Arlo: Low & Lonely

Rick Robbins: Low & Lonely
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You know how in “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” Arlo sings that it:

all started two Thanksgivings ago, was on - two years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the Restaurant?

The friend at issue, an unindicted co-conspirator in the criminal garbage dump, was named Rick Robbins. They had been friends since the early 1960s, when they both attended the Stockbridge School, where the librarian was a woman named Alice Brock. That Alice. At the Stockbridge School, Robbins was exposed to American music from Bessie Smith to Arlo’s dad, to current stars such as Joan Baez and Bob Dylan.  He's the guy on the left.

In 1965, Robbins and Guthrie set off on the road to discover music and themselves, and spent a lot of time singing and playing folk music and the blues. But rather than opt for the life of a professional musician, Robbins settled down to build houses and learn architectural design.

Fast forward to 1995, when Robbins was trading construction work at a music studio for recording time to create a record of some songs for his family.  Rory Block, the blues guitarist and singer (who I saw the other day, opening for Richard Thompson), happened to hear him playing, added some vocals, and persuaded Robbins to release an album. Block produced the album, Walking Down The Line, which also features Ramblin' Jack Elliott, John Sebastian, Eric Weissberg, and Larry Campbell, as well as old buddy Arlo. Not bad for an unknown carpenter/folk singer, right?

Robbins and Guthrie perform a fun, jaunty version of “Low & Lonely,” a song written by “the father of the Nashville music business,” Fred Rose, who wrote, under his own name, and as “Floyd Jenkins,” a number of legendary songs including "'Deed I Do" and "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain.” He’s the “Rose” in the name of famed music publishing firm Acuff-Rose.

“Low & Lonely” was originally released in 1942 by Rose’s partner, Roy Acuff and His Smoky Mountain Boys, and has been covered a few other times, notably by Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, one of Robbins’ main mentors and influences, Hank Williams, and George Jones, who recorded the song with Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys.

Robbins has released two more albums of music, most recently an album of original songs, in 2006.

Drugs: Sharing the Stash Edition

Fraternity of Man: Don‘t Bogart Me

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I went back and forth with myself over whether to include this song in this post. Susan settled the issue with her last post. Yes, this is Don’t Bogart That Joint, with its original title. The song is an artifact from the sixties, equating drug use with communal experience. Drugs, love, sex, peace, all were things to be shared. Bogarting was “uncool, man”.

Fraternity of Man would themselves be nothing more than the answer to a trivia question, were it not for the inclusion of Don’t Bogart Me in the soundtrack to Easy Rider. The band had no other notable success of their own, and lasted for only two albums. But in that time, former members of The Mothers of Invention, and future members of Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band and Little Feat passed through their ranks. Don’t Bogart Me appears on Fraternity of Man’s self-titled debut, while Lowell George did not become a part of the band until their second album, but George most likely performed the song live with them, prompting his cover of the song later as the leader of Little Feet.

Ramblin‘ Jack Elliott: Cocaine Blues

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A quick listen to Cocaine Blues shows no sign of anything being shared. But I cannot think of this song without thinking of Jackson Browne’s cover from his album Running on Empty. In that version, it is clear from the multiple laughing voices at the end, and from the song’s placement on the album, that Browne and his bandmates are sharing some coke during some downtime in a hotel room during a tour. Browne calls the song Cocaine, but it is not the Eric Clapton hit. Rather, Cocaine Blues is a cover of a song by the Reverend Gary Davis. Why then have I chosen Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s version over the original? I wanted to reflect the feel of the original as much as possible, but the only version I could find by Davis was an old recording with very poor sound quality. This was the cover that I felt best captured the spirit of the original.

Dylan Covers: The Dylan Sound

Angel Snow: Meet Me In The Morning

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Chris Smither: Visions of Johanna

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Vic Chesnutt: Buckets of Rain

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Ramblin' Jack Elliott: Don't Think Twice, It's Alright

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I'm a relative newcomer to Bob Dylan fandom, having grown up immersed in a very different, more melodic branch of the folkworld. And I came to that fandom through covers, and thus have spent much more time considering the songbook than I have considering the particular vocal and guitar folkstyle which, love it or hate it, is inimitably unique and Dylanesque. So it's only very recently that I've started to appreciate that carefully constructed nasality, the broken-voiced rawness which Dylan chose to evolve in himself, the better to make meaning in song.

I'm not the best candidate to explain Dylan's particular sound, and I don't think I need to. A library of books and reviews and films have been written on the subject, and it's also true that the Dylan sound is so iconographic, both as sound and as influence, it kind of speaks for itself. But as this wonderful week's journey through the Dylan songbook has progressed, I've found myself thinking about how difficult it is to cover Dylan's tone successfully. I would even posit that the ragged musical trappings are one of the biggest reasons why Dylan songs are so universal and coverable, so much and so immediately a part of the folkways of the larger culture. Which is to say, just as the older folk of Robert Johnson and Blind Willie Johnson are so mutable in the hands of others due to their own stripped down, prototypical recorded form, one of the functions of Dylan's almost tuneless approach to song is to make those songs seem more available for others to finish in their own way.

As I came to understand the power of this deliberately fundamental, elemental nature of Dylan's performance, I have grown to appreciate Dylan for more than just his songwriting and composition. And so, though I used to lean towards fuller production in my own musical taste, I increasingly respect the rawer, more elemental folk musicians, like Nick Drake and Elliott Smith and, more recently, Denison Witmer and newcomer Angel Snow, who, with just guitar and slightly wobbly voice, seem to be working in that same space where Dylan worked.

So I thought it would be worth looking for Dylan covers which try to bring that same sense of rawness to the performance -- songs which, in their own way, seem to be covering both Dylan's song and Dylan's connection with the baseline of emotion and sound that make song so direct a connection between performer and culture. Here's a few of my favorites from that camp, as a kind of end-of-week celebration of Dylan's influence beyond song itself.