Among the many great live experiences this year, Josh Ritter – a singer-songwriter inspired to play “messianic oracular honky-tonk” – blew into Britain for a handful of gigs, including St Stephen’s Hammersmith. The acoustics were perfect and the Idaho-born folkie – who’s spent some time holed up in Woodstock, writing songs and (to coin a phrase) watching the river flow – dipped deep into his songbag, bringing the house down with “Galahad”, his racy retelling of the Holy Grail Story.

Barbara Dickson, now relocated to Edinburgh, across the bridge from where she grew up in Dunfermline, turned in the most fantastic show at London’s Union Chapel. Those who came to hear the chart hits weren’t disappointed but the real treats were the folk songs, traditional and modern, from Scotland and beyond, which she performs with both reverence and deep knowledge – the poignant “Palace Grand”, for example, learned from the late Jean Redpath, the singer and collector who left Fife for New York as the 1960s revival drew a callow Bob Dylan to that city (Joan Baez recorded the song as “Lady Mary”.)  Other traditional highlights included “MacCrimmon’s Lament”, sung a capella and segueing into an exhilarating Irish jig, which spotlighted Troy Donockley’s Uillian pipework, he riffing on them much as he does on lead guitar, and the majestic “Farewell to Fiunary”, all drums and drone.

Barbara Dickson, with the Ballads of Child Migration, featured in the Radio 2 Folk Awards at the Royal Albert Hall, where the Scots and the Irish rather swept the board. Ry Cooder was given an award for Lifetime Achievement, flying in specially from Santa Monica for the occasion. He recalled how, growing up in 1960s West Hollywood, he’d seen the New Lost City Ramblers – “vests, bow ties, sad faces” – on TV and been struck by their sound. So he sought out Tom Paley, from whom he learned banjo and guitar, discovering the excitement of open tunings. The song he chose to sing at the Awards was “Jesus on the Mainline”, collected in Mississippi by Alan Lomax and Shirley Collins. Cooder bade the audience applaud the 89-year-old Paley – who has long lived in North London – enjoying his moment in the spotlight. He had been preceded on stage by Collins, who last year marked her own eightieth year with a new album, Lodestar, nominated for Best Album.

Paley had been an old pal of Woody Guthrie, inducted into the Hall of Fame in this the fiftieth anniversary year of his death from Huntingdon’s Chorea, a brutal disease which had silenced him years earlier. Naturally, it was Billy Bragg who stepped up to accept the honour, and his speech set Guthrie in his musical and social context as “arguably the first punk rocker” and “the father of the topical song tradition”. Bragg, punk turned folkie, chosen by Nora Guthrie to comb through her father’s archives and to set to music his unrecorded lyrics, sang “I Aint Got No Home (In This World Anymore)”.

Politics has always been good for folk music which chronicles challenging times and flourishes in them. So it’s perhaps no surprise that hidden in the Woody Guthrie Center’s Oklahoma archives was a song to Fred C Trump, slum landlord and father of Donald J Trump, apprentice President of the United States. The discovery was made by Will Kauffman, Professor of American Literature at the University of Central Lancashire. “Old Man Trump” was written around 1950, when the Guthrie family rented a home from Trump near Coney Island, Brooklyn. Kaufman, the author of Woody Guthrie, American Radical, said Guthrie would be repulsed by Trump and pointed to Guthrie’s song “Deportee”,  about a plane crash that killed Mexican farm workers, as an example of Guthrie “always championing those who didn’t have a voice, who didn’t have any money, who didn’t have any power.”

That song featured in Joan Baez’s set, on which she was joined by the Indigo Girls and Mary Chapin Carpenter, at her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but Baez has also debuted her own Trump song, this one for the Donald, ahead of the ceremony. “Nasty Man” has garnered almost 5m hits on YouTube and it has ended a long period of writer’s block for the 76-year-old, who has announced a final album, Fare Thee Well, and tour sometime next year. “I’ll quit singing and get fat”, she joked in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. The Los Angeles Times suggested that her long career is ripe for reappraisal.

Bob Dylan, meanwhile, plays on, touring the UK in April-May and offering up a selection from the Great American Songbook to which he accords more reverence than his own songs. Some fans and critics loved it, but Square Roots co-founder Liz Thomson wasn’t so sure, finding the mannered vocals and poor sound at Wembley upsetting.

A visit to the Slaughtered Lamb pub in London’s Clerkenwell made for a more rewarding evening. Ned Roberts, a talented singer-songwriter, was launching his second album, Outside My Mind, released on Green Note’s fledging Aveline label. He was joined on stage by James Kreiling on keyboards and Yoanna Prodanova on cello, a lovely addition which gave the music a new dimension and texture.

Roberts has been getting a fair bit of attention of late, his self-titled debut album, released in 2014, having set the stage. In addition to touring, he’s had a good deal of radio exposure, including a live session for Bob Harris. His songs are finely wrought and beautifully delivered, critics seeing shades of both Laurel Canyon and Greenwich Village in work that has drawn comparisons with Tim Hardin and (of course) Bob Dylan. Indeed, Roberts has done a rather lovely cover of “Girl From the North Country”. Check him out.

Finally, a great evening in Richmond (south-west London, not Virginia), where last month the multi-talented Alan Franks – journalist, novelist, poet, playwright (Looking at Lucian, starring Henry Goodman, opens at the Theatre Royal, Bath, in July) and musician – brought friends together to perform the songs that comprise his latest album, Wherever You Go. It’s the sixth collection of his songs in a playing career that began at the Edinburgh Festival, when Franks was a student and its 17 songs feature settings of his lyrics by a variety of performers, working in folk, rock, jazz and theatre. They include Isabella Pappas, Glen Strachan, Amanda MacLean and Dorten Yonder, a five piece acoustic band whose North American inflections belie their North London roots. Baritone Syd Maddicott, formerly British High Commissioner to Cameroon and well known for his performances of traditional songs and sea shanties, offers a wonderful a capella performance of “What Hope For Us, O Lord?”

Dorten Yonder

Syd Maddicott

Glen Strachan

Amanda MacLean

Hold the date: On 3 October at the Green Note, in London’s Camden Town, Square Roots will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Woody Guthrie‘s death with a celebration of his music.

An article in Ham & High about the launch of Square Roots Productions and the inaugural events at The Green Note in Camden Town, London.

Square Roots Productions makes its public debut this spring with three concerts at Time Out’s award-winning Green Note in Camden Town, London. Each focuses on a legacy musician or theme.

• More about the first three gigs >>
• Download the full press release >>

We now have the dates for Square Roots’ first UK events, each of them taking place at the Green Note in Parkway, Camden Town, winner of the Time Out Award for London’s Favourite Music Venue 2015. The London dates are 22 February, 23 March and 13 April 2016. Dates in New York City and Albany in early March will be confirmed shortly.

Twenty years ago, on 11 December 1995, New York Times critic Robert Shelton died in Brighton aged 69. Shelton is today remembered principally as ‘the man who discovered Bob Dylan’, and it’s true he wrote the celebrated review of his performance at Gerde’s Folk City which ran on 29 September 1961 and is credited with landing the 20-year-old with his Columbia recording contract. He went on, of course, to write the core text on Dylan, No Direction Home.

But Shelton also played a key role in bringing to national and international attention innumerable 1960s talents, among them Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Buffy Ste Marie, José Feliciano, Joni Mitchell, Janis Joplin, Frank Zappa and many more besides. A ‘metropolitan critic’ and ‘a taste-maker’ according to Dave Laing, who came to know him at Let It Rock in the 1970s, after Shelton’s relocation to Britain, he was also ‘the father of rock journalism’ according to Janis Ian, another of the era’s giants, who has always acknowledged her debt to him.

How he came to spend his last years on a regional paper on Britain’s south coast – where few of his colleagues knew his pedigree – is a whole other story. The Editors’ Introduction to the 2011 ‘author’s cut’ of No Direction Home, together with Shelton’s own Prelude, offers a sense of the man who is one of the under-sung figures in popular music history.
Read the Introduction and Prelude here (PDF file).

Two of the many tributes:

• Robert Shelton by Karl Dallas (Independent)
• Robert Shelton, critic who chronicled the 60s folk boom by Jon Pareles (New York Times)

Another anniversary: the centenary of the birth of Ewan MacColl (who famously condemned Dylan as ‘a youth of mediocre talent’) has been celebrated with a series of magnificent concerts and a tribute album – plus a folk music scholarship at Newcastle University. An actor-turned singer, MacColl was married to Peggy Seeger, she of the great Seeger clan, the first family of American folk music, who sang in the concerts along with the couple’s children.

• Blood and Roses: The Songs of Ewan MacColl – loving tribute to a legend by Colin Irwin (Guardian)
• Various Artists: The Joy of Living – A Tribute to Ewan MacColl by Hal Horowitz (American Songwriter)
• Real voices, real lives – the inspirational Ewan MacColl by Maxine Peak (Guardian)
• Newcastle University postgrad scholarship to commemorate the birth centenary of Ewan MacColl by Sam Wonfor (Chronicle)

As of this summer, Bringing It All Back Home is privileged to be working with New York State Arts for a series of concerts and an exhibition in Albany, the state capital.

And in Britain, Square Roots Productions CIO is now registered as a charity.

Check back soon for more news for both the US and the UK.

‘It’s Halloween and I’ve got my Bob Dylan mask on’, said the singer-songwriter as he stepped out at New York’s Philharmonic Hall on 31 October 1964. Joan Baez, who had introduced Dylan on stage at so many of her own concerts, joined him after intermission for a handful of songs. She had on a plaid Glengarry cap. Sean Wilentz was fortunate enough to be there…

‘The Halloween Concert That Reinvented Bob Dylan’

Bob Dylan kicks off his UK tour this week (21 October 2015), with London dates at the Royal Albert Hall, which he first played back in 1965 – remember those scenes in Pennebaker’s peerless documentary Don’t Look Back? To get in the mood, a flick through a few of his back pages…

• ‘Bob Dylan and the pursuit of the perfect song lyric’ by Anthony Holden, Daily Beast
• ‘Bob Dylan like you’ve never heard him’ by Jeff Slate, Daily Beast
• ‘Go behind the scenes of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album cover’ by Hank Shteamer, Rolling Stone

And from the archives: ‘Struck by the sounds before the sun: Dylan as composer’ by Liz Thomson, from Conclusions on the Wall: New Essays on Bob Dylan (Thin Man, 1980)

Read the definitive biography of Bob Dylan in his prime by Robert Shelton, the New York Times critic who wrote the celebrated review credited with launching Dylan’s career – No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, which takes you back, down the smoky ruins of time, to Greenwich Village in the 1960s. . . .

Buy it here: UK and US

Judy Collins, who shared many a beer and a bill with Dylan back in the day – and who remembers waking up in the middle of the night at Albert Grossman’s house in Woodstock and hearing him at work on ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – has also been playing in Britain. She was in in good voice at London’s Cadogan Hall, playing songs from a career spanning 56 years.

Collins reminded the audience that it was she who put Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell on the map, the first artist to record their songs. She recounted being at a Democrats Abroad bash in Norway last year when a woman introduced herself: ‘I’m Marianne’. Collins held out her hand, as the woman continued: ‘Leonard Cohen’s Marianne.’ Apparently, she and Cohen had been living their Greek idyll when the poet woke her in the middle of the night and explained: ‘I’m going to New York to sing my songs to Judy Collins’. Marianne hadn’t even known he was writing songs! Cohen knocked on Collins’ Upper West Side apartment door, introduced by a mutual friend, and sang to her. She was in the midst of recording her ground-breaking 1966 album In My Life and the very next day she cut ‘Suzanne’ and ‘Dress Rehearsal Rag’. Beguiled as she was, ‘I never had an affair with him,’ she said, ‘he was much too dangerous for me’.

She sang ‘Diamonds and Rust’, Joan Baez’ ‘bad boy song’ to Bob Dylan, whom she introduced in so many of her concerts – Baez’ own career was well established by the time he, ‘the unwashed phenomenon’ emerged from Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village.