Category: Mississippi Fred McDowell


(Re)Covered, XV: More covers of and from
Talking Heads, Pat Wictor, Lori McKenna, Mark Erelli & Paul Simon!

March 6th, 2010 — 10:32 pm

Our music library may be vast, but we’ve never claimed to be completists here at Cover Lay Down. There’s always something missed or previously unheard, and always something new, too, released just in time to taunt us in the aftermath of a topical post.

Serendipitous addenda come from fellow bloggers, readers, labels, artists and library visits into our welcoming ears and hands. From there, they make their way back to you via our (Re)Covered features, wherein we share new and newly-rediscovered songs that dropped into our laps just a bit too late to make it into earlier features.


Our recent post covering the Talking Heads songbook has proved to be immensely popular, netting huge surges in traffic after receiving mention from both Metafilter and Very Short List. As is generally the case, with popularity comes an increase in suggested also-rans, and though many of the songs readers sent along were not folk at all – for example, I had already considered and rejected Guster’s uber-funky alt-jamband take on Nothing But Flowers and Moxy Fruvous’ slammin’ live cover of Psycho Killer as far too rock for our readership, and passed over Miles Fisher’s electrocover as fun but far too weird, when compiling our original post – this Jason Spooner track, recommended by fellow Star Maker Machine regular FiL, is a great slow-burn acoustic folk jam that fits the bill perfectly.



In an interesting email exchange with Pat Wictor after our recent feature on the NY-based singer-songwriter attempted to used his recent career path to exemplify the challenges artists face in moving from “emerging” to “established”, Pat humbly suggested that I had made the common mistake of confusing buzz with name-recognition and much more typical under-the-radar career growth – an error all the more frustrating because I myself have addressed this issue of bloggers mistaking buzz concentration as an indicator of popularity in previous posts, specifically in regards to the shortened buzz-and-fall cycle which has accompanied the rise of the rapid-fire blogging world. Mea culpa.

As Pat points out, his career continues to grow, albeit in more subtle ways out of the “new artist” limelight; recent developments include growing audience sizes, his first major tours of California, Texas, the Midwest, and the Carolinas, and a move from opening act slots to co-bills in much larger spaces. But that doesn’t mean he’s rich and famous yet, folks. Instead, says Pat, he’s engaged in “the long, slow work of building an audience, person by person,” and that’s where a blog can be a fine vehicle, indeed. Here’s a matched set of subtly different covers of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s You Got To Move from Pat’s work with frequent stage-sharer and fellow 2006 Falcon Ridge Emerging Artist Abbie Gardner (of similarly up-and-growing folk trio Red Molly) – one from his album, one from hers – to help keep these artists on your radar where they belong.



We’ve featured local singer-songwriters and frequent touring companions Mark Erelli and Lori McKenna here in fits and starts over the years: our first-year Mother’s Day post offered a pair of now long-gone coversongs from the housewife-turned-singing sensation; the release of Mark’s 2008 album Delivered occasioned a similar subfeature, including several covers which have suffered the same fate.

But their recently recorded cover of Mary Gauthier’s Mercy Now, which came to me via Bottom of the Glass, is a full-bore delight, with driving beat, lightness, and harmonies that lend a bit more hope and perhaps a touch more steel to what seemed to be an untouchable original. And sending you off to purchase the recent 1% For The Planet benefit compilation from which it comes is a great way to support ecological causes, to boot. As a bonus, in lieu of reviving old posts ad infinitum, I’ve included a few favorite othercovers from those previous posts.

Bonus:



Finally, in other covernews, the new Peter Gabriel all-covers album Scratch My Back is, by most accounts, sappy, maudlin, emotionless and tame; it wasn’t even that hard to find a reviewer willing to call it “the worst cover album in the history of cover albums.” But the good news is that it’s part of a reciprocal project, which means upcoming Peter Gabriel covers from each of the artists whose work Gabriel mangles on his own release. And if Paul Simon’s cover of Biko, released in tandem with Gabriel’s cover of Boy in the Bubble as the second “Double A-side” single from the project, is any indication, we’re in for a great ride.

Our Paul Simon cover feature is yet another part of our long-dead archives, and we’re surely overdue to revisit his songbook, so expect another round of Simon covers to come sometime in 2010. In the meanwhile, stay tuned to the usual indieblogs for Peter Gabriel covers from Bon Iver, Regina Spektor, and more in the weeks ahead.



As an added bonus, since we’re looking back that far today, here’s another stunning Peter Gabriel cover from an album featured in our very first post here at Cover Lay Down, way back in September of 2007.



Cover Lay Down posts new features and coverfolk sets every Wednesday and Sunday, and the occasional otherday.

1,100 comments » | (Re)Covered, Jason Spooner, Lori McKenna, Mark Erelli, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel, Talking Heads

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

Red Molly: Never Been To Vegas (Gillian Welch, Susan Werner, Elvis and more)

November 7th, 2007 — 11:42 am

Though I spend plenty of time at the foot of the stage, I don’t usually care much for live recordings: I prefer the perfection of the studio to the roar of the imaginary crowd, and poor sound quality bothers my ears. But every once in a while, when there’s a good engineer at the sound board, something truly special results. Such is the case with Red Molly‘s strong first full-length album Never Been To Vegas — which, when added to their four-song in-studio EP, is the sum total of their recordings.

And, with the exception of a few previously-sung notables by Red Molly dobro player Abbie Gardner, every single song on these albums is a coversong.

The three folksingers that comprise Red Molly — Gardner, bass player/mandolinist Carolann Solobelo, and banjo/guitarist Laurie MacAllister — met around covers, so it’s no surprise that their entire recorded output consists of them. Formed from the early morning remnants of a latenight songcircle high above the darkened mainstage of Falcon Ridge Folk Festival, the trio returned to the festival two years later to win the highly-competitive FRFF Emerging Artist showcase. (Full disclosure: I’m crew chief for the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival teen crew).

Since then, the girls of Red Molly have toured with the other 2006 showcase winners, opened for such luminaries as Jonathan Edwards and John Hammond, and come back to Falcon Ridge as featured performers, wowing crowds and winning admiration from fellow musicians with their sweet harmonies and full acoustic sound. Throughout, they’ve been playing covers — banking admiration for such time as they might return to either their own solo work, or a fuller existence as the rarest of American folk creatures: the folk group.

Mostly, Red Molly’s interpretations lean towards the Americana end of folk music — coverchoices include Gillian Welch, Hank Williams, and old traditional folk/gospel songs such as Darlin’ Corey and When The Roll Is Called Up Yonder. But regardless of subject, their tight crystal-clear harmonies and brightstringed musicianship bring each song forward as a gift to be shared, a glittering gospel.

Today we feature a trio of songs from the folktrio’s Never Been To Vegas, with kudos to engineer Dae Bennett for changing my mind about live recordings, even if this one turns out to have been recorded in a studio, not a coffeehouse. Don’t forget to check out the bonus songs below for a sweet pair of covers from their self-titled EP, and a wonderful version of You Gotta Move by Abbie and fellow 2006 Falcon Ridge Folk Festival Showcase winner Pat Wictor.

  • Red Molly, Caleb Meyer (orig. Gillian Welch)
  • Red Molly, Coal Tattoo (orig. Billy Edd Wheeler)
  • Red Molly, Blue Night (orig. Kirk McGee)

Support these fast-rising, red-wearin’ women by buying Red Molly, plus solo albums from Abbie, Laurie, and Carolann, from CD Baby via the Red Molly website. While you’re there, follow the link to pick up this year’s Naked Folk Calendar (the girls of Red Molly were the November 2006 pin-up); all calendar profits go towards health insurance for struggling folk musicians.

Today’s bonus coversongs:

  • Red Molly wrings new life from old Elvis-covered chestnut Are You Lonesome Tonight…
  • …and jams through Susan Werner’s Yellow House
  • Abbie Gardner and Pat Wictor wail the doublesteel blues on You Gotta Move (orig. Mississippi Fred McDowell)
  • Previously posted: Red Molly covers Patty Griffin


34 comments » | Abbie Gardner, Billy Edd Wheeler, Elvis, Gillian Welch, Kirk McGee, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Red Molly, Susan Werner