Home

Playlists older playlists new lists available on request

John McLaughlin

About Us

The Folk Life Archives

Helpful Links

---

Philly. What can you say about Philly? What can you add?

 

Well, for a start, you might mention that it recently moved up a weekend, from the traditional weekend before Labor Day to the middle of August (for non-US-residents, of whom there are a few on the Internet, Labour Day Weekend is the near-official end of the Summer and traditional beginning of Fall – which is known as “Autumn” to people elsewhere in the civilized English-speaking world if that matters to you), in order to escape the rain, and found fat chance, the rain followed after.

 

Scotsmen used to matter, back when Kenny Goldstein was alive, presiding over a weekend-long mini-festival of Scots-Irish music at Philly, mostly but not confined to the Camp Stage, down thro the trees past Philly’s Main Stage – now the Martin Guitar Co Stage (“Why isn’t it the Woody Guthrie Stage?” groused Utah Phillips from the Crafts Stage, up near the Crafts area, but of course), and thro the kids’ juggling area, also known as the Dulcimer Grove – nice shady refuge from the blazing sun that burned down on festival-goers this time through).

 

“Ah’m loast!” – punch-line of one of Johnny Morris’ jokes of yesteryear, about the Scotsman who joined the French Foreign Legion  out of heartbreak – Scots lassies can be cruel – and eventually confided his state to a passing Eskimo, who cried, “You’re loast? Mush, huskies…!”

 

Ah well. Essential state for enjoying Philly is being willing to get loast, to get sunburned, to get drenched, to dance with pretty strangers, to Cajun-shuffle past the Pine Leaf Boys at the Dance Stage near the school buses at the entrance gate, to say “How ya doin?” to anybody you meet, to eat crab-cakes and sweet potatoes fries topped with watermelon and lemonade in order to support the Upper Salford Fire Company, to wait for the charge across the field with flying tarp after the thunderous cleanup sweep of Richie Pyott’s trash committee, Alice in Wonderland accompanied by the “Dies Irae” of the Carmina Burana (didn’t that Mad Hatter poster look just like Gene Shay?), to sit spellbound before Stephen Wade’s musicological lecture on Hobart Smith, to sing along with Mavis Staples - “This little light of mine, baby!” – and disbelieve Jack Williams specifying why he’s not a bluesman, after he’s rippled a few impossible riffs across your gape-mouthed face – yes, this is Philly. The Scotsmen may be fewer this year, but the young talent from elsewhere is magical, Jess Klein and John Flynn to Diana Jones to the Lovell sisters to Benton, PA’s Echoing Heart, the wicked daughter of Bill Bailey and her laughing consort Randy serenading the children in the Dulcimer Grove and their parents up in the annex to the dining tent – “the real deal,” pronounces Teresa Pyott, and the grande dame of the Liverpool Judies knows talent when she sees and hears it, anywhere from Schwensksville to Danville’s Iron Heritage Days. Yes. Philly.

 

So okay. Maybe you missed the only Doctor for your soul, Doc Watson himself, scheduled for only a Friday night concert. Maybe the rain drove you away – timid criminal – before Sam Bush’s tour bus rolled in on Sunday evening for his festival-closing concert. In between, of course, it’s not enough to think of Philly as the legendary elephant caressed by six blind men – I’ve decided it’s more like Buddha and a stampede of wild elephants – you have to, finally, stake out some space for your orange plastic rain-slicker and your little low deckchairs – politeness counts everywhere, blocking other people’s vision or claiming enough space for a family of fourteen is out of line at Philly – and get your ass in your chair, and listen, listen close, listen hard, listen happily, to this kind of thing:

 

Mountain Song, at the Tank Stage, 1:30 Saturday afternoon.

 

Scheduled: Diana Jones, Bob Carlin, and Mike Craver. Mike, one-time piano player for the legendary Red Clay Ramblers whom we all worshipped back in the ’70s, has a couple of tricks up his sleeve, namely Stephen Wade, a charismatic banjo picker and James Leva, one of those young “high, lonesome” wailers the Southern Appalachians throw up once a generation. Together, they launch into one of the classic Carter Family pieces that Tommy Thompson and Mike Watson joined Mike to render timeless on that old Flying Fish LP’s (now re-issued on CD), “Meeting in the Air,” and come close to duplicating that Red Clay Ramblers’ trio, in “Ain’t Gonna Work Tomorrow,” missing only Tommy’s impossible-to-duplicate groaning bass-baritone. Bob Carlin, a New Jersey boy gone Southern, follows with a Tommy Jarrell lament that “Raleigh and Spencer Gone Dry….” Diana Jones, in her inimitable contralto drawl, follows with a song she claims has been covered “by everybody from Johnny Cash to Marianne Faithful,” and that you probably know from Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Trouble in Mind” …”I’m blue/ But the sun’s gonna shine/ in my back door some day.” What a spellbinder!

 

Back to Mike – no, he defers to James Leva, who gives us one covered by everyone, he says, from Hobart Smith to the Soul Stirrers (doesn’t mention Dave Van Ronk, what the hey), and does a neatly half-tempo, “Jesus Met the Woman at the Well.” Lovely stuff, with Mike accompanying James on what looks, from your angle, like a small harmonium, that old missionary instrument, could be, huh? On to Bob Carlin, relating how he moved from NJ to the Piedmont in 1989, and gives us, “Sundown” – with, he quips, Dobro accompaniment, bleeding across the hill from the far-off Crafts Stage, good grief…. Back to Diana, with a lovely self-written song that would break a landlord’s heart, “This World is an Orphan’s Home.” Whew. And we’re back to Mike, again deferring to James Leva, with a Child ballad derived from his favorite mountain singer, Doug Wallin – filtered, says James, thro big band versions on the radio up in the mountains – and it’s a much-trimmed “House Carpenter” silencing the hillside.

 

Not for long, though. Bob Carlin, long John Hartford’s musical traveling companion, launches into a lovely, extended version of one of John’s best-known pieces, “Steam Powered Aeroplane,” just a masterpiece of  songwriting turned inside out and upside down and extended to a hilarious fare-thee-well.

 

And now it’s the turn of Diana Jones and her accompanist, Bo Stapleton (on his lovely little Mexican tenor guitar), and a song that’s taken from this morning’s headlines, about a trapped miner in Utah in 1927, and “Henry Russell’s Last Words,” with a hush-producing refrain, “Old pal, I love you, Mary.”

 

Mike and Stephen Wade pick up the pace a little with “Rocky Hill, and then it’s time for Bob Carlin with a song, he says, from the “Mountains of Liverpool” (see the workshop title), and he goes right into, yes, the Beatles’ “When the Rain Comes….” An apt tune for Philly, even in this afternoon’s blazing sunshine, completely foretelling the following afternoon’s soaked plight.

 

Diana and Bo follow, in lovely, strong harmony, a song about “the golden shores of eternity,” and Mike, noting the time – and Philly’s legendary stopwatch stage managers, offers a three-minute version of the Fred Cockerham/Tommy Jarrell, “Fall on my Knees!” bringing the crowd to clapping and clogging on the uneven hillside alongside the stage. (Maybe you’ve heard that young group The Mammals do this one? Patience – they’re coming up).

 
Mike Craver

Stephen Wade		Bob Carlin
James Leva		Diana Jones

OK. Time to get up, stretch your aching knees and hamstrings – I tell you, old folkies indeed – and get over to the Crafts Stage, to see who’s been making the noise that bothered Bob so much. Too late, they’ve left. But guess what? Here comes Jack Williams, who’s going to MC and also demonstrate his dazzler of a fingerpicking agility. It’s a song he wrote for Josh Williams which opens the session on “People and Places,” and boy, does it ever hum along the wires!

 

And guess who’s made her way thro the crowds, behind the Main Stage and back uphill to this workshop, if it’s not Diana Jones, Bo Stapleton in tow, with a husky-voiced “Pretty Girl,” from her currently on-sale-at-the-CD-booth, “Remembrances of You.” Are not the workers worthy of their hire? You betcha.

 

John Flynn, with his son Sean providing a harp solo that could drill wells by itself, follows Diana and Bo, with “America’s Wings,” awaiting the hollow “eyes of the soldier/just back from the war,”

and it’s Jack Williams, again in his role of MC conducting these two young songbirds, rolling into the little Southern town of Cedar Springs, with its “Tanya coming to the fountain/ And the young men to their knees,” the preacher’s daughter watching “Tanya dancing in the rain….” He calls it “My Lake Woebegon,” and that’s not lost on this crowded, appreciative hillside. The songwriting talent on display here is simply incredible in its lyricism.  End of paragraph, not end of story.

 

Here’s Diana Jones and Bo Stapleton with her beautiful contralto leading the chorus of “Lay Me Down.” Here’s John Flynn, ,with a sardonic first-person boast by one George Bush, “I’m the Decider” (“I just finished this song with Neil Diamond – he doesn’t know it yet”). Here’s Jack Williams, with his classic tribute to James Dickey, the “scholar/aristocrat/redneck,” The Old Buck Dancer’s Gone.” Here’s Diana Jones, with her lament for a young Native American boy, uprooted from his family and entrapped in a white man’s dormitory, listening with his heart for his people, moaning that “Some things I know for sure/Like it’s 1924/ My Daddy called me “Pony”/ We went riding in the snow/Hey-hey-hey-hey-hey-hey…..” Here’s John Flynn, discussing a job “facilitating discussion in a prison in Delaware” (“I’m claustrophobic to begin with!!”) and being joined by his old friend Reggie Harris to ask the inmates what he calls in this song, “Reggie’s Question,” nothing simpler or more basic or more necessary to a human being than, “What do they call you? What’s your name?” – evoking a litany of name-calling and labeling, proudly accepted by these toughest of the tough young men…. “What’s in a name?/ My name was stolen/A couple of hundred years ago/ When I complain you shrug and ask me, ‘What’s in a name?’ “ The question and its many answers echoes across the hillside.

 

But Jack Williams, in what has turned into something very like a cutting contest, declares that he’s now gonna make it hotter, in this blazing hot cup in the hills that we’re all sitting in. “How much hotter can this sun beat down?” he asks, his guitar ominously thrashing the answer slowly into our skins. This, he says, is the kind of day when “gators eat each other/when the water gets this low…” and we all reach instinctively for our half-empty water bottles. You bet. “Thirsty Town” is the name of this piece, about a corner of the South well away from the Interstate Highway System.

 

With seven minutes left on the workshop clock, Diana produces a bouquet of small white flowers, as Spring comes round again and she asks, “Shall I speak of my beloved? Shall I speak of silver? Shall I speak of gold?” – and she might as well have asked if she could produce a tiny breeze around our scarlet necks by now.

 

This leaves John Flynn with something around two minutes long to produce a song about Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Hurricane Katrina, and Life, which he does, inserting a lament that if you want the whole thing, you have to go up to the CD tent and buy his CD, but in any case, “Don’t sell your soul for a song/Life’s more than three minutes long,” and he’s triumphantly out of there, with the stage manager’s stopwatch still ticking under his thumb. Yes!

Did I mention this is Philly, where Arlo Guthrie lost the sound and lights at midnight in the middle of “Alice’s Restaurant” one year? Well, that’s who this is. You have to love ‘em, don’t you?

 

John Flynn		Jack Williams

Diana and Bo Stapleton

So you can go wander halfway across the hillside, flop on your little chair again, and listen to Old Springs Pike and oh my, Son Volt, if you can stand something close to rock-and-blues fusion – don’t ask me, I just report these things – or you can seek some shade, put up your feet, and wait for the legendary hillside sweep, when the aforementioned Richie Pyott brings his crew of impossibly-costumed groundskeepers from one side of the hill to the next, picking up all of the trash, left-behind blankets or tarps or chairs or drowsy festival-goers, carries everything before it in a mad tide of medieval thunder, and deposits it at the front gate, to await the evening concert. Time for some iced lemonade, for some people courtesy of the Hospitality Tent, for others courtesy of the Upper Salford Fire Department, for others a retreat to that city on the farther hill, beyond the Dulcimer Grove, the legendary Philadelphia Folk Festival Campgrounds. Let somebody else tell that tale. Me, I crashed out alongside a couple of happy infants (Elena and Benjamin) in the Hospitality Tent, and waited out the Carmina Burana.

 

		Old Spring Pike
		Son Volt

(Hey – might also mention it here, while we’re waiting for the Saturday Evening concert to come around on the guitar – tip o the old titfer to Jeff Barry, for sending me the “Hippies & Hillbillies” muscle-shirt I was wearing all day – I enjoyed that band, ‘way back, Jeff!)

 

OK. “Dies Irae!” thundered thro the festival speakers, the Alice-in-Wonderland  crew – one burly guy, sheepishly carrying a fairy wand, was happy to pass it over the fence to a beaming child – rolled up the hill, trucks tailing them, picking up the aforenoted trash, and finally the gates swung wide on the other side of the hill, and here came the charging mob, tarps and blankets and tiny deck-chairs carried high, and the evening’s entertainment had begun. Off to the races once more, this time around with The Mammals

following on Dennis Hangey, the Philly piper, who marched downhill and on to the Martin Guitar Stage with a medley of tunes, going from “Wull Ye No’ Come Back Again” thro “Scotland the Brave” to Amazing Grace” (I only follow these notes, I can’t believe that sequence either, OK?)

 

The Mammals ran fast and hard at “Rock that Cradle, Joe,” on into a full-tilt “John Henry,” before slowing down to let Tao Rodriguez Seeger thank the light & sound crew for this excellent 35^th (for him) birthday present, and then into a new-to-me “Tahoe,” followed up by Mike Miranda’s road song from his new CD – get it up the hill – and then into a fierce delivery of that “Wartime Blues” passed along from Blind Lemon Jefferson thro Woody Guthrie and then Pete Seeger: “Whatcha gonna do when they send your man to war?/ I’m gonna drink muddy water. Sleep in a hollow log….” Next, a somewhat doom-y song about starting war and calling it peace – we’ve been there before, right? – was followed by a fascinating murder ballad frojm Tao, what he called “Cubalachian music” – point well made – and here came the closer, which could well have been “Let Em Run!” but was, instead, “Fall on My Knees,” with some terrific percussion behind Ruthy Ungar’s wailing lead. Great opening, set, very high-powered.

 

A break with old festival videos of Dave Bromberg and then Leo Kottke, from Philly past, made a nice transition to the next act, the Pine Leaf Boys, with a sweetly swinging Cajun/zydeco set - after The Mammals, perhaps a bit of a letdown in volume and intensity, but most certainly lovely stuff for the dancers in the aisles and at the front corners of the central hillside, sloping down to the stage. Firecrackers or rockets from the campground punctuated the growing darkness, as the Pine Lead Boys waltzed us to their closing tune, the little Cajun triangle ching-chinging us along thro “Rockin’ Robin.”

The Pine Leaf Boys

Next video break featured Janis Ian singing a tremulous “17” at some long-past Philly, looking not much older than her protagonist, and laughingly catching up a fallen guitar pick without missing a beat; then David Baskin, Festival Chairman, and Lisa Nordell, new President of the Philadelphia Folk Festival, passed out a number of awards to long-serving committee chairpersons – Mike Flagg, Mitch Abramovitz, the hulking Richie Pyott and Liz Bralow (the last having served 26 years with the Press Committee), enough to have earned a gold watch and chain for that length of service for each of them.

 

And now came one of those miracles of audacious Philly programming – Bettye LaVette, a veteran soul and blues singer who, in her athletic dancing and cheeky grin, reminded me of Tina Turner on the loose. A tight young all-male band backed her up, drawing from her all kinds of happy innuendos in greeting them, and eventually she sank to the edge of the stage and delivered the most sinuous, beautiful version of – hold on to your hats – John Prine’s “Souvenirs,” soulful and soaring, eons away from John’s original, but for that very reason bringing to it a new life that you’d never have expected from hearing the song before. Roaring approval came from the crowd as she swung to her feet and sashayed stage centre and exited.

Bettye LaVette

 

The stage-changing break that followed was covered by another pairing of old-time Philly videos, first the Cape Breton fiddling and dancing of Natalie McMaster, and then the New Orleans blues of Clarence Gatemouth” Brown, cowboy hatted and gunslung guitar. Deep breath.

 

Here came Stephen Wade, Chicago boy gone Southern, with a startling musicological lecture, moving from a discussion of the second – or was it the third? – Philadelphia Folk Festival, and Alan Lomax introducing Hobart Smith, and away we flew into “Poor Ellen Smith,” lead vocal by Mike Craver, ex-piano player for the legendary Original Red Clay Ramblers (In a while I’ll get to the Sunday afternoon interview I managed to get with Mike – that comes in due time, be patient).

 

The question Stephen Wade posed was, “Where did Hobart Smith come from…?” In Stephen’s telling, Hobart Smith was a multi-instrumental genius with a vast repertoire, unparalleled in Southern Appalachian music, and the answer to that question formed the backbone of the musical lecture that followed. The next tune featured Sam McLeod and James Leva, on Hobart Smith’s “I Am Bound for the Promised Land,” and we were off into the deep body of the musicology, beautiful and moving music alternating with fascinating discussion by Stephen, punctuated in turn by his ringing banjo.

 

“Wild Bill Jones” followed, a ghostly, breathy version the likes of which I doubt anyone present had ever heard, and then, after another lecture-segment, a love-song first noted in 1630, from the repertoire of Hobart’s sister, Texas Gladden – are you taking notes? – ten points on the final exam – and on with a deedly-aye-ay…. The drollness of the lecture apparently held most of the crowd, with some few scattered exceptions, spellbound – “Play the music!” came down out of the darkness from one dissenter, as Stephen held aloft a gorgeous, wide-necked Civil War-era banjo, before carefully fretting another tune on it. And on into one of the square-dance tunes that Stephen claimed Hobart could call all night, with Mike Craver once more wailing out the lead on, “Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss!”

 

The penultimate tune was the completely unexpected “Blind Lemon” blues, “Sitting on Top of the World” (Blind Lemon Jefferson? A different Blind Lemon? Tantalizing gaps in the records, eh?) , and the set swung to a riveting close with James Leva singing lead on “Going Down That Road Feeling Bad, Lord Lord,” as the crowd gave Stephen and his band a hearty round of applause. (They got one definite positive note of approval backstage: Stretch Pyott, one of the long-time festival organizers, collared me to keep repeating what a magical set he thought this musical lecture was.)

 

Stephen Wade, Mike Craver, Zan McLeod and James Leva

Gene Shay once more introduced a between-the-sets video, of John Hartford, bowler-hatted and shuffle-clogging while picking the banjo, and Arlo Guthrie singing for his old friend Jack Elliott. This is the history of Philly you were getting a chance to see on the big screen flanking the stage, and the crowd was gobbling it up.

 

And here was the closing act, Mavis Staples, opening with a beautiful version of “Way Down in Mississippi,” sliding almost without transition to “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize, and winding up her opening medley with the Stephen Stills’ tune, “Something’s Happening Here” (Stop, Children, What’s That Sound…?”) What can you add to what’s already been written about Macvis Staples? The voice is a miracle, of course, passed down from the pater familias, Pop Staples, and accompanied, on this occasion, by a backup chorus of singers who sounded remarkably in tune with their leader for the night. A sweet and husky, “This Little Light of Mine” followed, with The Band’s “The Weight” following that – Mavis thanked all the members of The Band by name at this point – and then a majestic moan, “Why Am I treated So Bad…?” with a call to the congregation to remember than when you moan the Devil doesn’t know what you’re saying – remember that, children – and she went on to note that Pop, Dr King’s favorite singer, would sing the next song for the Reverend at each meeting when they were together.  

 

A brilliant solo from Rick Holstrum, Mavis’ guitarist, followed within “March for Freedom’s Highway,” followed by a pointed political sermonette in which Mavis noted that “The whole world’s wondering what’s wrong with the USA” (big roar of approval from the Philly audience, to which Mavis responded with “I love you too!). The evening’s finale was a call-and-response, “Let Me Take You There (Say Yeah! Say Yeah! I’ll Take You There! Take Us There!”), Philly on its feet for Mavis, Pop Staples, and the Staples Singers (“We’ve been taking you there for fifty-seven years!”). Rick Helstrum played a triumphant Mavis Staples offstage, calling out that she was a member of the First Family of Soul, and a Member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,” the audience cheering him along.

 

Rick Helstrum		Mavis Staples

They’d have had her back for encore after encore, but genial Gene Shay stepped in, to thank them for coming, “Drive carefully, and there’ll be more music tomorrow….”

 

With that promise, the crowd made its way to the waiting big long yellow school buses, which would deliver us to our cars for the trip home, north to Rte 63 and the Turnpike, east and west, south to 73 and 29 and maybe eventually to Baltimore and DC. It had been that kind of night. For us, it was a singing bus, with “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and that great American folk song, “How Much is that Doggy in the Window (Bow-wow!)” bringing our laughing bus-driver to let us off in the parking lot, only feet from our car. Some things, you know you cannot make up;.

 

 

So anyway, the rain came in overnight, and sitting in the Hospitality Tent on Sunday afternoon in our orange slickers, we counted it up. I’ve been invited to do six hours of “Evergreen” radio for The Village on XM, the subscription satellite service, and my head’s buzzing with that. I’ve finally managed to snag Mike Craver, the Red Clay Ramblers piano man, to interview him about the “second act” of his life, as it were, since the sad death of Tommy Thompson (“Give Me the Roses While I Live,” and “Will You Miss Me,” indeed), and after that interview, then what? H’m. If the rain lets up, we get another incredible day and evening of the kind of music I’ve been describing for you. If it keeps up, and if we decide to head for the highway – it’s about 150 miles to get home from Philly, maybe 3-4 hours in the rain plus shore traffic – then sure, we might kick ourselves at missing the rest of the festival, but we might be safer, with darkness and slick highways ahead of us (a concern felt by a couple of other people). In the end, discretion proves we’re not as tough as we used to be, and I flag down Mike Craver, we sit down for that long-desired interview – see elsewhere on this site – and we pack it in and head for home. Consolation: we’ve got a fine fat souvenir program book to peruse; there’s all kinds of great music we may have missed this weekend, but there’s always the C D player (and my radio programs, Roots & Wings, on WMUC, the FM outlet for the University of Maryland in College Park, MD), so whatcha gonna do when the boy’s been dancing half the night away anyway and the road’s calling and unspooling ahead?

 

You thank everybody you can reach, you thank the ones you didn’t reach in person thro this Internet means of reaching out, and you hit the road again. There’s always another session, right?

 

See you around the campfire sometime, guys  - John and Jamie

 

 

I saw the Celtic... Back of the Moon from Glasgow and Baka Beyond from UK via Cameroon's Rain Forest
Rik Palieri		Toby Walker
Johnny Duke and The Aces		Pat Wictor
See you for the 47th
		Rhiannon Giddens of The Carolina Chocolate Drops