Two Veteran folkies

In the early sixties, when I was a kid hanging out in Fort Lauderdale, I ran into a friend of mine in front of the legendary beachfront bar, the Elbow room. My buddy was excited. “Listen,” he said, “You got to come around to the Catacombs with me. There’s somebody you got to see there.”
The Catacombs was a tiny coffeehouse, down the alley from the elbow room. It drew a completely different crowd. The boozehounds went to the Elbow Room while the intellectuals, the creative people, frequented the Catacombs. We went in ands there on the stage about ten feet away from us, working to a capacity crowd of maybe fifty people, was a young Native American woman playing a mouth bow. That was Buffy Sainte-Marie. I watched her play three sets that night and became a major fan. Over the next forty-five years, my devotion has never wavered.
Now, my devotion has been paid off by Saint-Marie’s first album in thirteen years and it is one amazing piece of work. The world has changed a lot in forty-five years but Sainte-Marie has remained insistently her own person, going her own way. She has never become a nostalgia act, but neither has she abandoned her earlier styles and concerns. She has, however, deepened. Her work is stronger, truer and more powerful than it has ever been.
The new album, Running for the Drum, opened with three songs that simply can’t be classified, songs that use all the weapons in her vast arsenal. With their roots deep in Native American rhythms and dances, they take on corporate greed and contemporary politics, familiar protest themes of Sainte-Marie’s. The song include elements of folk, rock, pop and electronic, in addition to powwow chants. These songs are stunning. After this mini-set, she uses a fine version of her classic song, “Little Wheel Turn and Spin” as a transition into a varied set of love songs, contemporary blues and rock. “When I Had You” is a torch song while “I Bet My Heart on You” features Sainte-Marie and Taj Mahal on twin pianos. “Blue Sunday” could have been recorded in Sam Phillips Sun Studios with Jerry Lee Lewis on piano and Carl Perkins on guitar.
One thing Buffy Sainte-Marie has never been is predictable. She has always confounded people’s expectations, has always gone In directions that no casual listener could have anticipated. Running for the Drum continues that tradition of originality and creativity. It is brilliant and is like nothing else she has done. To my mind, anybody interested in where Americana music has been and is going needs to hear it.
Also brilliant is the DVD biographical film that is included in this set. Entitled Buffy Sainte-Marie: a Multimedia Life, this Canadian made film traces her life, covering her upbringing, her early days as a Greenwich Village folkie up to her current activities. It’s a film that will spend more than one viewing in your DVD player.
I also want to call your attention to a fine reissue: Carolyn Hester’s The Tradition Years. Tom Rush said a few years back that in the early years, no record company actually produced folk music. Most albums back then were “one voice, one guitar, one mic.”
By choice, Tradition Records was a one-voice, one guitar, one mic label. Formed by the Clancy Brothers, Tradition was devoted to the folk song, rather than to the music business. The Clancies spurned the more commercial trio and group acts. They had no interest in recording the legions of Kingston Trio imitators who blanketed the air, polluting the radio waves with what Folk music heavies called fakelore and fake music. Tradition concentrated on the people they felt were doing true folklore in song.
Carolyn Hester was one of those people. She lived in legend as the person who gave Bob Dylan his first shot in a recording studio and was responsible for Dylan being signed to Columbia Records. Like many legends, her reputation is better known today than her music, which is a shame. She was then and is now a brilliant artist. In her early sixties heyday, her work was widely admired and respected, her popularity wide enough for the Saturday Evening Post, a leading mass market magazine of the time, to label her “the face of folk music.” Significantly, she achieved that popularity doing mostly public domain songs from the great body of American and Latin traditional music.
Obviously, she was a good fit for Tradition Records, who recorded her with only her guitar for accompaniment, with no harmony vocals or overdubs. The result is a spare and haunting recording which makes the bold claim that, no matter how beautiful the singer’s voice, that voice is to be used to serve the song, which is more important.
And Hester does have a beautiful voice. This album reveals an achingly pure soprano that graces the songs she sings, a voice that never strains, never reaches but seems to soar effortlessly instead. The voice is intoxicating and when she takes on simple American folk songs like “Go Way From My Window” and “If I had a Ribbon Bow,” you feel the pain of the speakers in the song. Her voice is flexible enough to take on “Malaguena Salerosa” and, since she was raised on the Texas-Mexican border and was always well acquainted with Latin music, she sounds right at home with it. The only contemporary song on the album is George and Ira Gershwin’s “Summertime,” which the hide-bound label justified as folk music because it came from Porgy and Bess, a folk opera.
The Tradition Years is a reissue of Carolyn Hester, a 1961 album. It includes a couple of songs deleted from the original record. Thoroughly digitalized, the sound is as beautiful as the music.
It is great to see the early stuff coming back and it is great to see that artists who began in the early sixties are still vital. Hester has recent CDs that are fabulous. Listen to these women. Hear the good stuff that you’re never going to hear on FM radio.