Flipturns 🏊♀️ 📷 🦋
a/k/a ginger 🍵...🎶🌻Still thinking about a story James Taylor told on the Stephen Colbert show....
In the early 70s, he was performing at The Troubadour with Carole King; at that time, she was recording the album Tapestry and he was making Mudslide Slim. Carole played a new song she had just written: "You've Got a Friend." JT said he heard it and thought it was so great he literally ran for his guitar to learn/ play it.
So then, when he was back in the recording studio, they had recorded a few covers, and he said to the others, "Let's do this song of Carole's." They recorded it, and then he went to tell CK that he wanted to include it on his album -- before she had even released it herself. She (generously) said, that's great.
And then she told him that what had prompted her to write the song was listening to his song "Fire and Rain." When she heard the line "I've seen lonely times when I could not find a friend," she thought, I'm going to tell him that he's got a friend... and she wrote the song.
"You've Got a Friend" won them each a Grammy: JT for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Male and CK for Song of the Year.
Dr Pink#LGBTQ English #Wikipedia deletion alert
Could you save this LGBTQ related #English Wikipedia article from deletion?
Nesey Gallons
* Anna "Nesey" Gallons (born May 1984
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nesey_Gallons
Discussion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Nesey_Gallons
Strypey"You are more than what the pain has put you through."
#ArdenLeigh, from the song When You Come Undone by Arden and the Wolves;
https://ardenandthewolves.bandcamp.com/track/when-you-come-undone
This song was released on the 2016 album It Looks Like Trouble. There's some real lived experience behind these lyrics, and a deep and abiding joy in the performance of the song. A fantastic recording, reminds me of Wreckage by Pearl Jam and every bit as good.
#Listening #Music #rock #SingerSongwriters #ArdenAndTheWolves #FortuneCookies
When You Come Undone, by Arden and the Wolves
from the album It Looks Like Trouble
Jake in the desert#MusicWomenWednesday this week is this slow, beautiful, haunting song 'Heart Wants', the debut single from Ukranian born (but now USA based) singer-songwriter Rina Ford. Her voice is fantastic, unreal. Love the hell out of this song and psyched to see what else she does.
Rina Ford - Heart Wants (Official Music Video)
The Delete BinKate Wolf Sings “Across the Great Divide”
Listen to this track by Northern Californian singer-songwriter and country folk paragon Kate Wolf. It’s “Across the Great Divide”, the opening track to the 1981 album Close to You, her fourth. That record built on momentum that Wolf created for herself as an independent musician, initially releasing her material with her band The Wildwood Flower on her self-started Owl label. Her style touches on Sixties folk revivalist ingredients inspired by The Weavers, The Kingston Trio, and The Carter Family as well as from the country music radio she heard growing up in the Fifties.
Wolf achieved local popularity in Sonoma County and then the Bay Area, and soon became a stalwart participant in folk festivals all over North America in the 1970s. She didn’t exactly catch on as a name on the cover of Rolling Stone. Maybe this was because she chose to put her music out on her own label and fashion a career outside of the music industry establishment. She would branch out later in the decade when she signed with indie label Kaleidoscope who released her 1979 record Safe at Anchor. But Wolf would remain an independent artist who put out records on her own terms.
Taking her own path allowed her to craft a unique approach to American folk, bluegrass, and country traditions that put the storytelling aspects of her songwriting to the forefront. That emphasis on narrative and lyrical clarity gives Wolf’s music a warm, plainspoken, and straightforward quality that would inspire a generation of upcoming songwriters including Nanci Griffiths, Iris Dement, and Greg Brown. Wolf also inspired her contemporaries. This included Emmylou Harris who covered Wolf’s material later on.
By the time this song and the Close to You album came out, Wolf had folded The Wildwood Flower after two albums. She regularly toured with Bruce “Utah” Phillips, who would become a venerable and venerated folk music figure in his own right for decades. Phillips took her with him on tours of the Midwest, east coast, and into Canada’s folk music festivals in Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. By the end of the Seventies, she established a musical bond with guitarist and mandolinist Nina Gerber who’s guitar lines are prominent here on “Across the Great Divide” as entwined with Wolf’s own.
On this cut, Gerber and the rest of the band, including Norton Buffalo who provides a second lead voice with his harmonica, help Wolf retain the back porch quality that gives her music its warmth and humanity. The instrumentation and arrangements convey an inviting in-the-room feel that lends this song a certain timelessness, defiant of trends, and leaning into the fundamentals of telling relatable musical stories to an audience without flashiness or artifice.
Singer-songwriter Kate Wolf, circa 1980. image: Kaleidoscope Records – original publicity photo.“Across the Great Divide” remains one of Kate Wolf’s strongest artistic statements. It’s concerned with the strangeness of passing time, when events and chapters of one’s life seem both far away and almost like yesterday all at the same time. By the time she wrote this song, she was entering middle age. Beyond the literal geographical reference to the actual continental divide (where rivers really do change direction), whether this life milestone is the metaphorical great divide in the title or not is arguable.
However, this is a phase of life when perspectives change and people find themselves looking back more often than before. When we do that, it can be overwhelming as well as awe-inspiring as we consider those things which are unique to us; our memories, lessons, travels, mistakes, loves, sorrows, joys, connections, challenges, and achievements. Sometimes, our life stories can seem like they happened to a completely different person as we reflect on them. At a certain point in our lives, it becomes easy to say to ourselves where all the years went, I can’t say.
That contemplative space is exactly where this song lives. In this, “Across the Great Divide” has less to do with Kate Wolf as she sings it, and more to do with us as her audience as we hear her sing. And maybe this is a more useful conception of a great divide, metaphorically speaking; an earned awareness that has grown out of experience and how our own sense of mortality shapes our perspectives as we look back on where we’ve been, who we’ve been, and who we’ve become in the bewildering passage of time.
Wolf’s song suggests that an embrace of the mysterious nature of our lives as beings in time is the best way to avoid being in fear of it.
The finest hour that I have seen
Is the one that comes between
The edge of night and the break of day
It’s when the darkness rolls away
~ “Across the Great Divide” by Kate Wolf
There is a certain defiant hopefulness in this line. Where a song about the passage of time and of mortality could have easily turned down a path defined by ennui, this tune leans toward the light instead. Perhaps this is yet another great divide to consider as we find ourselves on the mountainsides of our lives; that they have been worth living, and that even in their imperfect episodes, they belong to us. As we consider the passing years, we can decide to be content instead of fearful as we straddle the great divide between the edge of night and the break of day.
Kate Wolf put out two more records of original material after Close to You, taking a brief sabbatical at one point, and then resuming her activities on the folk festival circuit and on broadcasts including A Prairie Home Companion and Austin City Limits. In April of 1986, Kate was diagnosed with acute leukemia. After a period of recovery and remission, the disease returned and she underwent a bone marrow transplant. Her immune system never bounced back. She died in December of 1986 at the too-young age of 44, remembered fondly by her fans, musical peers, and celebrated by her friends and family.
Speaking of her family, they established and currently curate the Kate Wolf official website. So, to learn more about her including biographical information and notes on all six of her original albums along with posthumous live and compilation releases, be sure and check that out.
To get a sense of Kate Wolf as a live act, check out this clip of her playing “Like a River” on Austin City Limits. Among other things, you’ll get a sample of Nina Gerber’s considerable skills on the mandolin along with that of fellow player Randy Sabien.
Enjoy!
#80sMusic #countryFolk #CountryMusic #Folk #KateWolf #singerSongwriters #songsAboutExistence
Eddie Biggins
Robin BannksCroce.
b. January 10, 1943 I’m a softy for singer/songwriters. I was in my early teens when Jim Croce hit the scene. He hit it hard, his music was everywhere. And then … he was gone. What he left us was nothing short of magical and masterful. Listen to my Jim Croce playlist on Amazon Music ... #jimcroce #birthday #folkrock #70smusic #singersongwriters #softrock #rock #rockmusic #music #musicsky #musiciansky
