Archive for the ‘ Folk ’ Category

Bobbie Gentry “The Delta Sweete”

| Americana,Concept Albums,Country Rock,Folk

With its picture of the gorgeous Bobbie Gentry superimposed in monochrome over a falling down shack, The Delta Sweete promises the peculiarly Southern music that Gentry was known for. The Delta Sweete is Bobbie Gentry’s second album, coming on the heels of the tremendous success of one of the most memorable, if bizarre, hits of the 1960s, “Ode to Billy Joe.”

A loosely-formed concept album of sorts, Delta further explores the vagaries of the Mississippi Delta country  of “Ode to Billy Joe.”  Here, Gentry evokes the county fairs and family reunions that would have been events during Gentry’s girlhood, along with the small, everyday moments that made “Ode to Billy Joe” such a classic.

“Okolona River Bottom Band,” a song about a southern talent show, is a veritable travelogue of the Mississippi Delta area, delivered in the husky voice that’s Gentry’s trademark.  It sounds like something from another time, or at least a lost track from one of the Band’s early albums.

“Reunion” is a child’s experience at that most Southern of traditions, the family reunion, complete with gossip, hair pulling, and a finger stuck in a Coke bottle.

Songs like “Penduli Pendulum,” “Courtyard,” and “Jessye’ Lizabeth” don’t lyrically reference the Delta country, but are musically evocative of the South,  from the dog days rhythm of “Penduli Pendulum” and the folk-song like structure of “Courtyard” and “Jessye’ Lizabeth.”

“Sermon,” “Louisiana Man,” and “Tobacco Road” are well-known covers, but are of a piece with the rest of the album, referencing the hellfire and brimstone of a country church service and the hand-to-mouth existence of sharecroppers and trappers.

The strength of The Delta Sweete makes the case for Bobbie Gentry as one of the most underrated and largely forgotten songwriters of the late 1960s-early 1970s era.  Gentry’s episodic lyrics, referential of the South of her girlhood, married to the simple, often melancholic melodies of her music are as arresting today as when they were released, yet most of her catalogue is out-of-print in the U.S.  Even “Ode to Billy Joe,” in its ubiquitousness, is often dismissed as a one-hit-wonder or novelty song.

If you appreciated the husky vocals or the unforgettable lyrics of “Ode to Billy Joe,” The Delta Sweete is worth looking for.

“Okolona River Bottom Band”

:) Original Vinyl | 1968 | Capitol | search ebay ]
;) MP3 Album | download here ]
8-) Spotify link | listen ]

Fotheringay (self-titled)

| Folk

In 1970, Sandy Denny’s departure from British Folk heroes Fairport Convention brought us Fotheringay, named after Denny’s original composition “Fotheringay” (about Fotheringay Castle), which appeared on Fairport Convention’s 1969 album What We Did on Our Holidays. Two former members of Eclection (Trevor Lucas, who would become Denny’s future husband, and Gerry Conway), and two former members of Poet and the One Man Band (Pat Donaldson and Jerry Donahue) completed the line-up. The newly formed group was ready to head in to the studio, and give us their first (and long believed to be) only album. Fotheringay has become recognized as a lost British folk rock treasure.

Of course, Sandy Denny’s voice is immaculate and flows ever so sweetly. “Nothing More,” track one, immediately sets the mood for the album, and features some of Denny’s finest vocals. This definitely sounds like a woman who knows all about pain, and offers her fellow mankind the best possible advice to move on from the past. Self-aware, yet sensitive, this is classic Sandy Denny. But believe me, the album just keeps getting better. The second track, “The Sea,” is absolutely stunning, a song that always gets me choked up a bit and gives me goosebumps. Let’s not forget to mention the musical quality here, either. For a newly formed and fresh band, they sound as though they’re completely comfortable with each other and have been jamming for years. The group knew exactly what they were doing.

Trevor Lucas takes the mic for “The Ballad Of Ned Kelly,” “Peace In The End,” a positively killer cover of Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Way I Feel,” and an almost equally impressive cover of Bob Dylan’s “Too Much Of Nothing.” I’ve always loved Lucas’ vocals on this album. He has a country-rock leaning to his voice, and I instantly dug it right from the start. The album closes with the truly beautiful traditional “Banks Of The Nile,” a perfect ending to a nearly perfect album.

I kept my favorite track for last. “The Pond and the Stream” affected me in a pretty personal way. In fact, when I first got my hands on a copy of this album, I played that one song five times in a row. Lyrically and musically, it hits me pretty hard. I’ve since held it in the same high regard as classic Denny-era Fairport songs such as “Genesis Hall” and the immortal “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?”

Sadly, Fotheringay split in January of 1971, right while they were in the middle of recording tracks for their second album. Some of these songs managed to make it on to Denny’s debut in ’71, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens. Lucas, Donahue, and Conway later resurfaced in the “new” Fairport Convention in 1972 for the album Rosie, which also contained some Fotheringay songs. In 2007, Donahue completed the abandoned album by using takes never-before-heard from the original tapes. Fotheringay 2 was finally released in 2008, and is also recommended.

I cannot say enough about this album. A definite “desert island disc” for me, it has brought me a lot of listening pleasure for quite some time. It may also become one of your favorite discs to spin on a cold winter’s night. Highly recommended.

“The Sea”

:) Original vinyl | 1970 | Island/A&M | search ebay ]
:D CD Reissue | 2004 | Fledg’ling UK | buy here ]

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band (self-titled)

| Americana,Classic Rock,Folk

The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is perhaps best known for helping to bridge the gap between the older generation of American folk musicians coming out of the 1940s and 1950s, and the rock and roll youth of the 1960s. Their seminal double record Will the Circle Be Unbroken presented the band alongside a number of country and bluegrass luminaries such as Maybelle Carter and Roy Acuff, and more or less proved that American musical traditions could span the generation gap.

Listeners dropping the needle on the Dirt Band’s self-titled debut for the first time may be taken aback at how far removed the record sounds from the group’s later material. Indeed, the opening cut Buy For Me the Rain is firmly in the west coast folk-rock tradition. The chiming guitars and soaring orchestral flourishes may make it clear as to how this tune landed the Dirt Band their first American chart hit, but they also spotlight the dissimilarity between the 1967 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and its later incarnations. The band here is more Beatle boots than cowboy boots, despite sporadic country and bluegrass touches. Jug band roots certainly make themselves clear on the second song, Euphoria, with funky instrumentation continuing into Jackson Browne’s Melissa. Browne had actually been a founding member of the Dirt Band before splitting to pursue a solo career, and though he does not appear on any of their records, a number of his songs remained in the Dirt Band’s repertoire.

In fact, it is another Browne composition that closes the first side of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and provides the record with its second highlight. Banjo and harpsichord drive Holding, yet another slice of folk rock featuring strong harmonies. Song To Jutta takes the mood into more ominous territory, with its plucky guitar picking acting as a weird foil to the chain gang beat and the slow, monotonous vocal. It’s a rather unnatural mood for the Dirt Band, but they’re quick to catch on and the next couple of cuts are back in the ole jug band tradition again. Mississippi John Hurt’s Candy Man receives a great arrangement, comparable to that of the Rising Sons, while the banjo comes back out for Dismal Swamp, a rollicking breakdown that calls together bluegrass instrumentation and a rock and roll beat. There is a lot going on during the course of this record, and if it were not for the band’s tendency to lean towards novelty numbers such as the snappy Crazy Words, Crazy Tune, it may have established them as pioneers in American music far before Will the Circle Be Unbroken.

Though The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band is currently out of print in its complete form, about half of the tracks found their way onto a 1970 compilation entitled Pure Dirt, which is available on compact disc from Beat Goes On Records. This album is a rather weird combination of tracks off of The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Dirt Band’s second release, Ricochet. As to why someone chose to reissue this instead of the original records¦well, it’s beyond me, but fortunately original copies are still quite easy to find.

“Holding”

:) Original Vinyl | 1967 | Liberty Records | search ebay ]

Tony, Caro and John “All on the First Day”

| Folk,Psych

A couple decades before the city of Derby in the rural midlands of England was awarded city status by Queen Elizabeth II (1977), residents Tony Doré and John Clark had become boon companions at the tender age of 11. In this gentle and eminently civil environment they quickly began to play music together in various rock bands or “beat groups” as they were then called, eventually stepping up to the folk club circuit in the surrounding boroughs of Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Yorkshire.

It is this same bucolic atmosphere of the mid-60’s folk scene in the UK with its competing elements of traditional folk and experimentation that gave rise to phenomena like the Incredible String Band, an admitted inspiration to friends, and in Doré and Clark’s own words “We were just ‘being there'”. After the summer of love the pair temporarily parted company to attend university, Doré in London and Clark in Sheffield. It is in London that Tony and Caro met and began gigging university folk clubs together. After graduation in ’70 John moved into Tony and Caro’s London flat turned sunny commune complete with Zinnias, Dahlias, homemade candles and herbal tea.

It was here that the three started recording the songs that Doré was writing onto an extremely low-tech Ferrograph tape recorder with track-to-track capabilities. The painful sounding process that required a person to play over a pre-recorded backing track with a simultaneous mixdown did not forgive any mistakes. However it is precisely this aspect that lends the recording of “All In One Day” its considerable home-spun appeal. The trio pressed 100 vinyl copies through Eden Studios of south London in ’72 that quickly sold at their shows. There are now a number of reissues available on Gaarden and Shadoks.

The music on “All In One Day” radiates a beguiling charm and simplicity throughout. The arrangements are unpretentious but not unadorned, boasting of delightful vocal harmonies, interesting instrumentation like mandolin and flageolet, and inventive musicianship for a folk album like the subtle use of bass-wah and low-key fuzz. Tony’s voice is clear and reminiscent of early acoustic Bowie, while his wife’s hazily glowing voice on sentimental numbers like “Waltz for a Spaniel” recalls Vashti Bunyan.

While there is definitely an unity of aesthetic on “All In One Day”, the album is eclectic in its musical style, ranging from the unabashedly romantic “Waltz for a Spaniel” to the personally fractured and sardonic “There Are No Greater Heroes” and on to the humorous and playful “Don’t Sing This Song” in total stride. “Sniggylug” is the cut that seems the most out of step with the rest of the album, though no less pleasant with its guitar work reminiscent of modern North African Tuareg and its tongue-in-cheek 6/8 time jazz sensibilities. “Eclipse of the Moon” is a psyche folk gem with its surreal dreamscape lyrics, chilly reverbed slide guitar, playful mouth harp, tasteful fuzz guitar and trippy delayed vocal decrescendo at the end. It is impressive that they were able to include relatively sophisticated studio tricks like the backwards guitar and the sounds of seabirds on tracks like “Sargasso Sea”, a dark metaphorical sea chantey with allusions to William Blake and Coleridge.

After the release of “All In One Day”, the trio added musicians here and there and started playing under the moniker “Forever and Ever”, an irony however in that they never released another album and were eventually swallowed by time. The overall feel of “All In One Day” is relaxed though at times bittersweet and poignant, almost as if Doré unconsciously realized that by the early 70s something precious had come and gone; the Zinnia’s and Dahlia’s are now dried and pressed into the volume of Shelly’s poems on the mantle, the candles are burnt, but the music of Tony, Caro and John speaks to us still in our comfy chairs by the hearth.

“Eclipse Of The Moon”

:D CD Reissue | 2002 | Shadoks | buy here ]
:) Original Vinyl | 1972 | UK | search ebay ]
:) Vinyl Reissue | 2010 | Gaarden Records | buy here ]
8-) Spotify link | listen ]

Michaelangelo “One Voice Many”

| Baroque,Folk,Psych

The use of the humble autoharp in rock may come as a surprise. Isn’t that the triangular doodad your elementary school teacher used to pull out of the cupboard to strum along to class sing-a-longs of Go Tell Aunt Rhody? And why take an instrument specifically designed for simplicity and bust a gut to play complicated stuff on it? Nevertheless, several intriguing instances of its use have come to light on rare albums from the late sixties and early seventies.

A zither is a small harp with its strings stretched across its soundbox; it has a beautiful, ethereal ringing sound, but is fiendishly difficult to play. To simplify matters, someone came up with the idea of spring-loaded bars that could be pressed down on to the strings so that felt pads under each bar deadened all the strings except those needed to sound a certain chord. Thus the auto-harp was born, and bingo “ a simple rhythm instrument with from 3 to 21 chords, each available at the press of a button. Almost immediately other folks started working out how to put all the complexity back into the autoharp by using it for playing melodies, and some of those Appalachian guys got pretty good at this despite the instrument’s patent unsuitability for this purpose. Then a genial sixties folksinger called John Sebastian customised his harp with an electric pickup, and rock autoharp was born. Sebastian’s playing was fairly limited, but a certain Billy Miller developed an astonishing electric autoharp technique with his late sixties Texas psych outfit, Cold Sun.

Classically-trained pianist and autoharp enthusiast Angel Petersen probably never heard of Billy Miller, but she certainly caught John Sebastian toting his harp around the Village and forthwith obtained a similar electric 15-bar model, making it the centrepiece of the mildly psychedelic folk-rock combo she christened Michaelangelo, after the name she’d already given her harp. In 1971 Michaelangelo (the group) came to the notice of Columbia Records through a fortuitous meeting with electronic music producer Rachel Elkind and her partner, the synthesiser genius Wendy Carlos of Switched-On Bach fame. An album, One Voice Many, was cut in New York with Elkind and Carlos producing, and the band’s major label future should have been assured. However, the story goes that Columbia president Clive Davis was perpetually at loggerheads with Elkind and conspired to have the album suppressed. It was released but received absolutely no record label backup and quickly disappeared. Dispirited, the band dissolved soon afterwards and the album became a collector’s rarity until reissued on CD almost forty years later.

Although likely to be described in current-day reviews as Acid Folk, One Voice Many’s signature sound is predominantly folk-Baroque, with the autoharp frequently sounding more like a harpsichord than the Fender Rhodes-like tone of Billy Miller, particularly on the Bach-influenced instrumentals Take It Bach and 300 Watt Music Box. Elsewhere, it sounds not unlike a Farfisa organ. Either way, there’s nothing remotely schoolmarmish about Petersen’s virtuoso playing. The picture of the band on the cover shows an earnest, studious-looking quartet, and the carefully-arranged music within generally bears this out, though it’s by no means sombre and there are some rocking and even exhilarating touches. The autoharp’s main foil is Steve Bohn’s clean, countrified electric guitar, and the two frontline players interweave their lines exquisitely within the four instrumental numbers. On the six songs, Petersen’s and Bohn’s respective lead vocals are workmanlike rather than attention-grabbing, but when harmonised and multi-tracked they produce a breezy, floating Harpers Bizarre-style texture. The highlights for me are the opening funky country-rocker West, the tinkling, twinkling 300 Watt Music Box, the pulsating generation-gap rocker Son (We’ve Kept The Room Just The Way You Left It) and the shameless sunshine pop of Okay with its whistled accompaniment. Avoid the 2007 Fallout bootleg and go for the 2009 Rev-Ola licensed pressing.

“Son (We’ve Kept the Room Just the Way You Left It)”

:D CD Reissue | 2009 | Revola | buy here ]
:) Original Vinyl | 1971 | Columbia | search ebay ]

PODCAST 24 Roots Rock

| Americana,Country Rock,Folk,Podcast

THE RISING STORM

Running Time: 54:03 | File Size 74 MB
Download: .mp3
To subscribe to this podcast: https://therisingstorm.net/podcast.xml [?]

1.  Go and Say Goodbye – Buffalo Springfield (1966)

2.  The Lost World – Peter Grudzien (1960’s)

3.  Eight Days A Week – Spur (1969/1970)

4.  Make You Mine – Fingletoad, Strange and Siho (1970)

5.  Cold, Cold World – Blaze Foley (1975-1978-)

6.  Ain’t No Use – Moby Grape (1967)

7.  Goin’ Down To Texas – Moby Grape (1971)

8.  You Been Cheatin’ On Me Honey – Riley (1971)

9.  You Just May Be The One – The Monkees (1967)

10.  Innocence Song – Cowboy (1971)

11.  Going To Nevada – Bluebird (1970)

12.  Here Comes The Blues Again – Delbert McClinton and Glen Clark (1972)

13.  The Seventh Son – Dion (1965)

14.  You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere – Bob Dylan and The Band (1967)

15.  Just Me And Her – Whistler, Chauncer, Detroit And Greenhill (1968-)

16.  Last One Asleep – Wilson McKinley (1969)

17.  Rat Faced Dog – Little Feat (1970)

18.  Faithless Lady – Cambridge (1977)

Luke Gibson “Another Perfect Day”

| Americana,Classic Rock,Country Rock,Folk

Along with Bruce Cockburn’s debut, Another Perfect Day was one of True North’s first releases in 1971/1972.  Prior to this disc, Luke Gibson fronted Luke and the Apostles, a legendary garage blues group who released an excellent punker in 1967 titled “Been Burnt.”   From here, Gibson went on to play in Kensington Market, a psych pop group who released two intriguing albums in the late 60’s (Aardvark is a great psych pop effort).  Disagreements and drug abuse killed off the Kensington Market.  From here, Gibson revived the Apostles once more in 1970, releasing another good hard rock 45 titled “You Make Me High.”  It was a popular record for the time but not enough to change the struggling group’s fortunes, so Gibson decided to embark on a solo career.

Listeners must’ve been shocked when they heard Another Perfect Day. The LP isn’t the psych, garage, or hardrock that colored Gibson’s past records.  The vocals are informed by hardrock and country-rock rather than folk or honky tonk.  This gives the music a sparse but ballsy quality – it’s what makes Another Perfect Day so unique.  Some tracks like “See You Again” and “All Day Rain” have electric guitars but for the most part this record is quiet acoustic music.  “Full Moon Rider” one of the album’s key tracks, is a riveting piece of music that features fiddle, superb vocals and a hard rocking ambience.  Other highlights are “Lobo”, a beautiful heartfelt country tune, the world weary title track and the trippy acoustic harpsichord laced gem “Angel.”  Great vocal performances, accomplished musicianship, a good backwoods vibe and strong songwriting make this one of the best discs I’ve heard in quite some time.  Long thought of as one of the best singer songwriter albums to come out of Canada, Another Perfect Day is the real deal – authentic stuff.

“Angel”

:D CD Reissue | 2010 | True North |  buy at true north | amazon ]
8-) Spotify link | listen ]

Koerner, Ray And Glover “Lots More Blues, Rags And Hollers”

| Americana,Folk,RnB

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but when white musicians decided to copy and adapt
black popular music forms in the nineteen-fifties and early sixties the result was all too often insipid,
sanitised shades of what had been urgent, emotive works. Fortunately there were exceptions:
Koerner, Ray And Glover may have been to all intents and purposes a white Sonny Terry And
Brownie McGee, but their version of the acoustic blues and plantation folk music was no less brash,
enthusiastic and full of energy than that of Sonny and Brownie.

Spider John Koerner, whose nickname allegedly derived from his being built like a harvestman
and walking like one, was an early reviver of the acoustic country blues and acapella field hollers
largely abandoned by the classic black bluesmen when they moved north from the Delta and
embraced electricity. Adeptly picking his weapon of choice, a seven-string non-resonator National
with an octave G string, and singing in a clear, powerful, distinctly non-black voice, engineering
student Koerner developed his catalogue of Leadbelly and similar covers and upbeat, lyrically witty
originals in the coffee houses around the University of Minnesota, frequently performing alongside
a teenage Bob Dylan (who compliments Koerner in Chronicles, Volume One). Encountering fellow
undergrads Snaker Dave Ray, who fingered a rare and mean Martin twelve-string and sang like
Muddy Waters, and Tony Little Sun Glover, a then unusual white exponent of blues harmonica, the
trio became official in time to benefit from the explosion of interest in authentic white folk music
around 1962.

Their first album, Blues, Rags And Hollers, appeared in a limited vanity run in June 1963 and was
quickly snapped up by Elektra for national distribution. The threesome had taped forty songs in one
twelve-hour session, recording as individuals, as duos (either Koerner or Ray with Glover) and just
occasionally as a trio, and when these were trimmed to twenty the resulting record was raw, gutsy,
one-take, down-home acoustic music, its jug-band feel propelled by Koerner’s favoured percussion
instrument, his foot, crisply recorded with plenty of reverb. The second album, Lots More Blues,
Rags And Hollers, appeared a year later. After a third and final collection, The Return Of, in 1965,
the group bowed to the inevitable decline in the popularity of unamplified folk music following the
British Invasion and went their separate ways.

It’s been said that the intensity of Lots More is rather less than that of the debut, but to my ears
the record displays more mature musicianship, classier songs and considerably more originality
in the performances, and thus it’s my preferred platter. Outstanding are Koerner’s solo Whomp
Bom which highlights his outstanding seven-string dexterity and distinctive vocal; the cover of
Muddy’s Honey Bee in which Glover’s buzzing, stinging harp wonderfully complements Ray’s
relaxed vocal and throbbing guitar; and Fine Soft Land on which Ray picks an astonishing riff with
a bottleneck on his twelve-string (only Leo Kottke comes close). Both albums are currently available
individually, augmented with bonus tracks, or as a twofer without the extras. The latter includes a
top-quality insert booklet with the original extensive liner notes plus a fine new retrospective.

Unexpectedly, I recently discovered in a charity shop a private-label reunion album the three players
had cut in 1996: One Foot In The Groove. The style hasn’t changed much; the heads are greyer,
the voices hoarser, but the enthusiasm is still audible in the songs and the twelve-strings chime as
sweetly as ever.

“Honey Bee”

:D CD Reissue | 1999 | Red House | order here ]
:) Original Issue | 1964 | Elektra | search ebay ]
;) MP3 Album | download here ]

Ted Lucas “The Om Album”

| Folk,Psych

Yoga Records, in collaboration with Riverman, are hitting it out of the park in their first year. It seems a shame I haven’t heard this record before, as it’s an easy new favorite. Ted Lucas got his start playing in a Detroit folk revival band called The Spike-Drivers, eventually leaving to form other groups The Misty Wizards, Horny Toads, and the Boogie Disease. While he was a respected figure in Michigan’s folk and rock scene, his self-titled solo album (recorded largely in his attic studio during 1974) failed to break beyond local recognition.

The promo sticker nails the sound, placing Ted Lucas next to legends John Fahey, Nick Drake, and Skip Spence. It’s a right on comparison when you hear what this album has to offer. Each side of the record is plainly its own thing; Side A being a suite of six perfectly sweet folk originals and Side B containing an instrumental, an extended blues jam, and an 8-minute raga. The first three tracks have melodies that seamlessly weave in your head on first or second listen. “I’ll Find A Way” is the sleeper knockout, tucking in after the record’s gorgeous three song opener: “Plain & Sane & Simple Melody,” “It’s So Easy,” and “Now That I Know.” These tunes are so easy to love and will have no trouble lodging comfortably in your head. I can’t contain how much I dig the side A closer “It Is So Nice To Get Stoned,” especially when “Sonny Boy Blues” on side B warns “you better stop drinking that wine.” Arrangements are sparse, an acoustic guitar gracefully ornamented with sitar drones (Lucas played uncredited sitar on the Tempations’ “Psychedelic Shack”) and delicate electric fingerpicking, with some auto-harp and tasteful percussion elsewhere. For a lost psych-folk record, the sound is remarkably current.

Comes in a faithfully reproduced LP-style package, with a facsimile of the original insert, new liners and a save-worthy protective cover. Yoga just might make the CD format cool again! Even so, I might have to spring for the vinyl. The insert, by the way, is wonderful, showcasing a badass t-shirt with Stanley Mouse’s cover design and contains the lyrics and chords to the songs on the first side. Got to be one of the best reissues of the year.

“It Is So Nice To Get Stoned”

:D CD Reissue | Yoga/Riverman | at amazon ]
:) Vinyl Reissue | Yoga/Riverman | at amazon ]

Fairport Convention “Full House”

| Classic Rock,Folk

Full House marked the consolidation of Fairport’s transition from West Coast-styled, hallucinogenics-
influenced outfit “ a British Jefferson Airplane, perhaps – to purveyors of rocked-up, electrified
British traditional folk, a courageous move tentatively started with the inclusion of A Sailor’s Life
on Unhalfbricking and triumphantly completed on Liege And Lief, perhaps the most influential and
important UK rock album to appear since Sergeant Pepper. But Fairport had then lost arguably its
two most important contributors, founder and direction-setter Ashley Hutchings and crystal-voiced
frontwoman Sandy Denny. New bassist Dave Pegg proved a valuable acquisition with his rocky style,
but the other members had to close ranks and take on the vocal chores themselves. They did so,
with an initial naïvité that retrospectively evinces considerable charm, Richard Thompson and Dave
Swarbrick proving to have distinctively different rural vocal deliveries and Simon Nicol reluctantly
airing a melodious tenor that would eventually see him become the band’s leading voice.

The other element that newly marks Full House out is the humour and looseness which its illustrious
predecessor lacked. With talented but earnest female vocalist Denny no longer having to be
accommodated and adulated, the boys were free to have some fun, and it comes across in these
grooves, notwithstanding the doomy themes of some of the lyrics: songs about sexual exploitation,
sin and death can be funky, as Doctor Of Physick, Sloth and Sir Patrick Spens show. I recall
seeing this line-up play the Bath Festival Of Blues And Progressive Music at Shepton Mallet in 1970,
and the high jinks on stage would not have been on display a year earlier.

Walk Awhile is a wonderfully swinging opener, with all three lead vocalists taking turns at the
verses and fine, fiery harmony and octave work between Thompson’s guitar and Swarbrick’s
violin. Sloth is an ominous, downbeat death march that builds to an almost unbearable tension in
the lengthy instrumental break as Thommo’s edgy Strat and Swarb’s compressed, wailing fiddle duke
it out in opposite stereo channels: perhaps the best instrumental work the band ever produced. The
two cheerful jig medleys offer a variety of familiar and little-known traditional tunes, forefronting
Swarb’s and Peggy’s duelling mandolins on Flatback Caper and all four string players on Dirty
Linen. Spens is a gloriously disrespectful, steady-rollin’ take on that revered Scottish traditional
ditty, while Nicol’s amplified dulcimer provides the backbone for that country’s mournful anthem
for the dead, Flowers Of The Forest. The Island CD re-release offers a number of bonus tracks,
including the unnecessarily lugubrious Poor Will & The Jolly Hangman that had been removed
(probably wisely) from the original pressing at the last moment at the insistence of its writer,
Thompson, and the brief but excellent non-album single Now Be Thankful, one of the band’s
evergreens.

Full House is arguably Fairport’s last really great album, its release being followed by the departure
of Thompson for a solo career and his replacement by Jerry Donohue, whose elegant Nashville style
prefaced a gentle slide in the direction of country rock. Henceforth Swarbrick would take over the
band’s direction as the quality gradually declined until his own departure, when Nicol as the last-
standing original member would take the reins. After countless further line-up changes and albums
the band remains extant and much-loved to this day, with its annual outdoor reunion at Cropredy in
Oxfordshire attracting swarms of the faithful.

“Walk Awhile”

:D CD Reissue | 2001 | Island | buy at amazon ]
:) Original Vinyl | 1970 | Island | search ebay ]