We’re celebrating the release of our fourth CD, Please Punch Richard For Me. Tony Nuccio made a nice poster for our upcoming CD release show at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Click the image to download a high-resolution PDF of the poster.

The CD release show is Friday, July 29th, with our friends Shotgun Party from Austin, Texas. We will be playing the new CD in its entirety, as well as debuting our first ever video, an animated short of ‘Fox on the Town’ by our friend Mindy Fisher.

For tickets, please visit the Old Town School of Folk Music website: OldTownSchool.org.

We’re very pleased to be celebrating the release of our fourth full-length release, Please Punch Richard for Me, on Friday July 29th at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago.  We will be joined by our friends Shotgun Party, from Austin.

Please Punch Richard for Me is 13 tracks of reactionary goodness, recorded at King Size Sound Labs, with Mike Hagler at the helm.

Here are the tracks:

1. Cold Cold Ground
2. Sloop John B
3. Logan Square Dance
4. Holy Ground
5. Whiskey on a Sunday
6. Fox on the Town
7. Last Night I Hit the Bottle
8. Billy in the l’Oh Ground
9. Rolling Downhill
10. Weila Waila
11. Colorado Cabin
12. Dirty Dog
13. Teenage Kicks

If you’d like to hear a preview, here’s track 1 for your edification, a Tangleweed original called Cold Cold Ground.

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Tickets are on sale now on the Old Town School’s web site:

https://www.oldtownschool.org/concerts/2011/7/29_tangleweed.php

We are very pleased to announce that the release party for Tangleweed’s fourth CD, Please Punch Richard for Me, will be July 29th at The Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago. We will be joined by our friends Shotgun Party, from Austin Texas.

Tickets are on sale now:
www.oldtownschool.org

We will, naturally, have copies of the new CD for sale that evening. In the meantime, here’s a little sample from the new disc, a little ditty called ‘Cold Cold Ground’

Tangleweed: Cold Cold Ground

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Howard Dukes wrote a nice piece about the group for the South Bend Tribune, in anticipation of our show at Fiddler’s Hearth on Saturday, May 14th.

Dukes and I talked about Tangleweed’s forthcoming CD, Please Punch Richard For Me, and about acoustic music as an alternative to mass-produced pop.

[Tangleweed's] commitment to making soulful and honest music extends into the recording process.

Tangleweed recorded its first album, “Just a Spoonful,” the old-fashioned way. The band eschewed over-dubbing, and all of the band’s members gathered in the studio at the same time.

“I believe that it’s very difficult to separate the process of making records from the end result,” Rainey says. “That means that the way we make a record has a direct impact on the way that record sounds, and there is a magic in some of those old recordings where everyone is in the same room at the same time.”

Rainey notes that setup often introduces a level of uncertainty into the process. But that can be a good thing, Rainey says.

“The energy that comes is not only from the interaction between the musicians, but sometimes that energy comes from the rough edges that you find,” he says. “What you find with those mistakes is a humanity and spontaneity that often get exorcised from modern recording because of the way they are made.”

You can read the full article here: http://www.southbendtribune.com/entertainment/inthebend/sbt-20110508sbtmichg-05-03-20110508,0,5488267.story

One of my favorite songs from our third CD is our cover of the old raggy blues tune Pick Poor Robin Clean. Luke Jordan and Geeshie Wiley each recorded fantastic versions of it, Jordan in 1927 for Victor, Wiley in 1931 for Paramount.

The song’s lyrics were long a puzzle to me. I had long assumed that it was a song about desperate poverty. The first verse seemed to suggest a person driven to desperate measures:

You Gotta pick poor robin clean
Pick poor robin clean
I picked the head, I picked the feet
I woulda picked the body but it wasn’t fit to eat
You gotta pick poor robin clean
Pick poor robin clean
I’ll be satisfied, having your family

I’ve recently been reading Stephen Calt’s interesting Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary, and he has a different interpretation: the song is about robbing the destitute:

[Poor robin is,] most likely, a ragged person, from the 19-century colloquialism ragged robin. In the above song, the subject is left penniless by a crooked gambler, clean signifying completely without funds in criminal slang, and to clean, to rob one of everything of value.

Here’s our version, and you can see if you agree with Calt’s interpretation.

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A sneak preview of our new CD, Please Punch Richard For Me is up for your listening pleasure, a little number called Cold Cold Ground. Check out the music player below to hear it, or head over to our music page to listen.

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The record is mixed and mastered, and Tony Nuccio is cranking away at the artwork. We should have a release date to announce soon.

Paul’s handmade piece of musical luggage, the Suitbass, was the subject of a nice little writeup on Christoper Catania’s website, along with a nice shot of our own Mr. Wargaski playing said instrument.

I had never seen an instrument quite like Wargaski’s suit bass, and it was great to be reminded that bluegrass music has a rich history of relying on the creativity of musicians to make instruments out of stuff they have around the house.

Read the complete article.

Our friend Mindy Fisher is working on a short animated film set to our version of The Fox, from our forthcoming fourth CD, Please Punch Richard for Me. Pictured are our own Paul Wargaski and Billy Oh. Paul is playing a cartoon version of his homemade suitbass.

The Fox is an interesting piece. Though it’s been widely recorded since the postwar folk revival, it has roots that run quite a bit deeper. There is a 15th-century manuscript in the British Museum with an early version of the lyrics. There’s an article Paul ran across from the Journal of American Folklore with some excerpts from the old text: