Folk /
Grimwood
2025 stock "Currently out of print on CD, Michael Yonkers's Grimwood finally receives its long-overdue vinyl re-release (with download code included). Yonkers's first four LPs were released simultaneously in 1973, but it is Grimwood, his first, that regular commands the biggest bucks on the collector-scum market. Recorded in 1969, less than a couple years after the material eventually released as Microminiature Love, Grimwood sounds like it emanates from another universe entirely. Straightforwar…
World Behind Curtains
2012 release ** “While guitarist Yair Yona was first lured into the world of acoustic fingerpicking by a Bert Jansch CD that he found in a London shop, the Takoma school is his foundation. Like Steffen Basho-Junghans, he’s embraced this fundamentally American style on its own terms, learned its language inside out, and still made music that’s true to an upbringing on the far side of the Greenwich Meridian.” Recommended if you like: John Fahey, Robbie Basho, Leo Kottke, American Primitive Guitar,…
Los Jaivas (El Volantín)
First official vinyl reissue of the now classic 1971 album. Produced by Transamericas in collaboration with the band from original master tapes, in a fully analog process at recording studios in María Pinto (Chile), London and Haarlem (Holland). Los Jaivas (“El Volantín”) is the first LP by Chilean rock band Los Jaivas, one of South America's biggest names in the fusion of folk roots and psychedelia during the 1970s. Los Jaivas were born in the city of Viña del Mar, with their five members deter…
Ghost Ship
Four years after his rock juggernaut Puritan, Chris Brokaw delivers Ghost Ship, a landscape meditation (at sea) for vocals and electric guitars.
I set out to make an 8 song statement like 'Desert Shore' or 'Raw Power', but it became a 9 song...something else. I've described it to friends as 'Twin Peaks-ish' but that feels only part right. The songs were written on a 60's Teisco Del Rey electric guitar, set up by the Belgian luthier Flip Scipio with heavy gauge flat wound strings and an .80 gaug…
The Sound Of Sagar Veena
Tip! The Sahaja Veena is a stunning stringed instrument with a unique and beautiful design reminiscent of the Vichitra Veena and Chitra Veena. With a wider range than the traditional Indian veena and a deep, warm sound, the instrument can produce compelling melodies and delicate ornamentation, often evoking deep emotions, and is therefore also known as the “Sagar” (‘Sagar’ meaning “sea” in Hindi). “(Sagar means ”ocean" in Hindi).
Noor Zehra Kazim is the world's only Sagar Vina player. Her father…
Powwow Songs — Music Of The Plains Indians
Produced and annotated by Charlotte Heth, a member of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma and a noted ethnomusicologist.
This disc offers ceremonial and social music of Indians from the Great Plains. Although the styles of singing and drumming vary greatly in different regions and among different tribes, the forms of music are similar, enabling musicians from many tribes to perform together. Most of the music here is intertribal singing of what are now the Southern Plains Indians, primarily from Ok…
The Early Minstrel Show
The racist stereotyping of blacks in the minstrel shows that enjoyed such enormous popularity during the latter half of the nineteenth century might be considered reason enough not to resurrect this material, but anything with so much cultural impact deserves serious study. We need to listen to this material in its historical perspective and understand that the study of it is not a validation of its racist sentiments. This recording attempts to recreate the music of a typical minstrel show of th…
Songs And Dances Of The Eastern Indians From Medicine Spring & Allegany (Cherokee, Seneca)
Produced and annotated by Charlotte Heth, a member of the Cherokee nation of Oklahoma and a noted ethnomusicologist.
This disc offers ritual, ceremonial, and social music of Indians of the eastern United States. It demonstrates remarkable similarities of style in the music of Indians from two distinct regions.
Tracks 1-3 comprise songs and dances from the Cherokee and Creek Indians and probably the now-extinct Natchez as well, who were forcibly removed from their homelands in the southeastern …
The Yankee Brass Band (Music From Mid-Nineteenth Century America)
Brass bands flourished in mid-nineteenth century America and were an integral and indispensable part of the social, cultural, and political life of the land. Regimental bands assumed tremendous importance during the Civil War whilst civic bands supplied the bulk of the entertainment in many a small town in the post-bellum years. It was during this period that the march as a genre experienced its greatest musical flowering with the advent of Sousa and his contemporaries. The schottisches, waltzes…
Songs of Love, Luck, Animals, & Magic
In aboriginal times the coastal Indians of Northern California shared a tremendous wealth of food, clothing, and material goods. From Trinidad, California, to the Oregon border, the forests almost touch the Pacific Ocean, which gave the people the bounty of both the woodlands and the sea. The Tolowa and the Yurok, along with their neighbors the Hupa and the Karok, are the southernmost representatives of the elaborate Northwest Coast Indian culture area. This disc contains a variety of love songs…
Come and Trip It-Instrumental Dance Music: 1780s to 1920s
This recording demonstrates some of the major developments in American social dancing and its music from after the Revolution up to the beginning of electrical recording in the mid-1920s. Dances such as the waltz, polka, tango, quadrille, charleston, cakewalk and turkey-trot are still familiar today, their names holding a permanent place in popular culture. The music they were danced to, however, is often forgotten.
This collection of hits, fads and phenomenons from the history of social dancin…
Seth McCoy, Sherrill Milnes, James Richman, Jon Spong, American Fife Ensemble, The Continental Harmony Singers, The Liberty Tree Wind Players
Music Of The American Revolution: The Birth Of LibertyAn evergreen for Fourth of July festivities, this reissue of music from the American Revolution restores to the catalog a classic of the original Recorded Anthology of American Music. It is a scholarly and well-programmed musical recreation of a defining moment in the nation's history, mixing propaganda songs, psalmody, fife-and-drum music, and wind band music, the four types of music most prevalent and popular at the time.
Highlights include baritone Sherrill Milnes's renditions of three propa…
Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? (American Song During The Great Depression)
American society was much less homogeneous during the Great Depression (1929 - 1941) than it became after World War II. There were still quite sharply defined classes, divided along economic, geographic, and ethnic lines. Each group was affected by the Depression, but in different ways and to different degrees. Each had its own tradition of popular song, and this carefully compiled sampling of recordings from the thirties gives a vivid picture of how each fared and how it reacted to the almost u…
The Hand That Holds The Bread
Songs of Progress and Protest in the Gilded Age 1865-1893
The Hand That Holds The Bread provides a window onto a particularly turbulent time (1865-1893) in this nation's history-a period of great economic disparity, surging immigration, and rampant government corruption. The accompanying 40-page booklet includes an essay situating the songs in their historical context, complete lyrics and a selected bibliography and discography.
The Golden Age Of The American March
The great age of the American march can be bounded by the years 1876 and 1926. This record gives a representative sampling of the American march during those halcyon years with a deliberate emphasis on some of the period's lesser-known and hard-to-find gems. While Sousa's preeminence is beyond dispute, many of his contemporaries wrote memorable marches, and that is the justification for this disc and its title. In addition, all the marches in this collection enjoyed great popularity and thus ind…
Where Home Is: Life In Nineteenth-Century Cincinnati/Crossroads Of The East And West
Life in 19th-Century Cincinnati
The Harmoneion Singers; John Miner, conductor; Peter Basquin, piano and harmonium; Clifford Jackson, baritone; John Aler, tenor
Where Home Is is an anthology of traditional songs of family and religious life coupled with contrasting songs by abolitionists, frontiersmen, and blackfaced minstrels. The explosive mixture of peoples and cultures found in nineteenth-century Cincinnati resulted in the widely disparate musical views represented here by wholesome choral …
Songs Of Earth, Water, Fire And Sky (Music Of The American Indian)
Music of the San Juan Pueblo, Seneca, Northern Arapaho, Northern Plains, Creek, Yurok, Navajo, Cherokee, and Southern Plains Indians
The importance of American Indian music is found not in its impact on modern scholarship and composition but in the traditions and values it expresses to and for the Indian people. This oral tradition has survived solely because the music was too important to be allowed to die. The emphasis in this recording is on musical value: the music of the first Americans ca…
Oh My Little Darling: Folk Song Types
This superb anthology of old ballads and other folk-song types comprises pre-war commercial and field recordings made in the rural Southeast, the part of the United States that most closely met the textbook definition of a "folk culture," in which culture was relatively homogeneous and customs were shared across class and ethnic lines. For this reason, this album focuses on the rural Southeast as a rich source of American folk life, ranging roughly from Virginia and Kentucky south to Alabama and…
I'm On My Journey Home: Vocal Styles And Resources In Folk Music
This album is a loosely structured survey of different types of vocal styles and resources found in rural Anglo-American lower- and middle-class communities. Some of the modes of performance, such as hollering and solo ballad singing, have almost died out; others, such as Sacred Harp singing, formal duet singing, and square-dance calling, continue to flourish. The album is divided into three major sections: a survey of nonstandard vocal effects that shows how much music infuses the everyday comm…
Kathleen Battle, Raymond Murcell, Rose Taylor, The Harmoneion Singers, Neely Bruce, Lawrence Skrobacs
Angels' Visits (And Other Vocal Gems Of Victorian America)This recording is a collection of American songs and hymns published mostly during the 1860s and 1870s that deal generally with angels, heaven, and death. Considering the rather morbid subject matter of these songs, they are surprisingly pleasant and refreshing. Death and its associated aspects were a major topic in fiction, poetry, art, and music during much of the nineteenth century in Victorian America. Consequently, the songwriters aimed at a broad popular audience because the subjects were …