Tag Archives: folk music

Annick Odom’s Linen Of Words

When listening to “How Can I Keep From Singing,” the first song on Annick Odom’s Linen Of Words, you could be forgiven if you take the album as just another excellent example of traditional Appalachian folk ballads. That’s what this … Continue reading

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Hans Kjorstad’s Dålågjel

Listening to this album is like sitting on the perimeter of an after hours fiddle jam at a Scandinavian folk festival. Five fiddlers sawing away at hoary old Norwegian dance tunes, each of them occasionally swapping out the fiddle for … Continue reading

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Alex Sturbaum’s Windjammer

Last time I caught up with Alex Sturbaum they had just released their excellent 2022 album Slash on which Alex played guitar to accompany a bunch of players of the fiddle, banjo, and nyckelharpa, most of them from the Pacific … Continue reading

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Los Super Seven’s Los Super Seven

Brendan Foreman wrote this review for Folk Tales. It was music producer Dan Goodman who envisioned gathering together a wide variety of musicians to cut an album that would show the wide influence and universal appeal of Mexican traditional music … Continue reading

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The Klezmatics’ Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah

Who knew? Woody Guthrie, the American folk singer and agitator of the Dust Bowl and the Depression, the writer of “This Land is Your Land” and “Roll On Columbia,” also wrote Hanukkah songs! And now, adding to his posthumous collaborations … Continue reading

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Alan Light’s The Holy or the Broken: Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley & the Unlikely Ascent of ‘Hallelujah’

Do you feel a personal connection to the song “Hallelujah”? I certainly do, and to judge from Alan Light’s book The Holy or the Broken, so do millions of people all over the world. Light is a longtime music journalist, … Continue reading

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John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax’s American Ballads and Folk Songs, and Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads; and John W. Work’s American Negro Songs

The father-and-son team of John and Alan Lomax played a pivotal role in preserving American folk songs at a time when they may have stood in danger of being supplanted by recorded popular music. And they played the role of … Continue reading

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Jack Hardy’s The Collected Works of Jack Hardy Sampler

Rebecca Swain wrote this review. This fifteen-song CD is a sampler of The Collected Works of Jack Hardy which was released in 1998 in two boxed sets of five CDs each. If you already know and love Hardy, you will … Continue reading

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Anna Tivel’s Animal Poem

Anna Tivel’s latest dropped the day after my birthday, which was one of those angsty ones that ends in a zero. Such a nice birthday present, even though whenever I listen to it I find myself on the verge of … Continue reading

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Various artists’ Son of Rogue’s Gallery

I keep thinking the whole pirate thing will play out, but it seems it has legs, even if one of them is a peg. A couple of friends of mine started International Talk Like A Pirate Day back in about … Continue reading

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