Customer Reviews

Garden of Joy: Jim Kweskin's America

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For Garden of Joy, Kweskin fleshed out his simple jugband sound with stellar jazz/folk violinist Richard Greene and Bill Keith (later of Neil Young's Stray Gators). The result swings to high heaven and is reminiscent of Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks' "Last Train to Hicksville (Home of Happy Feet)" a few years later. Easily his most sophisticated and jazzy album. I bought my cd version for $50 from Japan...and it was worth that price. Play it for your unititated friends...the sheer goofy joy of this music will force a smile on any face!

Stumbling across this set was magical for a number of reasons. Every few months, I would check the internet music sites for a reissue of Kweskin's "America" and it never showed up until... Likewise, for years, I had been trying to remember where I first heard "Minglewood (Blues)" and "If You're a Viper". Ka-Ching! So many wishes granted in one package. Two sides of one of the most estoteric musicians of the sixties and both wonderful. Someone make a movie on the life of Gus Cannon and maybe we'll have a brief rebirth of jug band music up in here.

I'm referring to Jim Kweskin's America, which I had feared I would not hear again for many a year. My old lp and tapes are lost, and this is the first reissue I've seen. What deep healing music!

It's an odd repackaging. The old Jim Kweskin before the reborn man, quite a contrast to say the least. The old Jim sings on Garden of JOy, the new man on America.

I don't believe America is for the casual listener, unless he's ready for quite a deep transformation. "Are they all 'in the Spirit'?" my new wife asked me when I recently played it for the two of us. Afterwards she announced herself totally healed of a deep malaise she'd been suffering. I heard it anew myself. It always sounds different to me. Sometimes my thoughts will come crowding in and the "old-timey" music seems suddently far away, and I feel guilty. But I relax and open up again and it's as powerful as ever. It's the saddest, most joyful, far-ranging, profoundest music of America ever sung. Unbelievable that it hasn't reached a larger audience -- but then, maybe it has and people still don't know how to talk about it.

As a kid, a promo LP of Jim Kweskin's America fell upon me. It was not the accustomed, but it gradually struck a deep chord. Many of the songs as performed by Kweskin, Muldaur, Lyman and company have stayed in my mind through the decades even though I haven't heard them in ages (haven't had a working record player to play that LP). I just discovered the reissue and look forward to hearing them other than in the mind's ear. The tone of the America album is peculiar. There is a tongue-in-cheek quality to a number of the performances, yet it's clear that they love the music, too. I would recommend tracks but fully seven of ten make my first cut. This is fine and interesting music, much of it from America's interwar years (that is, WWI and WWII).

The two disks in this set are quite distinct. The first is vintage Jim Kweskin jug band music, but it is only 33 minutes long. Stingy. The second consists of 10 mostly well-known mostly sentimental songs sung soggily.

My rating is based on four stars for the first disk and zero stars for the second. I find it hard to relate the two glowing views posted above to the album that I heard.

There is something of a joke on the folk rock circuit that Bob Dylan is on a never-ending tour. (Probably fairly close to the truth these days.) Apparently, in my reviews of the folk figures of the 1960s, I too am on never-ending tour. So be it. Today I go back to the now familiar question of why various male folk artists didn't rise to Dylan's iconic status. Except here on the subject of this review, Jim Kweskin of Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band fame (that also included two performers, ex-marrieds Geoff and Maria Muldaur, that I have spilled plenty of ink on in this space as well), I will not belabor the point for he simply made a choice to stay with his day job.

Except now some forty plus years later one Jim Kweskin has been making something of a revival in the Boston area,sometimes along with the afore-mentioned Geoff Muldaur. I recently attended a performance by the pair at a locally famous folk club (aka coffee house, for the nostalgically-inclined). Do these guys still have it? Oh, yes. Jim is still finger-picking with the best of them. Geoff (off a recent CD done with the Texas Sheiks) still is in good voice. Plus, a big plus, they are working the dust off the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music in their sets. Wow! Thus, I felt duty-bound to pick up the two CD set under review.

The set includes one old Jug Band album, including the classic Clifford Hayes jug number, "Garden Of Joy", a nice monologue by the late Jug Band member (and jug aficionado) Fritz Richmond, and Maria on Lead Belly's "When I Was A Cowboy." This, my friends, is history. The second CD is a little later after the Jug Band members went their separate ways. Here we have covers of Mance Lipscomb's classic "Sugar Babe", The Memphis Jug Band's "Stealin'", and Merle Travis' "Dark As A Dungeon" to feast on. The question still remains open though, one that I have posed before-Jim, Geoff and Maria are still performing, and performing well in their respective venues. Therefore...well, you know the question, right?

I was wanderin' around a store, looking at books, picking up one and another and looking at it, then puttin' it down, then doin' the same with DVDs, then went to the CD section to look here and there at and for this and that. Saw lots I wanted. Then thought to check, yet again, for Kweskin Jug Band -- and this was there! Guess what I did -- go ahead, guess. OK, I'll tell ya: I jumped for joy!

I picked up the vinyl of "Garden of Joy" when it was released in circa August, 1967 (even though I'm still not tall enough to be over 18, so couldn't possibly have done that). Gad! it was like reading a favorite nosepaper headline to see it again. I did what's called "scarfed" it. Strangely, or not, I had never heard "America," though a friend of, of years, of years ago, had it. Strangely (more likely), I've still not heard it: that's how good "Garden of Joy" is. Fun. Aw-reet! If you'se a viper you might even remember it. If not, then you'll dig "Kaloobafack" (also). That's Fritz doin' the talkin'.

Why are you wastin' time reading this!? Buy it, slip it in, an' try to not dance -- but don't step on the tumatuhs!