New Artists, Old Songs Week Vol. 4:
Covers from The American Popular Songbook And Other Standards
26 year old Frank Fairfield plays old mountain bluegrass and country blues standards solo on banjo, guitar and fiddle; he’s been compared to Mississippi John Hurt, and played sessions with the Carolina Chocolate Drops. Robin Peckinold of the Fleet Foxes, who has hosted Frank as a sideman, calls him a man “born out of time,” and sure enough, his recent Daytrotter session, his late November KEXP performance of Cumberland Gap, and this lovely sepia-toned video of Nine Pound Hammer come across like timeless field recordings:
- Frank Fairfield: Bo Weevil (trad.)
- Frank Fairfield: When The Roses Bloom Again (orig. The Carter Family)
(from a Daytrotter session, 2010)
Mack the Knife isn’t an American song by origin, to be sure; instead, it’s from Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, which debuted in Berlin on the cusp of the last Great Depression. But its introduction to the American canon by both Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin in the mid-to-late fifties has made it a popular choice for coverage in a number of genres, enough to win a Grammy for Ella Fitzgerald, and to cause American Idol supervillain Simon Cowell to call it the best song ever written.
Here, on the B-side of his brand new 7″ Newspress Scare, young Vikesh Kapoor breathes new life into the tune, stripping it down to a backporch fingerpicking croon for a folk audience, with great results. And it’s a great introduction to Kapoor, an up-and-coming folk musician whose ear for traditional lyric structure and performance is so resonant with tradition, and whose day-laborer subjects seem so universal, that I spent almost an hour trying to find the “origin” of several of the original tunes on his MySpace page, most notably the delicious ballads Willy Robbins and Down By The River.
Kapoor has been compared to both Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and rightfully so, but he also reminds me of both Davey Graham and more contemporary folk artists Josh Ritter and Joshua James. Newspress Scare drops February ninth on Good People records, and will come with a Midwestern and East Coast tour; Bostonians in our reading audience should plan to catch Vikesh Kapoor at Democracy Center on the 11th for his hometown record release show.
- Vikesh Kapoor: Mack the Knife (orig. Brecht/Weill)
(from Newspress Scare 7″, 2010)
If “non-repetitive pop” musician and trained ethnomusicologist Scott Alexander’s newest set of songs sound unpolished, it’s because after a sophomore effort with full production, he decided to release his follow-up with a more authentic, cheaper sound. The resulting money-themed 8-song album Scott Alexander Makes 7 or 8 Dollars includes a touch of guitar jangle, slippery one-take production, an interestingly experimental use of banjitar and other instruments, sweet silly lyrics, and a shaky bellow not unlike that of Jonathan Richman, with a hint of Nick Cave’s low, ragged vocal style.
But the cacophony works well, especially on the barebones acoustic Cure-esque Let’s Go Shopping, the fragile female-sung popfolk Penny Gumball, and this strange and ultimately broken-beauty cover. Sounds like he’d be worth catching live, too, and not just because Alexander makes a habit of baking fresh cookies for his audiences, not to mention giving them out free on the streets of his native Brooklyn. And though his songs are arguably anti-folk popsongs through and through, frankly, I had nowhere else to put this Neil Diamond cover this week.
- Scott Alexander: Forever in Blue Jeans (orig. Neil Diamond)
(from Scott Alexander Makes 7 or 8 Dollars, 2010)
Finally, though we already wrote about local indie pubfolkers The Points North when their label Grinding Tapes released their excellent cover of Auld Lang Syne just in time for New Years, their newest free release - a great, fluid, and mystical lo-fi indiefolk breakdown of Dylan’s Girl from the North Country, which comes via popular blog Ryan’s Smashing Life - only reminds us that this is a band to watch closely. The tension is palpable, the arrangement exquisite, and the accordions, drums, guitar and voice combine to create a sense of distance and longing that utterly transforms the song. Nice work, guys; can’t wait for more.
- The Points North: Girl From The North Country (orig. Bob Dylan)
(web release, 2010; more The Points North here)
Thanks for joining us here at Cover Lay Down for our New Artists, Old Songs Week, folks. We’ll return Wednesday with more featured artists, songs, and songbooks from the best of the folkworld.
In the meanwhile, as always, please remember that our goal here at CLD is not just to fill up your iPod, but to connect artists to fans, and vice versa, that music might continue to flow unabated and well-supported. If you like what you hear, please do the performers we feature the honor of following up on links and purchase opportunities.
Posted by boyhowdy at 4:04 pm | 1 comment
Labels: New Artists Old Songs


I rediscovered indie popsters 
Indiepop artist 
Like
Berklee grad
New Americana artists
I’ve been sitting on this John D. Loudermilk cover, which came to fruition on the soundtrack to the 2009 film Beautiful Kate, since before
Finally: I made a big deal of saying that Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah wasn’t really Leonard Cohen’s anymore, and implied that it was terribly, problematically overcovered, way back when 
I found out about
I wish I could remember how I heard about Acoustic Americana fiddler and guitarist
Backwater-born Australian singer-songwriter
Ghana-born, Ontario-based “Urban Folk” artist 
I finally managed to catch the 
The coverblogger code doesn’t usually consider a remade song a cover if it’s the same artist performing it - else we’d have to count pretty much every demo as an original, and every live performance an incident worthy of note. Wikipedia, however, seems to beg otherwise. And so just this once, I’m going to give honorable mention to the newest from
Looking past the horizon, I note that 
It is much rarer to find a band that does not use the term “folk”, yet comes across as obviously within the tradition. Such is 

Across the world, musicians and artists from
But in the end, it does not matter how we give. It matters that we give. And that we commit our life to giving, and to the memory of the fallen, if we are able. 
I was lucky enough to see Josh Ritter at the Green River Festival way back in 2003, before he graduated to the festival mainstage and beyond; I even plopped down next to him on the lawn to check out Redbird, with Erin McKeown alongside us both, once his set was finished. Ritter is a few years younger than I am, but he exploded onto the scene young, thanks in part to some attention from Glen Hansard, and a knack for backstory-rich songsmithing which resonated with audiences here and abroad; trivia buffs may also note that Ritter was recently married to
I first heard of Aussie singer-songwriter
Ohio-based singer-songwriter
I wrote about mid-western alt-folk singer 
Finally, turning back the clock a bit, my archives reveal a few old tracks from pre-revival folkie and “Singing Christian”