Through the week of the 20th, the AllMusic Blog will be publishing our editors’ favorite albums of 2009. We’ll be covering well over a dozen genres and styles, from rap to reggae, R&B to electronic, country to Latin, blues to metal, folk to soundtracks, and several points in-between. Right now, on the AllMusic Blog, we take a look at our favorite folk albums of 2009. Be sure to check our upcoming overall feature of new albums and classical releases, AllMusic Loves 2009, and our other 2009 in Review posts.

The Avett Brothers – I and Love and You
 
 
 
 
 
 
James Blackshaw – The Glass Bead Game
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Lonnie Johnson was best known for his tonally beautiful guitar playing, but he was also a fine singer and songwriter, and pretty adept on violin, piano, banjo, mandolin, harmonium, and bass as well. Equally at home in the blues or the jazz world (he worked with artists as raw as Texas Alexander and as polished as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington), Johnson’s life as a professional musician began in the mid 1920s and stretched all the way into the 1960s, when his career was given an autumnal boost during the folk/blues revival.

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Three Lobed Recordings issued a statement over the weekend that Philadelphia-based acoustic guitarist Jack Rose passed away over the weekend of a heart attack; he was 38 years old. Rose was self-taught and made a name for himself originally as the guitarist in the band Pelt in the 1990s, but eventually went his own way. Of the new brand of American acoustic guitarists, Rose was different. He had not only absorbed the styles of players such as Robbie Basho and John Fahey, as have others since the early part of the 21st century, but was obsessed with traditional ragtime, blues, country, and jazz styles from the 1920s through the early 1940s and incorporated them into a physical but fluid style on six-string, 12-string, and lap-steel guitars that also employed formal Indian classical music.

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Elizabeth Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree” is a delightfully whimsical song that carries at its heart a good deal of wisdom. Cotten developed the simple melody of the song from folk sources, and used it as a lullaby when putting her great grandchildren to bed in the evening. She encouraged the kids to think of words for the song, and they all had a hand in its composition. The song seems to be about hardship and poverty, as the lyrics list all manner of things that the singer has pawned, but the chorus (“didn’t we shake sugaree”) is upbeat and bears no trace of regret. To “shake sugaree” is to dance. Jean Ritchie has suggested that “sugaree” is a reference to the Appalachian practice of “sugaring,” of throwing sugar out to “slick up the dance floor.” So the message in “Shake Sugaree” seems to be that no matter how bad things get, you can always dance. Cotten’s original version was the title tune on her second album for Smithsonian Folkways, and the lyric was actually sung by one of her great grandchildren, Brenda Evans, who was then only 12 years old. Cotten performed the song frequently in concert, and its lightly surreal lyrics and gentle, positive tone have made it a popular cover song in folk circles. Taj Mahal, Mary Lou Lord (with Elliot Smith on guitar), Chris Smither, Greg Brown, Faith Nolan, and Po Girl have all recorded versions of “Shake Sugaree.” Fred Neil covered it as “I’ve Got a Secret (Shake Sugaree),” and it is Neil’s rendition that Bob Dylan used when he performed the song on his 1996 and 1997 tours. The Grateful Dead song “Sugaree” is based on Cotten’s original, but is essentially an entirely new piece, in which Sugaree becomes the name of a woman (a hooker, actually). Aside from “Freight Train,” “Shake Sugaree” is Libba Cotten’s best-known song, and its timeless and gentle wisdom make it a wonderfully joyous lullaby, one that feels like it has always been there.

The reclusive and enigmatic Fred Neil really didn’t care one hoot about the machinations of the music business, and while it is tempting to compare him to someone like Nick Drake, whose bouts with depression kept him away from the limelight, it would appear Neil suffered instead from a severe case of personal and creative sanity, an ailment extremely rare in the music industry. And Neil knew how that industry worked very well. He was a Brill Building songwriter for a time. He played sessions (he was a session guitarist on Bobby Darin’s 1958 hit “Dream Lover,” for instance). He certainly knew how the publishing end of it worked, since the publishing royalties from Roy Orbison’s version of Neil’s “Candy Man,” a B-side hit in 1961, gave the unusually frugal Neil the freedom to do as he pleased in both his personal and creative life from that point on.

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The American medicine show came into its own shortly after the Civil War with the rise of so-called patent medicines and the almost complete lack of regulations concerning the ingredients that went into them, and any number of noxious tonics, elixirs, and nostrums with trumpeted healing powers were hawked by silver-tongued pitch doctors to the audiences who flocked to see the various acrobats, dancers, fire-eaters, snake handlers, comedians, and musicians who entertained at these free extravaganzas. As a cost efficient way of merging entertainment with merchandising (and where manufacturing meant mixing ingredients in a bathtub), these medicine shows successfully traveled the so-called “kerosene circuit” of rural and small-town America until the dawn of the 20th Century, when the rise of radio and movies and the passage of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act combined to render them obsolete. The medicine show blueprint of offering free entertainment to attract audiences and then using intermissions to push products on them has hardly gone away, however, and is still the driving force behind radio and television in the 21st Century, and it’s the basic elixir for commerce all over the internet, too. The musicians working these colorful traveling medicine shows were professionals, at least professional enough to leave their home communities and take to the road, and luckily several of these musicians were still active in the 1920s and early 1930s when the fledgling recording industry was just getting off the ground, and numerous commercial 78s by former medicine show entertainers were issued in the prewar era.

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We were deeply saddened to learn that Scottish songwriter, guitarist, and true legend John Martyn passed away early on January 29, only weeks after being awarded Great Britain’s OBE (Order of the British Empire) — not bad for a rebellious lifelong Scotsman. His website announced his death with the words: “With heavy heart and an unbearable sense of loss we must announce that John died this morning.” As of this writing, the cause of that death is unknown but it hardly matters. What does is that in place of that gruff, slurring, dark, smoky voice and stunning guitar playing completely of his own design, is the silence, the gap, the void, the damn black hole in life that he filled by singing those unbearably emotional songs of his.

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Priscilla Ahn – A Good Day
 
 
 
 
 
 
Joan Baez – Day After Tomorrow
 
 
 
 
 
 
James Blackshaw – Litany of Echoes
 
 
 
 
 
 
Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago
 
 
 
 
 
 
Paul Clayton – Sings Homemade Songs and Ballads/Folk Singer!
 
 
 
 
 
 
Eliza Gilkyson – Beautiful World
 
 
 
 
 
 
Jolie Holland – The Living and the Dead
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Horse Flies – Until the Ocean
 
 
 
 
 
 
The Kingston Trio – Once Upon a Time
 
 
 
 
 
 
Kathy Mattea – Coal
 
 
 
 
 
 
Pete Molinari – A Virtual Landslide
 
 
 
 
 
 
Morley – Seen
 
 
 
 
 
 
Pete Seeger – At 89
 
 
 
 
 
 
Otis Taylor – Recapturing the Banjo
 
 
 
 
 
 
Vetiver – Thing of the Past
 
 
 
 
 
 
James Yorkston – When the Haar Rolls In
 
 
 
 
 
 
Various Artists – The Golden Age of American Popular Music: The Folk Hits
 
 
 
 
 
 

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.

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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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Some of Bumbershoot’s most rewarding and least known-about shows took place in the KEXP Music Lounge. A small indoor venue where the radio station hosted free-form broadcasts and performances by some of the artists doing larger performances later in the festival, the Music Lounge was the perfect place to get an intimate, acoustically perfect listening experience, and Bert Jansch was one of the ideal artists for the location.

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