Eclectic Company: Music Farming, Naturally

The POSSLQ and I spent a lot of weekends this summer in the company of our famous folksinger friend Heather Wood, and that’s led to some interesting musical adventures, because we like to show her a good time. This past weekend, we went to the revived Fiddle & Folk Festival, literally up the road at the Benner family’s 15-acre organic farm tucked away behind a tree-lined suburban façade. The F&FF was a family-friendly event with barnyard animals to pet, a giant tire swing to ride, and fresh-picked heirloom vegetables to buy. But it was a hot, muggy, cloudy-with-a-chance-of-rain day, and the climate control-freaks had issued a tornado watch for our area from 5:00PM — 9:00PM after a week heavy with rain and thunderstorms, so it wasn’t surprising that the Festival was far more lightly attended than it deserved.

But those who came had a grand time. There was an all-day jam session, a planned group singalong and a couple of dances with callers to keep the audience active, plus the music for viewing was delicious: Four acts playing bluegrass, Québécois, blues and cowboy songs (plus Juilliard grad violin virtuoso Dina Nesterenko covering the main stage set changes with classical flourishes) took short turns in a barn set up with hay bale benches and on the purpose-built-for-concertizing Back Porch stage at the bottom of a gentle slope with excellent sightline seating meant there was always an alternative.

We moseyed around toward the Back Porch stage and the hamburger and roasted corn stand from the singalong and a short set from cowboy singer Skip Gorman, who regaled us with “Goodbye Old Paint” and played some cowboy fiddle tunes with a delicacy I can’t say I associate with cowboys. His last release, 2011’s A Herder’s Call, includes one of my favorite childhood songs, “Home On The Range” (“where seldom is heard / a discouraging word” — my eight-year-old self wondered what was so discouraging about the word “seldom”) and cowboy songs I was surprised to discover I knew (must have heard them in the background of Yosemite Sam and Bugs Bunny cartoons years ago, because how else would I know them?) like “Git Along, Little Dogies” and “Bury Me Not On The Lone Prairie.” Dogie Music, an earlier album featuring his cowboy band, “The Waddie Pals,” has “Streets of Laredo,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and one of my all-time favorites from the late IWW organizer, hobo, prophet and raconteur, Bruce “Utah” Phillips, “The Goodnight Loving Trail,” about the hard lives of cowboys on cattle drives.

The headliner was Rhode Island native acoustic blues musician Paul Geremia, who learned to play country blues guitar and harmonica from a who’s who of the greats. At the F&FF, he played a handmade copy of a Gibson guitar that produces a warm caress of a sound, and despite the humidity that tends to muffle fine resonating wood, he held forth in an understated style that is so fine and tasty, covering the familiar and obscure blues tunes of all our heroes with an encyclopedic knowledge and a journeyman’s deft touch so well, it was a shame to let him get away with only an hour onstage. Geremia played the Back Porch stage midway through the afternoon, then settled up at the CD sales table to take on fans’ questions. Onstage he covered Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson and Blind Willie McTell, sang “Stones In My Passway” and “Silver City Bound” and “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues,” and maybe ten others familiar to fans of KRVS-FM’s Friday “Blues Box” show, and I for one wanted to hear a whole lot more.

The F&FF was jointly sponsored by the Long Island Traditional Music Association, which used to present it in a local historical museum’s grounds. After a hiatus, LITMA teamed up with the Benners and revived the Festival to honor the memory of Geraldine “Gerry” Reimer, the go-to acoustic music mover and shaker in Suffolk County, who booked coffeehouses and concerts, had a longtime folk show on WUSB (Stony Brook’s station, that once featured a feminist radio show by my sister Allison, the artist!), and was a tireless kindergarten teacher who took her classes to Benner’s Farm to show them where food really comes from. Reimer became a board member of a nonprofit the Benners started to teach farming and foodmaking skills, and to present traditions to new generations on their 15-acre homestead. She was the Benner’s go-to music program organizer.

Which is why I know about the Benners and their farm, and their allegiance to folk music. Earlier this summer, when the POSSLQ’s family flew in from all over to celebrate his milestone birthday, sister Susi stayed with us, and as we wanted to show her a good time, we all took in the Benner’s Back Porch concert featuring Claudia Jacobs, a Long Island performer known variously as a folk singer and a “bluesy mama,” who we knew about because we’d just caught her emceeing another local event, the Woodlands’ Folk Festival. Years ago, in another lifetime, Claudia performed at the Jewish Arts Festival of Long Island, which I organized with help from Claudia’s mom Rea. Claudia was then part of a Greenwich Village folk songwriter cooperative, Fast Folk, which put out sampler albums of coop members’ works as a monthly “newsletter.”

Claudia’s one of those deep/big-voiced women who can sing blues and country, rock, jazz and folk, who don’t get enough props from the mainstream music industry because they’re hard to pigeonhole, so they fall outside the major labels’ publicity and sales forces skillsets. At Benner’s, Claudia’s band included some excellent musicians — Greg Galluccio (slide guitar), James Hubbard (trombone — and what a fine bass instrument that proved to be) and Dan Weymouth (keyboard). Together they covered a lot of artistic territory in a couple dozen songs. Claudia alternately belted and crooned her repertoire, and the guys played tasty licks behind, around and out front of her. You can hear them on Jacobs’ new CD Rally On! that showcases ten Jacobs-penned songs, and covers Bob Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain,” and Ray Davies’ “Looney Balloon,” which I think covers the waterfront quite nicely.

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