Revival folk revived
Jerome Clark | Canby, Minnesota | 08/29/2003
(3 out of 5 stars)
"I first heard folk music at a very early age, but I must have been 10 or 11 before I heard the phrase "folk music." I heard it on the radio, and it was spoken in association, I'm sure, with an early Kingston Trio hit. I thought, then, of folk music as what full-throated harmony trios and quartets did, until one day somebody told me about Bob Dylan. Fourtold is a quartet made up of husband-and-wife Steve Gillette and Cindy Mangsen, Anne Hills, and Michael Smith. Gillette and Smith have deserved reputations as formidable songwriters. Gillette's "Darcy Farrow" (written with Tom Campbell) is among the finest new songs to come out of the 1960s revival, and as good an imitation-trad ballad as anyone has ever written. Smith composed the often-covered "The Dutchman," which is not among my favorite songs, and "Panther in Michigan," which is. Their current project revives -- on a smarter, more sophisticated level -- the harmony groups that began with the Weavers in the early 1950s and continued with the Tarriers, the Brothers Four, the Journeymen, and the like, before the style faded out of fashion and radio play in the mid-1960s. There have been occasional attempts to revive it. In the 1980s the long-forgotten Village Squares tried, without notable musical or esthetic sense, to shed soft-core folk's twee image and reinvent it as hip, attitude-bristling stance. A few years ago John Stewart and Darwin's Army botched an attempt to reintroduce and modernize a Kingston Trio sound. Only a mid-1990s political-humor group, the Foremen, pulled it off, mainly by writing hilariously, nastily satirical songs in the manner of a latterday Chad Mitchell Trio. Michael Smith has toured with a group calling itself Weavermania!, which recreates the repertoire of the Weavers. I imagine few nongray hairs in the audience. In 2003 the mockumentary A Mighty Wind made merry with an imagined reunion of what a friend of mine calls "fauxk singers."Fourtold isn't bad, a generally successful effort to do serious music with an approach history has judged not exactly the most obviously promising. If you demand that your folk music be hard-edged and authentic -- actually, I do, usually -- this may not be for you. The faults are hard not to notice, for example the vapid arrangement of Eric von Schmidt's calypso "Joshua Gone Barbados," square enough to turn "Sonny Chile" into "Sonny Child." (To hear it done right, hunt up Tom Rush's tasty version or, better yet, Johnny Cash's definitive one.) "Ballad of Springhill" still sounds like something Peggy Seeger both wrote and sang -- which, in fact, it is -- and that can mean only one thing: Run! On the other hand, "Darcy Farrow," lovely as always, never wears out its welcome. "Four Rode by," the great Ian and Sylvia song, gets a respectable treatment, and the traditional "I Drew My Ship," too seldom heard, makes a happy appearance. The arrangement of "Panther in Michigan" carries a bit too much baggage and suffers next to Smith's crisper solo version (on an out-of-print Flying Fish album from the 1980s), but it's still good to have it available again. The CD concludes with the spiritual "Run, Come, See Jerusalem" performed as the Weavers might have done it, except that Fourtold's version mercifully avoids the fingernails-on-chalkboard effect Weavers records invariably have on me. In sum: good songs mostly done decently and, on the whole, an amiable, modest pleasure."
Really Excellent CD by an Excellent group!
Maxine Burr | West Virginia | 10/02/2005
(5 out of 5 stars)
"In 2003 we attended the Old Songs Festival in Altamont, NY. The chance to hear Fourtold was one of the major draws bringing us to the Festival. The group, Fourtold, rarely gets together to perfom and this CD is the only one they have recorded. The four artists have dozens of Cds, but not with all four of them together. They seem to be even better together than they are as individual performers.
My husband and I have several dozen folk CDs and 33 1/3 albums. This is one of the very best of these recordings. We are hoping and hoping that they will record together again, preferably sooner rather than later.
Maxine"
It is the work of the Weavers!!!
Bruce | st louis mo usa | 01/06/2004
(5 out of 5 stars)
"I thought the weavers were no more until I heard the last four cuts of this work of art.. excellent music.."
Track Listings (12) - Disc #1