Brothers Seymour and Maynard Solomon started Vanguard as a classical label in 1950, but the folk music they recorded is perhaps their greatest legacy. Vinyl Me, Please picked six of their most catalyzing and revered early folk releases and reissued them in fine sound as VMP Anthology: The Story of Vanguard; they are the sole distributor. The albums were remastered by Ryan Smith at Sterling Sound and lacquered from the original mono tapes. The LPs were pressed at GZ in the Czech Republic, and the platters are multi-colored 180-gram vinyl. The artists included in the compilation are the Weavers, Joan Baez, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Skip James, Odetta, and Doc Watson. The anthology’s full-sized, 36-page book whets my appetite for the seven-episode podcast that is on the way.
The Weavers at Carnegie Hall (1957) was a blockbuster for Vanguard. Pete Seeger’s banjo kicks the album off like a bugle call, leading into “Darling Corey,” a Bluegrass Alley standard. “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” grew out of an Irish song about a cow; here, it’s a paean to a lifelong marriage with a gorgeous minor-to-major chord progression. The Weavers cover a lot of ground, with songs from Ireland, Israel, Spain, and South Africa. “Pay Me My Money Down” and “Wimoweh” are lively and powerful; the concert ends with their 1950 hit, “Goodnight Irene.” All throughout are committed singing, fine guitar work, and good humor. The only flaw is some clipping in the louder parts from the original taping.
It’s easy to hear why Joan Baez surprised and impressed the audience at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, partly sponsored by Vanguard. Her silvery voice and quick vibrato are commanding, even at their most ethereal; at 18, she had already figured out her musical identity. The bulk of the songs on her 1960 eponymous debut album are English and British folk ballads, almost all about the disappointments of love. There’s an English version of “Donna Donna” (a Yiddish theater song), a lullaby called “All My Trials” that is indeed soporific, a gorgeous cover of “Wildwood Flower,” and a Mexican song about the execution of a defiant prisoner who committed a murder of jealousy. Joan and her guitar are fine, but I particularly like when the Weavers’ Fred Hellerman joins with his.
Buffy Sainte-Marie’s debut, It’s My Way (1964), is a rough listen. She comes out swinging against the hippies who claim Native American blood from some ancestor but remain blind to the struggles of contemporary Native Americans. The devastating potential of drugs is declaimed, love gone bad is keened over, troops and civilians both get a scathing indictment, and, well, “The Incest Song” is obviously not easy listening. Buffy’s vocal tone veers from coarse brightness to throaty sternness.
Bluesman Skip James had recorded some sides for Paramount in 1931 but quickly sank into obscurity. Bill Barth and John Fahey found him in a hospital in 1964 and got him back into music. Today! (1966) reworks several Paramount songs and delivers a few new numbers. “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” one of his best-known songs, has lost none of its grim emotion, and it’s a pleasure hearing it in modern sound. “Washington D.C. Hospital Center Blues” is a grateful tribute to the medical staff who treated well during one of his stays. Years of poor health may have diminished Skip’s guitar technique, but it is still just as subtle, creative, and expressive.
Odetta’s dark, stentorian alto voice demands all of a listener’s attention; her guitar playing is basic but sufficient, and she’s joined by Bill Lee’s string bass on My Eyes Have Seen (1959). Her bluesy inflections seem to show the ancestry of the blues rather than reflecting the genre itself. Several of her songs come from her Black heritage: spirituals, prison songs, and one from a “Negro rouster, or stevedore.” Even the famous love ballad “I Know Where I’m Going” is given a new seriousness.
Doc Watson, a blind musician from North Carolina, had 25 fingers, I swear. On an eponymous debut LP from 1964, his fingerpicking on “Sitting on Top of the World” gives him a bass line, accompaniment, and countermelodies, and he bends the strings with enviable ease. His country-based folk music is refreshingly lighter in tone than most of the other records here, and his warmth and dry wit comes through in his tone, phrasing, and delivery. Even the mention of the protagonist’s decomposition stench in “Saint James Hospital” comes across as perfectly reasonable; the chestnut “Tom Dooley” sounds like a true folk song instead of an overly earnest cautionary tale.
Bless you, Vanguard, for balancing novelty, ability, and vitality, and for not turning your musicians into museum pieces.
