Kudos to The New Yorker for delivering the most deserved (and most surprising) magazine feature of recent years. In its April 28th issue, Burghard Bilger writes about searching for real folk music in an age when no area in America is so remote that it remains untouched by the broad culture. (It stands to reason that the oddest and most interesting folk music is created in a cultural vacuum.) Bilger does so partly by relating the histories of two of folk music’s biggest fans nowadays — Dust-To-Digital label founder Lance Ledbetter and field-recording expert Art Rosenbaum. –>

Singer and songwriter John Stewart passed away on Saturday, January 19, 2008. Stewart died in the same San Diego hospital where he had been born. While the obits have been plentiful, and the big songs and albums cited, I decided to look into the long career of Stewart as a songwriter, at what he brought, at the right time, to a thoroughly confused America, one embroiled in a foreign war, and one that had lost four of its most visionary leaders in John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Bobby Kennedy. Stewart traveled extensively with the younger Kennedy on his campaign trail. Along with singing partner — and later wife — Buffy Ford, they played on flatbed trucks, from the backs of trains, on stages at rallies. Stewart recorded an album in 1986 called The Last Campaign and filled it with songs written during and about that time.

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It’s odd to say that a singer/songwriter with four Top 10 singles and four Top 10 albums each, along with a stack of gold and platinum records, slipped through the cracks, but in an odd way Dan Fogelberg — who died on December 16 after a three-year struggle with prostate cancer — was often taken for granted. His biggest hit was “Longer,” a love song so sweet it naturally fit upon soft-rock radio in 1980, but its very success, along with several smooth successors in the early ‘80s, camouflaged Fogelberg’s genuine folky roots, the years he spent honing his craft, both as a studio musician and as a writer, as his first album Home Free appeared in 1972, nearly a decade before his greatest popularity. Those hits pegged him among some singer/songwriter afficianados as too soft, too mainstream, yet his music was so song-oriented — his albums sounding so clean, pure, and tasteful — that he never received the kind of revival or re-evaluation that some of his peers did, the way that Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald, and Hall & Oates were sampled and embraced by the Yacht Rock contingent.

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November is a transitional month where the trees are stark and bare, all your pagan candy is either eaten or stale, and you’re basically sitting on the couch watching Fox’s The Next Great American Band (I can’t be the only one!) and awaiting the impending snow squalls of December. There weren’t many standout releases that caught my ear, but here’s a few that may just good enough to settle in for a long winter’s nap.

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“The Cuckoo” began as an old British folk song about false-hearted love, but by the time it hit America and settled into the Appalachians, it had acquired enough floating verses to turn it into a riddle song full of African-American call-and-response lines, gambling and horse racing references, romantic misfortunes, a vague sense of impending disaster, and a general mournful cast. It had also become a completely American song with its key line about how the cuckoo “never hollers ‘coo coo’ until the 4th day of July.” Given the fact that there are no parasitic cuckoos in America (the European cuckoo leaves its eggs in another bird’s nest, making it a perfect symbol for false-hearted love), it all adds up to a curious little story about a song that is ultimately much greater than the sum of its parts.

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