Paul Smith - Mysterious Barricades: The Banjo Redefined

This is an incredible banjo album. It's so beautiful!!! (and that's an odd word to be paired with such a rude-sounding instrument)... It also continues to confirm my notion that every single record issued by Flying Fish was great (or every one I've heard so far at least). Moreover, he paved the way for Béla Fleck and Alison Brown, both of whom went on to become much more famous than he. Indeed, he's pretty much impossible to find information on, and I'm pretty sure this is his only record. God, it's good though... really. The best ragtime banjo number I've ever heard (his arrangement of Joseph Lamb's 'Ragtime Nightingale' is simply stunning), and classical banjo to match the great John Bullard. And really interesting original pieces, kinda dawgy but with less jazz and more classical and Celtic influence. There's even a traditional Irish number, done fingerstyle on a 5-string. Really, this guy could have been what Béla Fleck has become, but he never wowed everybody with his bluegrass chops, so he never really became famous. Ah, well. Another forgotten masterpiece, prime for blogging!


Paul Smith - Mysterious Barricades: The Banjo Redefined

Year: 1981
Label: Flying Fish

Review by Brian Olewnick

Banjoist Paul Smith presented here a selection of works divided between traditional folk and bluegrassy pieces and works from the classical repertoire rearranged for banjo. The former are the most attractive, including songs like his own "Missouri," sounding a bit like David Grisman's work from around the same period, and the Irish tune "Julia Delaney," a delightful romp giving Smith's nimble fingers a good workout. The title cut was originally a harpsichord work by François Couperin, played solo here and quite appealingly, the hollow banjo chords giving the short piece some breathing room. The little-known Joseph Lamb's "Ragtime Nightingale" is an unexpected delight with a subtlety of line and mysterious quality that compares reasonably well with Scott Joplin. The Beethoven and Vivaldi compositions work less well, coming off as slightly precious and overly benign. There's a bit too much self-consciousness in Smith's avowed attempts to "redefine" the banjo. One would have wished he simply relaxed and played pieces like "The Last Minute" and "Julia Delaney" and stopped worrying so much. As is, Mysterious Barricades is generally enjoyable and a fine banjo showcase, but it could have been much more.

Musicians:
Paul Smith, banjo and fiddle
Adam Rose, guitar
John Held, piano
Tudy McLain, flute
Paul Kotapish, bouzouki
Kundry Berger, piano and harpsichord
Joe Bichsell, cello

Tracks:
01 Missouri
02 Beethoven: Sonatina in C for mandolin and piano w/o 44.
03 Pythagoras
04 Julia Delaney
05 Les Barricades Mystérieuses
06 Ragtime Nightingale
07 The Last Minute
08 Tim's Flatted Fifth
09 Vivaldi: Concerto in D for lute, two violins, and continuo; I. Allegro
10 Vivaldi: Concerto in D for lute, two violins, and continuo; II. Largo
11 Vivaldi: Concerto in D for lute, two violins, and continuo; III. Allegro

pythagorian mysteries.
fresh vinyl rip, cleaned | mp3 >256kbps

I'm really curious about ragtime, classical, and Irish music played on the 5-string banjo. If any of you have Fred Sokolow - Ragtime Banjo, Bluegrass Style, or John Bullard - Bach on Banjo, I'd love to hear them. Or others I may not know about!

Reverend Gary Davis

"In Davis we encounter a complete musician, a composer aware of all musical details, exploring new possibilities. Davis has not been acclaimed as Robert Johnson, yet he alone brought many traditions to culmination through an artistry which surpassed nearly all others during his lifetime." -Allan Evans

Again we have an incredibly idiosyncratic guitarist and singer who was caught between sacred and secular music (and lifestyles). Reverend Gary Davis was one of the best and most unique guitar and banjo players of the 20th century. And, I'm not going to say anything really that would be better than what others have said, so once again I quote.

The Reverend Gary Davis

In his prime of life, which is to say the late '20s, the Reverend Gary Davis was one of the two most renowned practitioners of the East Coast school of ragtime guitar; 35 years later, despite two decades spent playing on the streets of Harlem in New York, he was still one of the giants in his field, playing before thousands of people at a time, and an inspiration to dozens of modern guitarist/singers including Bob Dylan, Taj Mahal, and Donovan, and Jorma Kaukonen, David Bromberg, and Ry Cooder, who studied with Davis.

According to guitarist and author Stefan Grossman, Davis said he was three weeks old when he became blind from chemicals put in his eyes. Despite this affliction, he showed musical talent immediately, making his first guitar from a pie pan and a stick before he was ten.

One of eight children, Gary was raised by his grandmother on a farm near Greenville, South Carolina after his father decided that his mother could not care for him properly. In the South of the early 1900s street bands provided entertainment, often traveling through the small towns on wagons. The music the young Davis picked up on was a lively combination of spirituals sung in black churches, square dance music, and marches by popular figures such as John Phillips Sousa. Davis's distinctive style can be seen as an attempt to translate these types of music to the guitar. In an interview with Sam Charters, Davis said of his chosen instrument: "The first time I ever heard a guitar, I thought it was a brass band coming through. I was a small kid and I asked my mother what it was and she said that was a guitar."

As a youth, Davis sang at the Center Raven Baptist Church in Gray Court, South Carolina. Later, he played in a string band in Greenville and learned to read Braille at the Cedar Springs School for Blind People in Spartanburg. After slipping on ice and breaking his wrist, the bones were set badly, and he was forced to play with an oddly cocked left hand. This may have become an advantage as it allowed him to finger the chords in a unique way.

He was self-taught on the guitar, beginning at age six, and by the time he was in his 20s he had one of the most advanced guitar techniques of anyone in blues -- his only peers among ragtime-based players were Blind Arthur Blake, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Willie Johnson. Davis himself was a major influence on Blind Boy Fuller. Davis's influences included gospel, marches, ragtime, jazz, and minstrel hokum, and he integrated them into a style that was his own. In 1911, when Davis was a still teenager, the family moved to Greenville, SC, and he fell under the influence of such local guitar virtuosi as Willie Walker, Sam Brooks and Baby Brooks. Davis moved to Durham in the mid-'20s, by which time he was a full-time street musician, and celebrated not only for the diversity of styles that his playing embraced, but also for his skills with the guitar, which were already virtually unmatched in the blues field.

"He was the most fantastic guitarist I'd ever seen." -Dave Van Ronk

Davis went into the recording studio for the first time in the '30s with the backing of a local businessman. Davis cut a mixture of blues and spirituals for the American Record Company label, but there was never an equitable agreement about payment for the recordings, and following these sessions, it was 19 years before he entered the studio again. During that period, he went through many changes. Like many other street buskers, Davis always interspersed gospel songs amid his blues and ragtime numbers, to make it harder for the police to interrupt him. He began taking the gospel material more seriously, and in 1937 he became an ordained minister. After that, he usually refused to perform any blues. Davis moved to New York in the early '40s and began preaching and playing on streetcorners in Harlem. He recorded again at the end of the 1940s, with a pair of gospel songs, but it wasn't until the mid-'50s that a real following for his work began developing anew. His music, all of it now of a spiritual nature, began showing up on labels such as Stinson, Folkways, and Riverside, where he recorded seven songs in early 1956.

Davis was "rediscovered" by the folk revival movement, and after some initial reticence, he agreed to perform as part of the budding folk music revival, appearing at the Newport Folk Festival, where his raspy voiced sung sermons, most notably his transcendent "Samson and Delilah (If I Had My Way)" -- a song most closely associated with Blind Willie Johnson -- and "Twelve Gates to the City," were highlights of the procedings for several years. He also recorded a live album for the Vanguard label at one such concert, as well as appearing on several Newport live anthology collections. He was also the subject of two television documentaries, one in 1967 and one in 1970. Davis became one of the most popular players on the folk revival and blues revival scenes, playing before laDavis was "rediscovered" by the folk revival movement, and after some initial reticence, he agreed to perform as part of the budding folk music revival, appearing at the Newport Folkrge and enthusiastic audiences -- most of the songs that he performed were spirituals, but they weren't that far removed from the blues that he'd recorded in the 1930s, and his guitar technique was intact. Davis's skills as a player, on the jumbo Gibson acoustic models that he favored, were undiminished, and he was a startling figure to hear, picking and strumming complicated rhythms and countermelodies. Davis became a teacher during this period, and his students included some very prominent White guitar players, including David Bromberg and the Jefferson Airplane's Jorma Kaukonen (who later recorded Davis's "I'll Be Alright" on his acclaimed solo album Quah!).

"Rev. Davis taught me, by example, to completely throw out my preconceptions of what can or can't be done on the guitar."
-Bob Weir (of the Grateful Dead)

The Reverend Gary Davis left behind a fairly large body of modern (i.e. post-World War II) recordings, well into the 1960s, taking the revival of his career in his stride as a way of carrying the message of the gospel to a new generation. He even recorded anew some of his blues and ragtime standards in the studio, for the benefit of his students.

"Gary Davis took you out of playing baby guitar and made you play it like a grown man." -Taj Mahal

In 1974, Davis described his teaching style for Blues Guitar: "Your forefinger and your thumb -- that's the striking hand, and your left hand is your leading hand. Your left hand tells your right hand what strings to touch, what changes to make. That's the greatest help! You see, one hand can't do without the other." This finger- picking style was capable of maintaining a melodic line while inserting complex harmonies. "Soldiers Drill," for example, was an instrumental reworking of some Sousa marches. Davis used a large six-string guitar, which he affectionately called "Miss Gibson" after the guitar's manufacturer. Reverend Gary usually tuned the guitar to a relatively difficult E-B-G-D-A-E configuration rather than the "open" tuning favored by most of his fellow street musicians (who could make chords by simply barring across a fret). This provided him with a more complex set of chord possibilities. He alternated major chords and sevenths to give his music the dissonance characteristic of the blues, while picking a melody and variations of the melody. In the liner notes to Davis' album Say No to the Devil, critic Larry Cohn compared his instrumental virtuosity in this regard to that of classical guitarist Andres Segovia and banjo player Earl Scruggs.

On May 5, 1972, he suffered a heart attack while on the way to a performance in Newtonville, New Jersey. He died at William Kessler Memorial Hospital and is buried in Rockville Cemetery in Lynbrook, New York.

More than two decades after his death, the influence of Reverend Gary Davis can still be felt. As each new generation is introduced to blues, folk, and other forms of traditional American music, Davis's signature guitar stylings and heartfelt vocals continue to move, entertain, and educate.

~ Bruce Eder, All-Music Guide &
Paul Andersen, Contemporary Musicians, April 1997

Here are a few albums that highlight the gospel side of his work:

Reverend Gary Davis - At the Sign of the Sun 1962
Year: 1990
Label: Heritage
get it here.
mp3 >192kbps vbr | w/ scans | 94mb

Live and very raw. The rev mostly plays six- and ten-stringed guitar, but plays six-string banjo on two tracks and harmonica on one.
Sister Annie Davis, 95 years old at the time, accompanies hime on I'll Be Alright Someday and When the Saints Go Marching In


Reverend Gary Davis - I Am A True Vine
Year: 1991
Label: Heritage
get it here.
mp3 192kbps | w/ cover | 94mb

These selections comprises the cream of many recordings of this superlative musician by his close asociate, Stefan Grossman, chosen for their guitar-picking skills, rarity of perfomance or sheer emotion.
All recorded in New York City, 1962-1963, by Stefan Grossman.

i forget where i got this one, but thanks probably go to stagolee

Reverend Gary Davis - O, Glory: The Apostolic Studio Sessions
Year: 1969 (recorded); 1996 (reissue)
Label: Genes
get it here.
mp3 >192kbps vbr | w/o cover | 79mb

Recorded in 1969, O, Glory: The Apostolic Studio Sessions is the Rev. Gary Davis' final studio LP, but he went out in style, working under the most state-of-the-art studio conditions of his career. The result is perhaps the best-sounding record in his catalog, even if the performances don't quite capture all the fire of his peak period; equally interesting is another break in tradition -- rarely recorded with other artists (outside of a few early-'50s sides cut with Sonny Terry), here Davis is backed by vocalist Sister Annie Davis, harpist Larry Johnson and the Apostolic Family Chorus. Also worth noting is that Davis performs on a pair of instruments he'd never before recorded with, the piano and the five-string banjo. The cumulative result makes O Glory a must for historians, but casual fans will undoubtedly be better served by his earlier material.


and you can get Rev. Gary Davis - Say No to the Devil & The Sun of Our Life at Broke Down Engine
and don't miss Josse's many fine Gary Davis & related album posts at Merlin In Rags

also check out ReverendGaryDavis.com, with discography, bio, stories, quotes, & related links

and read an interview of Rev. Gary Davis by Stefan Grossman

Dave Van Ronk - Sunday Street

Dave Van Ronk isn't very well-known to most people. But most of those who have heard him really treasure his music. Among folk and blues guitarists, he's something of a god, or a grandfather (are the two not the same?). He pivotal in Bob Dylan's development, housing the young Bobby Zimmerman, who slept on his couch for months; teaching him songs, which Dylan later ripped off and recorded before Van Ronk could; and exposing him to surrealist literature, which Dylan pretended to ignore but secretly studied avidly. Like John Fahey and Davy Graham, he accidentally started a whole school of guitar playing: all the Kicking Mule records from the '70s, featuring pretzel-fingered guitar arrangements of ragtime music, can be traced back to Van Ronk's arrangement of the St. Louis Tickle in the early '60s.

Dave Van Ronk was the musical conscience of the folk movement. While hordes of Boston and New York 'folk' musicians were strumming guitars, writing topical songs, and singing quaintly, Van Ronk was diligently crafting exquisite arrangements of old folk and blues tunes (he was one of the first white blues singers). It's hard for most people to judge just how good of a guitar player he was because he never did anything extravagant. But there is an intricacy to his timing, a purity to his tone, and a stark beauty to his sense of phrasing which mark him apart from those guitarists who manage to get their fingers to do what his do.

As Van Ronk explained:

"I am an accompanist. With the exception of a brief time in the 1950s when I wanted to be Mr. Superchops I've never been interested in that. I'm a singer. And I'm a singer who's very, very fussy about accompaniments. So I think about what I'm doing. My idol in this regard is Duke Ellington, who paid attention to voicings, timble, dynamics, tone color and all that kind of thing. When I play 'Maple Leaf Rag,' there are probably 150 guitarists who could tear me a new asshole playing pretty much the same arrangement I do. But I didn't do that so I could do that. That was a research project, and what I learned from learning how to do that has been applied hundreds and hundreds of times since -- to accommpaniments, which is what I do do."

I should mention his singing. Like many of his blues forebears, a life of drinking hard liqour and singing his pipes out has left its mark on his voice. It is not a pretty voice. It's rough around the edges, and in the middle too. But ther is more than gravel in this voice; there is white-hot rage, impoverished sorrow, and tender gaiety. By 1976, Dave Van Ronk's voice was raspy and ragged, but his singing had grown widely expressive, able to convey a multitude of emotions, moving from a growl to a moan to a murmur in a single line. His singing power can be felt in Nobody Knows the Way I Feel This Morning and his devastating cover of Joni Mitchell's That Song About the Midway.
The tempo of this album is rather slow. But it never lags. Quite the oppisite, it keeps you on your toes, always apprehensive and grasping for the next bar. By sticking to a pensive pace, Van Ronk makes every note ring with distinction. The single-riff accompaniment to Mamie's Blues is a remarkable example of simplicity that not only never gets boring, but actually becomes more intense through its endless repetition. This intensity is only bolstered by the repetitive sound of his heavy breathing.

As Elijah Wald (student and biographer of DVR) wrote in the liner notes:

Without a doubt, this is Dave's greatest single album. Every song perfectly displays one or another facet of his work, from the straight, traditional blues of "Down South Blues," a direct homage to one of Dave's early idols, Scrapper Blackwell, to the last of Dave's string of unique interpretations of Joni Mitchell's work. Then there is the title song, which announced a new commitment to songwriting and shows the skill and humour that Dave brings to that overburdened art. After a ten year hiatus from solo, acoustic, blues-based music, Sunday Street was like Dave coming back and saying, "This is what I do." He has done a lot since, from swing jazz to a jug band version of "Peter and the Wolf," but this album was the perfect summary of his basic artistic approach. Though he may not have thought of it that way, Sunday Street was a musical manifesto, stating Dave's aesthetic and demonstrating its pwer. It is also, incidentally, one of the few genuine masterpieces to come out of the folk-blues revival.

Notes on the Songs:
by Dave Van Ronk and myself
1. Sunday Street (Dave Van Ronk)
Most twelve bar blues have only two lines of lyrics per verse, which is all right, if somewhat predictable. I tried to make this one a little different by giving each musical line a separate lyric, thus reaching a grand total of six lines -- and absolutely no spot for the singer to inhale. Back to two lines.

2. Jesus Met the Woman at the Well (Traditional)
Any woman who can candle five husbands should have no difficulty with Jesus Christ
Ian & Sylvia do a very boisterous version of this song, to constrast the mournful treatment here.

3. Nobody Knows the Way I Feel This Morning (Traditional)
In the 1950s while working with a traditional jazz band, I had the good fortune to accompany a vastly talentad woman, Phoebe Ingram by name. L>ike Bessie Smith, she was something of a protégé of Clarence Williams. I'm not sure if Clarence wrote this song, but Phoebe sure sang the bejesus out of it. I've made some changes, not because the song needs them, but because I have no recordings of it and twenty years is a long time. I wish someone would record Phoebe so there'd be no need for this type of nonsense.
Check the version by Sippie Wallace and the Kweskin Jug Band to be found in this blog's archives.

4. Maple Leaf Rag (Scott Joplin)
Composed by Scott Joplin and published in 1899.
And sold over a million copies of sheet music!

5. Down South Blues (Traditional)
Originally recorded by Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell. Scrapper was from Indianapolis -said all the best blues guitarists were from Indianapolis.

6. Jivin' Man Blues (Traditional)
This piece sounds to me like it was originally a "toast," which is a long, narrative poem meant to be recited rather than sung. They are usually incredibly filthy. This would be very much in character for Frankie "Half Pint" Jaxon, who recorded it in '29. He also recorded "Freakish Man Blues" and a version of the "How Long Blues," the lyrics of which were simply "How long?" over and over and over.

7. That Song About the Midway (Joni Mitchell)
Seems like no album of mine would be complete without a Joni Mitchell song. The images are mostly carney.
An even more profoundly devastating take on middle age than Radiohead's High and Dry.

8. The Pearls (Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton)
This is the hardest song I no doubt played in my life. Jelly Roll Morton composed it as a piano solo. The guitar transcription takes some liberties, but what can you do?

9. That'll Never Happen No More (Traditional)
Blind Blake, of whom nothing is known, even his real name is in dispute. He spent some time in Chicago, we think.
To make matters more confusing, there was an early calypso singer named Blind Blake (Blake Higgs), altogether different from the ragtime guitar virtuoso Blind Arthur Blake. Though the place of his birth is not certain, he is likely from Jacksonville, Florida. This fact singlehandedly disproves Scrapper Blackwell's claim above.

10. Mamie's Blues (Traditional/Ferdinand "Jelly Roll" Morton)
Again, Jelly Roll Morton, certainly the greatest jazz composer before Ellington and a singer of incredible subtlety who claimed to have invented jazz in 1906. There is little point in argument.

11. Would You Like to Swing on a Star? (Van Heusen-Burke)
I can think of nothing whatever to say about this song -- it is perfect.
Cute song. Dave's performance a compelling case for that claim. He did another version of this song with a rock band, on Dave Van Ronk and His Hudson Dusters. Maria Muldaur also did a nice version of it on her album On the Sunny Side.


Year: 1976
Label: Philo/Rounder

hear it here
mr | mp3 192+kbps vbr | with cover | 76mb

there are a few other DVR posts floating around the blog pool:
Somebody Else, Not Me at Fourth String, Thrid Fret --> new album link: http://www.gigasize.com/get.php/3196530704/Somebody_Else,_Not_Me.zip
The Folkways Years 1959-61 at Merlin in Rags
Just Dave Van Ronk at Lost in Thyme or Entre a Mi Mente
Dave Van Ronk & His Ragtime Jug Stompers at Broke Down Engine
Two Sides of Dave Van Ronk at freebornman

Also check out this fine discography.