Recently in Folk Category

There's a lot of uncertainty out in the world today. Who knows exactly what is going to happen or when it's going to happen or who exactly it's going to happen to?

One thing's for sure, though. If Johnny Cash has recommended a list of essential songs, you sit down, you shut up and you start listening to those songs.

Back in 1973, the Man In Black gave his daughter, Rosanne Cash, a list of 100 songs that he thought she needed to know. Being a smart cookie, Rosanne listened to those songs and studied them over the years.


Now, Rosanne, a fine singer-songwriter in her own right, has whittled that list down to 12 songs and put out what is easily one of the best albums of 2009 -- The List. In her Rhapsody review, Linda Ryan, our country editor, writes, "It's difficult not to fall hard for the Springsteen-featured 'Sea of Heartbreak,' the gentle honky-tonk of 'Miss the Mississippi and You' and the Elvis Costello duet 'Heartaches by the Numbers.'"

One of the great things about Rhapsody is the depth of our catalog -- over 8 million songs strong -- that allows you to not only listen to the latest music, but also virtually any music from every period. Once you sign up for Rhapsody, it is at your fingertips.

And while you should definitely check out Rosanne's album, I went ahead and searched out 12 earlier versions of the songs on Rhapsody. These are tough, timeless songs with a sentimental streak, full of heartbreak, humor and resilience. The list includes rough, raw recordings as well as more polished, radio-ready hits of the past.

Listen in, take notes and either get reacquainted with some old friends or make some new ones. Johnny Cash was right: these are songs that you'll need at some point in your life. Rosanne Cash does the songs -- and her father -- proud.

From left: Mike Mogis, M. Ward, Jim James, Conor Oberst

The concept of the supergroup is older than fishing -- literally! Jesus and his Disciples were certainly a supergroup, and we're pretty sure Jesus invented fishing. Yes, bands of preternaturally talented brothers (and sisters) have been joining forces for millennia. With this week's debut from Monsters of Folk -- a supergroup comprised of Mike Mogis, M. Ward, My Morning Jacket's Jim James and Bright Eyes' Conor Oberst -- we thought we'd reflect upon some of our favorite supergroups of years past. Was the whole greater than the sum of the parts? Read on to find out, and don't forget: if you dig supergroups, regular groups or anything in between, Rhapsody has you covered. Take a free spin to see what unlimited, unfettered music access tastes like (surprisingly unlike chicken, we think you'll be pleased to discover).

America lost a genuine cultural treasure when on August 7, 2009, Mike Seeger succumbed to cancer. Though he lacked the high profile of his half-brother Pete, who is more or less considered the patron saint of the American folk revival, Mike is in many ways the greatest artist and musician to have emerged from the extended Seeger clan.

Seeger’s work as a sound explorer, archivist and music historian forms a large chunk of his reputation. He rediscovered and recorded the work of several obscure Southern and Appalachian troubadours, including the now-legendary Dock Boggs. In the last years of Boggs' life, Seeger had become his booking agent and closest confidante. Seeger also played a pivotal role in the bluegrass revival of the 1960s. Along with fellow folklorist Ralph Rinzler, as well as other East Coast “citybillies” utterly obsessed with the music, Seeger helped resuscitate the careers of both Bill Monroe and the Stanley Brothers.

Alexisonfire’s latest release Old Crows, Young Cardinals, is a hardcore fan’s wet dream. The songwriting demonstrates exactly what this Canadian quintet has to bring to the table and is Alexisonfire’s most thought out and impressive release to date. Featuring 43 minutes of non-stop, explosive, rock ecstasy, Old Crows may very well be the all-around best release to come out of the hardcore genre this year. Combined with string-bending hammer-ons, backed by raucous drum fills, Dallas Green and George Pettit’s mixture of angelic and demonic vocal styles create an almost perfect collection of tracks that when performed live, will assuredly be fueling circle-pits around the globe. Alexisonfire might possibly be the best band you’ve never heard of. With four full-length releases behind them, two of which went Platinum in Canada, one of which went Gold and Old Crows, Young Cardinals, which peaked at #2 on the Canadian charts, it’s a mystery as to what has kept them from climbing to the top of US rock charts, until now. The guys recently sat down with Rhapsody to discuss the death of punk rock, how Nickelback has influenced their band and exactly what has kept them from exploding onto US rock radio.

The other night I wandered out to the front porch. There, with a sixer of Bell’s Oberon at my feet, I cranked a little New Riders of the Purple Sage and watched the fireflies light up the trees late into the night. It was my own private send-off to John “Marmaduke” Dawson, who died from stomach cancer on July 21 in Mexico. Apparently, the former N.R.P.S. frontman had been living south of the border for quite some time. I always suspected Dawson was battling a serious illness. YouTube footage of a one-off appearance with the New Riders in 2001 shows a tiny man, frail and weak, who looked far older than 56.

Dawson, who co-wrote the American Beauty classic “Friend of the Devil,” was one of the elders of the Grateful Dead tribe. Jerry Garcia, Robert Hunter and he were pals in the mid-1960s, years before Haight-Ashbury and the whole acid rock/hippie thing. Back then, they all hung around Palo Alto and picked old folk music: jug-band tunes, bluegrass, country blues, etc. Another member of the inner circle was guitarist David Nelson, and after the Dead became a national act, Dawson and he began developing a new sound: psychedelic country rock, aka cosmic American music: a mix of hippie vibes, Bakersfield honky-tonk and vintage rockabilly.

Though it's Los Angeles legends like Gram Parsons, the Byrds, Gene Clark and the Flying Burrito Brothers who receive the bulk of the credit for pioneering cosmic American music, the New Riders’ contributions cannot be overlooked. Featuring Garcia on pedal steel and Mickey Hart on drums, 1971’s New Riders of the Purple Sage is every bit as seminal as The Gilded Palace of Sin, Sweetheart of the Rodeo and The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark. In fact, early tunes like “Dirty Business” and “Gypsy Cowboy” find the New Riders diving into the psychedelic void far deeper than their Southern California counterparts.

The 1970s were the age of classic rock, sensitive singer-songwriters and breezy California pop. They were a time when you got up in the afternoon, slipped into your favorite pair of denim shorts and headed down to the beach. There, you tossed a little Frisbee to the sounds of Little Feat, Slowhand, the Dead and Emmylou. And when nightfall came and those soothing waves washed romance upon the shore, you'd woo that special someone to smooth operators like Firefall and Nicolette Larson.

If this sounds like good living to you, then check out our super-sweet discount playlist Smooth Pop and Classic Rock For Cheap.

Elvis Costello and Emmylou Harris will be at the Telluride Bluegrass fest. How 'bout you?

Bluegrass is popular all over the United States -- no doubt about it. But historically, it thrives in about three to five regions: Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, eastern Maryland/Pennsylvania, the Ozarks of Missouri and southeastern Kansas and, interestingly enough, Colorado. The Centennial State -- that's Colorado, yo -- is probably the major hub for groups that explore progressive bluegrass (a.k.a. newgrass, jamgrass, hippie bluegrass). I'm talking about bands like Leftover Salmon, Yonder Mountain String Band, The String Cheese Incident and Oakhurst.

Colorado is also home to one of genre's more celebrated multi-day festivals, Telluride Bluegrass, which is entering its 36th year. Located in the San Juan Mountains in the southwest corner of the state, there's no beating Telluride when it comes to dreamy settings. Humongous snow-capped peaks and lush, Rocky Mountain flora surround its mainstage. There are workshops for musicians, all night jams, performance competition, camping, hiking and a well-established emphasis on green-conscious business. It's pretty darn amazing.

Musically, Telluride has followed Bonnaroo's lead in opening its doors to alt-country types, world musicians and hip indie rockers dabbling in Americana and roots music. For this year's installment (June 18-21), the line-up features everybody from newgrass heavies Railroad Earth to indie dude Conor Oberst to mandolin legend Sam Bush to the luscious Jenny Lewis. And that's just the tip of the iceburg. Here's the complete line-up -- more or less:

David Byrne
Elvis Costello & The Sugarcanes
Emmylou Harris
Three Girls & Their Buddy
Béla Fleck & Toumani Diabaté
The Steeldrivers
Todd Snider
John Cowan Band
Peter Rowan
Jerry Douglas
Tim O'Brien
Yonder Mountain String Band
The Punch Brothers
The Lovell Sisters
The Greencards
Crooked Still
Greensky Bluegrass
Gaelic Storm
Zac Brown Band
Blue Canyon Boys
Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
Mike Farris & The Roseland Rhythm Revue

This is an insane collection of talent for sure, but if forced to pick three can't-miss performances, I'd go with these:

1) Greensky Bluegrass
Not too many folks have heard these upstarts from Kalamazoo, Michigan, but Telluride just loves them. The quintet won the festival's band competition in 2006. In addition to the playlist up above, a great introduction to Greensky Bluegrass is their last full-length, Five Interstates, which has a real Jay-Farrar-meets-Dillard-&-Clark vibe. There's something very early '70s about this Greensky Bluegrass. They're basically classic singer-songwriters playing in a West Coast hippie bluegrass style.

2) The Steeldrivers
Much like the Infamous Stringdusters, the SteelDrivers are a pack of hot shot Nashville session cats getting all acoustic. That said, they're totally fiery, playing a brand of Appalachian mountain music that's fortified with brawny, swampy blues-rock. Singer and guitarist Chris Stapleton howls like Bob Seger had he grown up in, say, Bristol, Tennessee, rather than Detroit. Over the last year or so a Steeldrivers performance has become a pretty hot ticket in the bluegrass scene. So yeah, this will be a killer show.

3) Three Girls & Their Buddy:
Emmylou. Patty Griffin. Shawn Colvin. Buddy Miller. Need I say more?

With a new record and a national tour ahead of them, Philadelphia experimental rockers mewithoutYou are geared up to take the college indie scene by storm this summer. Their fourth release, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright, showcases lyricist Aaron Weiss’ softer side. The choral chants and Dylan-esque acoustic rhythms present an ideal backdrop for Weiss to channel God’s messages through his lyrics. Weiss stepped away from prepping the band’s eco-friendly tour bus and shared some words with me regarding his deep connection to God and what exactly defines his deeply spiritual lifestyle.

Grate news, especially for all you Deadheads: Rhapsody recently scored nearly every volume of tape-vault archivist Dick Latvala's Dick's Picks, a now-legendary series of live two-track concert recordings spanning the band's four-decade career. These things are wonderfully -- some would maddeningly -- raw. Lacking the remix work of the Dead's official live albums, each volume came with a "caveat emptor" warning would-be buyers about its very unpolished sound quality.

Of the 36 Dick's Picks released between 1993 and 2005, Rhapsody, if I counted correctly, offers 33. To celebrate these gnarly acquisitions, I've put together "So You Wanna Be a Deadhead ...", a 30-tracks-from-30-different-volumes playlist. For the uninitiated, this would serve as great primer to Latvala's sprawling work (he left us in 1999).

Though The American Book of the Dead is a regular read in my house, I lack the knowledge of the true Deadhead. Thus, I wasn't able to pay homage to some of the more adventurous tape collectors out there and turn my playlist into the ultimate Dead experience: a simulated concert stitched together from the best Dick's Picks has to offer. However, I did re-create a few of the group's classic segues, including the "Scarlet Begonias" > "Fire on the Mountain" jam. For the former I used the version found on Volume 24 (Cow Palace 3/23/1974), while for the latter I grabbed the version that appears on Volume 6 (Hartford Civic Center 10/14/83).

I also made sure every track I picked is considered, amongst the Deadhead cognoscenti, to be one of the group's very best performances of that particular song. But hey, that's expected from a guy who sits on the bowl reading a 450-page Grateful Dead encyclopedia. Which reminds me...

BTW, the volume I'm most obsessed with these days is No. 23 (Baltimore Civic Center 9/17/1972). This gig captures the Dead making the transition from countrified bar rock to the dreamy, fusion-based psychedelia of the mid-1970s. Good stuff, especially the, uh, 39-minute rendition of "The Other One."

Song: Houses
Album: Elyse
Artist: Elyse Weinberg

Sometime back in 1968, the same year he released his debut album, Neil Young hooked up with an old Canadian pal by the name of Elyse Weinberg. Also in Los Angeles recording her first record, the singer employed Young’s signature guitar squeal on the country-folk ballad “Houses.” This song is a total stunner -- emotionally raw and savagely honest. In a lot of ways its gritty, stripped-down vibe predates Young’s rustic work on After the Gold Rush and Harvest.

The rest of Weinberg's debut -- an eclectic collection of Dylan-inspired folk-rock, Baroque pop and sitar-tinged psychedelia -- is equally good. With the record cracking Billboard's top 50, rock critics were even mentioning the singer alongside the new wave of female singer-songwriters, namely Joni Mitchell and Laura Nyro. But alas, Weinberg's fame was short-lived. She eventually dropped out of the music biz and changed her name to, uh, Cori Bishop.

Elyse, meanwhile, became one of them rarely seen dollar-bin artifacts -- until 2004, that is. That's when Elf Power's Andrew Rieger discovered one of them dusty old copies and flipped out. This led to a wonderful reissue produced by Georgia's Orange Twin, a label and "artist co-op" centered around the Elephant 6 collective. But that's not the end of the story. In 2007 Vetiver contributed to Weinberg's revival by recording a version of “Houses” for his all-covers album Thing of the Past. That’s a good one, too, even if the band turned Young's guitar into more of a George Harrison lick.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Whether you are of Irish heritage or Irish at heart, this playlist is guaranteed to get you into the spirit of St. Patrick's Day. Traditional and contemporary Irish music sit alongside a handful of bands that know how to get the ceili (party) started. U2, Snow Patrol, Flogging Molly, Luka Bloom -- nobody knows how to party like the Irish! La Fheile Padraig!

SoundTreks: A regular feature on the music the other 97 percent of the globe is listening to

Many groups can claim to have influenced the revival and flowering of Irish traditional music, but the Dubliners were, in so many ways, the first. This was the group that went to the country and resurrected dying songs -- they copped their major hit, "Seven Drunken Nights," from a little-known sean nos singer named Joe Heaney -- and brought live music (the now indispensible "sessions," or seisiuns) back to bars in Ireland at a time when it was nearly nonexistent.

In this day and age -- and in this country -- it's hard to understand just how revolutionary the group was, and just how repressed Irish culture had been for centuries. The English in Ireland tried out tactics they later used around the world in their colonial endeavors: denying "natives" the right to use their own language in 1387, banning "Irish clothes" and banishing the Irish from walled towns, clearing them off their land, etc . Phrases like "beyond the pale" originated in Ireland, describing the zone outside the "civilized" English-controlled towns. That legacy, coupled with the famine of 1848 and waves of migration and economic stagnation, had left the country decimated, clenching a robust and punitive Catholicism in one fist and a bottle of booze in the other. We've all read the stories: Frank McCourt's litany of hardships in Angela's Ashes, the violence and hard-drinking in books like Roddy Doyle's Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha or The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, or films like The Magdalene Sisters.

Two Days and Counting

What's a St. Patrick's Day celebration without rebel songs? Rebel songs are the oral history of the Irish struggle for freedom from British rule -- set to music. Famously, the Irish rebelled against British rule in 1916 in what's come to be know as the Easter Rising; in 1972, Irish civil rights marchers were cut down on Bloody Sunday. Here are some powerful, fist-pumping anthems guaranteed to get your blood flowing and your Irish up.

Vetiver
Tight Knit

On previous records Vetiver's Andy Cabic was a freak-folkie who obviously owns a fat stack of awesome albums -- not bad, but not great either. With the release of Tight Knit, however, the dude is no longer a talented collector-nerd. He's an artist. This is profound landscape music, a misty coastal piedmont thoughtfully carved from the singer-songwriter's twin loves: vintage British folk and West Coast soft rock. Everything here locks together perfectly, from the elegant compositions to Cabic's phantom whisper to his band's patient gait.

I entertain this theory that Vetiver's recent collaborations with Gary Louris were critical to Tight Knit's success. As his backing band for both 2008's Vagabonds album and the subsequent tour, Vetiver had to learn 25 to 30 of the ex-Jayhawks' songs. This did two things: 1) teach Cabic the nuts and bolts of songwriting as craft (think a young Hunter S. retyping The Great Gatsby) and 2) helped transform his group from a loose recording project into a real-deal touring act. It's kind of like a carpenter who has graduated from apprentice to journeyman: Vetiver now builds better, and more meaningful, folk music.

"Hi, I'm Pete Seeger, and this post is totally sweet. You should read it -- all of it."

I recently received an e-mail from the boss-man. "Do you want to write up a blog post about re-working the folk genre?" he asked. "The approach you take would be up to you, but I figure maybe there's something to say about some of the choices you've been making ... It can be as formal or as informal as you like."

Okay. I choose informal.

Please enjoy the following 1,500-word (and some change) rant on my recent update of Rhapsody's folk music genre hub -- THIS THING HERE -- which is our approximation of a kind of CliffsNotes for all of folk music, in other words a pretty good place to start if you're a folk newbie, and an equally sweet page to check out if you're a folk obsessive, 'cause you're bound to agree and disagree with some of the choices. If the prospect of my rant doesn’t tickle your fancy, try this: Chilly Weather. Hot Women.

Otherwise, take ol' Pete's advice and dive into this sucker.