Category: Tim O’Brien


Tim O’Brien Covers:
Randy Newman, John Hartford, Jimmie Rodgers, Dylan, Hendrix & more!
…plus bonus covers of the Tim O’Brien songbook!

February 10th, 2010 — 04:16 pm




I’ve been thinking bluegrass all week, thanks to a pair of tickets to this weekend’s Joe Val Festival – an annual mid-winter marathon excursion which we’ve written about profusely in past years. It’s a form that often doesn’t get included in the folk blogger pantheon, save for the tradfolk and oldtimey set, and a tiny handful of Bluegrass specialists, but here at Cover Lay Down we like to define our terms broadly.

In an older sense, of course, our inclusion of the ‘grass is easy to defend: bluegrass is most definitely a folkform, though of a vastly different branch than the revivalist folk which generally defines the term in the popular mind. And though it is one of the newer folk genres – hewn out of old timey and appalachian countryfolk by a young Bill Monroe, and spread outward from there to infiltrate the corners of a culture – modern bluegrass is a broad umbrella, filling in the odd-shaped nooks and crannies between folk, country, and other peripheral forms, its sound ranging from countrified all-out newgrass to a gentle and sweet-sounding music bordering on popfolk.

Still, its origin in the band-driven sound generally frames bluegrass performance as a group thing; Joe Val, for example, will feature plenty of bluegrass groupings, but nary a soloist on the mainstage. Rarer is the bluegrass soloist, though there’s certainly room for the singer-songwriter in the ‘grass. And no one has worked harder to bring solo folk performance back to the bluegrass audience than Tim O’Brien. Today, we feature just a small slice of the vast spectrum of covers from this contemporary bluegrass legend – followed by a short set of bonus tracks from other, newer artists covering his own songbook. Ladies and gentlemen: Tim O’Brien.


Tim O’Brien has been around the barn and back again, as far as the Bluegrass world goes. Famous as a founding member of the seminal 70s and 80s contemporary bluegrass quartet Hot Rize and their Western swing alter ego Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers, whose members moved on in the early nineties after a five album run, Tim moved on easily to a strong career as both a highly respected producer and collaborator, and a solo artist trying to capture the full range of folk music, from singer-songwriter work to the exploratory, oft-countrified sound of pop bluegrass.

As a solo artist, O’Brien cites James Taylor and Joni Mitchell as antecedents; though he is generally found in a different section of the CD racks, there’s something to this comparison. O’Brien’s voice is sometimes strained, but it has its own unique beauty, and his adept delivery carries easily from poignant and lonely to playful and proud. His masterful guitar, banjo, fiddle and mandolin work is stunning in its direct simplicity; as both interpreter and composer, his lyrical tenderness and melodic prowess have an inimitable, easily recognizable style.


Prolific and dedicated to stretching the boundaries of his own craft after 30 years in the business, the Tim O’Brien canon includes over 25 albums in a variety of incarnations as soloist and group member, and each is worth celebrating. O’Brien won a well-deserved Grammy in the Traditional Folk category for his spare, intimate 2005 album Fiddler’s Green; his simultaneous release, 2005 album Cornbread Nation, is a personal favorite, one that moves fluidly through a batch of predominantly trad-song source material, teasing the worldbeat, the folk, the blues, the gospel, and a host of other influences out of oft-shadowed lines where genre blurs, marking his rightful place in the folk pantheon as a name-brand. Cover lovers will also be thrilled with Red On Blonde, Tim’s 1996 tribute to the man whose recordings first prompted him to pick up a guitar at age 12.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch Tim live in several guises: as a sidestage solo act, in duet-mode with his sweet-voiced sister Mollie, and even in full-blown progressive newgrass mode with a revivalist version of Hot Rize, who will next appear together for the unwashed crowds at this summer’s Bonnaroo. Each was a delight. And though even his canon of coverage is far too vast for us to include it all, I’m proud to share a fair sample of his work with folk fans who may have overlooked him. Listen, and then visit Tim O’Brien’s store for much, much more.



Of course, any musician as talented, influential and ubiquitous as Tim O’Brien has inevitably had his share of tribute from other artists, too. Earlier coverage came from the likes of Kathy Mattea, The Seldom Scene, New Grass Revival, and more; today’s bonus tracks include a half-dozen more recent favorites from the next generation of artists performing on and about the lines between bluegrass, folk, country and pop.



*previously posted as part of this Grey Fox Bluegrass Fest feature.
**previously posted along with 8 other covers of Gillian Welch’s Orphan Girl.
***previously posted as part of a full set of Coversongs about Sleep.
****previously posted as part of a full post of Oceanfolk Covers.
*****previously posted in a set of Passover Coverfolk.

1,129 comments » | bluegrass, Tim O'Brien

Cover Lay Down Status Update:
Rumblings from Behind the Scenes

November 10th, 2008 — 01:50 am

Just a quick note to let folks know that, although I’m holding off on posting anything of real significance this close to the move, thanks to some amazing benefactors and patronage, I’m hoping to have good news and a new site address sometime later this week. (Of course, there’s always room for a bit more encouragement as the process continues; if you haven’t had a chance to offer your support, please check out our call for patronage below.)

The plan is to resume regular twice-weekly posting, with the depth and breadth you have come to expect from Cover Lay Down, by next Sunday at the latest. In the meantime, here’s some coverfolk tunes to keep your ears humming while you wait, from Emm Gryner’s pianofolk take on a personal thrash metal fave to Tim O’Brien’s chunky newgrass take on an old gospel spiritual, and from the Irish siren croon of Cara Dillon to the Cape Breton Celtic of The Cottars. Plus two ragged favorites previously posted, just to top the list off right.

Cover Lay Down will return.

960 comments » | Cara Dillon, Emm Gryner, Redbird, Richard Thompson, The Cottars, Tim O'Brien

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

Covering The Working Life: Songs About Day Jobs (From Those Who Don’t Have Them)

August 26th, 2008 — 11:02 pm

Ever since I chose teaching as a career, Labor Day has been doubly relevant for me: an annual return to the classroom-as-job-site marked by a national holiday in celebration of the organized workplace.

This year, however, after leaving a teaching position that just wasn’t working out, and subsequently spending the summer carrying hope from one interview to the next, I find myself in a bit of limbo. Which is to say: for the first time in over a decade, Labor Day looms, and I don’t have plans to be anywhere the day after.

The game’s not over yet — I’ve got two interviews tomorrow, in fact, and both seem promising. But the joy that I should have been feeling as we put my daughter on the bus for her first day of first grade today was tempered by uncertainty, and it’s been hard to put it aside to take on the next few drafts down the line.

In the name of killing the jinx, then, and because I really should get to bed sooner than usual in order to be prepared, today’s coversongs channel our complex package of cultural conceits about work: having it, hating it, needing it, loving it, and leaving it.

Don’t let the size of today’s list scare you, folks: huge and topically sprawling, it is nonetheless a carefully-selected and winnowed-down set of my favorites, from the crazed old-timey house party of Springsteen’s take on Pay Me My Money Down to the driving, countrified folk rock production Melissa McClelland brings to Springsteen’s own Factory, and from the delicate, precious indie retropop of Ephemera’s Manic Monday to Richie Havens‘ surprisingly powerful treatment of John Lennon’s Working Class Hero.

There’s something for everyone today; after all, we all have to pay the bills somehow. So whether you prefer the slow barrelhouse bluegrass of Alison Krauss covering Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 or the radio-ready bluesfolk of Mark Knopfler’s unfortunately named side project The Notting Hillbillies, Joshua James‘ quiet solo acoustic Modest Mouse cover or Jeb Loy Nichol‘s atmospheric hi-hat driven electro reggaefolk, the pulsing popfolk of Leslie King‘s Pink Floyd cover, the twangfolk of Peter Case doing Merle Haggard, or the true blue bluegrass of Salamander Crossing and Tim O’Brien, enjoy them all, and wish me luck at the interview table.

Of course, today’s list would be sorely incomplete without my favorite John Hartford song. If you missed ‘em the first time around, head back in time for a look at two great takes on In Tall Buildings, a perfect, bittersweet song of white collar life and lost summer, from Gillian Welch and The Jones Street Boys.

Oh, and as always: if you like what you hear here on Cover Lay Down, please consider purchasing CDs and other merch from the artists we feature. After all, if it weren’t for our patronage, the music makers would be out of a job, too.

ADDENDUM 10:05 pm: Seems the jinx-breaking worked — after a whirlwind day, I have accepted a teaching gig for next year! Thanks to all for the good thoughts and crossed fingers…

705 comments » | Alison Krauss, Bruce Springsteen, Ephemera, Jeb Loy Nichols, Joshua james, Leslie King, Melissa McLelland, Peter Case, Richie Havens, Salamander Crossing, Tim O'Brien

Festival Coverfolk: Grey Fox, July 17-20 (Bluegrass covers of Tom Petty, John Mayer, Richard Thompson, Bob Dylan (x2), and more!)

June 25th, 2008 — 09:42 am

Walsh Farm: the gorgeous new site of Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival

After over thirty years on the same site, for most regular festivalgoers, the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival experience has become intertwined with the landscape of the farm which hosted it, from the steep hill which formed a natural mainstage amphitheater to the even steeper hill which separated the entrance and parking areas from the main camping and festival site. So when the organizers of Grey Fox announced at this winter’s Joe Val Festival that the farm had been sold, and that they would be moving the festival almost forty minutes north to Oak Hill, NY, there was some serious buzz in the bluegrass community.

It happens: farms fail; festivals move on. And certainly, switching sites changes things around a bit for any music festival. Figuring out where everything goes in a new and unfamiliar space can be disorienting. But making changes is also a great opportunity to revisit and re-establish the very values which do not change, the ones that bring us together each year. When Falcon Ridge Folk Festival moved from one farm to another three summers ago, for example, watching returning regular festivalgoers try to figure out where their “usual” camping spot was on a totally different field made for a fascinating sociological case study. But it was reassuring to see how gentle and cheerful everyone was about the whole process. Once we all settled in, we found our old friends, and had made some new ones, to boot. And by the time the music started, the place felt just like home.

Which is to say: though landscape and terrain certainly frame the experience of any outdoor festival, in my experience, it is the community and the music which make or break a music festival. And given that, Grey Fox fans have nothing to worry about. Having attended Grey Fox for several years, I can attest to both its strong and welcoming sense of community, and its well-deserved reputation as the best bluegrass festival in the Northeast, thanks to wonderful craft and food vendors, impeccable sound production, tight sets and staging, and a performance schedule chock full of artists that will knock your socks off.

This year’s lineup, in fact, is one of the best I have seen, a veritable “who’s who” of the very best artists in the surprisingly diverse spectrum of sound that is today’s bluegrass. The list includes plenty of big names (see below), and many bluegrass community favorites, like International Bluegrass Music Association multiple award winners Missy Raines (bass), and Michael Cleveland (fiddle), both of whom impressed the hell out of me at Joe Valover the past few years. And the Grey Fox organizers have a good eye for new talent; it’s a slow year if I only come away with a couple of new favorite and previously-unheard acts by the end of the festival’s four day run.

There’s banjo master Bill Keith, who has been a mainstay of the Northeast bluegrass scene longer than most folks knew there even was a Northeast bluegrass scene. All-female old-timey bluegrass group Uncle Earl do a great afternoon set every year; if you haven’t heard them, know that they are often cited next to new folk artists (and Cover Lay Down favorites) Crooked Still and Sam Amidon as part of a rising generation of great neo-traditionalists. You’ll find plenty of current chartbusters, such as the Nashville-based Dailey and Vincent Band, who lean towards countrygrass. And those are just the artists who I didn’t have room for in today’s download extravaganza.

Today, then, a few choice covers from just a few more of the great acts scheduled to play at the new, more gently sloping home of Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival, July 17-20. Notably, this is just the tip of the iceberg; this year’s roster is so good, it was hard to hold myself to a reasonable-sized list. But like the above survey, these artists comprise a representative sample of the “best of the fest” in more ways than one, ranging from traditional bluegrass groups to artists pushing the boundaries between jazz, appalachian folk, and newgrass, and from up-and-coming artists to still-vibrant mainstays of the bluegrass scene. Enjoy, and I’ll see you in Oak Hill.

And don’t miss these other Grey Fox 2008 attendees which I’ve previously featured on Cover Lay Down:

Tempted? For a full list of performers coming to this year’s festival, directions to the new site, and tickets galore, head on over to the Grey Fox Bluegrass Festival website. I’ll see you up on the hill at the new, gently sloping site July 17-20.

1,128 comments » | Abigail Washburn, David Grisman, Del McCoury, Gibson Brothers, Hot Rize, Infamous Stringdusters, Sam Bush, Sparrow Quartet, Tim O'Brien

Covered in Kidfolk, Vol. 5: Barnyard Tunes and Critter Songs for Cool Moms and Dads

June 11th, 2008 — 09:01 am

I grew up in the suburbs, where wildlife was scarce, though we had our share of squirrels and birds, and the occasional rabbit sighting in the backyard. When we wanted to see larger animals, we generally headed out to Drumlin Farm, a working farm run by the Audubon Society, where caged birds of prey lined the path to the chick hatchery, the pigs and sheep gave birth every spring, and you could always spot the queen in the glass-lined, thin-sliced beehive, if you looked long enough. There was a pond, too, for crawdad spotting. Well worth the membership, and the half hour drive.

These days, we live in the country, where turkeys congregate around corners year round, and the neighborhood dogs roam aimlessly throughout our lives. Round these rural parts, Spring brings a whole mess of animals into the yard, from the new baby robins that nest in our holly bush to the frogs, toads, and salamanders that scatter when the kids run through the tall grass and hollows. On weekends, it’s a five minute jaunt through the woods to the dam and its shady, overgrown waterways, where turtles, ducks, and beavers play in the water, and the fish practically jump on the hooks the moment we throw our lines in.

On hot days, we head up the hill to Westview Farm, where the new baby goats skitter up and down the concrete barriers, butting heads and bleating; in the evenings, the mother cow in the grazing field across from our driveway lows to her new calf. This year, the neighborhood has even been graced by a family of foxes; we haven’t seen the mother and her kits yet, but the father runs past our windows and down into the growing darkness just about every day towards suppertime.


The world of kidsong is chock full of songs about animals, and for obvious reasons. A healthy child’s life is full of nature, and nature is full of life. Too, the developing awareness of what it means to be alive, and be part of a world full of other things that are alive, is an important part of child development; songs which portray the various relationships we have with animals — both wild and domesticated — help prepare us to think deliberately about our world, and our place in it, as we grow up to become parents of our own.

Today, in service to this aspect of development, we present a sprawling collection of animal coversongs from my growing kidfolk cache. Most predate the phenomenon of song authorship. And with artists such as Tim O’Brien, Nickel Creek, Garcia/Grisman, and Seldom Scene lead singer Phil Rosenthal on the list, the set skews towards the bluegrass, but I make no apologies for this; it is only very recently, with the advent of the NYC indie bluegrass scene, that bluegrass has begun to leave behind it’s associations with rural community and farmlife, and this makes it good solid folk music in my book.

But regardless of origin, as with all previous entries in our Covered in Kidfolk series, the point here is to provide a respite from the cheesy, cloying pap that passes for mainstream children’s music, that we might — as cool moms and dads — stay true to ourselves while providing our children with music that befits their age, and their emotional and developmental needs. I think this particular set hits the mark admirably. Whether these songs speak of the swamp or the barnyard, the woods or the stream, each is wonderful, in both the usual sense and in the older sense of the word: full of the wonder which we should nurture in every child, and in ourselves.

As always, folks, links above go to label- and artist-preferred sources for purchase, not some faceless and inorganic megastore. If you like what you hear, buy, and buy local, to help preserve the little spaces, for the little people you love.

295 comments » | Buckwheat Zydeco, David Grisman, Elizabeth Mitchell, Jerry Garcia, John McCutcheon, Kidfolk, Laurie Berkner, Nickel Creek, Pete Seeger, Roger McGuinn, Taj Mahal, Tim O'Brien, Townes van Zandt

Covered in Folk: Randy Newman (Bonnie Raitt, The Duhks, J.J. Cale, Shelby Lynne, and 9 more!)

April 30th, 2008 — 01:49 am

Though my father hasn’t missed it in decades, I haven’t been able to attend the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival since I started teaching over a decade ago — something about the way a last gasp of hunker-down-and-teach takes over public education as we approach state testing, and the long downhill slide toward the end of the school year. But every year as we hit the last weekend in April my mind begins to muse upon the great acts I saw down there the few years I made it: Los Lobos, the Indigo Girls, Taj Mahal, Blues Traveler, the Neville Brothers, a holy host of Marsalis siblings, and many, many more.

What stands out strongest after all these years is the time I saw Randy Newman play a whole set of songs about rain in a downpour one year at Jazzfest. We were muddy football fields away from the stage, umbrella-less to boot, but what I remember best is the clarity of his set, just that wry warbly scratchy voice and a barroom piano style, over a substance chock full of extremely unreliable narrators and sarcasm, with a power that I had never really heard in his music before.

The scene was terrible; the view was worse. But Newman’s music got burned into my brain. And since then, though I haven’t made it to another performance, I’ve never passed up a chance to listen to his songs, no matter who is singing them.

Randy Newman’s original performances aren’t folk, quite — though as a set of produced music that, at its best, focuses and features the simple melodies and heartfelt, story-troped acoustic output of a songwriter and his stringed instrument, much of his songs share the qualities of both traditional folkways and modern singer-songwriter folk. That so many from the folkworld and beyond have managed to take his work and make it beautiful in their own way acknowledges this ground, it is true. But that the songs speak — as all good folk should — to a nation and a people and a heart all at once is both a testament to the inherent beauty in the songs themselves, and the inherent and universal beauty in the human condition, even at its most terrible and sodden and rained-upon, of which they speak so effectively.

Today, in honor of my tenth consecutive year missing Jazzfest, we bring you a predominantly southern-tinged set of Randy Newman coversongs. Though I could not resist a song or two from the lighter and less historically-relevant side of the Newman catalog, those younger folks who only know Newman from his recent work scoring Disney soundtracks may be pleasantly surprised to find that in his younger days, Newman was a gifted songwriter, known for his ability to expose the whole range of the human experience, from the poignant to the historical accurate to the absurd, rub it raw, and somehow manage to make it touching all the same. Sometimes, I guess, it takes a little rain to make you really understand.

Today’s bonus coversongs come with little fanfare after two megaposts in three days:

  • Randy Newman covers Harry Nilsson’s Remember
  • Randy Newman “covers” Every Man A King, bringing his trademark irony to lyrics originally by Huey P. Long just by singing them straight alongside his Good Old Boys

Randy Newman will play this year’s Jazzfest on Thursday evening. Can’t make it? Check out this related post @ Star Maker Machine: The Preservation Hall Jazz Band covers Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans

885 comments » | Bonnie Raitt, Chris Smither, Covered in Folk, JJ Cale, Mae Robertson, Marc Broussard, Martin Simpson, Peter Mulvey, Randy Newman, Shelby Lynne, The Duhks, Tim O'Brien

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