Wildwood Flowering in 2024

 I just saw a comment on the 1928 recording of Wildwood Flower by the Carter Family that set me off researching so much that I have to share the results here to justify the time I spent in "SecondHandSongs.com" "Discogs.com" and "YouTube.com" -- all amazing resources!

The commenter who got my attention said they always thought the song was from the 1960s. (It's actually from the 1860s, as someone pointed out in the same discussion.)

My (expanded) reply:

It definitely "came back" in the early 1960s!

The New Lost City Ramblers and Maybelle Carter did it at a Newport Folk Festival, Flatt & Scruggs did it at Carnegie Hall, the Stanley Brothers and a dozen others (even Duane Eddy's twangy electric guitar!) recorded it, and almost every high school and college student learning to play "folk guitar" struggled with Maybelle's "Carter scratch" bass-and-chord thumb-pick guitar style.

(Search YouTube for her 1961 Grand Ol' Opry live video with closeups.)

Some learned the tune with different lyrics -- Woody Guthrie's c.1942 song, "The Sinking of the Reuben James," about the first U.S. ship sunk in World War II. The song was brought back c. 1960 in thousands of concerts and coffee house singalongs by Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio and more.

And then there was the pot-farming parody, "Wildwood Weed"... Even the NLCR did that one in concert, minus Maybelle! (But with a cute reference by Mike Seeger to his brother Pete.) Author credits for the parody apparently belong to Texas songwriter and radio host Don Bowman around 1964. Fascinating that YouTube has all of these versions.

I'll put a couple of YouTube videos here if the computer doesn't crash, then get on with my day...

Remembering Josh White

Happy birthday to Josh White!
(February 11, 1914 – September 5, 1969)
I saw him on the old ABC Hootenanny TV show, and soon scraped together the price of a couple of his LPs. (Ones whose album covers weren't too risque to bring into the house; it was years before I got "Empty bed blues," and I don't think I ever let my mother see it.)
I also bought a 191-page Josh White Song Book to show my guitar teacher, who had started me on classical lessons because my first guitar had nylon strings. (Nylon was recommended by the Oscar Brand book I had started teaching myself out of a year earlier. I got a new guitar, with steel strings that Christmas after convincing my parents I was going to stick with it more than I had with the accordion a few years earlier. It was a long time before I could afford a Martin OO 21 like the one Josh played on his albums, but I got it eventually.)
Unfortunately, Josh's book wasn't a guitar instruction book. The $2.95 volume (pricey in 1963; my first Dylan songbook was $1.95) featured piano transcriptions of the songs, not his original guitar arrangements. 
I did learn something about music watching my teacher try to work things back to the guitar at my novice level. And I learned other things from the text by Robert Shelton, folk music critic at the New York Times (yes, that was a job then!), who provided song commentaries and a biography of Josh.
It wasn't as thorough as Elijah Wald's "Josh White, Society Blues" several decades later, but it made me feel like a folk blues insider... and, come to think of it, those song book introductory chapters were probably the only biography of a black person that I read in high school, two years before Alex Haley published "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings shared a link to a Spotify playlist with a birthday post today, inspiring my reminiscence..

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157545963179815&id=10367554814

Rather than using Facebook to share a Spotify playlist, why doesn't Smithsonian Folkways just share a link to its own web page that sells a classic Josh White album, and lets you download its 14-page LP size booklet as a free PDF? I hope it's because Folkways makes some money from Spotify. Curiously, when I tried to post that question to the Smithsonian account on Facebook, Facebook marked my comment as spam! That reminded me to put my thoughts out here on the more open web, not just in Facebook's controlled space.

https://folkways.si.edu/josh-white/free-and-equal-blues/american-folk/music/album/smithsonian

Linking around a Web of ragged memories

As a pre-college-graduation present to myself many years ago, I bought a guitar from a guy who bought it from another guy, named Dave Lindorff... whom I have just stumbled upon, thanks to a Web link to some of his journalistic work. And one link does tend to lead to another.

I'm not sure I ever heard Dave play -- although I did learn a tune or two from his brother Gary. And I don't think I knew that Dave and I both chose journalism as a career some 40 years ago.

Strangely, though, one of the first songs I played on that old red sunburst Epiphone Frontier, with its pickguard decorated in cactus flowers and lariat loops, was "Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag," which Dave apparently updated a few years ago and still has on his MySpace page, playing roughly the same guitar part... which I guess we all learned from some combination of Country Joe, Jim Kweskin and Dave Van Ronk.

I still use the same guitar lick, which works on a medley I start with "Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" -- not as politically meaningful, but timeless in its own way.

Mr. Lindorff, however, is now down in my record book as the only person I know of to attempt "City of New Orleans" on the Appalachian autoharp.

(As for the Epiphone, I traded it years ago for a Martin with a fatter fingerboard, but I saw one just like it at Gruhn Guitars last month and was momentarily tempted...)

Centennial year for gypsy jazz guitarist

I love coincidences... Another journalist who doubles as a computer geek and triples as a guitar player... (He's terrific at all three, but I'm older and my fingers don't move as fast.) Reading Adrian's interview at a journalism publication tipped me off to a January 23 musical milestone this month...

Five questions: Adrian Holovaty – The Society for News Design:

"5. Is there a bright future for gypsy jazz guitar players?

Yes. Gypsy jazz has enjoyed a renaissance over the last couple of years, probably thanks to the Internet and YouTube. These days, hundreds of videos of world-class players are just a click away, for free, and there’s been an explosion in instructional material. And January 2010 is Django Reinhardt’s 100th birthday. It’s a good time to be playing this type of music."

Django:



Adrian:


Local (Radford, Va.) note: Scott Fore plays a Django style too with his Hillbilly Hotclub, but YouTube seems to know him better for another style... Even though he won't have the whole band, maybe he'll do some Django tunes at the River Company Jan. 22.