Death’s Little Black Train

riverlark on June 30, 2024

Death’s Little Black Train – Roman Barten-Sherman

Roman turned twenty making this record of hundred-year-old material. The sources combine Deep-Blues 78s with material mined from the collection of Arizona State Folklorist Jim Griffith. Roman’s in college now, studying Ethnomusicology and playing Jelly Roll Morton pieces on the piano. Roman is a ‘restringing’ lefty player, very unusual to start with, but even perceiving the music backwards, is a flat virtuoso player on whatever chosen instrument.

The Last Trip Home

riverlark on May 14, 2024

The Last Trip Home – Wendy Grossman’s New Album

The Last Trip Home – Wendy Grossman: Wendy, now in her seventies no, gave the Folk World a shot back in the seventies and eighties but has relied on her writing skills since then for her daily bread. She writes mainly about The Computer Wars and publishes a magazine called The Skeptic. She never stopped playing though. On this CD, released June 29, 2024, her first project in forty years, she mixes archaic ballad material with more contemporary stuff, backing herself forcefully on guitar, Autoharp and a couple of different squeezeboxes.

Gary Davis Style

riverlark on April 26, 2024

Gary Davis Style -Various Artists:

A tribute to the finest exemplar of Piedmont Style playing, Rev. Davis’s playing mimicked a rollicking barroom piano, and at times the whole band! It was said of him that he never let a string be still. Davis was a dedicated teacher of this music for seventy years; the players on this CD are his students and ‘grand-students’. Some of them are famous, like Dave van Ronk or Peter Paul and Mary. Others, like Rolly Brown and Ellen Britten are ‘lifers’, musicians who play, teach and achieve some regional notoriety but otherwise work in relative obscurity. About half the musicians on this recording are still kicking. We’re all teaching as fast as we can.