Review WAMC’s “Hudson River Sampler” Goes on the Road in Music Haven Concert Recorded for Future Broadcast
Wanda Fischer marked 43 years as host of WAMC’s “Hudson River Sampler” with folksinging friends at Music Haven Saturday. Celebrating folk’s durability, and Fischer’s, fell on Woodstock weekend, 66 years after the festival that forever changed pop music: It was never so diverse thereafter, but more profitable. Most in Saturday’s crowd fit the coulda-been-there boomer demo.
Music Haven maestro Mona Golub briefly introduced the evening, which otherwise belonged to WAMC. The regional NPR station’s On the Road chief Peter Hughes, producer and sometime morning host Sarah LaDuke and Fischer herself ran the show whose traditional Music Haven intermission raffle benefited the station. They and some performers noted NPR and affiliates are under threat, losing federal support. Many urged support of the station and its work, and the music they played demonstrated its importance as a community builder and catalyst while Music Haven and Golub earned major love and respect for hosting it.
Fischer (at right) and LaDuke sang the first number, duetting shyly but well enough on “Five Hundred Miles” with headliner Joe Jencks playing acoustic guitar.
Michael Jerling
North country troubadour Michael Jerling opened with well-honed, low-key charm, skilled and straightforward guitar picking and easy-going vocals. After a naturalist’s observation of his forested home in “Blue Heartland,” he paid witty, affectionate tribute to Merle Haggard, inspiration for “In Lieu of Flowers” about honoring the departed with love for those still here.
His musician wife Teresina Huxtable had chided, “You’re not going to play that in front of people, are you?” on first hearing “Personal Appearance.” But sing it, he did, to amusing effect. He sang he’s short for his weight and he’d look like a boiled ham with ears if he shaved his head.
“Fish Trout Lake” nostalgically recalled family vacations before his self-improvement promise “Starting Tomorrow” tickled the funny bone like “Personal Appearances.”
Kate McDonnell and Jimmy Woodul
Kate McDonnell played guitar upside down and backwards, as Fischer noted in her intro. Her percussive thumb strums hit hard under treble lead runs by guitarist Jimmy Woodul, who played last Sunday at Music Haven in Reese Fulmer’s Carriage House Band opening for SteelDrivers. He also harmonized Saturday with McDonnell’s beautiful voice; singing blended as well as their playing.
Unstated socio-political trouble lurked in the shadows behind “Pretty Good Day” and “No Ordinary Time,” both positing simple pleasures and human connection as antidotes to fear and division. In “Trapeze,” she sketched the difficulties of music as career, a cautionary tale about running away to the circus of any art. “Step Right Up” also cautioned: “you’re the next what might have been.” “Oh, Mercy” was both a slam on George Bush as “the boy-king…the sequel” and a singalong call to action.
After intermission and the raffle of folk-related prizes, Dan Berggren first saluted the forever wild Adirondacks and the people who appreciate and nurture rather than exploit this delicate/rugged land and its creatures. “Whippoorwill Blues” lamented threats to that place and that ethos before extolling noble hard work in “Big Beams.”
Dan Berggren
Berggren explained the folk process of recycling old melodies with new words, transforming “Wayfaring Stranger” into a call for peace and justice and “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You” from sentimental adios to a singalong call to action: “Hold on and keep moving forward” – toward peace and justice.
His persuasive lyrics packed Tom Paxton-like righteous moral clarity packaged in cozy melodies, but could have used more of Seeger’s humor.
Joe Jencks
Joe Jencks started where modern protest folk did, in conversation with Pete Seeger. Adapting Seeger’s 1955 testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee into lyrics, Jencks sang a defense of the First Amendment rather than the Fifth which a hostile interrogator accused Seeger of using, as if guilty of something. Seeger never named names, as some frightened coerced witnesses did, and stressed his right to sing for anyone. He was never prosecuted; the inquisition simply died of neglect or embarrassment, as ICE now also should.
Maybe history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes as Jencks implied, dropping a verse of “If I Had a Hammer” into his Seeger quotes song.
A dual US and Irish citizen, Jencks praised South Africa’s pluralism before hailing his ancestors’ immigration here in the homeland-sentimental waltz “Rose of Tralee.” Praising his grandfather Felix Kilbride’s courage in coming here via Ellis Island, he recounted the horrifying/preposterous recent arrest of Hopi tribal people in Arizona for failing to produce green cards – all by way of setting up the pro-immigration “Lady of the Harbor,” Lady Liberty. Many fans knew Jencks’s words and sang along, and did so again in “Bells of Freedom.” Jencks reached back to the Lomax 1939 recordings in Rayford prison as source for his “Take this Hammer,” a tool of hope and defiance.
The finale; from left: Sarah LaDuke, Wanda Fischer, Michael Jerling, Kate McDonnell, Dan Berggren and Joe Jencks
The full cast came on to join Jencks and sing “Get Together,” the Dino Valente (born Chet Powers) hit for the Youngbloods – changing the words a bit to sing “Smile on each other.” (The Youngbloods’ hit arrived in 1969, the Woodstock year, and they sang it at their last-ever show Aug. 5, 1972 at the late lamented Lenox Music Inn. But we digress.)
Wanda Fischer beams in the finale
The whole thing was sweet, inspiring and well-performed, but the staging seemed awkward. A seemingly permanent mic placement positioned the performers in odd places, as if their stage blocking in the finale determined where they’d stand whenever they played. They also performed oddly down-stage when greater closeness to the audience, physically, would have enhanced their connection in communicating sentiments all seemed to share.
Joe Jencks touts his Sept. 20 Eighth Step show during the raffle, with Sarah LaDuke, behind Jencks, and Wanda Fischer
Wanda Fischer introduces Dan Berggren
Fans file out of Music Haven afterward; over the pastel-lit treed hill, a baseball game was underway at Central Park’s A Diamond.
Hoke's Jukebox 