Suzy Bogguss returns to town this Wednesday evening for a show in Minneapolis. Anticipating the show brought me back to one of her recordings that fits this special holiday weekend. I thought I would draw on that recording to continue the festivities this morning.
Suzy seemed to me to have created a second career for herself when her country star faded, but in January she was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry. I must have missed something along the way. Her country star still shines bright.
I have admired Suzy for founding her own label, widening the scope of her recordings, and forging her own path in the music business while maintaining the highest level of quality. In 2011 Suzy teamed up with Cracker Barrel to role out her American Folk Songbook compact disc and accompanying book. The book remains available on Suzy’s site for $15.00
I contributed to the crowdfunding she employed on Kickstarter for her Merle Haggard compilation Lucky in 2014. I inferred that no major label was interested in her anymore and wanted to help her out. Now she has joined the Grand Ole Opry. Something does not compute.
On American Folk Songbook Suzy is joined by a few of Nashville’s finest musicians. They include Pat Bergeson on guitar, harmonica, and Jew’s harp, Stuart Duncan on fiddle and mandolin, Charlie Chadwick on bass and cello, Harry Stinson on drums and backing vocals, Jerry Douglas on dobro, John McCutcheon on hammered dulcimer, Richard Bailey on banjo, Paul Cramer on mandolin, Jeff Taylor on keyboards and accordion, her friends Matraca Berg, Gretchen Peters, and Gerald Boyd on backing vocals, and her husband Doug Crider on lead guitar (on “Johnny Has Gone For A Soldier,” not included below) and backing vocals. Crider also engineered the recording.
Suzy says that the idea for the project first came to her while on tour with Garrison Keillor. She realized that while everyone loves to sing along to the old songs we grew up with, but that many children aren’t now exposed to the songs that have been “a vivid scrapbook of the American experience.”
“Music has always been my purest joy even as a child,” Suzy writes in the introduction to the songbook. “One of my favorite memories is my grade-school music teacher pounding on the piano and leading the class in rousing renditions of folk songs from all around the world.
She credits Keillor with awakening her to the possiblities: “In the summer of 2008, I toured with the brilliant and engaging Garrison Keillor. The energy that passed between the audience and Garrison was overwhelming at times. Several thousand people standing and singing together-old songs, hymns, the Beatles and the Everly Brothers. People of all ages, sharing music. Ahhh, pure joy.” Having been in Keillor’s audience a time or two, I can testify to that.
My thought this morning is to serve up eleven tracks from American Folk Songbook. I can’t do more than offer stray notes and citations of titles or lyrics that strike a literary chord familiar to me. I hope a few readers may be inspired to look up the history of a favorite song or two and seek out the rest of the disc on YouTube if these songs hit home with you.
Take, for example, the traditional folk song “Shenandoah.” It dates to the early 19th century. Perhaps most notably, the historian Bernard Devoto took the title of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Across the Wide Missouri (1947) from the lyrics. It’s the second volume of a trilogy that includes The Year of Decision (1942) and The Course of Empire (1952). This is the second track on the disc. If you start here, I think you are certain to want to continue.
“Red River Valley” continues in the same vein. It is another folk song of uncertain origin. Looking up what I could find out about it, I learned that the Red River Valley to which the song refers is the one that runs up the North Dakota/Minnesota border to Canada. The Red River empties in Lake Winnipeg. It has nothing to do with the Red River of the classic Howard Hawks film (1948). On a personal note, one of my happiest memories is my mom taking me for a picnic on a gorgeously sunny day on the Red River in Fargo when I must have been four or five. Perhaps that is why Suzy’s performance reduces me to blubber.
Wikipiedia lists film appearances of the song including:
1936: Gene Autry sang the song in the Republic film Red River Valley and again in the 1946 film Sioux City Sue with the Cass County Boys.
1939: The Three Stooges sang the song in the short Yes, We Have No Bonanza. We’ll have to look it up.
1940: Tom and Ma Joad dance to it in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. Henry Fonda even sings a verse.
Suzy stepped out from behind the microphone with her accompanists to play “Red River Valley” for the encore of both her early and late shows when I saw her at the Dakota in 2024. Keillor style, she invited us to sing along, as you may well want to do if you listen to her recording below.
“Wayfaring Stranger” has become a bluegrass staple. Emmylou Harris included it on her heavily bluegrass- inspired Roses in the Snow (1980). In my opinon, Suzy’s cover does not suffer by comparison. It was first published in The Christian Songster (1858)(“a collection of hymns and spiritual songs, usually sung at camp, prayer, and social meetings, and revivals of religion; designed for all denominations”), by Joseph Bever. Burl Ives titled his autobiography Wayfaring Stranger (1948). James Lee Burke titled one of his many Holland family novels Wayfaring Stranger (2014). To the point of these songs, Fiona Ritchie and Doug Orr titled their study of folk music Wayfaring Strangers (2nd ed., 2021, with a foreword by Dolly Parton).
“Old Dan Tucker” is a storied song that provides a comic change of pace. According to Wikipedia, “The song was first published in 1843 by Daniel Decatur Emmett, though the melody circulated widely in oral tradition long before it was printed. It ultimately became a staple of the blackface minstrel shows of the 1800s.” You may want to check out The Adventures of Old Dan Tucker and His Son Walter (1851) after taking this one in.
“Rock Island Line” is a song that John Lomax recorded with Leadbelly at a prison in Louisiana. Lomax then helped spring Leadbelly from prison and enlisted his help in recording songs that might otherwise have been lost to our history. “Rock Island Line” is said to derive from a slave spiritual. In this version of the song, the train engineer is smuggling pig-iron — not pigs! — through the toll gate. Pat Bergenson picks up the pace on the harmonica on Suzy’s cover. This is fun. A Mighty Fine Road (2020) by H. Roger Grant tells the history of the Rock Island line.
“Sweet Betsy From Pike” is a song of the California gold rush-era. Carl Sandburg collected the lyrics in The American Songbag (1927 and still in print). See more background on the song here. Burl Ives included it on his debut album (1941). Sam Sackett turned the song into a novel.
Suzy’s cover of “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” is another highlight. We are told that this spiritual is widely credited to Wallace Willis, a Choctaw Freedman. Jerry Douglas contributes the instrumental grace notes on dobro. Robert Penn Warren borrowed the title of Band of Angels (1955), his novel about race and identity, from the lyrics. The novel was a finalist for the 1956 National Book Awards/Fiction. Jackie Lynn (Lynne Hinton) titled one of her Shady Grove mysteries Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. If there is a book telling the history of this moving song, I am not aware of it. American Songwriter dips into the history of the song here.
“Careless Love” is a traditional song with several popular blues versions, including one by Bessie Smith. Careless Love is the title of the concluding volume of Peter Guralnick’s masterly biography of Elvis Presley. Last Train to Memphis is the opening volume.
“All the Pretty Little Horses” is a traditional American lullaby. All the Pretty Horses (1992) is the title of the first novel in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy.
The Carter Family popularized “Wildwood Flower.” See the Library of Congress’s account of the song here. It is said to have originated in an 1860 “parlor song” called “I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets” by Maud Irving and Joseph Philbrick Webster.
Stephen Foster wrote “Beautiful Dreamer” a few years before his death. It was published posthumously in 1864. While it is described as a “parlor song,” it sounds like a loving wake-up lullaby to me, at least as Suzy performs it.
Omitted above are Suzy’s versions of “Shady Grove,” “Froggy Went a-Courtin,'” “Banks of the Ohio,” “Johnny Has Gone For a Soldier,” “Erie Canal,” and “Git Along Little Doggies” (with Suzy’s yodeling). They are all worth seeking out on YouTube.
I have frequently quoted or alluded to Walt Whitman’s “I hear American singing” in this series over the years. In Suzy’s American Folk Songbook we can hear America singing “strong melodious songs.”
