Eclectic Company: Live, Live, Live

Looking back over the last eight weeks, I see more than a dozen performers I want to tell you about, so let’s get started:

Magpie, the husband-and-wife duo of Terry Leonino and Greg Artzner, were along on the Phil Ochs Song Night in Huntington, New York back in May, and again at the Old Songs Festival in Altamont, New York in late June. Magpie are a fervent social justice duo, whose broad-ranging repertoire of self-penned works and stirring songs by others frequently deals with issues of race, class and the environment. Their performance of “Love Me I’m A Liberal” at the Phil Ochs night included their updated lyrics and were worthy of Ochs’ best lines. But I was especially taken with their performances at Old Songs that delved into the songs of the Civil War.

For a decade now, Magpie have been presenting Sword of the Spirit, a two-handed one-act play about John Brown, the famous abolitionist who started an unsuccessful armed slave revolt by seizing the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. (After the Jena Six tragedy, they performed the play in Louisiana as an anti-racist educational experience.) They’ve also released a companion album of Magpie’s newly-written songs about Brown and others in the abolition movement. With all their work on John Brown and their newest album, The Civil War: Songs and Stories Untold, they were in the perfect position to share the flavor of that era as part of Four Seasons, Four Years – The Civil War: A Musical Journey, directed by Old Songs founder Andy Spence. Spence chose nearly 40 songs from the mid-1800s through the beginning of reconstruction, and then found readings from personal letters, poems and news clippings that were relevant to the music. The overall program featuring eleven musicians, including some great ones I’d never heard (such as Stephen and Betsy Fry – he’s a classically trained horn player, pianist and violinist, she’s a chorale vocalist, bass player and clarinetist) and some old friends (John Roberts, English traditional singer, concertina and banjo player, best known for his duo with Tony Barrand), was almost overwhelming. Magpie’s share of the three+ hours of readings and music covering many aspects of the war and the soldiers’ lives in New York State’s volunteer regiments who were fighting in the war of northern aggression (as I’ve heard it named by my southern friends from many states) were moving, humorous and enlivening.

One especially nice surprise at Old Songs was running into my old fiddling friend Henry Jankiewicz, who played in Syracuse with Cranberry Lake Jug Band when I lived there years ago, and is now playing with old timey and bluegrass and even Irish bands when he has the chance. Henry’s sweet nature and gentle good humor were fundamental to the Cranberries’ show, and I loved watching him turn from serious to smiling as the band would hit a particularly tasty groove. Henry’s the author of “Einstein the Genius” (“Einstein’s a genius / not like you and me / wrote two equations every day / on Sunday he wrote three . . . Albert let your hair stick out your socks hang down”), which has got to be one of the best old timey songs written in the latter half of the twentieth century.

At the moment, I’m pretty brain dead, preparing for the annual New Bedford (Massachusetts) Summerfest opening tomorrow night. The Festival is reviving a Friday night fundraising concert, and the lineup is pretty wonderful. Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary fame is the headliner, and the opening acts are singers, songwriters and husband-and-wife hot pickers Pete and Maura Kennedy, described by organizers Alan and Helene Korolenko as the heart of the festival, and Annalivia, a quartet (augmented for this occasion with a member of Crooked Still) playing their own and traditional music from various places in the Celtic world. I’ll be stage managing in Customs House Square, and my stage runs all weekend, so I’m not likely to get to hear anyone who isn’t performing there. Luckily, the POSSLQ’s job at the festival will give him a little more freedom to hear music at the smaller venues around the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, so he’ll be the one to hear the future stars and I’ll just have to hear about who I missed from him, as I did several weeks back.

VOICE OF THE POSSLQ:

Even if you’re not old enough to remember Ozzie and Harriet Nelson from their early 1950s through mid-1960s TV show (or! their even earlier radio show), a fictionalized reality series about themselves, you no doubt have heard of them — the perfect American Family, Ozzie a band leader, Harriet a singer, their son Ricky a singer, their son David along for the ride. So wholesome, the family almost defined the 1950s American ideal. Now let’s move ahead and back in history: Instead of two sons, see two daughters named Erica and Annalee. Let the parents be called Rick and Georgianne. Have the family perform traditional folk music instead of pop. Change the family name from Nelson to Jackofsky, and you have The Homegrown String Band, a group resurrected from the pre-radio days when many families sang together entertaining themselves and, sometimes, friends.

Leslie was unavoidably out of town, so I attended their recent local concert at the Emma Clark library in East Setauket, New York without her. Their program ranged from the early country favorite “How many biscuits can you eat?”, a rewrite of “Old Joe Clark,” Rick’s tribute song to Johnny Cash comprised principally of lines from his songs, and a song taken in the true folk tradition by Led Zeppelin from Lead Belly – “The Gallows Pole” – previously taken from a Child Ballad nee “The Maid saved from the Gallows.” In the middle there’s an interlude in which Georgianne, Erica, and Annalee take turns doing some pretty fair clogging. All in all, a pleasant way to spend a 21st Century afternoon in 19th Century fashion.