Saturday Song of Place: On Hyndford Street

The Irish love to name places in their songs and poems. Place is far more than a geographic data-point for them.

Day 18: Songs of Place

There's interesting information about The Brazos Rover Song here. I think this is a song I discovered through the wonders of the Internet. The first version I ever heard was by Townes van Zandt. I figured he wrote it, but the link above clears up that matter. It was a true folk song, coming down to us from ultimately unknown sources.

The song names just about all the rivers in Texas, I suppose. The singer seems to know these rivers intimately, but every river makes him think about the one river, the Brazos, where he once walked with his love.

Looking for versions to post here, I've come upon many wonderful renditions. It's a true Cowboy song. You can imagine it sung around a campfire in West Texas, under the stars, maybe a cowboy with a squeezebox or a harmonica, another strumming a beat up guitar, and still another singing lowly. It might have sounded a little like this:

For the Love of Songs

I love songs. I think it's kind of amazing that we have this storehouse of music to draw from, thousands of songs to listen to, play, re-interpret, sing around campfires or on front porches with friends. Gospel songs, country songs, love songs and murder ballads, handed on from generation to generation. Call it the Great American Songbook, with its various chapters titled, Show Tunes, Cowboy Songs, Train Songs, Story Songs, The Blues, etc.

To me this is a chunk of our history every bit as inspiring as Mount Rushmore, say, because it is living history, continually expanding and deepening. It can make me feel downright patriotic! It is one of the great achievements of the American people, a kind of national self-portrait in song.

As a kid I learned to love songs as songs (as opposed to songs as vehicles by which to admire your favorite rock star). In school we sang Steven Foster and Woody Guthrie tunes and their lyrics seemed like fine poetry to me. Then of course there were the pop songs on the radio, one after the other, little 3-minute gems that take up permanent residence in your mind, so that even just one note can bring the whole song back.

In the rock era, two attitudes developed, which actually caused many in my generation to ignore or demean this precious resource. First, we baby boomers developed the notion that the good was to be found exclusively in the new. If it's old, it's probably bad.  Radio stations played "the latest hits," and that's all. Of course not everyone had this attitude (as the folk revival of the 60s demonstrates) but it was widely prevalent. The second nefarious idea that was adopted by many in my generation was the notion that you weren't a great musician unless you wrote all or most of your own music. Maybe this started with Dylan or the Beatles, but the idea is just plain silly. My favorite musicians love the "songbook" and are frequently adding its gems to their repertoire. To me, the musical possibilities provided in the pages of the "songbook" are positively inspiring, and to ignore it is not to prove your genius but to reveal your ignorance.

Youtube is an invaluable tool for song-lovers like me. You look up a song, and you get to choose from dozens of versions. Sometimes I like to sample several renditions of the same song, discovering a wide range of interpretive possibilities. This morning I got interested in looking up the music of John Loudermilk. He died a couple of years back at the age of 82. He wrote the songs "Tobacco Road," "Indian Reservation," "Now You Can Tell Me Goodbye," and "Abilene," among others.

"Tobacco Road," for one, has entered the songbook. It's one of those tunes that seems ageless, like a mountain or a river, a permanent part of the landscape (or songscape), so it comes as it of surprise to find out it was only written in 1960. These songs about growing up in constricted circumstances are legion, but Tobacco Road is the example without equal, the granddaddy of them all. I recall most readily the Eric Burden version and also Edgar Winter's memorable take, but of course the covers of this song are countless. Here's the 1964 version from The Nashville Teens:

Another favorite Loudermilk piece is the country song, Abilene. I listened to Bobby Bare's version this morning. Loudermilk's classic tune falls into that category of songs where the singer is not where he wants to be. He's far from home and longing to go back. In this case, back to Abilene.

That's all for now. I'm headed out today to go to a bluegrass festival and soak in some old songs. In the meantime, be sure to listen to some old songs today!

A Song of Place: Louisiana Man

A couple of months back I established a daily habit of sharing a song on Facebook. I'm trying to share songs that feature admirable writing, or examples of American folk, blues and country music history.

Well, I'm up to the Daily Song #78. I have to admit it's not something that has generated much interest, but my goal now is to share 365 songs. Who knows after that?

I'm looking for songs that feature great storytelling, songs that evoke a time and place and a way of life, like this one:

Songs of Place: Cumberland Gap

Let's do another song of place. Wikipedia has a nice backgrounder on this old folk song, whih has been recorded numerous times. The Cumberland Gap itself plays a significant part in several aspects of American history, and the song seems to draw on some of these memories. Every version selects from a somewhat different set of lyrics, but here's a nice early recording by Frank Hutchinson.

But while we're at it we might as well include Jason Isbell's remarakble song of the same name:

Songs of Place: East Houston Blues

Rodney Crowell is a treasure. Here is a true song of place, conjuring the time and the locale in an almost shockingly compressed way. The phrases flow on with almost no minor words. Every line packed and efficient, the precise tone absolutely consistent throughout. 

Songs of Place: Eldorado Blue

From Balsam Range:

Songs of Place: Biloxi

We featured Jesse Winchester's Misssissippi On My Mind not long ago. Is Jesse the official songwriter for the State of Mississippi? Anyway, there are many nice versions of this song, Biloxi, not only Jesse's original but also Jimmy Buffett's, but I'm going with Roseanne Cash's lovely rendering. A wistful recollection of the seaside at Biloxi, with Jesse's typical deft lyrical touch.

Song's of Place: Pacheco (and a couple more)

I've been listening to a lot of Kate Wolf this evening. I was only vaguely aware of a few of her songs during her lifetime (she died back in the 80s).She was a year younger than Joan Baez, a year older than Joni Mitchell. In other words, she came of age in the 60s folk revival, just like these her peers.

Many of her songs are songs of place: "Carolina Pines,","Across the Great Divide," "Pacheco," and "The Golden Rollin' Hills of California," among them.

Those last two are featured in the following video. Nobody wrote about the countryside of California better than Kate Wolf. Her music was grounded in the contours of the mountains, the smell of the woods and fields and the sound of birds.

And because I just can't get enough of her music this evening, let's listen to "Like a River" while we're at it, but this time covered by a string band called Front Country. 

Songs of Place: Mississippi You're On My Mind

Songs of a certain place are usually written by folks who are far from that place and longing for them(like "Georgia on my Mind," for example). As I've said many times here, I love writing that conjures a place with vividness, and Jesse Winchester's "Mississippi You're On My Mind" does just that. The particular details of each verse seem utterly authentic. Winchester knew the place of which he speaks, with its fields covered with flecks of dirty cotton, and just where the mint leaves can be found. I really love this song, but I couldn't find a decent live version, which I would have preferred. Enjoy.

Songs of Place (#31): Cumberland Gap

That sense of place, when you know the name of the gap in the mountains off to the west, and you know the name of the big rock on the heights above the river. As for the gap itself, you've probably walked through it once or twice, and know what's on the other side.

That's the old way. The new way is to know cities, and street names, and neighborhoods, but the space between the cities is fly-over country or its a ribbon of asphalt flowing under your car, and maybe the names of rest stops along the way, one or two exits where you know a good place to stop for lunch or clean bathrooms.

Nothing in that is worth putting in a song I suppose. Our sense of place, of the value of a place, and of rootedness in a place, or the pain that comes from being uprooted from it, these used to be the subject of many a song. 

Wikipeida has an informative history of the song here.

Songs of Place: Down in the Lonesome Draw

It's been a while since the last Song of Place. It's my contention that a strong sense of place is important to storytelling of all kinds, not least the musical kind. A song of place will often include specific place names, descriptions of land features, descriptions of the weather, the light, the feel of the place. There are plenty of songs from the mountains that speak of some lonesome hollow. People in the Smokey Mountains, say, know better what a hollow is than city-folk of the coastal cities. Similarly, people from the prairie know well what a draw is, but I had to look it up, just to be sure.

Draw. A draw is a less developed stream course than a valley. In a draw, there is essentially no level ground and, therefore, little or no maneuver room within its confines. If you are standing in a draw, the ground slopes upward in three directions and downward in the other direction. A draw could be considered as the initial formation of a valley. The contour lines depicting a draw are U-shaped or V-shaped, pointing toward high ground

"Down in the Lonesome Draw" is a beautiful song. I first heard it by The Stray Birds, and then later by Eli West and Cahalen Morrison. I think of it as a kind of cowboy lament. Perhaps it depicts an end of things. And end to the West? All I know is its a lonesome song of a man who is not where he longs to be. It's a man alone on the prairie, and something is burning.

Songs of Place: Tecumseh Valley

Keeping with Nanci Griffith, who recorded quite a few Songs of Place. When we speak of "place" we speak of more than geography of course, but of the way that place is woven into the stories we tell and intrinsic to those stories. It is similar to the answer to the question, What does home mean to you? Your answer is your story. You cannot be truly known apart from the knowledge of the place you come from. In Tecumseh Valley, a heart-breaking song written by Townes Van Zandt, we see something that occurs in many sad stories. The question is not only where you come from, but why you can never go back, and the tragic gap between there and where you are now,

Songs of Place: Rockingham

A Song of Place is not simply a song that mentions place-names in the lyrics, but a song that shows a deep-seated connection to place. B. J. Barham's Rockingham is a good example.

Take be back to where I'm from / where the air is thick as tobacco gum.

You just can't make that particular observation if you don't know the place. Unless you've actually breathed that air. I think place is an important and under-appreciated aspect of every kind of art, not least songwriting.

So take a little journey to Rockingham, "right there on the river Dan."

It's Rockingham, North Carolina, by the way. Barham is a fine songwriter and lead-guy for the band American Aquarium.

Songs of Place: Seminole Wind

John Anderson's Seminole Wind tells the story of the death of a Florida swampland.

And blow, blow from the OkeechobeeAll the way up to MicanopyBlow across the home of the SeminoleThe alligator and the gar

But it could as well be a part of ,y History Song series, with its implied tale of human dislocation and the "toll" of progress (similar to John Prine's Paradise). In the version below, John Anderson sings his 192 hit accompanied by the bluegrass band Carolina Road.

Songs of Place: Baton Rouge

"I'm gonna learn to dance in Baton Rouge."

12 Albums: John Prine

This is the third in a series of posts on"formative albums," records that shaped by musical taste and the direction of my listening. I've always admired the fine storytelling type of songwriting that has often come out of Nashville. Many of these songwriters have been featured in my Songs of Place series. Tom T. Hall, Guy Clark, Merle Haggard, Townes van Zandt, and Kris Kristofferson are all in that pantheon of personal favorites. But I sometimes think the best songwriter of our day has been John Prine.

Somewhere along the line as a kid I stumbled upon Prine's self-titled first album, picking it out of a discount bin as I recall. There is no one that can paint pictures in a song quite like Prine. He writes from a big but weather-beaten heart. No one tells stories with characters, living breathing characters, like Prine. In the tradition of much country music, he sings about the lonely, the broken, the old, and the drifting. This album's best examples are Donald and Lydia, Sam Stone, Hello in There, Illegal Smile, and of course Angel from Montgomery.

But the song I've chosen to feature here is yet another "song of place." It manages to be wistful and quietly angry at the same time, as if the voice you hear is that of an old man, remembering a long ago injustice. The version below comes from a live performance some ten years after the album's release.

Songs of Place: The Streets of Arklow

The only people I know who sing and write about place as much as American Southerners do are the Irish and Scots. The Streets of Arklow is a paean to a place and to a day, and I think it is one of the most beautiful songs I know.

Songs of Place: Wichita Lineman

A friend of mine suggested I make a list of my twelve most influential albums. These are albums that molded my taste and understanding of music, that moved me, that I listened to endlessly, and that still remain strong presences in the music-space in my mind.

So, okay. I'm up to that challenge. I was born in 1956, and a lot of the albums I first loved came out between 1968 and 1972 or so. One of the first albums I ever bought with my own money was Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman. This record featured a lot of really fine songwriting, which impressed me as a literary-minded boy. The fact that songs could tell stories, could even be at times high poetry, really meant something to me.

The Wichita Lineman album featured many fine songs, including "Reason to Believe,"  which would probably rank high on my best-songs-ever list. But the title track, written by the great Jimmy Webb, deserves to be featured here .I've chosen a  live version from a much older Glen Campbell.

Songs of Place: Texas 1947

I love the sense of place you can get in a good song (or poem, or novel, or painting, etc.). When a song conveys this sense of place you often get the names of streams, streets, bridges, etc., and you get the names of local characters, a sense of what the weather is typically like, the seasons, and also the attitude, the frame of mind, that goes with the place. Think of Ode to Billie Joe, for one very good example.

Another is Texas, 1947, by Guy Clark. Guy Clark passed on just the other day, so this is a chance to honor his fine songwriting. Texas, 1947 captures a time and a place and an attitude, not just of one person but of a community. And down underneath it all it's about modernity, and about country places getting left behind in the backwash of fast trains. Everything is fine about this Guy Clark song, everything perfectly drawn. Guy Clark, who recently passed away, and whom we have featured here before with Dublin Blues, could tell a story with the best of them. Featured below is Johnny Cash's fine version.