Category: Cassandra Wilson


Rainsongs: Folk Covers for a Stormy Night

June 1st, 2008 — 08:30 am

Written last night in a rainstorm’s aftermath. Posted this morning in bright dappled sunlight.

They say April showers bring May flowers, but I’m not so sure. This evening’s thunderstorm was a big one, and in our end-of-the-wire rural existence, even when the power stays on, thunder knocks our ‘net connectivity for a loop. Meanwhile, now that the trees have finally filled in, our newly-terraformed backyard doesn’t seem to be getting more than a few hours of sun each day; as a consequence, we’re having trouble getting flowers to do much of anything back there.

I’ve got dozens of posts half-formed and half-written, in my mind and on the screen: new and beloved artists to feature, a long-overdue return to our Covered In Kidfolk series, a few great songwriters to rediscover through folk covers. But writing this with a waning battery and no ‘net access means being shut off from my usual research materials. And in the darkness, the sounds of rain pattering against the leaves, punctuated by the intermittent gutterball of thunder, are sweeter than any music I could play – so sweet, it’s hard to think about anything but the world outside.

Instead, I spent the last hour watching the flowerbeds all but wash away, and the muddy water wash the fill from between the flagstones. The rain against the windows turned the yard beyond into an everchanging pointilist dream. And I lost the thread of anything but the present.

Some rainstorms disrupt; some destroy; others help things grow. All involve chaos, in their own way; even if it is only because rain challenges our default image of the world outside as inherently sunny and easily navigable. Here’s a playlist compiled quickly, in the dark, and researched only afterwards: a set of coversong, from the usual wide variety of folk artists and singer-songwriters, that celebrates storms both real and metaphoric.

Previously on Cover Lay Down:

  • Single Song Sunday: Rain and Snow

  • 1,046 comments » | Beth Orton, Cassandra Wilson, Edie Brickell, Grant Lee Phillips, Jimmy LaFave, Joan Baez, Juju Stulbach, M. Ward, Nanci Griffith, Neko Case, Northern Lights, Petty Booka, Rani Arbo

    Covered in Folk: Cyndi Lauper (Greg Laswell, Kasey Chambers, Eva Cassidy, Willie Nelson, etc.)

    May 14th, 2008 — 10:08 am


    As an unabashed child of the 80s, I grew up with a particular image of Cyndi Lauper in my head, and it wasn’t pretty: hanks of bright-colored hair, that highpitched little-girl voice, the theme song to Goonies, that weird staged event with beer-bellied wrestler Lou Albano that years later comes across as even more creepy than it was back then.

    But something was in the air, even then — something which didn’t gell with that synth-heavy dance-pop production and bouncy airhead persona. It turned out other songwriters really respected Cyndi Lauper. When, in the late nineties, Cyndi began to pull away from the charts and the public eye, she remained in the industry, taking stage roles, working behind the scenes as a vocal coach. You’d still see her every once in a while, passing through the red carpet crowd at the usual run of awards shows, and the people who stepped aside for her were people whose opinion we respected.

    Some of the reasons people loved Cyndi had to do with who she was as a person — a scrappy kid who had to kick-start her career several times to get heard, only to garner a record-breaking number of singles from mid-eighties release She’s So Unusual. Some had to do with sheer admiration of talent — love it or hate it, but that unique voice has a four octave range and a flexibility that many other megastars would die for. But though Cyndi continued to tour, outside the industry, with the exception of a few VH1 appearances, and a brief flash of misty-eyed memory when a few select somebodies like Phil Collins hit the charts with a cover, most of us forgot about Cyndi.

    Then, in 2005, Cyndi partnered with several contemporary artists from Shaggy to Sarah McLachlan to release The Body Acoustic, a series of gorgeous, slow interpretations of her older songs that showed just what we had missed behind the synthesizer pop. The album charted on the Billboard Adult Contemporary Charts, where her earliest fans, their ears mellowed with age, were ready to welcome her back. And, simultaneously, a generation that had grown up like I did, eyes glued to the early stages of MTV, began mining their own past, finding surprising sentiment in the songs of their hairspray childhood.

    It turns out when you strip those songs down, and recast them as folk, they speak to the heart. And though some of today’s coversongs wobble on the edge of oversentiment, it takes but a short survey – let’s say, a few choice covers of just three of Cyndi Lauper’s most famous songs — to recast Cyndi once and for all as a songwriter and song interpreter who may not have been in full control of her image, but sure as folk had the chops.

    So here’s those mid-career covers from Willie Nelson and long-gone bluesfolk songstress Eva Cassidy, plus some choice contemporary covers of Cyndi Lauper’s work from a wide variety of folk artists. From the rich, majestic pianofolk of Greg Laswell to the more atmospheric indie guitar style of Norman Palm, from Benjamin Costello‘s delicate pianopop to Allison Crowe‘s heartfelt guitarfolk to the rough live stylings of indie band Wakey! Wakey!, from Kasey Chambers‘ stunning acoustic folkpop to the mystical jangly jazz stylings of Cassandra Wilson, they go a long way towards explaining why Cyndi Lauper merits her success, and her praise.

    Remember, kids: instead of supporting faceless megacorporations which ask artists to take the least share of their due for the greatest part of the work, all artist and album links here on Cover Lay Down go direct to label homepages and artist preferred source for purchase – the most effective way to help keep music in the hands of musicians. If you like what you hear, head over to the sites and purchase an album or three. I especially recommend Greg Laswell’s new EP How The Day Sounds, the collected posthumous works of Eva Cassidy, and anything by Kasey Chambers. And cover lovers will be especially tickled by the loads of free downloads available from Wakey! Wakey!, Allison Crowe, and Benjamin Costello.

    Cover Lay Down publishes regularly on Wednesdays, Sundays, and the occasional Friday. Coming up: a return to our exploration of folk subgenres, and a feature on a favorite young singer-songwriter and cover artist in recognition of her newest collaborative album.

    249 comments » | Allison Crowe, Benjamin Costello, Cassandra Wilson, Covered in Folk, Cyndi Lauper, Eva Cassidy, Greg Laswell, Kasey Chambers, Norman Palm, Wakey Wakey, Willie Nelson

    James Taylor Covers: Sam Cooke, George Jones, Joni Mitchell, Stephen Foster, Peter Pan, The Drifters, and more!

    April 27th, 2008 — 08:57 pm


    A bit woozy today after yesterday’s all-day drive up the East Coast from North Carolina. My head still swims with the sights of barbecue joints and crabcake stands, and roadside shacks where one can get smoked ham and sausages, local peanuts, and fireworks to celebrate it all.

    But it’s good to be home, where the daffodils are in full blown bloom, even if the lawn still struggles against the moss and hemlock. The American South is a wonderful place to visit; I like seeing the world, and though I’ve been to more countries than states, the diversity of the US pleases me. But this place feels right, somehow. With a few tiny stints out of bounds, I’ve been a Massachusetts-based New Englander all my life, and I expect to be one for the remainder of it.

    James Taylor likes it here, too. And I’ve been promising myself a feature post on good old JT for ages. What better way to celebrate our triumphant return than with an eighteen song megapost on the coversongs of and from this incredible singer-songwriter? Ladies and gentlemen: the coverwork of James Taylor, Massachusetts resident.


    Born in Boston, James Taylor spent his adolescence in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where his father was Dean of the UNC School of Medicine. But the family retained strong ties to Massachusetts, summering in Martha’s Vineyard; James attended boarding school at Milton Academy, and when he struggled with depression in his early adulthood, he headed for McLean’s Hospital, a stately suburban instititution just outside of Boston where I remember visiting one of my own friends in the last year of high school.

    Though he has since lived in California and London, and though his signature voice retains the barest hint of southern twang under that clear-as-a-bell blueblood bostonian accent, like me, Taylor has always returned to the Massachusetts he loves. Today, he lives about thirty miles west of here, in the Berkshires, just on the other side of the Adirondack ridge. And he retains strong ties to his beloved Martha’s Vineyard, performing there each summer, sometimes with Ben and Sally, his children by ex-wife Carly Simon, who is also a Vineyard resident.

    Beyond our shared love of the beaches and woods of Massachusetts, there’s something immutably local and authentic about my experience with James Taylor. My childhood understanding of and familiarity with folk music as a genre and a recorded phenomenon was primarily driven by a strong record collection at home, but my experience of acoustic music as folk — as something singable and sharable and communal — was peppered with young camp counselors who had learned their guitar licks from the radioplay of the day. For me, Fire and Rain will always be a song for campfire singalongs, one which helps me come to terms with the bittersweet and constant state of being both in good company and away from home.

    Too, James Taylor was my first concert, and you never forget your first. I remember lying on the summer grass at Great Woods (now the Tweeter Center), looking up at the stars and letting the wave of Fire and Rain wash over me. I remember peering at the stage and recognizing the way James smiled at us, at bass player Leland Sklar, at the song itself as a kind of genuine communion, one which flavored the performance with something valid and universal.

    Because of that night, and the organic songs-first-performance-afterwards way I came to it, James Taylor, for me, is the standard by which I measure the authenticity of folk performance. That so many shows have not met that standard since then is a tribute to both Taylor’s gentle nature, and his way with song and performance.

    James Taylor’s voice is unmistakable, almost too sweet for some, and he doesn’t fit my every mood. His loose, white-man’s-blues guitar playing is better than most people give him credit for, but it is often downplayed in his produced work. But in the back of my mind his songs are a particular form of homecoming, one intimately tied to summer song and simple times outside of the world as we usually live it. And when I sing Sweet Baby James or You Can Close Your Eyes to my children at night, there’s a part of me that’s back on that summer lawn, letting the music reach a part of me that cannot speak for itself.


    We’ll have a few choice covers of Taylor’s most popular in the bonus section of today’s megapost. But first, here’s a few of the many songs which Taylor has remade in his own gentle way over the years: doo-wop standards, sweet nighttime paeans and lullabies, hopeful protest songs, and others.

    Though James Taylor does have his pop side, this isn’t it. You’ve heard ‘em before, so I’ve skipped the original versions of the covers which Taylor has made his own through radioplay over the years — including Carole King’s Up On The Roof and Marvin Gaye’s How Sweet It Is (To Be Loved By You) — though I did keep a live version of Handy Man in the mix, and thought it worth trying the new version of You’ve Got A Friend from Taylor’s newest release, the stripped-down One Man Band. (I’ve also skipped his lite pianojazz ballad version of How I Know You, from the Aida soundtrack: it’s not folk, and it’s not my thing.)

    Instead, by presenting a selection of Taylor’s rarer and lesser-known coversong all at once, it is my hope that the diversity of the source material here allows even the most jaded of us to come to what is too-often dismissed as Adult Contemporary pablum with new ears, attuned to more subtle differences of tone and undertone — to explore and even collapse the distance between bittersweet and tender, longing and acceptance, home and homesickness, which continues to make James Taylor worth listening to, and celebrating.

    James Taylor’s works are mainstream, and distributed as such; his website sends us to amazon.com for purchase. As here at Cover Lay Down we prefer to avoid supporting the corporate middleman in favor of direct artist and label benefit, we recommend that those looking to pursue the songwriting and sound of James Taylor head out to their local record shop for purchase.

    Not sure where to begin? Anything released between 1968 and 1974 provides the best introduction to JT’s core sound; I promise it’s folkier than you remember. Jaded folkies who stopped listening a while back might take a second look at Taylor’s 1977 release JT, or albums from the late eighties and nineties such as Never Die Young, New Moon Shine or Hourglass. I’ve heard great things about the recent DVD release One Man Band, Taylor’s return to a sparser acoustic sound. And coverlovers shouldn’t lose sight of James Taylor, either — rumor has it that he has already recorded tracks for an album of soul covers to be released later this year.

    I had been saving the bulk of my collection of covers of James Taylor originals for a future Folk Family Feature on the Taylor family: James, Livingston, son Ben, and Ben’s mother Carly Simon. But I’ve been leaking them slowly and surely as time goes on, and the floodgates are open today. So here’s the backlinks, and a few bonus coversongs to tide you over:


    James Taylor covers previously on Cover Lay Down:

  • Sheryl Crow covers You Can Close Your Eyes
  • Mud Acres covers Carolina in My Mind
  • Cindy Kallet covers New Hymn

    Related posts:

  • Ben Taylor covers The Zombies’ Time of the Season
  • Livingston Taylor covers Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely
  • Carly Simon covers the theme to Winnie The Pooh

    PS: I’m also looking for a rumored 2004 recording of James Taylor and Alison Krauss covering the Louvin Brothers’ How’s the World Treating You. Found! Thanks, Carol!

  • 711 comments » | Bonnie Raitt, Carly Simon, Cassandra Wilson, Da Vinci's Notebook, James Taylor, Mae Robertson, Seldom Scene

    Covered in Folk: Jimi Hendrix (Rickie Lee Jones, Fiona Apple, The Corrs, Emmylou Harris, 6 more!)

    April 9th, 2008 — 02:59 am

    Big news in the folkworld yesterday as Bob Dylan received a Special Citation from the Pulitzer Prize folks for his “profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” In response, For the Sake of the Song turns up a set of stellar live Dylan rarities, and claims Dylan’s recognition as a big win for rock and roll, but we know better — that description has folk written all over it, doesn’t it? Kudos, Bob.

    This would be the perfect moment for a set of Dylan covers…if we hadn’t already featured singer-songwriter Angel Snow‘s deep thoughts on Dylan’s “profound impact” and “poetic power” this past Sunday, along with her great take on Meet Me in the Morning. Rather than try to top that admittedly premature but no less effective tribute, today, we offer a compromise: a feature on the musician who took a Dylan song and turned it into the seminal soundtrack of every Vietnam movie ever made. Ladies and Gentlemen: the songs of Jimi Hendrix.

    Like so many of our Covered in Folk subjects, Jimi Hendrix isn’t folk, but he has a kind of folk credibility that makes him a natural choice for popular cover songs. Woodstock, the drug culture, the sixties — if that electric wail and trippy, funky, post-blues sensibility wasn’t at the very heart of his sound, we’d be remiss not to claim this cultural icon as one of our own.

    But the challenge of covering Jimi Hendrix, of course, is that while plenty of Jimi Hendrix songs have lyrics, most don’t have that many words to play with. Take Voodoo Child, which uses a dozen words or so to proclaim repeatedly that the singer/narrator is standing next to a mountain, and is a voodoo child, and still manages to remain seared in our brains. Or the few short lines of hallucination poetics that is Little Wing, so trivial to the song’s success that while Sting’s cover is too maudlin to share here, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s instrumental cover comes across as masterful and complete. It’s telling, in fact, that many of the best Hendrix covers out there are by blues musicians, as in many ways, Hendrix lyrics are like the words in the blues — they might offer some context, but it’s not the words we look to when we struggle to find ourselves in the blues experience.

    It’s not that Hendrix songs are meaningless. And it’s not that his lyrics are useless, really. It’s that with a few exceptions, Jimi speaks with his guitar, and uses his voice, even the lyrics themselves, as another instrument, a factor to set the stage, so that the technique and raw emotion of the strings might more effectively convey the subtleties of emotion that the song is intended to “mean”.

    As such, a Hendrix song offers several avenues of ownership for a covering performer. It can, for example, be an opportunity to feature the production — to shape a sound that in toto compensates for the lack of a prodigy at the center. Many artists who perform on or just over the pop edge of the folkworld have done just that. The heavy worldbeat production makes Voodoo Child a pop song in the hands of Beninise singer Angelique Kidjo, but the bounce and cry of the vocals call to the original. Though Cassandra Wilson‘s cover of The Wind Cries Mary is languid by comparison, it, too, shares a jangly acoustic jazzpop sensibility and an honest delivery which make it authentic, as if played on a jazz bar stage after the audience had gone home, and the mics had been turned off.

    Other related genre covers focus on the instrumentation itself, reminding us that Hendrix was a guitarist first, and a band member and singer only afterwards. The Corrs bring a more traditional folk rock sensibility to their live cover of Little Wing that could pass for a mellow version of the original, were it not for the pipes and fiddle. Bluegrass dobro wizard Jerry Douglas may sing the words to Hey Joe, but as with Hendrix himself, it’s the instrument who is the real star here. And if Memphis blues/rock prodigy (and sometimes rapper) Eric Gales sounds little like Hendrix when he sings through his guitar, it is only because here, too, the heavy drums and lyric only lend support to what is ultimately a guitarist’s song, played b a guitarist of extraordinary talent.

    If few true “folk” musicians and singer-songwriters take on Hendrix, it is because so few of his songs leave room to build on lyrical meaning. Because of this, to me, the most daring and often the most interesting Jimi Hendrix covers are the ones where the emotional emphasis is shifted to the voice. Emmylou Harris covers everybody, but I think her cover of May This Be Loved is among her more successful attempts, and surprisingly so, in part because of how effective her aging yet still etherial voice applies itself to the sparse, repetitive lyrics — though the very heavy wash of sound in the production, which features what seems to be an electric guitar played back in reverse throughout, provides an effective, moody underscore.

    Similarly, though Alison Brown‘s Angel is a true ensemble piece, with rich harmony vocals and a full acoustic band from banjo and guitar to bass and piano, Beth Nielsen Chapman‘s warbly, honest lead vocals beat Fiona Apple‘s earnest attempt to bring the blues to her voice, which almost works, if both voice and production didn’t teeter on the edge of channeling Cher and Aaron Neville. And most effective of all, the nuanced, impish delivery Rickie Lee Jones brings to Up From the Skies recenters the song on the lyric without losing a whit of the hopeful, playful emotional tone of the original.

    A mixed bag today, then: a few stellar covers, and a couple of flawed gems worth celebrating nonetheless. Heavy on the fringes of the folkword, too, with worldpop, cool jazz, and plenty of blues and bluegrass to choose from. Perhaps, in the end, this is the more honest tribute to a man like Hendrix, who — for all his wizardry — was a musician for whom experiment and experience, not perfection, were the ultimate goal.

    Though most tracks on today’s list came from compilation albums, the Hendrix estate doesn’t really need our cash. On the other hand, today’s artists really do deserve your support. As always, clicking on artist names in the post above takes you directly to artist websites for purchase and, in most cases, further tuneage.

    Looking for today’s bonus tracks? How about a few versions of that Dylan cover? If you missed it a couple of weeks ago, head on over to last week’s Audiography guest post to hear a pair of covers of All Along the Watchtower from Canadian Celtic rockers The Paperboys and old-school American folk rockers Brewer & Shipley, who you may remember as the guys who originally recorded “One Toke Over The Line”.

    666 comments » | Alison Brown, Angelique Kidjo, Cassandra Wilson, Fiona Apple, Jerry Douglas, Jimi Hendrix, Rickie Lee Jones, The Corrs

    Spring Has Sprung: Soft Coversongs of Hope and Renewal

    March 19th, 2008 — 07:31 am


    Tomorrow is the first day of Spring, and someone forgot to tell the sky.

    In the morning, says the weatherman, the world will turn to slush. And if we are truly blessed, all our sins will be washed away.

    Outside the snow sulks in great mounds where the plows have pushed it aside. Hard ice falls on three-inch shoots and tufts of new grass. We stay up late, and sit by the window together, and wait for the rains that do not come.

    Send rain, O Lord. For it has been a hard Winter, and we are ready for Spring.

    Happy Spring, everyone. May the darkness turn, and the world turn green and alive for each of us.

    698 comments » | Ann Percival, Cassandra Wilson, Damien Rice, Dolly Parton, Elizabeth Mitchell, Emmylou Harris, Erin McKeown, Gillian Welch, Greg Brown, Mary Chapin Carpenter