many cooks" syndrome.
Several of the tracks from Celebration stand out upon first listen. The album opens with Arlo Gurthrie's rendition of Bob Dylan's When My Ship Comes In. For listeners who aren't overly familiar with the genre, this song will best fit with the expectations of what folk music sounds like. We've got a mainly acoustic instrumentation, a straightforward verse-chorus-verse progression, and some uplifting lyrics that work on both a literal and a more spiritual/figurative level. It starts the album off on the right foot, and the audience applause at the end of the track is well-deserved.
Other songs that spring forth through the speakers include a version of Dylan's All Along the Watchtower by Richie Havens and Jimmy Johnson's version of Lonnie Brooks' Two-Headed Man. Havens plays the familiar sixties anthem with a raw, blistering intensity that sounds it must have taken a full band to produce, but in fact was played only be Havens and one other guitarist. The vocals are at once smooth and desperate, equaling, and perhaps surpassing, the version recoded by either Dylan or Jimi Hendrix. Two-Headed Man is the only solidly electric song on the album, and brings an authentic, down-in-the-delta blues feel, with a traditional twelve bar progression and some scorching blues solos. Purists may argue that a song that leans so far to the blues side of things doesn't belong on a folk collection, but pay them no heed. Purists are no fun at parties anyhow.
Then there are the songs that grow on you after a while. Sonia Rusttein gives us a touching, heartfelt solo acoustic performance of her song Me, Too. She sings sweetly of individuality, patriotism, and coming to grips with oneself. David Bromberb and his band perform the traditional tune Make Me a Pallet with a spirited Dixieland orchestration. Janis Ian (of Society's Child and At Seventeen) brings us her song Take No Prisoners, full of bluesy guitar licks and bitter lyrics of political protest. Lost My Driving Wheel, from Tom Rush, is a sad, wistful tune full of melancholy, made truly enjoyable by the rich harmonies provided by Rush's backing singers. None of these songs seemed all that special when I first heard them, but I've certainly come to appreciate them as I've been listening to the album.
Unfortunately, not everything managed to grow on me like the above tracks did. Laura Love's Capricorn & Hominy incorporates too much yodeling and tribal chanting for my tastes, while Solas instrumental Dougie MacDonald's Set has an overly strong Celtic feel that reminds me too much of the music from Riverdance. Gettin' Up Early from Annie Hills and Tom Paxton comes across as to saccharine and sappy, like something we might find on a second-rate children's album. Chris Smithers' Killing the Blues might have come across as one of those songs that grew on me, but the vocals are to muddled for me to really enjoy it. Other songs, like Laurie Lewis' Sleepy Eyed John/Tom and Jerry are rooted too firmly in the realm of country music, which has never held much of an appeal for me. Again, none of these songs are terrible, but after a while, I just found myself skipping past them.
As I stated above, Celebration: 40th Philadelphia Folk Festival Highlights, extremely diverse, so much so that it comes across as inconsistent and uneven. People who are already big fans of folk music will probably enjoy this collection (as will, undoubtedly, attendees of the Philadelphia Folk Festival), but people who are looking to get into the genre will probably be too overwhelmed, even though this isn't an exceedingly long collection. Look for other collections of folk music first, ones that offer a bit more focus, and then, once you've gotten a better feel for the genre, come back and give Celebration another spin.
Be sure to check out the entries from all of the articulate and talented pairs of writers in this write off:
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