Eclectic Company: It's Sum Sum Sum Sum Sum Sum Summerfest

It’s hard for me to believe it, but another year and another New Bedford Summerfest has come and gone. Lots of traditional English singers and others singing English traditional songs were among nearly 40 acts on hand this year, and most of them performed on the stage at which I was emcee. We had John Roberts and Tony Barrand who brought all the bawdy ballads with them when they came over the ocean to study psychology at Cornell, Anais Mitchell, whose hippie dad taught her the big Child ballads while he strode around his land with her tucked under an arm, Anne Hills, whose sweet demeanor and soaring soprano hide her truly wicked sense of humor (she sang TWO songs about goblins, and lives with a perennial punnyman, but she easily holds her own) and the incomparable Heather Wood, whose career began in London’s Tradition folk club, where she and Peter Bellamy and Royston Wood (no relation) joined up to use the harmony singing they’d learned from the Copper Family of Rottingdean, Sussex. Wood, Bellamy and Wood eventually brought over their Young Tradition trio to wow the Philadelphia Folk Festival, and the rest is, in this instance at least, satisfactual history.

At Summerfest, Wood sang sea shantys and other trad songs with her most recent trio, Tradmore, featuring actor and singer Ken Schatz and musician and archivist David Kleiman. She even invited me and a few other female friends up to the stage to sing as she led the shanty “One More Day,” a favorite of mine, with its chorus “come and rock and roll me over Johnny/one more day.” Tradmore also sang “Babylon Is Fallen,” which Heather learned from the late, great Helen Schneyer, a frequent performer in her later years on Garrison Keillor’s “A Prairie Home Companion” radio show and a stalwart of the Washington, D.C. folk scene, and which I learned from the English electric folk band Home Service (an outgrowth of Ashley Hutchings’ Albion Band), both of which bands provided traditional music for Bill Brydon’s National Theatre productions, including “Lark Rise to Candleford,” adapted from Flora Thompson’s semi-autobiographical novels about British village life in the early 20th Century (Albions), and “The Mysteries,” a re-setting of the Wakefield cycle of medieval plays based on bible stories (Home Service). I can never get enough of history as told, subjectively, through the ballad tradition, and many of the songs I love most I learned from Heather and The YT and the Home Service’s John Tams. For more Heather Wood info visit www.priups.com/heather.

Some non-traditional English songs were showcased too: Lake Charles favorite Vance Gilbert was on my stage twice, singing uplifting songs in a workshop one day, and winging his way the next with a solo set that ended with the stirring a capella “King of Rome,” about a homing pigeon who makes it from Italy to Derby, England, against all odds. Gilbert had just been telling me about his fascination with private aviation (especially Polish) between the World Wars, and it seemed fitting that he would end his Summerfest shows with a song about long odds, courage and flight.

Famous filmic scaryman Ronny Cox (“Deliverance,” “Total Recall,” “Robocop”), a Summerfest favorite known for southwest-tinged folk and cowboy songs and swingy classics, performed some of his own ruminative and story songs, including one with a real recipe inside, about his grandmother’s hot water corn bread, and a couple of delicious numbers from the 1920s, “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles With You),” which he introduced with its little-known verse, and “(I’m The) The Sheik of Araby,” in the Spike Jones impish version where every line ends with the aside “with no clothes on.” Cox usually plays with a sideman, and this year it was Radoslav Lorkovic, on Parisian café accordion and keyboards, a veteran player whose familiar yet surprising turns of musical phrase bumped up the heat under Cox’s guitar and lyrics just that perfect extra notch. Cox told me he’s not taking any new film work for now, turning down scripts in favor of touring his own and others’ music, including a Woody Guthrie show that sometimes ends with a showing of the Guthrie biopic “Bound For Glory,” starring Cox as a musician/union organizer. He’s hoping to play Shreveport sometime, and I’m hoping we can lure him down to Lake Charles as well. He’s a class act, and we can always use more of those. For more Ronny Cox info, visit www.ronnycox.com.

This year Summerfest presented a tribute to Richard and Mimi Farina, the late songwriter and his singing partner/activist wife, through the vocal performances of Caroline Doctorow, daughter of the celebrated novelist, and better-than-the-originals arrangements of guitarist Pete Kennedy, who produced “Another Country,” an album of Doctorow singing Richard Farina songs. The duo selected some of Farina’s most interesting works for “Another Country,” including “Hard Loving Loser,” “Birmingham Sunday,” and “The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood,” all of which formed an important part of the internal soundtrack of my teen years. In Doctorow’s Summerfest performance, the poetry and tension of Farina’s moody music was conveyed through the surround-sound of Doctorow’s band, including Mick Hargraves on semi-acoustic bass and backing vocals, Andrew Carillo on electric sitar (cowabunga dude!) and electric guitar (the subtler Fender Telecaster, not its show-off-y whammy-bar pyrotechnicrat cousin, the Stratocaster), Pete Kennedy on rhythm and lead acoustic guitar and backing vocals, and Maura Kennedy, Pete’s partner in life and crime, on rhythm guitar and backing vocals. The Kennedys supported and enhanced the star during their years with Nanci Griffiths’ band, but we’re lucky they decided to strike out on their own. Pete can play rings around many better-known musicians, but he never gets pushy about it, while Maura’s muscular voice covers the waterfront of vocal styles. Alan and Helene Korolenko, my dear friends who’ve made Summerfest the jewel that it is, call the Kennedys “the heart of the festival,” and won’t hold one without them. Well, I too suggest you all take heart, friends. Find them at www.kennedysmusic.com.