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It’s been 25 years since the world was introduced to Rufus Wainwright with his debut self-titled album, which featured songs like “April Fools,” “In My Arms” and many more. To celebrate, the singer-songwriter sat down with Billboard‘s Tetris Kelly to reflect on his career. Explore Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, […]
Country music in 2023 means the stadium-filling sound of Luke Combs, the lonesome midtempos of Morgan Wallen and the vulnerable twang of Lainey Wilson.
But country also means stories. When non-country acts, such as Lionel Richie or John Legend, reference the genre on TV’s music competitions, they frequently cite the life narratives that are prominent in country as the primary element that separates it from other formats. That foundational storytelling thread is a direct result of country’s overlapping folk roots, still evident in the sound of at least two current singles: Jordan Davis‘ “Next Thing You Know,” at No. 15 on Country Airplay, and Ashley McBryde‘s “Light on in the Kitchen,” No. 37.
“They’re so reflective,” says singer-songwriter Lori McKenna. “They give you space to find yourself in them.”
McKenna, whose composition “Humble and Kind” likewise belongs to both folk and country, is one of the talents performing at the 35th annual MerleFest, a three-day event set for April 28-30 in Wilkesboro, N.C., with historic overtones. March 3 marked 100 years since the birth of the festival’s co-founder, singer-guitarist Doc Watson, who was one of the key figures in the folk boom of the 1960s.
The interplay between folk and country is a subtle part of both MerleFest — which features Maren Morris and Tanya Tucker among its multigenre participants -— and a tribute album, I Am a Pilgrim: Doc Watson at 100, arriving April 28 on FLi Records/Budde Music. Pilgrim enlists Dolly Parton, Rosanne Cash and Steve Earle, artists who have all mixed folk and country in some manner during their careers.
“They’re sisters of one another, or family members,” McKenna says of the genres. “It’s like Maren’s song ‘Good Friends,’ and Kelsea Ballerini has a new song now, ‘If You Go Down (I’m Going Down Too).’ Those sound like John Prine songs to me, just great songs that anybody can sing along to and anybody can [appreciate] the normalness, the ordinariness, in this well-crafted song.”
Watson, who resisted attempts to lure him into mainstream country, is likely unknown to most country fans, though his core talents and persona are a good road map for the elements of folk that have historically informed the genre. He played guitar with a fluid simplicity, sang with a natural — almost spoken — tone and viewed his public personality with extraordinary humility. He was also not a traditionalist.
Watson defined his repertoire as “Appalachian-plus,” a phrase that pinpointed its origins but left it room to grow.
“His music was mountain music, Appalachian Mountain region from Deep Gap, North Carolina,” says B Townes, the now retired co-founder of MerleFest, named after Watson’s son when it was established as a fundraiser for the Wilkes Community College Foundation. “The primary influences there, of course, were the fiddle, square dances and that type of thing.”
But the “plus” was quite expansive. It meant “anything I want to add to it,” Townes recalls Watson saying.
The 2023 MerleFest lineup reflects that wide-ranging ideal, boasting Americana acts Jim Lauderdale and Nickel Creek, bluegrass figures Jerry Douglas and Sam Bush, guitar virtuoso Tommy Emmanuel, banjoists Alison Brown and Don Flemons, and country artists Morris and Tucker.
Country is equally wide-ranging, though there’s almost always one or more songs or artists keeping the folk flame lit. Songwriter Bob McDill, named alongside Tucker on April 3 as a 2023 Country Music Hall of Fame inductee, originally moved to Nashville to become a folk artist. That interest influenced the sound of country in the 1980s as he contributed such folk-tinged stories as Don Williams‘ “Good Ole Boys Like Me” and Alabama‘s “Song of the South.”
Miranda Lambert‘s “The House That Built Me” and Kathy Mattea‘s “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses” followed in the same tradition, while folk played a heavy role in shaping the music of Emmylou Harris, John Denver, The Carter Family, Mary Chapin Carpenter, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Suzy Bogguss, Bobby Bare and Tom T. Hall, whose elaborate tales earned him the nickname “The Storyteller.”
Davis’ “Next Thing You Know,” in fact, unfolds much like one of Hall’s compositions.
“There’s definitely some Tom T. Hall in there,” Davis allows. “Not that I’m anywhere near Tom T. Hall, but I can see the comparison.”
One of the features common to both Davis’ and Hall’s work is a focus on blue-collar people. “Next Thing You Know” recounts a successful relationship with working-class familiarity. Hall invariably wrote about the same kinds of individuals: bartenders, dry cleaners, parents, soldiers and Sunday school teachers.
“Somebody said that folk music is just songs about folks,” McKenna notes. “It’s just story songs. It’s people’s lives. And that’s what I love most about songs is just these ordinary lives that we get to write about.”
Folk music doesn’t require its artists to become social activists, but that embrace of the middle and lower class makes the music and politics compatible. Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Earle, Prine and Joan Baez are all examples of folky acts who used their music to take a stance on specific issues or defend embattled populations.
That spirit was evident when two Tennessee state legislators -— Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, ousted from the statehouse floor for protesting inaction on guns — were reinstated April 11 in Downtown Nashville. Outside the capitol, Harris, Bush and Margo Price led a contingent of singers in a cover of Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released.” Subsequently, Old Crow Medicine Show issued a song, “Louder Than Guns,” on April 27 that echoes the fight for public safety.
The artists were all doing what folk singers have done historically: stand up for the underdog. Country singers have done that, too, be it Johnny Cash supporting anti-war demonstrators in “What Is Truth” or Brad Paisley flying to Ukraine to sing for an embattled nation.
“It’s about the people and their problems,” says John Lomax III, a music entrepreneur-manager-journalist who, deep in his career, has begun performing historic, rough-edged folk songs. “Pete Seeger, he made his whole career out of that sort of thing. And I guess, to a lesser extent, Woody and Dylan, they kind of blazed a trail, so to speak, that others follow.”
One of folk’s original missions was to pass music and information from generation to generation, and the Lomax family embodies that character. Lomax is a third-generation descendent of a prominent folk family. His father, John Lomax Jr., managed Lightnin’ Hopkins and founded the Houston Folklore Society, which provided a forum for the likes of Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Lucinda Williams, all of whom would see some of their folk/Americana works covered as country hits.
Lomax III’s grandfather, John A. Lomax, and uncle, Alan Lomax, discovered Black folk/blues singer Lead Belly and worked with the Library of Congress. The senior Lomax collected Western songs, publishing his first book of folk lyrics, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, in 1910.
“It originated with him as he lay in bed at night and heard the cowboys singing to soothe the cattle,” Lomax III notes. “When he was about 8 or 9 years old — 1875 or 1876, somewhere along in there — he started writing the words down because the Chisholm Trail practically ran through the back yard.”
The trail from those early folk songs continues to modern folk and country, even if the roots are a little less obvious. That idea of heritage is key to both Davis’ “Next Thing You Know” and McBryde’s “Light on in the Kitchen,” as each of them embraces the passing of a torch to the next generation.
“I thought of my daughter,” “Kitchen” co-writer Jessi Alexander says. “If you could give your daughter an instruction manual of any kind, what would you want to say in a song?”
Even now that country is a stadium-level attraction, folk developments in the genre are increasingly essential, if for no other reason than to remind the artists and decision-makers of its primary base.
“This is what country music is supposed to be about,” Lomax III says. “Telling about the lives of normal people.”
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Kelly Clarkson kicked off the Wednesday (April 5) episode of her talk show with a lovely, lilting cover of Joni Mitchell‘s “A Case of You.”
Accompanied by a lone Appalachian dulcimer, much like the original recording, the American Idol winner rolled out the story Mitchell first told on her landmark 1971 album Blue, singing, “Just before our love got lost you said/ ‘I am as constant as a northern star’/ And I said, ‘Constantly in the darkness/ Where’s that at?/ If you want me I’ll be in the bar’/ On the back of a cartoon coaster/ In the blue TV screen light/ I drew a map of Canada/ Oh, Canada/ With your face sketched on it twice.”
The ballad was originally released as the B-side to Blue‘s sophomore single “California,” which failed to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 following the modest success of lead single “Carey.” Mitchell later re-recorded “A Case of You” for her 1974 live album Miles of Aisles and another version of the song also reappeared on her 2000 orchestral full-length Both Sides Now.
Other tracks Clarkson has selected for a Kellyoke spin as of late include Lenny Kravitz’s cover of “American Woman,” GAYLE’s Grammy-nominated breakout “abcdefu” — complete with tweaked lyrics to allude to her divorce from Brandon Blackstock — and Janet Jackson’s “When I Think of You.”
Meanwhile, the talk show host is also prepping the long-awaited release of Chemistry, her first new album of original, non-holiday music since 2017’s Meaning of Life. The studio set’s lead single “Mine” is set to arrive April 14 via Atlantic Records.
Watch Clarkson pay homage to Mitchell with her take on “A Case of You” below.
The tribute concert for the Gershwin Prize, designated each year by the Library of Congress to fete an artist’s lifetime contribution to popular music, is by its very nature a love fest. The fact that this year’s event ratcheted up the heartstrings even more than usual is a testament to its 2023 honoree, Joni Mitchell.
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The show, which took place earlier this month in Washington, D.C., and airs Friday (March 31) on PBS, brought out a cavalcade of well-wishers, musical talent and friends. That included Brandi Carlile (who, besides performing, acted as an intermittent MC), James Taylor, Annie Lennox, Cyndi Lauper, Marcus Mumford, Graham Nash, Angélique Kidjo, Ledisi, Diana Krall and Herbie Hancock.
Mitchell, 79, was an obvious choice for this year’s Gershwin. She’s received a host of recent accolades since she made a remarkable recovery after suffering a brain aneurysm in 2015 that left her hospitalized. She received the Kennedy Center Honor in 2021, was celebrated as MusiCares’ 2022 Person of the Year and received an honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music the same year.
Seated front and center in DAR Constitution Hall, which added rows of chairs in front of the stage to accommodate a full house of invitation-only fans and Capitol Hill luminaries, Mitchell swayed and smiled throughout the night, clearly relishing the celebration.
Carlile, who performed her professed favorite Mitchell song, the title track from her 2007 album Shine, sprinkled in stories of spending time with Mitchell during her convalescence and Mitchell’s triumphant return to the Newport Folk Festival last year, where she performed 13 songs.
“The songs of Joni Mitchell, like the woman, speak to innocence and experience, success and failure, overcoming odds, falling short,” Carlile told the crowd. “[Last summer] she showed the world that it was not done with Joni Mitchell, and she showed the world that she was not done with us. All of us on stage here tonight just couldn’t let anything pass without recognition of Joni’s courage, her determination, her spirit, will and grit.”
The performances were strong across the board, all delivered with reverence on a stage that was adorned with images of some of Mitchell’s paintings. And the band comprised musicians who are longtime collaborators and friends of Mitchell, including music director Greg Phillinganes.
Mumford got things started with “Carey,” from Mitchell’s cherished 1971 album Blue. Lennox soared with power and passion on the timeless “Both Sides Now.” Kidjo got creative with her time in the spotlight: while performing Mitchell’s Billboard Adult Contemporary No. 1 “Help Me,” she hopped off the stage and delivered a portion of the song directly to Mitchell, who obliged by dancing along in her seat.
Describing her contribution “Big Yellow Taxi,” Ledisi said Mitchell wanted listeners to understand the importance of maintaining the balance of the natural world, “but she did it in an almost subversive way, wrapping the message in a universally easy-to-sing chorus that sneaks up on you and then hits you in the face with the importance of taking action.”
Nash, who shared a long-resonating love affair with Mitchell between 1968-70, recalled meeting her in 1967. “She took me to her room and played me probably over a dozen of the most incredible songs I’ve ever heard in my life,” he said, before launching into “A Case of You,” which was highlighted by photos of the two in their younger years.
Lauper gave a lilting performance of title track to Blue, though she immediately had to do a second take when Ken Ehrlich of Ken Ehrlich Productions made one of a few mid-show appearances to make sure the event would be ready for its primetime debut. (When Ehrlich came out, halted Taylor’s silky, buttery performance of “California” and asked him to start over, Taylor quipped, “Is this the part where you come in?”)
Excitement was palpable leading to the finale, when a beaming Mitchell rose from her seat and took the stage.
“This is such a great honor; it’s so exciting to see all of these musicians I admire preforming my music. And I wanted to express my gratitude by singing a Gershwin song,” she said, before launching into a jaunty rendition of “Summertime,” which she followed up with her own iconic “The Circle Game,” joined by the cast of performers.
Janis Ian had a memorable night at the International Folk Music Awards, which were held at the Westin Kansas City at Crown Center in Kansas City, Mo., on Wednesday (Feb. 1). The veteran artist received a previously announced lifetime achievement award and also won in the top competitive category, artist of the year.
Crooked Tree by Molly Tuttle & Golden Highway won album of the year. The album is nominated for a Grammy for best bluegrass album. Tuttle is also nominated for best new artist. The Grammys will be presented on Sunday Feb. 5.
There was a tie for song of the year between “Bright Star,” written and performed by Anaïs Mitchell, and “B61,” written and performed by Aoife O’Donovan. Mitchell won a Tony and a Grammy for her work on the musical Hadestown.
Jake Blount and Wallis Bird performed in tribute to Ian. Blount performed Ian’s Grammy-winning coming-of-age classic “At Seventeen.” Bird sang “Better Times Will Come.”
Ian, 71, is a two-time Grammy winner. She won the 1975 award for best pop vocal performance, female for “At Seventeen” and the 2012 award for best spoken word album for Society’s Child: My Autobiography. Ian received her 10th Grammy nomination this year for best folk album for The Light at the End of the Line.
Leyla McCalla and Josh White Jr. performed in tribute to Josh White, who received this year’s lifetime achievement award for a legacy (deceased) artist. White died in 1969 at age 55. McCalla performed “I Gave My Love a Cherry (The Riddle Song).” White Jr. sang “One Meatball.”
McCalla also received the People’s Voice Award, which is presented to an individual who “unabashedly embraces social and political commentary in their creative work and public careers.” Past recipients include Jason Mraz (2022), Jackson Browne (2021) and Ani DiFranco (2020).
Oh Boy Records, which was founded in 1981 by John Prine, Al Bunetta and Dan Einstein, all now deceased, received the business/academic award. In tribute to Prine, the Milk Carton Kids performed “That’s the Way the World Goes ’Round,” a song from his 1978 album Bruised Orange. Iris Dement performed “Mexican Home,” a song from his 1973 album Sweet Revenge.
Sara Curruchich performed “Mujer Indígena” at the show, which was held on the opening night of the Folk Alliance International’s 35th annual conference.
The organization, based in Kansas City, Mo., was founded in 1989. Today it has more than 3,000 members — artists, agents, managers, labels, publicists, arts administrators, venues, festivals, and concert series presenters.
Alisa Amador received The Rising Tide Award, which was launched in 2021 to celebrate an artist under 30 who “inspires others by embodying the values and ideals of the folk community through their creative work, community role, and public voice.”
Shambala Festival, a four-day contemporary performing arts festival in Northamptonshire, England, received the Clearwater Award, which is presented to a festival that “prioritizes environmental stewardship and demonstrates public leadership in sustainable event production.”
Here’s a complete list of winners at the 2023 International Folk Music Awards, as well as the recipients of honorary awards:
Album of the year
Anais Mitchell, Anais MitchellWINNER: Crooked Tree, Molly Tuttle & Golden HighwayGet on Board: The Songs of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Taj Mahal and Ry CooderMarchita, Silvana EstradaQueen Of Sheba, Angélique Kidjo & Ibrahim Maalouf
Artist of the year
Aoife O’DonovanJake BlountWINNER: Janis IanLeyla McCallaPrateek Kuhad
Song of the year
“Udhero Na,” written by Arooj Aftab, performed by Arooj Aftab and Anoushka Shankar“Vini Wè,” written and performed by Leyla McCallaWINNER: “Bright Star,” written and performed by Anais Mitchell“How,” written by Marcus Mumford and Brandi Carlile, performed by Marcus Mumford featuring Brandi CarlileWINNER: “B61,” written and performed by Aoife O’Donovan
The Elaine Weissman Lifetime Achievement Awards: Janis Ian (living), Josh White (legacy), Oh Boy Records (business/academic)
The People’s Voice Award: Leyla McCalla
The Rising Tide Award: Alisa Amador
The Clearwater Award: Shambala Festival
The Spirit of Folk Awards: Steve Edge, Amy Reitnouer Jacobs, Marcy Marxer, Adrian Sabogal, Pat Mitchell Worley
The Folk DJ Hall of Fame: Robert Resnik, Marilyn Rea Beyer, John Platt, Harry B. Soria Jr.
When two of the most singular voices in music history first came together 15 years ago, it’s not surprising that alchemized harmonies and pure, uncut vibe came as a result. Upon melding their vocals on the 2007 collaborative album Raising Sand, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss translated traditional Americana into mainstream consciousness by force of personality, expanding on Krauss’ extensive repertoire within the genre and furthering the work in the sound for Plant, whose own predilection for Americana had been a benchmark of popular music since he first lamented, “I can’t quit you baby,” 53 years ago on Led Zeppelin‘s cover of Willie Dixon’s Delta blues scorcher.
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But in a testament to Krauss and Plant’s respective popularity, as well as the delicate yet tantalizing sound they’d created, Raising Sand transcended well beyond fans of folk, bluegrass and blues, becoming a sort of blazing anomoly across popular music at large. The LP hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 (where it spent 72 weeks), secured the pair a headlining spot at Bonnaroo, and earned them the 2009 Grammy for album of the year. “In the old days, we would have called this selling out,” Plant said in his acceptance speech, “but it’s a good way to spend a Sunday.”
Then the project went dark, disappearing in a puff of smoke as quickly as it had arrived, as Krauss returned to her longtime band Union Station and Plant worked in the studio and on the road as a solo act and with his own outfits, Band Of Joy and Sensational Shapeshifters. But just like the many listeners who considered Raising Sand a new classic, Krauss and Planet were aware the project was special, with considerations of a reunion occupying their minds during the long hiatus.
“I really wanted to get back to it. I love it,” Plant, 74, tells Billboard, calling from the United Kingdom, where he can be heard puttering around his house during what is there late afternoon.
“Harmony singing is my favorite thing to do,” Krauss, 51, dialing in from mid-morning Nashville, adds of what she and Plant do so especially well together.
So get back to it they did, with the stars realigning last year year for Raise The Roof, another collection of covers by acts as disparate as Calexico, Allen Toussaint and The Everly Brothers, all rendered in a twangy, incandescent style built around the union of Krauss and Plant’s voices. The album — which, like its predecessor, was produced by T Bone Burnett — debuted at No. 1 on the Top Rock Albums, Americana/Folk Albums and Bluegrass Albums charts, and at No. 7 on the Billboard 200. This past summer, an attendant tour included a main stage show at Glastonbury and a performance in London’s Hyde Park (“Basically we were just passing time until the Eagles came on stage,” Plant says of that opening gig), along with three dozen other dates in the U.S. and Europe.
And now, as a surprise to precisely no one, Raise The Roof has garnered some Grammy nominations — three total, for best country duo/group performance (for “Going Where The Lonely Go”), best American roots song (for “High And Lonesome”) and best Americana album. The nods add to Krauss’ mythology as the second-most-awarded woman in Grammys history (after Beyoncé) with 27 wins and 45 nominations. Meanwhile, Plant has eight wins and 18 nominations, the first of which came in 1969 when Zeppelin was up for best new artist. (They lost to Crosby, Stills and Nash.)
“The very fact that it’s has been recognized that we’ve had a good time,” Plant says of this latest round of nominations, “is more than I could imagine.”
Plant: Hello. Good afternoon.
Krauss : Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!
Plant: Hello Alison! How are ya?
Krauss: Hey, I’m fine! How are you doing?
Plant: Okay, I think we may actually be getting into a place now here on the Welsh borders where it’s starting to get chilly. We had the longest, longest, longest beginning of an autumn, but it’s beautiful. The weather’s good. Things are good. I’m looking forward to going to have a look at this little puppy dog next week, and I’m actually living a normal life, finally.
Krauss: Wow.
Plant: I hate it.
I’m curious about this puppy!
Plant: Well, you know, when I was a kid, my mom was allergic to dog hair and stuff. We never had a fluffy pet or anything like that. So over the last so many years, I’ve always prized these beautiful running dogs. They’re a combination of Greyhound and a terrier.
And the traveling folk, the gypsies and the travelers — you always see them with them; they’re just really beautiful — they’re this kind of dog you see on all those medieval paintings and stuff. There’s always somebody standing behind the blinds with a beautiful animal.
I lost my best dog after 14 years about two or three months ago, and I said I would never have another dog, but life without a dog is difficult for me. But it’s got nothing to do with “Stairway To Heaven,” thank god!
I mean, if you don’t see a connection, there isn’t one.
Plant: No, there isn’t one there. I just had to stop talking about dogs.
Okay, let’s talk about your album then. November 19 marked the year anniversary of the release of Raise The Roof. I’m curious if your relationship to the music changed in any way over the last year, particularly as you’ve been touring it.
Plant: I think that Alison and I became — I mean, we’re partners in every sense, professionally. And we’ve shared every single element and every single part of the creation of the record from the get-go, from the song selections to creating the atmosphere, and we take it into the studio together; we use it when we’re coming up with artwork. I think we’ve just grown a lot tighter and a lot closer, and we share a lot of lighthearted humor, but at the same time I think we’re pretty, professional about how good we want it to be. Would you say so, Alison?
Krauss: I don’t think that there’s a different relationship to it. I mean, you’re always looking for things that speak to you in a truthful way, whether you’re telling someone else’s story, or you’re relaying a message or telling your own story. I don’t think that that’s changed. The fun thing was to pick this up again — like, to have something be so fun and be a total surprise, then get to come back and and get to do it again. To me, when we went back in the studio together, it was like no time had gone by, especially with T Bone. It was a lot of fun. We had some new faces in there, but the energy was very generous, which it always was. So I don’t know if there’s a different relationship to it, just happy to revisit.
Plant: We had no idea how it was going to pan out, and going back together after such a long time was, well — there was a lot riding on it. Were we still able and amenable to exchanging ideas? With material and song choices, a lot runs on how we can perform within these old songs. So yeah, it was interesting to get the ball rolling again and to blow away the cobwebs. But as I said, in that kind of oblique answer, we grew closer, if you like. We were able to take the actual songs and embellish them and develop them for a live show, which made them, I think, quite tantalizing, and there was another energy to them as well.
I saw you guys in Chicago this past June, and it seemed like the vibe onstage was often mellow, and sometimes almost contemplative. What does it feel like to perform these songs live? What mood are you in?
Plant: Well, contemplative, I don’t think so — I think it’s just the nature of the song. You weave in and out of the original form of the music as you heard it, even before you recorded it. The songs have a personality. I just think that we’re very adaptable — we just go into character and we just sing the best that we can within those character settings.
Krauss: I also think this wouldn’t be appealing to us if it wasn’t natural. So I don’t feel like there’s any headspace we have to get into. It just kind of fell into place. It was a natural friendship, and it just translated — we both have a love of history and traditional music, and all the people in the band are the same kind of historians. So it was a natural thing. It didn’t feel like we had to pump ourselves up for it, if that makes sense.
Plant: No, exactly. And I think there’s a kind of melding, a kind of a great coming together on stage, especially with the way the musicians have developed the songs with us. It’s quite a liberation. We’ve been through quite a bit in the last 12 months, with working through the United States and then into Europe. We became real rolling musicians. It was something to behold, because the group personality got more and more, I suppose, charming. And also there was sort of a little bit of a warrior feel, going from country to country to country, through Scandinavia and down into Western Europe and across even into Poland. I do believe we grew more and more into the gig.
Were you able to do things at the end of the tour that weren’t happening in the beginning?
Plant: Sure, yeah. You find a groove that works, and it’s genuine.
How do you maintain the stamina required for such a massive and far-flung tour?
Plant: I think it’s just the will, isn’t it? To want to do it.
Krauss: It helps to be fun!
Plant: Yeah. We do laugh a lot. I mean, it’s not a competitive thing. It’s just such a magnificent and unexpected surprise, to be able to be from such different worlds initially and find that we have our own world. We’ve got our own place.
I read a relatively recent article that described you two as an “odd couple,” and didn’t feel like that description was entirely accurate. How do you feel like you two fit together at this point, after this long collaboration?
Plant: I just think that we’re really, really firm friends. And we confer and listen to each other when we have options. It’s really good, because we don’t tangle. Obviously life off the road is — we’re so far away from each other that these moments of hanging out or telephone conversations, or we’ll be coming back to Nashville in April — all those sort of things is all stuff to look forward to. So we’re never around each other long enough to get tired of anything. It’s just a growing condition, really.
Krauss: Yeah, I mean, it’s a really nice cast of characters in that band, and we enjoy them, and it’s a pleasure. We were happy to get to do it and happy to be going back. It’s something we talked about putting back together for years. It was a really nice idea, and sometimes those things are just a nice idea, but this one [did some back together]. I just feel really grateful. It was a surprise, from start to finish.
Why was last year the right time to come back to the project, after releasing your first album together in 2007?
Plant: I’m not in control of my own time, I just find the momentum in a project and go with it. There’s only a particular lifespan from record to record. In the old days, that was how it worked — if you’re really buying into this as a life, which we are — then as it used to be that there was a cycle of events where you would write or create a record, and you’d follow it through with the usual rigmarole of touring and stuff like that. It always used to be something like a three-and-a-half or four-year thing, from start to finish.
So when we left Raising Sand and said a tearful farewell, we went on to do other projects. And if I’d finish something and I was really looking forward to doing something fresh, maybe Alison was in the middle of one of her projects, and that’s how it was. It was no negotiation except for with the calendar and with time. I also had been on the road a lot with with my friends Sensational Spaceshifters, and this [project with Alison] was just promising to be — offering to be — a totally different experience, or a different feel. I really wanted to get back to it. I love it.
And every night when we sing, two or three of the songs where Alison takes the lead, I always find it such an adventure to join and contribute to her personality as a lead singer. I love that. I didn’t have that for several years. So once the opportunity arose, and we were both free and ready — and free to fail actually, I think would be the term — it’s quite tenuous really to go back in after such a long time, but it worked. These are different days as far as the music biz is concerned, but they’re not different days for us. We’ve got it down, and we know what we’re doing, and we like it.
Krauss: Harmony singing is my favorite thing to do. And he is a…
Plant: Steady. Be careful.
Krauss: [laughs] He always changes in those tunes, night to night, and it keeps me on my toes. I was listening to a show we did in Red Rocks, and the differences and changes in the tunes night to night — the show sounds so good, Robert. It’s just fun, because they really evolve, and it’s a much different environment than what I grew up doing, which is very regimented harmony singing where the whole gig is perfecting it. Like, you don’t go to prom because you’re working on your harmony. This is just a totally different animal, and I just love the way the tunes have changed, even throughout this past summer.
Plant: And all I did was go to prom. I still am! Life could be a dream sh-boom! That’s what happened to me. When I used to open the show for people, you know, stars in the early and mid-60s, I used to go, “Wow, this is so exotic. It’s just amazing.” When those big old stage lights came on in the proscenium arch theater, my whole heart leapt. I couldn’t wait to get to the next place to see somebody else do the same thing. And so I didn’t study anything, except for trying to be as good as Terry Reid, or Steve Marriott, or Steve Winwood, or so many people who are extraordinary singers.
Krauss: One big prom! [laughs]
Plant: But I think that’s part of the really big thing about you and I, Alison, is that we’ve leapt into each other, and it’s given me a great departure from finding myself typecast and in being challenged, which, despite its changes from time to time within the shows, just makes for a really good ride, I think.
Krauss: It’s never dull. [laughs]
Plant: I could be sort of far too serious about myself and sit in my dressing room with a star on the door, but that’s not why I do this. I do this because I only work with people who’ve got a big heart, and this is it. So it’s never dull. But if it’s dull, I’m not sticking around anyway.
You both have many previous Grammy wins and nominations. Do these awards matter to you? Does getting nominated enhance the project itself or make it more meaningful in any way?
Plant: I’ll leave that to you, Alison.
Krauss: I just think it’s always unexpected. You don’t figure it’s going to happen, that you get nominated. Like I always say, every record you make is like the only one you’re going to.
Plant: Yeah.
Krauss: And so it’s really nice to get that acknowledgement that people have heard it and like it. It’s always a relief.
Plant: And also the idea of us being considered to be a country duet is fascinating. The thing is, a nomination is a nomination — the very fact that it’s been recognized that we’ve had a good time is more than I could imagine. I didn’t get many Grammys… so to be nominated as a country duet is out of my normal radar. It’s great. I love it, and I also know that we did a pretty good job. I learned a lot, and continue to learn, which is what I want to do. I do think that’s pretty cool.
In 2009, Raising Sand won the Grammy for album of the year. Nominated in that category this year are artists like Lizzo, Beyoncé, Coldplay. Do you feel connected to those kinds of acts, or are you more at home in the country category? What’s your relationship to mainstream pop stars?
Plant: Not a lot. [laughs] It’s different worlds, isn’t it? That’s all it is. It’s just like, do you like this, or do you only appreciate stuff that come out of the Mississippi Delta or New Orleans? We’re all musicians; we all do what we do. You have to appreciate everything from where it stands in its own world.
Is there any chance of a third album from you two?
Plant: I can’t see any reason why not. I suppose if we wait another 14 years it could be a bit dicey for me, to be honest. I might find it a little bit difficult hitting a top C. But we can say it really works well, and we enjoy each other and that’s a great thing — so it seems like a great idea.
Elton John interviewed Joni Mitchell for his Apple Music 1 show on Saturday (Nov. 12), and the folk legend opened up about her legacy, performing at the Newport Folk Festival and more.
After telling Sir Elton she’s in the process of trying to release a live recording of her surprise performance at the festival this summer, Mitchell also revealed she “didn’t have any” rehearsal for what ended up being her first concert in two decades.
“And you stood up and played guitar,” John pointed out, to which she replied, ” Yeah, that I had to figure out what I did. And I couldn’t sing the key. I’ve become an alto, I’m not a soprano anymore, so I couldn’t sing the song. And I thought people might feel lighted that if I just played the guitar part but I like the guitar part to that song. So anyway, it was very well received, much to my delight.”
Mitchell also reflected on the impact of her early music from the folk movement of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as how she was compared to male singer-songwriters of the time. “At the time, no, I took a lot of flak if anything,” the singer said. “People thought that it was too intimate. It was almost like Dylan going electric.
“I think it upset the male singer/songwriters,” she continued. “They’d go, ‘Oh no. Do we have to bear our souls like this now?’ I think it made people nervous. More nervous than… It took to this generation — they seem to be able to face those emotions more easily than my generation.”
In the wake of her return to the stage, Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” re-entered the LyricFind U.S. and Global charts at No. 1. Next year, she’s set to join Brandi Carlile for their joint “Echoes Through the Canyon” shows at The Gorge in Washington state.
Watch clips from Elton’s interview with Mitchell below.
The following profile was originally published on Tom Paxton’s 80th birthday. He turns 85 today (Oct. 31) and is currently on tour with the Don Juans—Don Henry and Jon Vezner. In July he released All New, a 28-song album recorded during the pandemic with Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer.
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It was a beautiful summer afternoon, with breezes blowing off the Hudson River, as Tom Paxton picked up his acoustic guitar under a bright tent at the Clearwater Festival in Croton Point Park, some 30-plus miles north of New York City.
For decades, Paxton has performed at this festival to support the environmental work of the Hudson River sloop Clearwater. The Clearwater was conceived in 1966 by Paxton’s longtime friend and mentor, the folk music icon and social activist Pete Seeger, who once called Paxton’s songs “part of America.”
Paxton, with a grey beard matching his hair, gazed across the Hudson to the wooded hills of the Palisades as he sang his opening song, with lyrics inspired by an Old Testament prophet and Seeger’s activism.
God knows the courage you possessedAnd Isaiah said it bestHow beautiful upon the mountainAre the steps of those who walk in peace
Paxton — who turns 85 today — is one of the most important figures in American songwriting and the folk music tradition.
“You can draw a direct line from Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger to this man, who is a true troubadour” said John Platt of WFUV (the adult-alternative public radio station at New York’s Fordham University) as he introduced Paxton at the Clearwater Festival.
Tom Paxton at Clearwater Festival in 2017.
Greg Lawler
The line of musical history from Paxton goes further. The folk music scene of Greenwich Village of the 1960s was the Big Bang of modern songwriting, a dramatic break from the styles that came before, which were rooted in musical theater. The impact of that era is still felt in the success of singer/songwriters today.
Bob Dylan “is usually cited as the founder of the New Song movement, and he certainly became its most visible standard-bearer, but the person who started the whole thing was Tom Paxton,” wrote the late folk pioneer Dave Van Ronk in his memoir The Mayor of MacDougal Street.
The Greenwich Village folk singers, early on, focused on traditional repertoire, songs with words and melodies passed down through generations and whose composers—Guthrie and Seeger aside—were typically unknown. Dylan changed that. However, “by the time Bobby came on the set, with at most two or three songs he had written, Tom was already singing at least 50 percent his own material,” wrote Van Ronk.
Across the decades, generations of musicians have drawn inspiration from Paxton’s songs of love, laughter and political outrage: “Ramblin’ Boy,” “Bottle of Wine,” “What Did You Learn In School Today,” “Whose Garden Was This,” “The Marvelous Toy” and countless more.
“The Last Thing On My Mind,” which Paxton released on his major-label debut album on Elektra Records in 1964, has since been recorded by Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Glen Campbell, Neil Diamond, Gram Parsons, and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others.
In a career that spans more 60 albums, Paxton has received lifetime achievement recognition from ASCAP, the BBC and the Grammy Awards, as well as several Grammy Award nominations. But his greatest honor has been the praise of his peers.
“Tom Paxton taught a generation of traditional folk singers that it was noble to write your own songs, and, like a good guitar, he just gets better with age,” said the late Guy Clark, in one of the tributes collected on Paxton’s website.
Said Judy Collins: “He writes stirring songs of social protest and gentle songs of love, each woven together with his personal gift for language.”
“Tom Paxton embodies the spirit of folk music in the most beautiful sense,” said Ani DiFranco. “He’s the coolest.”
On stage at the Clearwater Festival, Paxton asked the crowd: “Can anyone honestly say that Pete and Toshi are not here today?” Pete Seeger passed away in 2014 at age 94, while Seeger’s wife, Toshi, died in 2013 at age 91.
Their spirits filled the festival, but Paxton himself almost skipped performing there.
“I came to a point a couple of years ago when I actually convinced myself that I was going to get off the road,” said Paxton in a recent interview from his home in Alexandria, Va., taking a morning break from doing The New York Times crossword puzzle to speak with Billboard. “At the same time I was starting to work with these two songwriters from Nashville, Jon Vezner and Don Henry.”
Vezner and Henry are best known for co-writing “Where’ve You Been,” recorded by Kathy Mattea, which received the Grammy Award for best country song in 1990.
“We were writing songs together,” recalled Paxton, “and they said, ‘we’ve started doing some performances, calling ourselves the Don Juans, and we’d love to open shows for you and then accompanying you.’ I said that sounds like fun. And, in fact, that’s what it’s been. I don’t love the travel, but I love the performing and the co-writing and the friendship.”
“I think I was playing ‘The Last Thing On My Mind’ when I was 14 or 15 years old,” says Steve Earle, who has shared the stage with Paxton and now lives in Greenwich Village. “Tom wasn’t the only person who got the idea you could write your own folk songs. But he wrote some of the best songs around, quite literally.”
Tom Paxton photographed in 1965.
Gems/Redferns
Thomas Richard Paxton was born on Oct. 31, 1937 in Chicago and, when he was 10, the family moved to Arizona, where Paxton discovered the songs of Burl Ives, an early inspiration. (In his songbook and memoir, The Honor of Your Company, Paxton describes meeting Ives years later in New York and saying, “Burl, I just want to thank you for ruining my life. He laughed and showed not a trace of sympathy.”)
In 1948, Paxton’s family moved to Bristow, Okla. and he later attended the University of Oklahoma, to study drama. “I wanted to be an actor,” he told Bob Santelli, executive director of the Grammy Museum in a 2015 interview at the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa (where Paxton has donated his archive). “I have a degree in drama from O.U. But in the end,” he quipped, “I decided to settle for the security of folk music.”
In college, Paxton heard the album The Weavers at Carnegie Hall, from the group that featured Seeger, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman and Ronnie Gilbert. Released by Vanguard Records in 1957, the album was a comeback for the foursome who had been blacklisted from radio and TV appearances during the McCarthy era for their progressive political beliefs.
“The breadth and depth of that album was so fantastic,” Paxton said at the Woody Guthrie Center. The variety of songs on the album—including love ballads, children’s songs, topical broadsides—anticipated the scope of Paxton’s own career. “By the time that album concluded, I had an epiphany,” he said. “I went from someone who loved this music to someone who had to do it.”
But first Paxton did a stint in the U.S. Army, which brought him from Oklahoma to the Northeast. He served at the Army Information School in New Rochelle, N.Y. and then at a clerk-typist school at the Army base in Fort Dix, N.J.—both within a bus or train ride from Greenwich Village. He began spending every weekend in the clubs of the emerging folk scene—the original Gerde’s Folk City on West 4th Street, One Sheridan Square and, on MacDougal Street, the Kettle of Fish and the Gaslight Cafe.
In their 2013 film Inside Llewyn Davis, directors Joel and Ethan Coen pay homage to the Village folk era. One character in the film, the earnest Troy Nelson, is based on Paxton and performs “The Last Thing On My Mind” in the movie. Paxton has only one quibble with the character: “I would have drunk paint from a can before I would have worn my [Army] uniform in the Village.
“I did like the movie a lot,” he said. “And I liked the look of the movie, it looked a great deal like it looked for us. The one thing that I noticed— about it was their movie not my movie—was that nobody laughed.
“And we laughed our asses off! I mean, we were having such a ball. We were having fun, making music and living it up. I’ve always loved to laugh. And I’ve always loved funny songs.”
But did Paxton and his peers in the Village in the ’60s also realize they were living through a remarkable period in history?
“No,” he replied flatly. “It was just the way it was. We were fish swimming in the sea; we didn’t know the sea. We had no clue that people would still be talking about it 50 years later, no idea of that.”
At that clerk-typist school in Fort Dix, Paxton, already a proficient typist, was bored silly. On his Army-issued typewriter, he pecked out the lyrics to what would become one of his most enduring children’s songs, “The Marvelous Toy.” Polished with the help of Noel “Paul” Stookey of Peter, Paul and Mary, the song also began one of the most significant professional and personal relationships of Paxton’s life, with the arranger, producer and music publisher Milt Okun.
Okun was auditioning a replacement for a member of The Chad Mitchell Trio, who had performed in 1960 with Harry Belafonte at Carnegie Hall. Paxton tried out for the gig (borrowing a guitar for the session from then-18-year-old Jim McGuinn, later known as Roger McGuinn, of the Byrds). Initially chosen, Paxton was told within a week that his voice wasn’t right for the group.
But he had played “The Marvelous Toy” for Okun. And Okun signed Paxton as the first songwriter to his new Cherry Lane Music publishing company—a relationship that continued for the next half century. Through Okun (who passed away in 2016) Paxton’s songs appeared on albums by Peter, Paul and Mary and John Denver, among many others. “The single biggest break I ever had in my whole career,” said Paxton, “was meeting Milt Okun.”
Tom Paxton and Inductee Milt Okun attend the 39th Annual Songwriters Hall of Fame Ceremony at the Marriott Marquis on June 19, 2008 in New York City.
L. Busacca/WireImage
At the Clearwater Festival, Paxton recalled the evening in 1963 at the Village Gate on Bleecker Street when he asked Pete Seeger if he could play him a new tune. “Suuure!,” said Paxton, quoting Seeger and affectionately spoofing the folk icon’s boundless enthusiasm. He sang “Ramblin’ Boy” for Seeger—and recalled his astonishment when Seeger performed it soon afterward at Carnegie Hall.
But Seeger, having just learned the song, got the chorus wrong, singing “fare thee well, my ramblin’ boy,” not “here’s to you, my ramblin’ boy,” as Paxton wrote it. Afterward, from his travels, Seeger mailed Paxton a postcard decorated with one of his well-known banjo doodles. He wrote simply: “Dear Tom, Oops! Pete.”
Paxton was no political firebrand when he first came to New York (unlike, say, his friend and fellow songwriter Phil Ochs). “I was really quite apolitical, which is the way Oklahoma was in those days.” But the gathering storm of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s shaped the songs and musicians of the era. Paxton recalls going to his first protest rally with songwriter Len Chandler at a Woolworth’s store in Manhattan. They declared solidarity with demonstrators engaging in “sit-ins” at a Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. seeking to end segregated service by the company. “I quickly began to develop a political consciousness,” he said.
From the start, Paxton’s topical songs were often laced with a mix of irony, insight and anger. The songs often transcend the time in which they were written. In “What Did You Learn In School Today,” from 1962, the “little boy of mine” tells his parent:
I learned that Washington never told a lieI learned that soldiers seldom dieI learned that everybody’s freeThat’s what the teacher said to me
What sets Paxton’s songs apart is a deep sense of empathy, conveyed by his writing in the first-person. “Jimmy Newman,” sung from the perspective of a young soldier in Vietnam, with its heart-breaking final verse, remains one of the most moving anti-war songs ever written. “The Hostage,” about New York State’s Attica prison uprising of 1971, is a harrowing lyric from the viewpoint of a murdered guard—who blames government authorities, not the prison’s inmates. And Paxton’s narrator in “The Bravest” is a survivor of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center who’s “haunted by the sound/ of fireman pounding up the stairs / while we were running down.”
Paxton tells songwriting students: “If you want to know my approach to songwriting, pick up a newspaper, find an article or a cartoon or anything that moves you to any emotion at all, whether it be grief or rage or hilarity. Then write a song with yourself as either an eyewitness or a participant in that story.
“And the first thing that will do,” added Paxton, “is get you out of writing about your own boring life and your goddamn relationships. And it will put you out in the world—where Shakespeare wants you to be. The first-person is infinitely stronger in songwriting. And [the narrator] is almost never myself.”
You also can trace a good deal of American history through Paxton’s songs. On his most recent album, Boat In The Water, he re-recorded “Outward Bound” with its lyric of voyagers “upon a ship with tattered sail.”
“When Robert Kennedy was assassinated” in 1968, remembered Paxton, “I had call from CBS and I went in to their TV studios and they were recording literally all night in tribute. And the next day as the train was going down to Washington, D.C. carrying his coffin, they played that song, superimposed over images of the train. It took on that meaning for me; it still does.”
When asked to perform at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. for the first Earth Day in 1970, Paxton wrote one of the first great environmental protest songs, “Whose Garden Was This.” It still resonates in the age of climate change. “How I wish I didn’t feel I had to keep singing this song,” Paxton said at the Clearwater Festival. “But I do.”
Whose garden was this?It must have been lovelyDid it have flowers?I’ve seen pictures of flowersAnd I’d love to have smelled one
Paxton remains as engaged as ever. During his Clearwater set, from his 2015 album Redemption Road, he performed a song—again written in the first person—condemning neglect of the impoverished. “If the poor don’t matter,” he sang, “neither do I.”
Since the election of Donald Trump—”this buffoon we have in the White House,” says Paxton—how has he reacted?
“I am outraged,” he said. “All the time. I’m working on one song that’s going to be difficult to pull off. It’ll be satirical. But it has to be savage—or there’s no point. I cannot express how dangerous I think this man is. And when he’s gone, Trump-ism will still be with us. I bleed for the country.”
(L-R) John Sebastian, Josh White Jr, Peter Yarrow, Tom Paxton and Pete Seeger with Adam Amram right, perform onstage at the he ‘Power of Song’ Award Concert to Benefit Pete Seeger’s Clearwater Program which honored David Amram at Symphony Space in New York on Nov. 9, 2012.
Ebet Roberts/Redferns
For all the recognition he’s received for his topical repertoire, his storytelling tunes or his children’s songs, Paxton’s love ballads are among his greatest works. For his Clearwater Festival audience, as he introduced “My Lady’s A Wild Flying Dove,” he spoke of the inspiration for his love songs.
“Back in 1963,” he said, “the first week of January, into the Gaslight one evening, came the nearly 18-year-old Midge Cummings, on the arm of another folk singer—who had no chance. No chance. By the end of that evening, we were together. I proposed to her in two weeks. And if you ever saw a picture of her at that time, you’d say, ‘what took you so long?’
“We were married in six months,” said Paxton. “And in the end, we made it to just two months short of 51 years.”
Midge Paxton passed away in 2014 at age 69.
“Midge was… she was my guiding star,” Paxton said. “She was my conscience. She never lost sight of what I was trying to do. And if I seemed to be straying from it, she’d mention that. She was almost ready to listen to a new song. She’d point out speed bumps, if there were any.
“Above all, she was my cheerleader.”
After the performances in New York and Alexandria, Paxton will gather for his Oct. 31 birthday with family members. He and Midge had two daughters—extolled in Paxton’s song “Jennifer and Kate”—and three grandsons by Jennifer’s marriage.
At this birthday milestone, it seems the right time to ask: does Paxton ever reflect on the impact he’s had on decades of songwriters?
“No, I don’t,” he says. “I still find that kind of amazing. I don’t know why—when I think of the impact that Pete and Woody had on a generation of writers. I guess I shrink from putting myself in their company. To me, they’re the giants.”
What does he see as his own legacy?
“I hope people will see that I saw the richness in traditional folk music—it speaks to life, the best part of humanity—and I tried to perpetuate it in my own work. I just tried to add to that legacy.”
