The other day, I was listening to an album by the Be Good Tanyas while I was doing some sort of repetitive work. I've heard it before but didn't realize that one of the songs, The Coo Coo Bird is one that I really like on Hem's album Rabbit Songs, although they call it, The Cuckoo. Hem's version sounds like a traditional folk song, which it is, but the Tanyas' version is darker, and looser, feels like it sung by the bayou, and has a great fiddle in the background. I wanted to link to both recordings, but unfortunately I can't find a video of Hem; however, I found recordings by several different, really different, performers. As with any good folk song, the lyrics are constantly changing. I'm not sure that they are the same in any two of these videos. Here's the Be Good Tanyas.
Richard Thompson. He probably sounds more like the person that wrote this song than any of the others.
Combining the two, folk music and 60s rock, is gonna knock ya, rock ya, and sock it to ya now--although up until about the fourth minute her only contribution is marakas.
A great interview with Clarence Ashley before the song..
AMDG
Eliza Carthy's Blue Period?
ReplyDeleteTruth is that I never heard of Eliza Carthy until I saw this video.
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These are great. I don't really have time to comment now--maybe tomorrow. Liza Carthy--Martin Carthy's daughter?
ReplyDeleteAnother milestone! My first comment from a hamburger.
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You're confusing me with McLean. That's another sandwich altogether.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a big Janis Joplin fan, but I really like this clip with her, which I assume is Big Brother and the Holding Company. People always said they were a better band than they ever seemed on record. I like Janis's singing here better than on most of her later stuff, which often strikes me as overdone.
Yes, I meant to mention that it was BB&HC even though it's just billed on YouTube as Janis Joplin. She always scared me. If you had asked me when I was younger if I'd have liked to have met her, I would have said, "NO."
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If you ever feel like reading a sad story about a lost soul, read the biography of her called Buried Alive. I was having trouble remembering the name of it (I read it in the early or mid '70s), so I looked on Amazon, and I see a lot of negative reviews from people who seem angry that it calls into question their view of those wonderful days of the 1960s.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I meant to say about this song: these versions are all fairly similar, which makes me think they all started with Clarence Ashley's, which was apparently on that famous Harry Smith anthology. I've heard variants that are recognizable as having the same roots but are pretty different. One that I used to like says that the cuckoo "Brings us the tidings / And tells us no lies"
The Richard Thompson version says something about the Harry Smith anthology.
ReplyDeleteHem's version says, "She will cause you never no trouble, and tell you no lie." Is that on any of these?
AMDG