Folk Tales 2 - The Mighty and the Forgotten
While the folk movement of the 60s and early 70s was messy, it did have some common themes. It was primarily white, acoustic, and performed before college-educated audiences. The performers were mostly singer-songwriters, not bards nurturing some historical tradition. While they occasionally nodded to the ancients - more often to set a mood than out of actual regard or interest - modern folk music had very little to do with what had come before. (A shame because what came before was really good, far richer and more diverse than modern caricatures of hillbillies with banjos. You can get to know it better through the Lomax Digital Archive, linked below.)
The modern folkies’ focus on the personal had a nasty backswing. As their audience started to die off, so too did their their songs and reputations. And the audiences were too small to create a generational echo effect. There are no “Classic Folk” radio stations because Dave Van Rock never played the Oakland Coliseum. Their fans were loyal, but they did not start The Preservation Hall Folk Band, or the Girls With Guitars Hall of Fame.
But…on that last item…maybe someone should. Even in their own time, female folk artists were neglected, pigeonholed, in some cases deliberately held back. Some, like Vashti Bunya, quit. Others, like Mary McCaslin, persevered. Joni Mitchell fought it for a while, then walked out and got into jazz, but not before leaving the most significant legacy of any individual in the folk movement.
Joni Mitchell
“When the dust settles, Joni Mitchell may stand as the most important and influential female recording artist of the late 20th century.” - Jason Ankeny, Allmusic
It’s a measure of Mitchell’s extraordinary achievement that if she had retired in, say, 1970, we would still have to talk about her as the preeminent folk artist. She wrote like Edna St. Vincent Millay, and accompanied herself with Miles Davis-influenced arrangements, played on open tunings of her own invention. Here, at the age of 26, she sings “Both Sides Now” on national television. She is already a star, and performs with professional assurance and fluency:
It is one of the best songs ever written, according to Youtube commenters and a list compiled by Rolling Stone. For Mitchell, it was Tuesday:
I was reading ... Henderson the Rain King on a plane and early in the book Henderson ... is also up in a plane. He's on his way to Africa and he looks down and sees these clouds. I put down the book, looked out the window and saw clouds too, and I immediately started writing the song. I had no idea that the song would become as popular as it did.
To the degree the song attracted unusual attention, it was from male commentators who questioned how a girl in her mid-20s could imagine she knew so much about life. Speaking from the other end of the chronological spectrum, I can kind of see the point they were trying to make. But Mitchell had already seen plenty. She’d grown up artistically in the brutally competitive world of music. She’d had a marriage and a child, and lost both, at least for a time. She’d experienced more real life than most of the people writing about her.
Girls aren’t supposed to hit back, but Joni did, hard. She was a consistent source of irritation for promoters of patriarchy, insisting on her validity as a person and mocking their pretensions. Consider “The Priest”, which is both confessional and remorseless:
The priest sat in the airport bar
He was wearing his father's tie
And his eyes looked into my eyes so far
Whenever the words ran dry
Behind the lash and the circles blue
He looked as only a priest can through
And his eyes said me and his eyes said you
And my eyes said, "Let us try"
He said, "You wouldn't like it here
No, it's no place you should share
The roof is ripped with hurricanes
And the room is always bare"
I need the wind and I seek the cold
He reached past the wine for my hand to hold
And he saw me young, and he saw me old
And he saw me sitting there
Then he took his contradictions out
And he splashed them on my brow
So which words was I then to doubt
When choosing what to vow?
Should I choose them all? Should I make them mine
The sermons, the hymns and the valentines?
And he asked for truth, and he asked for time
And he asked for only now
Now the trials are trumpet scored
Oh, will we pass the test?
Or just as one love's more and more
Will one love less and less?
Oh come, let's run from this ring we're in
Where the Christians clap and the Germans grin
Saying, let them lose crying, let them win
Oh, make them both confess
Take away the music and you have a fine modern poem. The interplay of the human need for intimacy and religious imagery hits the ambivalence of the age dead center. I feel a little sorry for the priest, but…you mess with Shakespeare, you get the pen. Welcome to the club: James Taylor, Graham Nash, and Neil Young can relate.
“Let us try” is straight up murder.
Mitchell found her family again, and having done so left the music industry, calling it a “cesspool”. After a devastating aneurysm in 2015, she slipped away from public attention almost completely. Her rehabilitation was difficult. She had to learn again how to play and sing. Gradually friends came by and played music with her at her home. As she regained her proficiency and confidence, she finally agreed to perform publicly again. The result - a surprise appearance at the Newport Folk Festival a few weeks ago - speaks for itself. If you have tears, prepare to shed them now -
Let’s agree that she has now sufficient life experience to sing the song, and that her difficult, fully-lived life imbues the lyrics with new and richer meaning. “Don’t give yourself away” - but of course she did. We have seen her young and we have seen her old, and we have seen her sitting there. Thank goodness.
Mary McCaslin
There’s a woman named Mary McCaslin who lives down the coast. She’s not famous. She’s sick now and no longer performs. But she wrote beautiful songs. In 1981 Robert Christgau compared her favorably to Mitchell: "Without self-dramatization—she favors plain melodies and commonplace imagery and her singing is gamely unhistrionic—this woman explores Joni Mitchell's territory with equal intelligence, more charm, and no drums."
I first heard McCaslin’s “Way Out West” on a folk anthology. It’s the sort of tune that makes you turn your head ands say “who’s that?!”
McCaslin knows what she’s doing. The West in the cinematic imagination was mostly a male construct. Women are generally presented as victims, from “Red River” to “Once Upon a Time in the West”. Reality was not much better. Farm wives in The West were mostly indentured servants, sentenced to lives of hard labor. The historian Robert Caro interviewed some of them:
[S]he handed me the bucket and told me to drop it in. It dropped quite a way. When it seemed full, she told me to pull it up, and I felt how heavy it was, and thought of how many buckets she—mostly she alone, her husband working in the fields or with the cattle all day, her children working beside him as soon as they were old enough, no money on Hill Country farms or ranches to even think of paying a hired man—had to pull up every day. I found a 1940 Agriculture Department study of how much water each person living on a farm used in a day: forty gallons. The average Hill Country family was five people. Two hundred gallons in a day, much of it hauled up by a single person. And then they had to get the water to the house. It was another elderly woman who asked me, “Do you want to see how I carried the buckets?” I suppose I nodded. Walking over to her garage, she pulled up the door, and there was her yoke. I don’t know that I will ever forget that woman—old and frail now, but her shoulders were thin, and her arms, too, you felt, had always been thin—standing there in front of that heavy bar of wood...
McCaslin’s family drives across the landscape where this occurred, reaching “the great suburban stucco forest” of the west coast. The recording of the song has an old-timey piano in the background, evoking for me those saloons and dusty streets in the movies. And when she arrives in The West, she is, like the folks in “The Class of ‘57”, bemused to learn it is not all she had dreamed.
My family left home when I was a child
To head out West, all open, wild
I couldn't wait to get* the prairie on a pony
But we passed over the plains and on down
Into the great stucco suburb forest
The people there all held my dreams in jest
Somehow I grew to spite them
Way out West
My first love came West to play and to sing
But soon he left the hearts-and-flowers scene
He started to hang around the ranch
And then he joined with the Wild West Show
He became one of the bunch
He gave them all, all his very best
He's riding high somewhere
Way out West
Then I fell in with a rounder who was always on the move
But he wanted to make, instead of give, love
He wouldn't hear of love as a gift, instead
He used his cruelties, and his remedies
To come down heavy on my head
He'll only stay if he can be a guest
He lives one day at a time
Way out West
My family left home when I was a child
To head out West, all open, wild
I still can't wait to get the prairie on a pony
I'm gonna head back out to the rolling plains
And leave behind the great stucco forest
I'll be using all these stormy nights for rest
For my daybreak journey
Way out West
Way out West
Way out West
* The lyrics say “ride”, but that’s not what she’s singing. It sounds like “get”, but maybe “gaff”? Some sources say the latter is cowboy slang for spurring on a horse. [Upon futher reflecton (4/18/23) I think it’s “gad” —> “to be on the go without a specific aim or purpose” - Merriam-Webster]
I was going to say the song is an elegy for a dream, but it ends defiantly. She is still dreaming, pushing away the parents, boyfriends, and Zen Buddhists (probably) trying to tell her not to. She’ll take charge of her own journey because now she understands that - heartbreak or no - she can own that. ‘Way Out West” is lyrically sophisticated and discernibly human, hallmarks of her work. A local radio station did a nice McCaslin retrospective back in 2020, and the playlist is linked below.
Vashti Bunyan
People were younger back in the 60s. Vashti Bunyan was 25 years years old when this record came out, and 70 when it was rediscovered and used in the TV show True Detective. It was her last bid for success as a pop artist, and it flopped. “I wanted desperately to be a pop singer,” she told a reporter in 2007, [but] “I really wasn't the right kind of material at all." Well, not if you’re going to write songs about trains, Vashti…
Writing in The Guardian, Jude Rogers explains what happened next:
A young female singer-songwriter leaves London for the Outer Hebrides with her boyfriend, travelling in a wagon drawn by a black horse called Bess. The 650-mile trip takes two years; she makes an album about it, 1970’s Just Another Diamond Day, full of precise, quietly sung songs…conjuring atmospheres of innocence and wonder.
Like several other musical achievements of the era (e.g., The Zombies’ Odessey and Oracle, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, and Nick Drake’s Pink Moon) it was overlooked at first, but ultimately gained critical praise and a devoted audience. A Washington Post article (linked below) estimates that only 100 copies of the original album were sold; they cannot be had now for love nor money.
The entire album is astonishing, but the title track particularly so:
Bunyan breaks with modern folk tradition by not singing about herself much. Her subject is ordinary life; not suburban drives to the drugstore, but the life experienced by most people in the fifty centuries before such a thing was possible. She’s concerned with the elemental rhythms of…well, existence:
Just another field to plough
Just a grain of wheat
Just a sack of seed to sow
And the children eat
I was listening to this song in a shared workspace, and chanced to look up as a woman in front of me threw her head back with laughter. I am not much for spiritual insights, but this as close to one as a song has brought. For a brief moment I was out of my body, appreciating all that was around me. Dang.
After the album failed, Bunyan left entertainment for motherhood. When she returned to recording in 2005, the new album was called “Lookaftering”. Maybe this voice of motherhood is why Just Another Diamond Day elicits such strong emotional reactions. When I first heard it, I simply didn’t know how to respond. I wasn’t sad, but for some reason I wanted to cry.
An anonymous Youtube commenter says: “this makes me feel like I didn't do anything wrong.” (You didn’t, you know. But who but your mother would ever say so?)
Bunyan did her best to forget about the album, and focused instead on her children. She didn’t want them to know about her past. But eventually they learned the truth about her.
I didn't have a copy of the original album, just an old dusty tape in the back of a drawer. My daughter told me the other day that they knew I didn't want them to listen. . . . So apparently they used to take it out to the car and put it on the tape player there and listen to it secretly.
And I’m crying again.
the Lomax Digital Archive (link)
Joni Mitchell Biography by Jason Ankeny - Allmusic (link)
Folk Music & Beyond: Way Out West--Songs of Mary McCaslin - KALW (link)
Just Another Diamond Day - Wikipedia (link)
“Vashti Bunyan’s ‘Day’ Has Come Again” - Washington Post (link)
Interview with Vashti Bunyan - The Guardian (link)
Vashti Bunyan interview - BBC (link)
Addendum: Mary McCaslin passed in October 2022.
“Mary McCaslin, 75, Folk Singer Who Lamented the Lost Old West, Dies” - New York Times (link)