Receive Weekly Email and Text Message Updates:
Sign up for latest info on concerts, dining, promotions and more!
Go!

Most Popular

  • Getting Off
    Attorney Tyler Flood says he wins 80 percent of his clients' DWI trials, even if they were 100 percent drunk as a skunk.
  • Houston's Choice for Mayor
    Black Guy, Rich White Guy, Lesbian or Hispanic Republican
  • City of Coffee
    Is Houston about to become America's coffee capital?
  • Looking for a Bull Market
    Killen's Steakhouse in suburban Pearland is probably best during boom times.
  • Burgers and Hash
    Lola, a modern diner in the Heights is dishing up some top-notch Texas short-order cooking.
Most Popular sponsored by

Reader's Picks

Top Recommendations

A short list of Houston's most popular hot spots.
user content provided by: LikeMe.net & Houston Press

National Features >

  • City Pages

    Michele Bachmann, Unmuzzled

    You don't need to read Sarah Palin's book to hear the ravings of a mad woman.

    By Matt Snyders

  • Miami New Times

    Pimp Daddy

    The rise and fall of a chubby sex-cult leader.

    By Natalie O'Neill

  • Riverfront Times

    Babe 'n' Arms

    Tom was a hot-tempered cross-dresser with a garage full of guns--and then he became Rachel.

    By Nicholas Phillips

Old Town School of Folk Music Songbook Vols. 2 & 3

Share

  • rss

By William Michael Smith

Published on August 08, 2007 at 9:24am

Like an Old Testament of folk music, these compilations — 42 songs in all — are both celebration and preservation. Artists ranging from faculty of the 50-year-old titular Chicago institution to Austin honky-tonk legend James Hand to alt-country chanteuse Kelly Hogan play 'em stripped and straight up, taking each performance beyond interpretation to almost worshipful tribute. Emily Hurd's menacing piano rendition of "Hard Travelin'" breathes hobo bravado and travelin' blues; Folk Uke's "Wildwood Flower" sounds as innocent and fresh as the day it was written; and Marvin Etzioni's raw "Don't You Hear Jerusalem Moan" rains hellfire and brimstone on preachers of all denominations. Whether written in a prison chain gang or Tin Pan Alley, these songs are so well known, this project could easily have become an embalmed cliché; but the honesty of each performance makes it obvious why songs like "John Henry," "Trouble in Mind" and "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" have become not just American classics but precious cultural baggage in this iPhone and Maroon 5 age.