Category: The Mammals


Metablog, With Music: On Blogging, Bandwidth, and the Unlimited Archives of the Mind

October 20th, 2008 — 09:27 pm

pic courtesy mynavel.co.uk
I’ve tried to keep the metablogging to a minimum here at Cover Lay Down. I appreciate that people like to know about the man behind the curtain, but writing about technical difficulties smacks of navel-gazing narcissism: you come here for the writing and the music, not blogging about blogging. So if you’re coming here for the music, welcome, and feel free to scroll to the end of the post for a few relevant tracks.

But a few of you have asked. And so, in a nutshell: after an incredible month of growth, my habit of keeping the archives eternally open to all comers, combined with a huge influx of new faces (thanks to Boing Boing, and our work with the Denison Witmer Covers Project), bumped me up against the next tier of file hosting cost just as my provider was about to close for the weekend. I regret this weekend’s bandwidth max-out, and feel badly for every curious coverfan and folktracker who found his way here only to go away without the song.

But if this weekend’s file outage was frustrating, it was also healthy. Being unable to blog this weekend, watching instead the sitetracker pick up echoes looking for something no longer there, forced me to confront some hard truths about what I do here, and why. It’s time to pick our battles, folks. And before I do, I feel like I owe my loyal readers some sort of explanation.

You see, like many bloggers, I’ve come to think of the blog as part of something bigger, something more community-minded and interactive, than just me sitting down in the kitchen, late at night when the kids are in bed, and trying to make sense of just one thing at a time. This, of course, is pure egoism: as a regular reader of over fifty music blogs myself, I know that while such a tone of collaboration is sometimes welcoming, it is also a collusive fiction, a consensual construct. But it is nonetheless true that, as a blogger, I am no more or less a part of the ongoing conversation as every fan that wears the T-shirt, every artist that is truly excited about their review, every label rep that reaches out with a handwritten note. From those perspectives, I am part of their circle, just as they are part of mine.

Still, clearly, I can’t be everything to everyone. Though I wish that every new reader could start her journey, if she so desired, by scouring the collection, catching up on what has become over a hundred posts and almost a thousand coversongs, it’s hard to deny the strain this causes on our ability to provide constantly new content.

I could just go the ad route, or have a fund drive for that donate button there on the sidebar. I could dig deep, and upgrade past my current Business-class hosting solution to something called the Enterprise-level account, which sounds just big enough and expensive enough to have its own holodeck. But though I appreciate any and all support for the current cost of file-hosting, I don’t really feel like I want to get bigger. I like thinking of myself as small, of being a hobbyist, an amateur in the proudest sense. I like being awed by musicians who know my name; I like being part of the crowd. If I have to choose, I’d rather walk the walk, and stay small, like folk itself.

So let us let our journey keep its beginning and end, and choose to live more in the present than the past. If we are to truly consider this an ongoing conversation, I think we need to be willing to let some baggage go, so that we can come to each idea fresh. And if that means letting the songs of older posts turn into ghosts, faint memories to accompany long-written text, then perhaps that is only right, given our ghost in the machine existence.

Over the next week or two, then, I’ll be deleting older mp3s from the archives. I’m thinking I’ll leave some posts up — anything linked recently, a good set of the holiday music as the weather grows colder. I might even celebrate by featuring a few old favorites on a sidebar spot, right next to the elseblog posts I continue to crank out faithfully at collaborative theme-blog Star Maker Machine, where this week all song titles consist of an adjective and a noun, in that order. If you’ve got any favorite posts here on Cover Lay Down which you think merit inclusion in a greatest hits collection, to stay live into eternity, let me know.

But the bulk of the files will fade. Because providing two terabytes of bandwidth in one month is not a hobby anymore. It’s not even an obsession. It’s just not cost-effective. Our souls are more important.

All writing will remain, of course. The conversation grows, ever onward, exploring the mysteries of how people share song, and why, and how it changes the world. Through it, the music lives on, in new covers and in old recordings, in the hands of the people, where the folk belongs. Our ghosts echo in the ever-present hypemachine slipstream.

When I started here, I was thinking of words; I still struggle to listen with my heart. But if I had named this blog after a song, it might have been one of these.

  • Tim O’Brien: Lay Down Your Weary Tune (orig. Bob Dylan)

  • Cowboy Junkies: To Lay Me Down (orig. Grateful Dead)
  • The Mammals: Lay Down Yr Mountain (text Allan Ginsburg)
  • Mississippi Fred McDowell: When I Lay My Burden Down(trad.)

Cover Lay Down will return to our regular schedule later this week. Coming soon: new covers from newcomers, and the year’s first Christmas albums begin to hit the market.

897 comments » | Cowboy Junkies, metablog, Mississippi Fred McDowell, The Mammals, Tim O'Brien

Covered in Folk: Pete Seeger (On Folk as an Engine of Social Change)

September 24th, 2008 — 08:37 pm

Though I believe that folk, most especially in the way it functions as a channel of engagement and public discourse, is by definition an agency of cultural change, I have been reluctant to use this blog as a forum for advocating explicit change of any one type. Perpetuating the relevance of folk as an agenda in and of itself, it seems to me, precludes taking sides for any particular agenda which might be carried by folk, lest we alienate opposing values, and in doing so, diminish the potential of folk to remain dialogic.

But it’s pledge drive time at our local radio station, and the Nobel Prize selection committee does seem to have a set criteria for signatories and public outcry as an establishing principle for prize consideration. And it’s hard to imagine anyone genuinely untouched by the compassionate, tireless work in the name of human dignity, empowerment, and awareness which Pete Seeger continues to consider his life’s work after over sixty years as a recording artist and activist.

So when my mother, who once used Seeger’s songs as a vehicle for planting the seeds of peace and justice in both myself and in the inner city classrooms of New York City, became the most recent in a long series of folks to remind me of the recent petition to recognize Pete’s long-standing contribution to social, environmental, and political change, it seemed like the right time to use the soapbox to do some particular good.

Though there are parallels to be made between the community ownership of song upon which this blog is predicated, and the ways in which Pete Seeger‘s work has bridged time and space to touch and affect the rest of us, one one level, honoring this particular life’s work is made more challenging by our focus on coversong. For, though there are certainly tunes that one can point to as written by Seeger during his long career, the question of coverage and song origin is complex and unclear in much of Seeger’s catalog.

Which is to say: the son of an ethnomusicologist and a true believer in folk as a mechanism for tying past to future, perhaps more than any artist in history, Seeger has lived folk song as if it truly did belong to the community for which it speaks. As such, Seeger’s contribution to folk was one of popularization as much as songcraft; many of the songs he is best known for have their origin in the past, and much of his better-known works, like Turn, Turn, Turn, use older components to create new works. Even Seeger’s own greatest hits album combines songs written by Pete Seeger with songs popularized by Seeger. And even the better tribute albums out there mix songs which Seeger actually wrote with songs which he made his own.

None of this precludes consideration from the Nobel folks, of course; indeed, it is Seeger’s deep sense of the social and folk environment as both purposeful and shared by all of us which is perhaps the most powerful case for his recognition. As such, first and foremost, the aim of today’s post is to ask all of you to take a moment and — in the name of folk itself — sign your name to the petition asking the Nobel Prize Committee to consider Pete Seeger for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his tireless work sowing the seeds of peace.

But of course, you also come here for the music. And there are some great tributes out there, most notably the three sets which the activist-founded, socially conscious folklabel Appleseed Recordings has released in a scant decade of existence; I’m especially enamored of double-disk first release Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs Of Pete Seeger, which in addition to the Ani DiFranco and Bruce Cockburn covers below includes a veritable who’s who of big-name inheritors of the activist folkmantle, from Richie Havens and Odetta to Springsteen and Billy Bragg.

Someday, I aspire to the time and energy it would take to approach a proper post on the central influence Pete Seeger and his family — from father Charles (the ethnomusicologist) to half-siblings Peggy and Mike to half-nephew Neill MacColl and grandson Tao Rodriguez of the Mammals — have had in defining and continuing to define folk music as a social and political engine of change for almost a century. In the meanwhile, here’s a set of personal favorites with a much simpler organizing principle: songs which other folk artists of a certain political bent have learned from or associate with Pete Seeger himself, regardless of authorship, and have recorded in deliberate tribute to this long-standing folk icon.

*removed at artist/label request.

Folk and social consciousness go hand in hand; to support one is to support the other. If you have ever been moved by folksong, sign the petition — technically, a petition “to persuade [the] American Friends Service Committee to enter Pete Seeger as their nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize 2008 ” — and in doing so help make the case for both Seeger and the folk process itself as an agency of peace. Then, head on over to Appleseed Recordings for the opportunity to purchase Seeger’s work, the aforementioned cover albums, and a whole host of other folksongs from a growing stable of socially aware artists actively engaged in using folk music to change the world for the better.

Want more? Today’s bonus coversongs offer a tiny, tiny taste of Seeger as political song interpreter, just in case you’re still young enough to have never really encountered his own continued celebration of his folkpeers and ancestors:

Cover Lay Down publishes new materials Sundays, Wednesdays, and the occasional otherday. Join us this weekend as we celebrate one year of coverfolk blogging.

1,112 comments » | ani difranco, Bruce Cockburn, Eric Bibb, Holly Near, Joan Baez, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Marlene Dietrich, Natalie Merchant, Pete Seeger, richard shindell, The Mammals, Tony Trischka

Ruth Ungar Merenda Covers: Tom Waits, Hank Williams, Richard Thompson, Nico & more!

June 7th, 2008 — 09:05 pm


In the early days of Cover Lay Down, I spent some time covering the emergence of artists like Teddy Thompson, Rufus Wainwright, and Sam Amidon, all new voices who walked in the footsteps of folksinger parents; more recently, we heard Neill MacColl, son of Ewan and half-sister of Kirsty, in duet with Kathryn Williams, and Ben Taylor as a tagalong in discussion of the life work of his father James.

This may seem like a high percentage of “folk kids” for a blog that’s only been around since September. But stepping back and looking around, we see that the prevalence of second generation musicians in Cover Lay Down is not so far off from the natural order of things in the world of folk music.

And if the idea of folk music as a family business is not so uncommon, then I suspect much of this has to do with the kind of work that musicmaking is — after all, the artistic muse isn’t one which takes place solely outside of the household, and can be left at the office each evening. As we alluded to in our recent exploration of folk musicians who are also mothers, as an art form and a vocational practice, the work of folk is something which permeates home life.

Some forms of folk, like some forms of music, are more open to family performance, of course. In the contradance and traditional folk music worlds, especially, performance is very often something which happens in households and community halls, with families and children; proportionally, you see more kids on (or near) stages in dance performance than you do in latenight singer-songwriter coffeehouses. Sam Amidon grew up in a household like this, where music took place as a daily and family activity, and performance was more often mid-afternoon than anything else. And the family atmosphere which permeated the McGarrigle/Wainwright household is famous for bringing forth Rufus and sister Martha Wainwright as musicians of confidence in their own right.

Someday soon, I hope to tackle the phenomenon of three-generational folk families which have their roots in the early American folk resurgence of the fifties and sixties, such as that of Woody, Arlo, and Sarah Lee Guthrie, or the performing careers of the Seeger family, including Pete Seeger’s grandson Tao Rodriguez Seeger, who performed as part of The Mammals with today’s featured artist until the band went on its recent hiatus. But such massive undertakings are for cooler, more comfortable days than today’s high humidity heat wave. Instead, today, we look at another folk performer who grew up in not one but two households of folk musicians, and has since struck out on her own. Ladies and gentlemen: the various folk incarnations of Ruth Ungar Merenda.


For a young folk musician, fiddle and uke player and vocalist Ruth Ungar Merenda has gone through a surprisingly large amount of performing groups and incarnations. Starting off as a childhood sidegirl determined not to follow in the footsteps of her mother, luthier and singer-songwriter Lyn Hardy, and her father Jay Ungar, who with Ruthy’s stepmother Molly Mason is a staple of the New England contradance and fiddlefolk revivals, Ruth headed off to Bard College, and from there to NYC, where she tried to make a go of it as an actress.

But as with so many second generation musicians, it seems the music was in her blood. By her mid-twenties Ruthy had drifted back to the fold, making appearances throughout New England as part of the family bands. In 2002, with the production support of Jay and Molly, Ruthy released Jukebox, a sprawling solo album which tackled a few originals and a bunch of early country and jazz classics with powerful but still slightly immature vocals over a delicate old-timey charm and acoustic swing production. Though the album showed diverse influences, and would have probably done well in the track-by-track promotional model of today’s blogworld, back then it sold no more than a handful of copies.

Luckily, even before she released her solo disk, Ruthy had found a different outlet for her sound, joining up with a few other younger folks, including fellow second-gen songwriter Tao Rodriguez Seeger and singer-songwriter Michael Merenda to become The Mammals. And this time, people started to listen.

The Mammals emerged in the midst of a young person’s newgrass revival, finding fame alongside similarly female-voiced bluegrass and folkgrass acts such as Uncle Earl and Crooked Still. As fiddler and the sole female voice of the Mammals, Ruthy found herself front and center plenty; she also began to play with others backstage at festivals, and occasionally showed up with a few other women from those aforementioned groups in side projects and sidestages, even recording a slightly racy album with her compatriots Aoife O’Donovan (of Crooked Still) and Kristin Andreassen (of Uncle Earl) as the trio Sometymes Why after a successful jam session in a festival parking lot.

I was lucky enough to see the Mammals several times in their few years together as an active performing group, both as a solo act and in tandem with Canadian-based folk group the Duhks (their performance together was billed as Platypus, as in Duhks+Mammals, which is just too cute). I liked the sound an awful lot, and I think their early release Evolver was a masterpiece of modern traditional folk rock. But seeing them in concert in their last year of performance, you could tell there was a hint of something in the air, just a faint unease in the way they clustered in threes and twos, rather than as a full ensemble, as if that there were some differences of opinion about what the “right” sound for the Mammals was supposed to be.

These days, in fact, The Mammals are “hibernating” while their members pursue solo projects; for Ruthy and Michael Merenda, now performing as Mike and Ruthy, these projects included marriage, which came with a very generous wedding present of studio time and production for an album. The result was The Honeymoon Agenda, a complete set of originals and well-chosen cover songs which run the musical gamut from the urgent yet delicate one-guitar duet sound of Tom Waits cover Long Way Home to a surprisingly countrified version of the Velvet Underground’s I’ll Be Your Mirror to a grungy production-laden folkpop that rivals the best work of Evan Dando and Juliana Hatfield or Mary Lou Lord and Elliott Smith, or more recently, Signature Sounds indierockers the Winterpills — that latter being unsurprising, since it was the Winterpills’ producer who gave the duo the generous gift.

This newest incarnation of Ruthy’s collaborative work is a far cry from the bouncy, almost renaissance sound of the contradance she grew up with, and it seems to have replaced the acoustic folk-slash-newgrass jam session sound of the Mammals work with a more intimate studio sound. Nor is it truly a return to the country swing-influenced singer-songwriter sound of her earliest solo work. Instead, though the record ultimately still shows an evolving artist in flux, it shows much more potential, in many more directions than before. It is lo-fi, but confident and mature in a way that Ruthy’s first solo work only hinted at. And, as in all Ruthy’s previous work, there is an energy and an honesty here which is well-served by her perpetual sense of whirlwind glee in making music, regardless of the style or subgenre.

But why take my word for it? Here’s a few coversongs from each of these three major phases of Ruth Ungar’s adult career thus far, so you can hear her musical journey for yourself.

The Honeymoon Agenda is available from various artist-friendly sources, including CD Baby; for digital downloads, I highly recommend Amie Street, where the entire album is currently available for download for six bucks, but where, due to their snowballing scale, song prices will continue to rise as others find Mike and Ruthy’s music. (Bonus: when you arrive at Amie Street, sign up for an account, and enter the code “coverlaydown” for a three dollar discount!)

The Sometymes Why album appears to include no covers, but it, too, has some great ragged moments. And all five of the Mammals albums, Ruth Ungar’s single solo album, and hubby Michael Merenda’s solo works are all worth checking out, too.

If you’re up for some live music, and live in the NY/NE area, Mike and Ruthy will also be appearing at several folk festivals in the American Northeast this summer, including the always amazing Clearwater Festival and Revival on June 21 and 22, and New Bedford Summerfest in the first week of July, which I’ve never attended but very much hope to make it to this year; their tour schedule has more. And for those who are willing to make the trip, experimental folk trio Sometymes Why will be at Bonnaroo next week. In full, it’s an exceptionally busy schedule for any performer, let alone one who became a mother on January 28 of this year. Given Ruthy’s own irresistible pull towards the musicworld, I’m confident that we can expect to see little William performing alongside Mama, Daddy, Grandma Lyn, and Grandpa Jay before long.

Today’s bonus coversongs offer a taste of Jay Ungar and Molly Mason’s typical contra-slash-swingfolk sound, as a roundabout way of exploring the deeper roots of Ruth Ungar’s musical journey.

Previously on Cover Lay Down:

  • The Mammals (and many others) cover tradfolk tune The House Carpenter

  • 79 comments » | Compay Segundo, Hank Williams, Jay Ungar and Molly Mason, Mike and Ruthy, Nico, Richard Thompson, Ruth Ungar Merenda, The Mammals, Tom Waits

    Single Song Sunday: House Carpenter (Natalie Merchant, Nickel Creek, Roger McGuinn, Tim O’Brien)

    January 6th, 2008 — 07:51 pm


    It’s been some week here at Cover Lay Down. Features on popular singer-songwriters Billy Bragg and Paul Simon brought us to the top of the charts at musicblog aggregator The Hype Machine and a linkback from New York magazine’s Vulture blog. On Friday, almost 900 of you visited the site, a new record; download tracking shows that many of you came in for one song, but stuck around to try something new. Welcome, kudos, and thanks for validating our goals here at Cover Lay Down.

    But a slow day at home and a new branch of our local library system got me thinking about our roots, both as a folk blog and as community members. Popular artists and indieacts may have got you here, but there’s more to folk music than the indiefolk and Grammy winners of the last decades. Above all, it is our goal at Cover Lay Down to broaden your horizons, even while we serve your existing biases and favorites.

    Today, we return to our roots for the fourth in our very popular Single Song Sunday series with a feature on Child Ballad #243 in the canonical collection of British folk ballads, a song more commonly known as House Carpenter.


    Habitat for HumanityThey’re building one of those Habitat for Humanity houses in our town, just along the main road, out past the edge of what counts for downtown in these rural one-bar parts. A few weeks ago our local church helped make lunch for the crew — chili and cornbread, the kind of early winter comfort food that can be soaked up quickly, and keeps the fires going for hours. I wasn’t there, but the story goes that they had plenty of leftovers, primarily due to the fact that the workforce that day was a group of local college girls, doing their community service. The girls ate all the clementines, though. I guess we made the food with heartier carpenters in mind.

    The 18th Century folk ballad House Carpenter, officially titled either James Harris or Demon Lover, isn’t about hope, or new beginnings. Quite the opposite. It’s a morality play, in which a woman is tempted by a finer life with an old flame, gives in, leaves her new little babe in the care of her carpenter husband, regrets it too late, and drowns for her sins. It’s about the perils of choosing style over substance; it’s about the consequences of valuing speed and beauty over community and commitment. Like our Habitat for Humanity project, it’s not about house carpenters: it’s about the girls who showed up to be house carpenters, and the church making lunch; a reminder of the value of all who help make a house, a home, a community.

    That authenticity is hard to come by in the world today is an oft-repeated trope in folk music; it is the universality of the sentiment, as much as the plaintive beauty of House Carpenter’s simple tune, which explains why the song continues to find voice in each new generation of folksinger. In some ways, it’s frustrating to find that the message is still needed, hundreds of years after it was first found necessary. But the house goes up, nonetheless. Looks like it’s going to be a cosy place, too.

    Work on our local Habitat house seems to have been put on pause for the winter. The girls who came that day to help have gone back to their lives with a new entry for their graduate school applications and, hopefully, a true sense of having participated in something selfless and pride-worthy. May their lots and ours be better than the lot of our alternate-verse narrator, who sinks and goes to hell for one bad decision. If their work on the house is any indication, they’re already headed for a better life.

    Unlike Rain and Snow, the emotion of this oft-covered song is set in the lyrics; as such, most interpretations aim for a melancholic delivery. But as today’s featured artists demonstrate, there’s a wide potential for instrumentation and tone, even within a limited emotional range.

    The fast-paced storyteller’s banjo on Pete Seeger and Clarence Ashley’s ancient versions creates a tension which serves the piece equally, if differently, from the languid brushstrokes, etherial harmonies and skeletal bass of The Tami Show’s haunted cover, the sweet, rich mysticism of Mick McAuley’s celtic ballad, or the fuller instrumentation and nuanced tonal ebb and flow of Tim O’Brien’s moody, celtic-flavored bluegrass.

    The sparse, cracked doublevoiced tones of Roger McGuinn are a world away from the mournful, driving blues Natalie Merchant brings to the piece. And interpretations by folkfave youngsters The Mammals and Nickel Creek provide a study in contrast, two new-folkgrass bands taking the song through vastly distinct but equally powerful paces.

    Try ‘em all. Find your favorite. It is, after all, the personal connection that makes us folk.

    As always, all album and label links above take you direct to the source for your musical purchase. Buy local, support community: it’s that simple.

    874 comments » | Mick McAuley, Natalie Merchant, Nickel Creek, Pete Seeger, Roger McGuinn, Single Song Sunday, The Mammals, The Tami Show, Tim O'Brien