85 f


As an insight into the musical and eco- nomic growth of bluegrass music from its infancy where a young J D Crowe was taken by his father to see Flatt & Scruggs at every opportunity to the present day with The International Bluegrass Association providing awards and a Hall of Fame to honour folk like Crowe this book has, so far, no equals.


You are left with the idea that above all Crowe was a team player, but a strict captain if needed and maybe that has been the essence of bluegrass music right from its inception.


Equally fascinating and well researched is the account of Bean Blossom. Bean Blos- som, in Brown County Indiana was a music park for years owned and operated by Bill Monroe. Adler chronicles the period pre- and post-Monroe, but it is the Monroe period that holds the most interest as his bluegrass festival grew over the years to become one of the major dates in the bluegrass calendar. Adler gets well into the workings of the festi- val, where brother Birch Monroe ran the park and music with incredible penny-pinching meanness. Both Birch and Bill would rather straighten an old nail than buy a new one and they were lucky they could rely on the loyalty of bluegrass fans to ignore the defi- ciencies. I recall myself, in a moment of weak- ness, visiting the one restroom on the site and as I came out being slapped on the back by a well known bluegrass singer who said “Now son, that was a shit hole”. Bill was incredibly proud of his festival and was omnipresent touring the site, playing, chat- ting to festival goers and fellow pickers while still keeping an eye on Birch.


Monroe himself was such a complex character that I doubt that one biography will completely reveal all. It will take a num- ber of books like Adler’s Bean Blossom to tease out a few more pieces with further hints about Monroe’s failed marriages and his womanising. Adler also adds to the knowl- edge that Bill was not really a businessmen and passed through a number of failed ven- tures, often supporting the ideas of his son James. Bluegrass festivals per se became the lifeblood for bluegrass musicians and it is fit- ting that Bill Monroe ran one of the best of them and that on the strength of this his park at Bean Blossom grew from a local music park to a major international venue.


Crowe On The Banjo and Bean Blossom are both well researched, well written, easy to read and invaluable documents in chroni- cling the history and furthering knowledge of bluegrass music.


John Atkins


No Direction Home – The Life & Music of Bob Dylan


Robert Shelton with Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick Humphries Omnibus Press (ISBN 978-184938.458.2)


Robert Shelton (1926-1995) was a critical link in the chain in Bob Dylan’s story. On 29 September 1961 his New York Times piece appeared hailing him as “a bright new face in folk music”. It was local recognition because the newspaper was a regional newspaper with little in the way of a readership outside the state. But it was also one of those news- papers that got noticed in those pre-internet days by other titles in other states feeding on stories from elsewhere. When the review was reprinted on the rear of Dylan’s debut album next year, it lit a powder trail that helped spread both of their names – and that of the New York Times. When the first edition of No Direction Home appeared a quarter of a cen- tury later – in September 1986 – its publica- tion was a milestone in the understanding of Dylan’s life and works. This new edition, over- seen by Elizabeth Thomson and Patrick


Pioneers Of English Folk


Guitar Wise Publications (ISBN 978-1-78038- 199-2)


Bob Dylan, London 1962


Humphries, benefits from the relative ease, compared with then, of fact-checking and sifting and “some twenty-thousand words of authentic anecdote and detail restored from Shelton’s 1977 manuscript”. While that is good, what is still better is to have this out- standing work available again.


Robert Shelton lays his stall out early: “Dylan arguably did for the popular song- form what Picasso did for the visual arts, Stravinsky for ‘serious music’, Chaplin for film, Joyce for the novel. Dylan lived up to the artist’s greatest tasks – growth, explo- ration and change.” He has a grandiose turn of phrase sometimes, although his judicious citations of others’ heaped spoonfuls of praise or rage help to maintain a balance. He draws on all manner of other sources: the gamut from press conference interview to classic criticism of the order of Ewan Mac- Coll’s “I think his poetry is bunk. It’s derivative and terribly old hat ... Dylan’s songs accept the world as it is.”


One sample from the late summer of


1965 in the New York Post under Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston’s byline remains a personal favourite. Them: “Some American folk singers – Carolyn Hester for example – say that what you’re doing, the new sound, ‘folk-rock,’ is liberating them.” Him: “Did Car- olyn say that? You tell her she can call around and see me anytime now that she’s liberat- ed...” (Playful, with a touch of the updated Mae Wests or what?) Another favourite is a masterpiece of the ouch factor. Laurie Hen- shaw of Disc Weekly’s ‘probing’ gets an exas- perated: “Listen, I really couldn’t care less what your paper writes about me ... The peo- ple that listen to me don’t need your paper.”


What acts as the icing on the cake is Shel-


ton’s original interviews. He had access to all manner of people. Martin Carthy and his first wife Dorothy Carthy, Johnny Cash, the concert promoter Harold Leventhal, the list goes on. And Dylan, of course. But one of the most insightful comments in a hindsight kind of way is from Dave Van Ronk, a musician five years Dylan’s senior. He makes, given Dylan’s subse- quent Grand Tour re-inventions, an interest- ing, if not crystal-ball point. Dylan spent a fair amount of time with him and his wife Terri Thal in New York. “The best of Dylan isn’t in the drawing room, it’s on the stage.”


You might call this ‘No Direction Home Deluxe’ and you would be dead right. Its power has not diminished. Only grown.


Ken Hunt


There is an interesting blend of songs and tunes in this book of sheet music, complete with tab and standard notation, aimed at the intermediate guitarist who wants to pick up how some of the greats do and did it. There are a couple of, dare I say it, chest- nuts (Davey Graham’s Anji and John Mar- tyn’s May You Never), straight guitar pieces (John Renbourn’s The Hermit and Gordon Giltrap’s take on Blackwater Side) and songs. Richard Thompson’s 1952 Vincent Black Lightning is the most modern offer- ing, with Bert Jansch’s Strolling Down The Highway and Nick Drake’s version of Jimmy Reed’s My Baby So Sweet giving a pretty good variety of styles to work on. The most challenging are Nic Jones’s Canadee-I-O and Martin Carthy’s The Whale Catchers, in which the full vocabulary of the notation is stretched to cope with the innovations and unique voicings of the guitar accompani- ments. I’m not too sure that Jake Thackray is a pioneer of English folk guitar, his play- ing owing more to George Brassens and the French chanson school than anything else, and On Again! On Again!, for all its clever wordplay, would get very short shrift in the current scene... but it’s nice to have a nylon- string piece featured. So away you go, and I’ll want you all playing these by half-term.


Ian Kearey


ABC My Grannie Caught A Flea: Scots Children’s Songs And Rhymes


Ewan McVicar Birlinn £9.99 ISBN 978-1- 84158-937-4


What a wonderfully stimulating, evocative publication this is!


Ewan brings together Scottish chil-


dren’s street and playground rhymes and songs, partly from his own work in schools but also culled from previous publications dating back to the 19th Century and tran- scribed from recordings in Edinburgh Uni- versity’s School of Scottish Studies. He gives us hundreds of these over 200- plus pages. They are mainly short – 12 lines or less – many are parodies of pop or folk songs and, let’s face it, they are largely doggerel. But for all that there is a wonderful vibran- cy, spirit and rumbustious rhythm to them and a wonderful attitude that displays dis- dain of authority and convention and a defiant sense of humour. There are even a few pearls of wisdom and great insight in some of them.


To someone who had his boyhood in the streets of Edinburgh, they bring another reaction; they provoke long-forgotten mem- ories and feelings of the person I was when I learned and shared these chants, sayings and songs. There are those learned from play- mates but also from my mother and grand- mother and those I shared as an adult with Isabel Sutherland who grew up on the other side of Edinburgh. Of course, hers always varied from mine and this strong point is made by McVicar. These ditties existed in many different forms in different places and times and he give many interesting versions of how the change and develop. The short currency with any generation of children that these items have make them a sort of speeded-up example of oral tradition in action. The enjoyment to be derived from this book is almost endless.


www.birlinn.co.uk Vic Smith


Photo: Brian Shuel


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