Sunday morning coming down

Four years ago I posted three installments of this series with songs that had a special meaning to me one way or another. To me they feel like stones in the road. I have aggregated the videos in this extended lockdown edition of the series and included personal notes about the songs and/or the performers to try to pique your interest.

Richard Thompson made a name for himself in the British folk group Fairport Convention. He subsequently met and married Linda Peters, with whom he released a classic series of albums. The series of albums with Linda Thompson culminated in Shoot Out the Lights, chronicling the breakup of their marriage. If a limited vocalist, he is nevertheless an excellent guitarist and songwriter.

Thompson wrote the song “Persuasion” with Tim Finn, formerly of the group Crowded House and a talented musician in his own right. In the video below, Richard performs “Persuasion” with his son, Teddy Thompson. I think Teddy inherited the vocal gifts of his mother. The father-son version of a song inviting the renewal of a relationship hits home in a special way, as you can observe watching the audience in the video below. The video quality is not great but the sound is good.

By the way, Fairport Convention has a storied history and a rich catalog. One memorable edition of the group included Thompson on guitar and Sandy Denny on vocals. Below is Fairport’s version of Denny’s “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” Denny sang like an angel, but she was a troubled person who died too way young at the age of 31. In Sweet Judy Blue Eyes Judy Collins recalls that Elektra producer David Anderle played Denny’s demo version of “Who Knows” for her as she was recording what became the title song of her 1968 album with Stephen Stills backing her on guitar.

I love the folk artist Jonatha Brooke. She teamed up with her Amherst classmate Jennifer Kimball to form The Story for her first few albums. One of the highlights of her work with Kimball is Jonatha’s “So Much Mine,” a song about a wayward daughter told from the point of view of the mother. The live version below comes from a 2016 performance for World Cafe that follows the original vocal arrangement. “Where’s the heart in me that made the one in you so cold?”

As a folk duo, Jonatha and Jennifer must have studied up on Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Indeed, Jonatha contributed the Paul Simon tribute to the excellent out-of-print compilation Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village in the 60’s. Jonatha leads off the compilation with a knockout version of Simon’s “Bleecker Street” (below), from the first Simon & Garfunkel album. It’s a young man’s song; Simon was still finding his voice and quickly perfecting his craft. “It’s a long road to Canaan on Bleecker Street…”

Venturing out on her own, Jonatha has pursued a successful solo career. We went to see Jonatha’s autobiographical one-woman show My Mother Has 4 Noses in New York (and again in Minneapolis). Jonatha wrote the book, the music, and the lyrics. There is a lot of unassimilated anger in the show over her mother’s Christian Science-based refusal of medical treatment, but I left with tears in my eyes. I wrote about the show in “Jonatha Brooke gets it down.” I even posted a picture of myself with Jonatha in the lobby after the show. Hey, I said these are personal notes.

Richie Havens grew up in Brooklyn singing with a choir in church and with doo wop groups on street corners. He crossed the river to figure out how to make a go of it in Greenwich Village as a performer until he signed a recording contract with Verve. In 1967 Havens seemed to materialize out of nowhere with Mixed Bag, a beautiful album of folk covers and original compositions. The album was full of striking performances, but none more so than Havens’s moving interpretation of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like A Woman.”

Getting out to San Francisco on a trip to visit colleges with my dad in June 1968, I had the great good fortune of seeing Havens perform live at the hungry i the week before Enrico Banducci closed the club. Banducci was determined to go out with a bang. Mort Sahl was playing the room on one side of the club, Havens the room on the other. Not yet famous, Havens played to a tiny audience accompanying himself on guitar and just poured it on. The obscure comedian Stanley Myron Handelman warmed up for Havens without drawing a laugh, although he deserved to. He was funny.

Reviewing Havens’s performance at the Troubadour in West Hollywood just before or after I saw him at the hungry i, Los Angeles Times staff writer Pete Johnson surrendered: “He sings in a lispy rasping voice which by all odds should be unappealing and flails the strings of his guitar with an energy which belies sensitivity, but the performance and the man remain inarguably beautiful.”

I was a teenager then wondering where I might find my place in the scheme of things. Richie’s song “New City” from the follow-up album Something Else Again captured my feelings. I hadn’t listened to it in a long, long time when I heard it again on the CD compilation of Richie’s first three Verve albums, still sounding good to me after all these years.

I think I first heard Nanci Griffith singing Dylan’s “Boots of Spanish Leather” as background music in a store on Grand Avenue in St. Paul. I hadn’t heard that song in a long, long time either, but it caught my attention. Tracking down the song on Griffith’s Other Voices, Other Rooms, I heard Griffith’s striking version of Kate Wolf’s “Across the Great Divide.”

Looking back on her life, the singer finds herself “on the mountainside, where the rivers change direction…” That’s just about where I was at the time, and I loved the metaphor. Kate Wolf died at the age of 44, also way too young. In the live performance of the song below, Griffith called on two musicians who played with Wolf to help her out and threw in Emmylou Harris on harmony for good measure.

The Band leads off its great self-titled album of 1969 with Robbie Robertson’s raucous “Across the Great Divide,” a different song entirely. Bob Dylan had borrowed the members of the group that became The Band to back him when he went on his first tour featuring his electrified, post-folk music. I saw them performing with Dylan when he came to town in 1966.

Reading in the paper that Dylan would be performing that night at the old Minneapolis Auditorium, I asked my dad if he would take me downtown to see him. We walked in and found a SOLD OUT sign on the box office window. We nevertheless snagged just-released first-row tickets to the show. Bob’s mom was sitting way in back with our friends the Applebaums. We had better seats than she did.

Bob performed his folk songs unaccompanied for an hour and a half or so, then took an intermission and brought out the band for another hour and a half of his amped up stuff. In the middle of his first set my dad asked me, “How can he remember all those lyrics?” Good question! They were plentiful. I will just say that I loved both halves of the show.

Working with Dylan on tour and later in Woodstock, his friends in The Band must have picked up a thing or two about songwriting from him. The Band ended that great 1969 album with Robbie Robertson’s “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” (video below). It’s not an obscure song, but it fits in with what turns out to be a slight Dylan motif in these recollections.

In dire straits, the singer (Richard Manuel on the vocal with Levon Helm joining him on the chorus) forces an abashed or ambivalent optimism. “Last year this time, was no joke / My whole barn went up in smoke / Our horse Jethro, well, he went mad / I can’t ever remember things being that bad.” Are you sure King Harvest has come? It sounds like a permanently relevant confession of faith.

When Don McLean came to perform at Dartmouth in the spring of 1972 or so, he might have been the last man on the circuit I wanted to see. I was done with folk music, so I thought. I had moved on to the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye. So when a classmate gave me his ticket to see McLean on a Saturday night in Spaulding Auditorium, I had a bad, bad attitude.

In performance the man just blew me away. He had arrived with the monster hit “American Pie,” but he was no one-hit wonder. He had an incredible catalog of songs to play on guitar and banjo and he would not quit until he had won everyone in the (large) audience over. He wore down my resistance. Damned if he didn’t have me singing along with my assigned group in “Waters of Babylon” when he divided the audience into three parts, as in the live recording below. I left in awe.

When McLean released an album of his favorite songs a year or two later, I was interested. I bought it on vinyl and couldn’t wait to pick it up on compact disc years later, which I did, though it has long since gone out of print. He included one song on Playin’ Favorites that I had never heard performed by anyone else. The song is “Mountains O’Mourne” (video below), a gem that seems to have been awaiting McLean’s heartfelt performance.

Who the heck is Percy French and where did that song come from? I had no idea. Now you can check it out with a click or two.

Listening to the college radio station around the same time, I heard a song that knocked me out. It saved some part of a day I had rued. What was that song? I called over to the station to ask. It turned out to be the Youngbloods’ “Sunlight,” by Jesse Colin Young, off their album Elephant Mountain.

Jesse came out of the New York folk scene. I’d seen Jesse performing with the Youngbloods at Dartmouth in May 1970, but just didn’t appreciate them. Having come to love them subsequently, I caught up with Jesse when he played in Minneapolis a few years ago. I wrote about his show in “Elephant Mountain revisited” (a post that has disappeared from our archives) and posted my interview with him in “Aloha, Jesse.” I hope you like this one.

The Indigo Girls (Emily Saliers and Amy Ray) emerged out of the folk scene around Atlanta in the late 1980’s. I loved the singing and writing on their first album. I could hear that they had done their homework. They had studied up on Simon & Garfunkel, but they had added Lennon and McCartney to the mix as well.

I must have raved about them to my friend Linda Svitak at Faegre & Benson. A good listener, Linda gave me their album Nomads, Indians, Saints as a gift when I turned 40. I would have missed this song — “Watershed,” by Emily Saliers — if it weren’t for Linda.

As you might infer from the title, the song is about turning points. Looking back, however, the song conveys the need not only to be grateful for the good things we have found along the way, but also for the tragedies we have been spared. The first verse opens with an image: “Twisted guardrails on the highway, broken glass on the cement…” Something we’ve all seen, but perhaps passed without reflection. The song made me reflect.

ENCORE: Walking back to my college dormitory on a beautiful spring day in May 1970, I found that a student had moved his stereo speakers to the open windows just over the entrance to the dorm. He had the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” playing through the windows. Let It Be had just come out and I loved the song, complete with mantra. It was a moment in which time stopped for me: “Limitless undying love / Which shines around me like a million suns / It calls me on and on across the universe.” Not bad for a pop song.

In 2015 Jonatha Brooke posted a video of herself working on a cover of “Across the Universe.” In 2020, I can report, she has nailed the song, but the video is not generally accessible; she distributed it through the Dakota with personalized Father’s Day messages. Here is Jonatha working on her cover of the song back in 2015.