Here’s a nice Dutch-language review of our new CD, Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals, courtesy of Moors Magazine:

Tangleweed is een heerlijke frisse stringband waar we al eerder enthousiast over waren. Ook hun album Most Folk Heroes Started Out As Criminals is weer een puur genot om naar te luisteren. Lekker fel spel, prima zang, met vooral ook erg mooie meerstemmige zang, een beetje alsof je met een punkhouding bluegrass gaat spelen. Noem het streetgrass, of nugrass, of wat ze tegenwoordig allemaal bedenken, maar het is feitelijk gewoon ouderwetse akoestische muziek die met een rock ‘n’ roll-instelling gebracht wordt.

Tangleweed speelt traditionals als Sandy River Belle, moord- en doodslagliedjes als Little Sadie, rebelse Ierse liedjes, maar ook een cover van een nummer van The Rolling Stones, dat hier als een oeroude traditional klinkt. Hun commentaar bij dit nummer, Dead Flowers, tekent ook het gevoel voor humor van de band: “This is a lovely tune first recorded by an obscure quintet from the British Isles. The lyric “I’ll be in my basement room with my needle and my spoon” alludes to two of Mick Jagger’s great passions: embroidery and commemorative spoon collecting.”

De muziek straalt dezelfde lol uit als het commentaar bij de verschillende nummers doet vermoeden. Aanstekelijke muziek dus. Een absolute aanrader.

Blind Alfred Reed recorded this in New York City, just weeks after the 1929 stock market crash. His recording career began two years earlier in Bristol Tennessee, discovered in the same series of sessions that produced the first recordings by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Reed was 47 at the time of the sessions.

While Reed’s anthem captures the zeitgeist of the dawn of the Great Depression, his career couldn’t survive the subsequent collapse of the record industry in the early 1930s. This was to be his last session. He lived out the rest of his life in Tennessee and West Virginia, and died in 1956.

Reed sings and provides his own fiddle accompaniment.

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Courtesy of archive.org

Today’s post is more reposty goodness for the holiday season. Enjoy

Here’s another song from the Kennett Brothers’ long out of print and now ridiculously pricey Xmas CD, Santa is Real. This time, it’s the Kennett’s performance of the Marty Robbins tune, ‘One of You in Every Size‘.

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The lineup as best I remember:
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Bob Dunn is rightly revered as the Ur source of Western Swing steel guitar, owing to his work with Milton Brown’s Musical Brownines in Ft. Worth in the mid 1930a. Dunn cut his first sides with Brown in Chicago, 1935, and cut dozens more with the group until Brown’s death in April of the following year. He was among the first musicians to record with an electric guitar, but Dunn’s work has significance well beyond that. He was an unusually sophisticated soloist whose elegant and languid melodic style helped establish the electric steel guitar as de rigeur in country music.

Dunn recorded in Houston under his own name, with a group that was essentially Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers. He had some notable sidemen for the session (not least of which was another pioneer of electrified string music, electric mandolinist Leo Raley), and they recorded some solid sides of their own. Moon Mullican sings lead on this one.

The personnel:

• Bob Dunn, electric steel guitar
• Leo Raley, electric mandolin
• Mancel Tierney, piano
• Hezzie Bryant, string bass
• “Fritz” Kehm, drums
• “Moon” Mullican, vocal

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Courtesy of Archive.org

Signs of the times at the National Old Time Music Fest in LeMars, Iowa

This sign, reading “No Modern Music”, with the “No” underlined for emphasis, was posted on the wall at a festival we played in LeMars, Iowa, this past summer.

This is a repost of a post I wrote two years ago. Enjoy, while I take the rest of the day off.

Santa is Real, the Christmas record my old band the Kennett Brothers put together, is long out-of-print, and, thanks to the efforts of obsessive Wilco completists, prohibitively expensive on the second-hand market. In the spirit of the season, I’m posting an MP3 of one of the tracks, our cover of the Louvin Brothers song ‘A Shutin at Christmas‘.

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(download link below the jump)

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Thanks to the miracle of FLICKR we’ve come upon a couple of nice snaps of Tangleweed playing in the balcony at CBGB Fest. Thanks to Rory O’Connor and MT Sullivan respectively for sharing their work so generously with us!