NEW FOLK RECORDS

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30481, 1 July 1964, Page 7

NEW FOLK RECORDS

There has been some extravagant comment about Joan Baez, but she is a talented young performer with a fine soprano voice, as pure as a reed in the breeze, and she sings with care for the meaning and contours of songs, and a fine sense of the dramatic (as opposed to the melodramatic). Joan Baez, Vol. 2, is her third and best L.P. to appear here. The ' programme includes traditional songs like “The Waggoner’s Lad” (which she sings beautifully, a capella), “The Trees They Do Grow High,” “The Great Silkie of Stile Skerry,” and “Barbara Allen,” as well as equally unbreakable songs of more recent vintage like “Flora Lane” (which Miss Baez calls “The Lily of the West”) and “The Banks of the Ohio.” If there is a flaw in her performance, it is that her close attention to details “freezes” these songs—pushes them back into the past so that they appear rather like relics, delicately preserved in aspic, than living, growing songs. But there are some who would consider this a virtue. Otherwise it is a splendid record, although “Old Dog Blue” is rather too sentimental and Tedesco’s “Plaisir d’Annour” is out of character with the rest of the programme.

Since Miss Baez’s first flush of popularity a few years ago a generation of young female folk-singers in America has paid her the ultimate accolade—imitation. So Lynn Gold, whose first L.P. has recently been issued

here—Lynn Gold, Warner Bros. WB 1495—has had the misfortune to have been treated by several reviewers as a sort of junior Joan Baez. She really deserved a better fate. Her voice is small and clear (and probably sweet, but the recording puts a strident edge on both her voice and guitar). “Bonny Boy,” which Miss Baez sings as “The Trees They Do Grow High," and Woody Guthrie’s “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” are two of the best items in a rewarding programme. Collectors, by the way, will be surprised to learn that “Bonny Boy” (a ballad of Scots origin that is several centuries old) and several other traditional

songs were composed by Miss Gold and Milton Okun, the musical director. This might have been easier to accept if Mr Okun had noticed that her guitar was out of tune.

The Bitter and the Sweet (CBS BP 473050) is a new album by the perennial folksinger, Pete Seeger, recorded in person at the Bitter End, a night club in New York. The programme Ts less eclectic than usual with Seeger, but includes contemporary songs and some of Seeger’s own compositions as well as traditional items like “Bartiara Allen.” The latter is brighter, perhaps more likeable, than Miss Baez’s version. Other worthwhile items are Seeger’s own, strikingly beautiful “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and the old English song, “The Ram of Derby.” Bluegrass is a branch of folk-music from Kentucky which is little known in this country. A combination of “hill-billy” and white blues, it has become quite popular in America in recent years. Two of its foremost practitioners, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, can be heard in concert on Flatt and Scruggs at Carnegie Hall (CBS BP 473038), with their small band of guitars, bass and fiddle. There is an admirable lack of pretension about the proceedings, and a rollicking beat Scruggs is a phenomenal banjo player, and, like Miss Baez, has received an ultimate accolade—a style of banjo “picking” has been named after him.