Anger & Phelps bring the music of our people
Old hippie musicians never die, they just recompose. Darol Anger will be well-known to some. As a founding member of the Dave Grisman Quintet, Anger has made his mark on a particular genre of music.
He may be somewhat less well-known to the broader market, and that’s a shame, but his 2018 entry, Music of Our People: Songs of the Roaring Sixties may do something to resolve that problem.
Fiddle player Anger, who notably appeared as one of the players on the theme to NPR’s long-running Car Talk, is an inveterate practitioner of “old time” bluegrass, roots and “psychograss” music.
The list of performers he has joined on stage and in the studio is broad and deep and includes the likes of Bela Fleck, Earl Scruggs, Bill Frisell, Willie Nelson and more. Anger spent the last three years teamed up with vocalist and instrumentalist Emy Phelps (and friends) to produce an album of popular music reinterpreted in the folk tradition.
The track list includes well-known classics “These Boots (were made for walkin’),” “The Wichita Lineman,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Ripple,” and “Uncle John’s Band,” to name a few, all performed in ways you aren’t likely to have heard before.
Despite my own connections to folk music, I tend to be a little leery of “reimaginings” of tunes. Granted, the very nature of folk lends itself to interpretation, that’s part of the point, but too often an artist looking to flesh out an album will pick an old tune, play it on different instruments, at a different tempo, or in a different key, and call it a day.
Without naming names, I can say that there are at least two popular groups that in the last five or ten years have seen chart success with their versions of seminal Bowie, Lennon and Dylan songs and honestly, these were “new” versions that never needed to be made.
The popular artists brought nothing new to the table, had no particular “spin,” no new vision; it was simply, “Hey, this is us playing that guy’s song,” which is disappointing.
This is not the case with Anger and Phelps, whose love of the source material, combined with their mastery of technique, and with a little help from an all-star lineup of “friends,” have successfully taken on the Herculean task of approaching well-known music with a, “Here’s a new way to hear this” attitude.
Hardcore deadheads may not care for a non-canonical version of “Uncle John’s Band”, but the inclusion of Celtic harp and accordion on the old standard is simply gorgeous. You tread a razor’s edge when you start messing with classics and there is rarely any middle ground. You either fall flat or you knock it out of the park and Anger and Phelps consistently knock it out of the park on Music of Our People.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say that for a younger generation who isn’t bound to the original music by nostalgia, the songs as performed here may easily supersede the originals as “favorite versions.”
The album is available now and is currently in rotation at our local NPR station and as far as additions to your personal music collection, it’s a very safe bet.
At worst you will find a collection of very pleasant sounding versions of familiar tunes. At best, you will find new life breathed in to iconic standards of a generation.
In either case, or anywhere in between, you will definitely have an album of beautiful music.