Roger McGuinn was one of the founders of the folk-rock giants The Byrds, which earned him a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But before he strapped on and plugged in his Rickenbacker 12-string, he was a pure banjo-strumming folkie. In recent years he has continued to record in the folk-rock vein, and did a short U.S. tour with Richard Thompson in the mid-90s.
Folk has always remained McGuinn’s first love, though, and in the early days of the World Wide Web he founded the Folk Den, an online digital archive of folk songs as an outgrowth of a Byrds fan website. He promised to record a folk song every month and make it available for free download, a service he has more or less kept up, with frequent upgrades as the technology has grown.
This CD is an offshoot from the Folk Den project. After recording songs in the field with old friends on the East Coast, the likes of Pete Seeger, Odetta, Tommy Makem, Joan Baez, Judy Collins, he decided to re-record them for this CD release. It has duets with all of those big names and more from at least three generations of folk musicians, plus a new friend, Eliza Carthy. And it has a fine roster of memorable songs worth preserving, such as “Wagoner’s Lad,” “Bonnie Ship the Diamond,” “Cane Blues,” “John the Revelator,” “Alabama Bound,” “Willie Moore,” “The Brazos River,” “Sail Away Lady,” and “Trouble in Mind.”
It’s doubly disappointing then, that the CD is a dud. Hardly any of the singing or playing really sparkles, which must be at least partly due to the recording and production. Everything sounds flat, muted and indistinct, voices and instruments fade in and out and cross from speaker to speaker seemingly at random. McGuinn’s multi-tracked vocals, reedy under the best of conditions, are muddy and inert.
One of the few bright spots is the playing of Carthy, on an instrumental reel and on “Willie Moore,” on which she plays fiddle and Baez plays guitar behind McGuinn’s vocals. Josh White’s slow and bluesy take on “Trouble in Mind” is a keeper, as is McGuinn’s arrangement of “The Virgin Mary,” the sole track which features his signature 12-string.
Curiously, McGuinn writes in the voluminous liner notes that he included the lovely “Brazos” because it was in danger of being lost, although both Mason Williams and Lyle Lovett have recently recorded very nice versions of it.
The Folk Den has a worthy aim, and I’m all for preserving folk songs, but this CD makes them sound like they belong locked away in some musty archive somewhere.
(Appleseed, 2001)
