In case you were wondering…
“Art”
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt — a wind to freeze;
Sad patience — joyous energies;
Humility – yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity — reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart
To wrestle with the angel — Art.
Herman Melville, 1891.
I first heard Linda Thompson sing on the album Shoot Out The Lights, recorded and released with her then-husband, Richard Thompson in 1982. The duo had been making music together since 1974’s I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight and this was their sixth and, as it would turn out, final album.
Long time readers of this blog will know that I have remained a passionate Richard Thompson fan. My devotion is chronicled in my post of August 31, 2010 entitled: “Another Obsession On My List.”
I did not, I’m embarrassed to say, keep up with Linda’s career after she and Richard parted company and therefore missed her first solo album, One Clear Moment in 1985. I did most fortunately pick up her 2002 sophmore CD, Fashionably Late. That’s where I, and most of the rest of the world, discovered Linda’s song “No Telling.”
“No Telling” is another song that effected me on the first listen like Gillian Welch’s “Hard Times” did.
This was a song that I had to learn, that I had to be able to play and sing and savor and share.
This is the kind of song that I sing about in one of my own songs, “There Are (Songs To Be Sung),” in the first line of the first verse: “There are songs so good, songs that must be heard. There are songs that are more than melody and words.”
Please. Take a few minutes and hear for yourself.
There you go.
“No telling what a love song will do.”
That’s some song.
I hope you enjoyed that. I’d love to hear your thoughts. Maybe you’ll post a comment!
“No Telling” from the Linda Thompson 2002 CD, Fashionably Late.
The Harrow & The Harvest by Gillian Welch came out last summer, June 28 to be precise.
I’d known the release date and had been looking forward to this new CD for about a month. I’ve been a fan of Gillian Welch (see my post of October 2, 2010 on the occasion of Ms. Welch’s 43rd birthday) for some time and this album would be her first since Soul Journey came out in June of 2003.
Simply, the album was well worth the wait and I highly recommend it to you.
Of the ten excellent songs in the collection, however, one stood out from the beginning and continues to resonate with me. That song is track 8: “Hard Times.”
At the risk of getting analytical – to paraphrase writer Tom Piazza: “endless interpretation can make it harder to hear the song” – Ms. Welch and co-writer David Rawlings channel a few bits of Stephen Foster in their song. Besides the title, which immediately reminded me of Mr. Foster’s 1854 song “Hard Times Come Again No More,” the phrase “camptown man” from the first and third verse seems to be an obvious reference to one of Mr. Foster’s more well-known songs “De Camptown Races” from 1850.
But that’s enough of that. You’ve got to hear the song for yourself.
Please take a few minutes. If you’ve got headphones or the like, put them on. Close your eyes (the accompanying video can be distracting), sit back… and listen.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve listened to that, how it feels to sing along while driving down the road or sitting with my guitar in a quiet, darkened corner of my house.
“Hard times ain’t gonna rule my mind.”
That’s some song.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, reactions, comments. At the least, I hope you enjoyed the song, the recording, and are glad you took the time to listen.
Maybe the song will in some way resonate with you and sometime soon, you’ll come back and listen to it again, or better yet, purchase the CD.
“Hard Times” by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings, from The Harrow & The Harvest.
Good music doesn’t get old.
I had a Barnes & Noble gift card that, as my father would have said, was “burning a hole in my pocket” and a B & N store coupon for 20%-off any one item.
It was summer, I was on vacation: I just had to go shopping!
During my careful-but-leisurely afternoon browsing through the racks, I came upon a brand new (copyright 2011, first edition) paperback. Devil Sent The Rain: Music and Writing in Desperate America by Tom Piazza.
If the thumbnail pictures of such artists as Jelly Roll Morton, Jimmie Rodgers, Charlie Patton and Bob Dylan on the cover were not enough, the one of Gillian Welch was the clincher. I bought the book (and one other and a video, too) and headed on home.
Devil Sent The Rain is a collection of essays by Mr. Piazza, divided into three sections. In the second section, where the author “turns his attention to literature, politics and post-Katrina America,” I read the piece titled “Going Back To New Orleans.”
Originally published in the 2006 Music Issue of the Oxford American, Mr. Piazza writes about a recording that he calls “one of the all-time best musical tributes to the Crescent City.” It was a song I’d never heard of by an artist I’d never heard of: “Going Back to New Orleans” by Joe Liggins.
Singer and pianist Joe Liggins (born July 9, 1915 in Guthrie, Oklahoma) led a popular, Los Angeles-based group that produced “smooth, tightly scripted, functional jukebox small-band dance music for black audiences” during the 1950’s. Back in 1945, Liggins had recorded his first hit, “The Honeydripper” and later named his band “The Honeydrippers.”
In his essay, Mr. Piazza so eloquently and passionately described the arrangement and recording of “Going Back To New Orleans” that I had to hear it for myself. I was not disappointed.
Check it out for yourself.
So, what do you think?
After listening to this track, I searched my shelves and dug out a fabulous CD set that I’d bought a few years back called The Roots of Rock ‘n’ Roll, 1946-1954 to see if it contained a Joe Liggins song. Sure enough, disc 2, track 14, was Joe’s other hit “Pink Champagne” from 1951.
After listening to that track, the CD player went on to play track 15 and its opening acoustic guitar lick took me totally by surprise. What was this? It was: “Eyesight To The Blind,” written by Aleck Miller, aka Sonny Boy Williamson 2, and recorded here by The Larks.
Well, if you’ve come this far, you’ve got to hear this one, too.
Isn’t that amazing?
There you go. Thanks to reading an essay in a new book, I discovered a wonderful new recording and re-discovered an equally-wonderful recording I already had.
And thanks to this blog, I get to share them with you.
Life is good.
P.S.: Devil Sent The Rain by Tom Piazza is full of excellent essays and superb writing. Very Highly Recommended.
A year or so ago, I started casually searching on-line for a book about the history of recording.
Last June, in a spur-of-the-moment, while-I’m-in-the-neighborhood visit to Kramerbooks (1517 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, D.C.), I found exactly what I was looking for: Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History Of Recorded Music by Greg Milner.
The 2010 trade-size paperback has a very graphic, pink, light blue and white front cover and the usual array of excerpts from good reviews that appeared in high-profile publications on the back cover. One of these quotes though was attributed just to “Jarvis Cocker” and reads like a challenge as much as a recommendation. (Jarvis, I have discovered, is a British musician, former frontman for the band Pulp, host of the BBC Radio 6 Music show: Jarvis’s Sunday Service and not the son of one of my favorite singers, Joe Cocker.)
Jarvis said: “Very, very, very few books will change the way you listen to music. This is one such book. Read it.”
Really?
Well, I did read Perfecting Sound Forever and I have to admit that Jarvis was right. This book did indeed change the way I listen to music.
How so?
Well, here’s some of what I learned from Perfecting Sound Forever.
In the history of recording there have essentially been only two “systems” for recording sound: analog and digital.
Analog recordings are everything from the wax cylinders that were played on the original Edison phonograph (introduced commercially in 1888) to 78-rpm shellac discs to magnetic tape (as found in cassettes and 8-tracks) to vinyl LP’s (1948) and 45’s (1949). Digital recordings are CD’s (first produced commercially in 1982) and MP3’s, the latter being the usual format for digital downloads.
In an analog recording, sound waves are “captured” in one of two ways.
The first way is in an uninterrupted, variable-width (or depth) groove etched into the surface of a rapidly spinning cylinder or flat disc.
The other way is in an uninterrupted stream of “patterns of varying magnetic polarity” electronically created in a layer of highly magnetic material – such as tiny particles of iron or nickel – that has been adhered to one side of a thin and flexible ribbon, or tape.
In the 1950’s, terms like “high fidelity” and “audiophile” were preeminent in the blossoming commercial world of analog recorded music. “Presence” was the ultimate goal of the best music recordings and most sought after by those audiophiles.
Presence is defined by Mr. Milner with a quote from John Urban who said that it is: “the aural illusion of being in the same room with the performers.” In Mr. Milners words: “A recorded sound with presence did more than just capture the music perfectly. It captured the sound of music made in a specific space.”
In other words from Mr. Milner, in the early years of analog recording “the fundamental ethic governing recorded music” was “to document reality.” The word “presence” implies “capturing everything.”
S0, in 1982, when CBS/Sony released Billy Joel’s album 52nd Street in Japan as the first commercial CD, they were hoping that listeners would find that this new digital format captured everything of Mr. Joel’s music even better than the vinyl and tape analog versions did.
However, can the idea of “capturing everything” ever apply to a digital recording?
Here’s Mr Milner again: “A digital system is the ultimate negation of this idea. The system begins with an idea of perfection and works backwards. The CD system ‘knows’ that the entire world of sound can be accurately depicted using a set of 65,000 building blocks, as long as 44,100 of them are used each second.”
Mr. Milner quotes Ivan Davis saying “Analog is about ‘approximating perfection,’ while digital is about ‘perfecting approximation.'”
Hmm?
In the process of recording music digitally, the music or sound waves are translated into a “binary language” and stored as “information.” Binary language uses “binary code” as its alphabet. Each letter of this alphabet is a number with 16 places, or “bits.” Each place or bit in this long number can be either a 0 or a 1. (Binary is defined as “consisting of two things or parts.”)
This is what one of those 16-bit numbers would look like: 1001101011001101.
There is a total of 65,536 possible variations on this number, starting with all 0’s, which would be silence.
A digital recorder analyzes or samples an incoming signal and starts translating it into binary language using one of those 65,536 numbers. The digital recorder repeats this process another 44,099 times during the first one second of signal or music. So, if my math is accurate, a 3 minute song would eventually become a dominoes-like row of 7,938,000 16-bit numbers.
Whew.
What then, did this sound like? Could enough of everything be captured? Did the recorded music in this new format have presence?
Mr. Milner quotes musician Neil Young: “Listening to a CD is like looking at the world through a screen window. If you get right up next to a screen window, you can see all kinds of colors through each hole. Well, imagine if all that color had to be reduced to one color per hole. That is what digital recording does to sound.”
Regardless of how they sounded to Neil and many others, CD’s soon took over the world of commercially recorded music and rewarded that world with great financial success for many years.
Personally, I found some of the first CD’s that I bought back in the late-1980’s to be nearly unlistenable, “A Hard Day’s Night” from the Beatles being particularly annoying. But in recent years, I think that the sound of many re-released and “remastered” albums – such as those from the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and the Beatles – has been simply spectacular.
Well, in all things technological and commercial, there eventually has to be something new.
On October 23, 2001, Apple introduced the iPod.
The iPod allowed music listeners to pack all of the music on all of those rack-filling, space-hogging CD’s into a pocket-sized, battery-powered, completely portable and very cool… device. With this device, and a computer, music consumers could also now purchase recordings on-line, from the comfort of their homes, “downloading” their tunes in the formats of “MP3” and “AAC” digital audio files.
How does this work?
Mr. Milner explains: “When music on a CD is converted to MP3 or AAC (the iPod format), between 80 and 90 percent of the music is simply discarded.” This compression is the only way “to really shrink music enough to stuff thousands of songs on an iPod.”
And how does this sound?
Here are two thoughts.
Drew G., a friend and colleague of mine, compares the sound of an MP3 recording to a dry sponge.
To me, an MP3 recording is like a fresh rain puddle on the street: it’s all shiny and pretty on the surface and fun to splash around in. It’s just not a sound that you can immerse yourself in.
Finally, I will leave you with one more quote from Greg Milner and Perfecting Sound Forever.
“High fidelity barely exists today, not so much because recordings don’t attempt to document reality anymore but because the fundamental ethic governing recorded music has been reversed. Presence implies capturing everything. Today, we try to capture as little as possible while fostering the illusion of everything. We don’t want everything. We want just enough.”
There you go.
All of that (and more – I’ve gone on long enough) is why reading this book changed the way I listen to music.
Forever.
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner. Highly Recommended.
Last year, I missed B.B.King’s birthday and ended up writing about it belatedly on Sept. 20, 2010. I entitled that post “One That Got Away.”
This year, I vowed to not miss this very important and historic day in music.
In “One That Got Away,” I wrote:
B.B.King was born Riley B. King on September 16, 1925 in a house on the shores of Blue Lake, midway between Itta Bena and Indianola, Mississippi.
B.B. made his first recordings in 1949 for soon-to-be-out-of-business Bullet Records. His first hit record was “Three O’Clock Blues” on the RPM label. It reached #1 on the R&B charts in 1951 and stayed at #1 for 18 weeks. Between then and 1985, B.B. King put 74 recordings on the Billboard magazine R&B charts.
B.B.King has long been revered as the undisputed “King of the Blues.”
Back in 2010, I also wrote about one of my favorite videos of B.B.King. It came from a performance given on May 11, 1985 in Austin, Texas.
The event was a tribute concert held to honor the late Stevie Ray Vaughn. Organized and directed by Jimmie Vaughn, Stevie’s brother, the nationally-broadcast show brought together a stellar line-up of Blues musicians, including B.B.King, and gave each artist a chance to pay and play their respects to Stevie.
At the end, all of the artists joined together to play “SRV Shuffle,” an instrumental written by Jimmie for the occasion.
To be honest, back in 2010, I hadn’t figured out how to imbed video into my blog posts. But now, I know how!
So, here it is. I hope you’ve got nine minutes and eight seconds to watch and listen to this extraordinary Blues jam session. It is a master class in electric Blues guitar and features the incredible playing of Mr. B.B.King.
Now, if you don’t have nine minutes and eight seconds, here’s a shorter video of just B.B. that I recently discovered. It is from the “extras” of the DVD of the film “The Road To Memphis.” This was one of the films in the 2003 series “Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues.”
Isn’t that amazing?
Happy 86th Birthday, B.B.King.
Thanks for working so hard and so long to keep the Blues alive and well.
Where would the Blues be now if not for you?
It had not been the best of summers.
On Sunday, August 5th, 2001, my mother, Avis Louise Foss Sinclair, died. She was 87 years old. Her passing was not sudden. August 8th, my 48th birthday, had been the day of her funeral and burial.
On September 8th, I’d finished writing a new song: “Round And Round.”
Now it was Tuesday, September 11th, in the morning.
I was at home, in the den, working at the computer. I had the house to myself and was absorbed in proof-reading and putting the finishing touches on the more-than-year-long project of writing my own guitar method book to use in my teaching.
The telephone rang.
There was no greeting. The voice on the other end just asked a question.
“Have you got the news on?”
I barely recognized the voice. It was my father-in-law, calling from Connecticut.
“No,” I replied.
“Turn it on. Any channel.”
“What’s up?”
“They’re flying planes into the World Trade Towers.”
Click.
At the beginning and end of two long journal entries that I wrote on the following Saturday, September 15th, I wrote the words: “Everything has changed.”
Now, as we all know all too well, everything here in America was changed that day. Those of us who lived through September 11th, 2001 will never go back to the way we thought, the way we lived, to the same kind of future that we looked forward to before that day. Never.
We did however, carry on. But as I look back, it seems that we did so at a very slow pace.
Two weeks into the following October, I finally finished my guitar method book. Without fail, every time I hand a brand new copy to a student, I hear the sound of my father-in-law’s voice when I answered the phone that morning.
That new song, even though it was written “before,” soon became my post-9/11 performance piece.
Somehow the words and the melody and the arrangement all seemed to fit how I felt then and still fit, these ten years later, how I feel now.
I hope that in some way, large or small, they will fit for you, too.
“Round And Round” – words, music, guitar and vocals by Eric Sinclair
Everything changed.
Sometimes, in my teaching, one of my guitar students will ask if I can teach him/her how to play a favorite song that he/she has recently been listening to. Sometimes that song is so new or obscure that there is no transcription available either in a songbook, guitar magazine or on the internet. Often, it is a song I’ve never heard before.
All the student has is a recording of the song and a good bit of faith in my ears and expertise to be able, in about 45 minutes, to unlock the mysteries of exactly what is going on musically and guitaristically (?) in this piece of music that he/she is dying to be able to play.
No pressure.
Every now and then there is a song that I want to learn how to play and, again, only have the recording to work with.
Recently, that song was the 1933 Ashley & Foster recording of “Rising Sun Blues.”
Having often listened to, read much and written once (see my September 6, 2010 blog post) about this recording, I started my detective work based on the assumption that on the record, Clarence Ashley played guitar and sang and Gwen Foster played harmonica.
But listening to a piece of music when trying to figure out how to play it is much different from listening to a piece of music for the simple, pure enjoyment of it.
Active listening, as I call it, reveals details that passive listening does not. Active listening requires repeated listenings. What I heard as an active listener of “Rising Sun Blues” told me something that was contrary to my initial assumption: it sounded like there was more than one guitar being played behind the vocal and the harmonica.
Listen for yourself. (Click on the link.)
“Rising Sun Blues” by Ashley & Foster
That opening guitar lick is played on one guitar. But at the very end of it, just before the vocal starts, there is the hint of a low bass note that sounds like it is coming from another guitar.
In the accompaniment to the first verse, right at the word “God,” another low bass note appears.
Then, the instrumental break between the first and second verse clinches the deal. Guitar 1 repeats that opening lick and is obviously accompanied by another guitar, playing Carter-style. Guitar 2 then hits the lowest bass note of all on the first beat of the measure where the second verse begins: “Just fill the glass up to the brim…”
Go back. Listen again, closely.
Did you hear those bass notes?
Well. Who is playing the other guitar?
Foster?
My detective work took a non-musical turn.
In my library, I have a book: Country Music Originals: The Legends and The Lost by Tony Russell. (Great book!) In the book, there is a chapter on the “Carolina Twins,” a duo that recorded for Victor Records from 1928-1929. The members of the duo were David Fletcher and Gwin Foster. (His recordings always use the spelling “Gwen” but his gravestone has it as “Gwin,” according to Mr. Russell.)
And there is a picture.
In between fiddler Gordon Buford and singer Avery Keefer, that is Gwin Foster himself, playing a C chord on his guitar while (thanks to what looks like a homemade, round-the-neck rack) blowing into a harmonica at the same time! Shades of Bob Dylan!
(The photo dates to around 1926 and is credited as being from the “Wayne Martin collection.” Robert Zimmerman was 15 years away from even being born.)
So, that solves the two guitar question.
But it raises another: why didn’t, or couldn’t, the player of Guitar 1 hit that bass note on his guitar?
Well, once upon a time, in my formative years, I had seen a film (probably on PBS) of the sixties Folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary in concert. I noticed that while accompanying Mary, Peter and Paul rarely played the same thing on their respective guitars. One of them would be playing with his guitar capoed up the neck while the other wasn’t using a capo and was playing different but harmonically equivalent chord voicings down in open position.
By the way…
A capo is a device made up of a bar of some sort (covered in hard rubber or slightly soft plastic) that uses the pressure provided by elastic bands or a spring to simultaneously press all six guitar strings against the same fret, as chosen by the player. The vibrating strings are now shorter and thus sound notes of a higher pitch.
So, for instance, a guitar player can put a capo at the fourth fret and finger a C major chord and have it sound like an E major chord. If this first guitarist is playing with another guitarist, this second guitarist can forego the capo and play an E major chord using the open-position fingering. When the guitarists play together, one gets a voicing of the C major chord containing high notes and the other gets a voicing that contains that low, open-sixth-string E bass note. The overall sound is gorgeous.
Now, Ashley & Foster play “Rising Sun Blues” in the key of E major.
Could it be???
Back to the book.
Two pages before the chapter on the Carolina Twins, is the chapter on the “Carolina Tar Heels.”
Guess who was in the Carolina Tar Heels?
And… there’s a picture!
That’s Clarence Ashley, from 1928, thanks to Mr. Russell’s photo collection.
See his left hand? See that white line across the guitar’s fingerboard just above his fingers?
That’s a capo.
And he’s fingering a C major chord!
Mystery solved.
The 1933 recording of “Rising Sun Blues” features the guitar and harmonica work of Gwen/Gwin Foster and the vocals and guitar work of Clarence Ashley.
In 3/4 time and the key of E major.
In case you were wondering.
If you’ve got the time, scroll back up to the link and listen to it again.
Actively.
One of the items on my summer to-do list was to add a couple of 78-rpm records to my collection of 45s, EPs, LPs, reel-to-reel tapes, cassette tapes, CDs and digital downloads.
You can’t have too much music, I always say.
Late last spring, my colleague and friend, Randy, had given me the name of an antique store – Eagle Antiques – on Rte.4 in Northwood, NH that carried 78s and a few of the “Victrola”-style record players as well. It took me until July, but I finally got around to paying Eagle Antiques a visit.
The guy behind the counter, Chuck, took my request and directed me to three dusty wooden boxes tucked in under a hutch on the wall to the right of the front door. One box was filled front to back with the thick black records, none of them in jackets or paper sleeves. The other two boxes held what looked like several very old photo albums; but these turned out to be collections of 78-rpm records, each album containing 8 -10 records, each record in its own protective page.
There were many records to go through and examine, but after much careful consideration I selected three: one for the artist, one for the musical content and one for the record label. At $2.00 apiece, I was thrilled.
Here they are.
At the top of the picture is “Lester Leaps In” b/w (backed with) “Dickie’s Dream” by the Count Basie Kansas City Seven. This is the one I picked for the Vocalion label – I do like Count Basie, too – which is the label that Robert Johnson’s records were released on. This record dates from 1937.
On the bottom left is “Death of Floyd Collins” b/w “Dream of a Miner’s Child” by Vernon Dalhart on the Victor record label. Vernon started his recording career in 1916. In 1924, he recorded his first Country song – “The Wreck of the Old ’97” – and went on to sell an estimated career total of 75,000,000 records! “Death of Floyd Collins” was based on an actual event and was one of Vernon’s hits. This record dates to 1925.
On the bottom right is “My Old Kentucky Home” by Columbia Stellar Quartette b/w “Uncle Josh at a Meeting of the School House Directors” by Cal Stewart. I purchased this one because of the Stephen Foster song. This is the oldest record of the three, dating to 1918.
Judging by the scratches on the label around the center hole, whoever owned this record was more of a fan of Cal Stewart than of Columbia Stellar Quartette.
So, what about the music on these antiques? Well, I don’t own a record player that will play a 78, but thanks to the wonders of the internet, I was able to find and download most of the music my new treasures contained.
If your interested, give a listen to this:
“Dream of a Miner’s Child” by Vernon Dalhart
While going through the 78s, I felt lucky and asked Chuck if he had any Edison cylinders. He said that he didn’t; but after making a phone call, he recommended a place right up the road, run by a friend of his, that did.
So, next stop on Rte.4, west: Fern Eldridge & Friends Antiques, right next door to the Northwood town hall.
Jeff presented two medium-sized covered cardboard boxes, each containing about 35-40 Edison cylinders. All of the cylinders were standing on end, with the label edges pointing up. This made it easy to see the title of the piece and the name of the artist whose performance was etched in the grooves around the circumference of the dark blue, 4 & 1/8″ tall tube.
Again, going by my random criteria from before, I selected two cylinders and paid Jeff his asking price of $5.00 each. More treasures!
Here they are.
The one standing is an Edison Blue Amberol Cylinder with the song “Annie Laurie” as performed by Christine Miller. This cylinder dates to 1913. Christine Miller was a well-known soprano in her time, and a friend of Thomas Edison. I’d been reading about her, Edison and the phonograph (Edison’s invention that cylinders were – and still are – played on) in a fabulous book: Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music by Greg Milner.
The one lying down is an Edison Concert Blue Amberol Cylinder with the Stephen Foster song “Old Folks At Home” as performed by Margaret Keyes. This cylinder dates to 1912.
Again, thanks to the internet, here is Ms. Keyes.
“Old Folks At Home” by Margaret Keyes
Three 78s and two cylinders added to my music collection and one item scratched off my summer to-do list.
That’s what I call a pretty good day.
P.S.: What did you think of those old recordings/performances?
Not the hurricane, the song!
The recording you just listened to – you did click on the link and listen to it, didn’t you?!? – was recorded in New York City, circa August 1943, by Moe Asch. It features Lead Belly singing and playing his 12-string guitar with harmonica accompaniment by Sonny Terry.
This recording of “Irene” was the first commercial release of the song, originally issued in a 78 rpm album entitled Songs by Lead Belly on Asch Records.
It is currently available on the CD Where Did You Sleep Last Night? from Smithsonian/Folkways. This collection is volume 1 of the 3 volume Lead Belly Legacy series of reissues of the Lead Belly/Moe Asch recordings.
sixstr stories 