Check back weekly for more songs from Peter's pandemic "Sing Out the Darkness" efforts,  singing out to his Seattle neighbors. Peter's recordings of each song are found at the bottom of each posted episode.

(See Episode #1, below,  for the full history of this ongoing undertaking.)

[NOTE: This episode was originally sent out as an email two days after the attempted coup and storming of the US Capitol Building on 1/6/21  by Trump supporters]

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I prepared this next episode of "Sing Out the Darkness - Virtual Edition" a few days ago.  I recorded the song and wrote what follows last Monday.  Waking up today, Thursday morning, after witnessing Donald Trump's attempted coup and terrorist assault he unleashed on our nation's capitol, I thought the seeming simplistic idealism of the song I had chosen just might not fit the time in which we now find ourselves.  But then I remembered the quote I have on the door to my music room, from Sojourner Truth, the former slave who became a central leader of the abolitionist movement and later the women's movement from the 1840s until her death in 1883:

And so I have now decided that this episode's song is both timely and one that I will keep singing as we all continue to struggle in the "good fight" to preserve and protect our liberties.  Endure. - Peter

The Song: “Keep on the Sunny Side” - by the Carter Family

Hopefully this song will guide us in the coming year.

History:

For those of you who may not know the history of The Carter Family, many have said that they are the true foundation of what became both country and folk music. In August 1927, A.P. Carter, his wife Sara Carter, and her pregnant 18-year-old cousin Maybelle spent 8 hours  traveling 25 miles, fording three creeks, while having three flat tires in a borrowed car.  The were traveling from their home of Mace Springs in the Poor Valley of Western Virginia to the big city of Bristol, Tennessee.  A.P. was responding to an ad in the local paper that the Victor Talking Machine company would have a representative in Bristol that week, recording local musicians who wanted to audition for Victor .

(A.P. standing, Maybelle on guitar and harmony vocals, Sara on autoharp and lead vocals, 1927)


As a result of the 6 songs they recorded on August 1 and 2, 1927, they were signed to the Victor Company and became the first stars of a genre of music which would later become known as County Music. Their first recordings, along with those of Jimmy Rogers, who also auditioned for Victor in Bristol that week, became known as the foundational “Big Bang” of Country Music.  Before the Carter Family, there was not reference to this type of music as “country”.  If it was called anything, it was referred to as “hillbilly” music.

It is not a stretch to say the songs of the Carter Family were also the foundation for the later folk revival of the 1940s -1960s.  The Carter Family songs such as “It Takes a Worried Man (Worried Man Blues)”, “Wildwood Flower” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”, deeply influenced the music and lives of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, The Weavers, The Kingston Trio,  Bob Dylan and countless more.

“Keep on the Sunny Side” became the Carter Family’s signature song.  A.P. had known this song since he was a boy, as it likely appeared in his church hymnal, originally written in 1898. When some of my generation rediscovered the music of the Carter Family though the seminal recording of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on their1972 album “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”, the second song on that album was “Keep on the Sunny Side”, led by Mother Maybelle Carter.  It is a great version.

Here is a link to the original recording made by the Carter Family for Victor on their third recording session, in New Jersey in May 1928.  Sara was the distinctive high lead singer.  Maybelle is playing her signature guitar style which later became known as “The Carter Scratch”.  (A.P. would wander in and out, providing low vocal harmony as he was so moved.)

My version of this Carter Family song is found at the bottom of this posted episode. Careful listeners may detect that I changed the last two lines of the last verse of the song.  Not raised in the Carters’ fundamental Southern Christian traditions reflected in the original1898 hymn, I changed the original lines:

And let us trust in our Savior always
He’ll keep us everyone in His care.

to:

As we sing, may the clouds drift away
Let our voices as one fill the air.

(I believe Pete Seeger would have called this “the Folk Process”)

In July 2015, Judy and I took a week-long trip down what is now called “The Crooked Road, a designated route in Western Virginia that takes you though many of the towns and locations where Country Music and bluegrass music first arose.  We attended the 41th annual Carter Family Fold musical gathering in Maces Spring, where AP was born, and Carter family members still live.  We traveled down the little rural road, named the AP Carter Highway, to the Mt. Vernon Methodist  Church and the Carter family burial plot, just a couple miles south of Maces Spring.  On a very hot July day, I sang the song to A.P.’s grave:

Embedded into both A.P. and Sara’s gravestones is a replica in bronze of the Victor record, “Keep on the Sunny Side”:

Sara’s grave:   (While Sara is buried here with the Carter family, she and A.P. divorced in 1936, after which she married A.P.'s first cousin, Coy Bayes.  Sara moved to California where she lived for the rest of her life.  Amazingly, she continued to perform and record as The Carter family with A.P. and Maybelle until 1943.  In the 1960s and early 1970s she had occasional reunions and made some recordings with Maybelle):

(Maybelle died in 1978 and is buried in Henderson, Tennessee, where she lived.)

Here is my recording of "Keep on the Sunny Side" (Click "Download File" to listen):

About Bob Gibson: 

 I am embarrassed to admit that it was only in the last 5 years that I fully realized the important role Bob Gibson played in the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. If you are interested, you can Google him (just make sure you don’t get directed to the famous baseball player, Bob Gibson.)  One of the many things that he was known for was introducing Joan Baez to the world.  In 1959, Gibson was a big name in the folk scene and was one of the headliners performing at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959.  Without the permission or knowledge of the festival organizers, he brought the unknown 18-year-old Joan Baez up on stage to sing two songs with him.  Here is a recording of the first song they sang:  

 Bob Gibson with Joan Baez at Newport, 1959: 

Needless to say, after that performance, the rest is history. 

I also like this YouTube video clip of Gibson performing on the TV show “Hootenanny”, from 1963.  While it is definitely a period piece (check the college students he is performing before!), the ease of his performance inspires me.

As many of you know, at the start of the global pandemic, from April until October, I decided to play my banjo and sing out to our Seattle Jones Avenue neighbors every Friday night at 7:00 PM for a half an hour at a safe distance from the top of our entryway steps.  As the pandemic had precluded our band, Clallam County, from getting together for our weekly rehearsals and cancelled our plans for a 40th Anniversary concert in November, I realized I needed some motivation to keep practicing and singing. Judy joined me on several songs over the months and did couple of kids' performances on Saturday afternoon for the neighborhood kids. Fellow bandmate Pat joined us for a few songs one Friday evening in late June.  But in July, our governor needed to impose further restrictions on public gatherings and our weekly “Sing Out the Darkness” gatherings had to end.  Judy and I continued on with “Covid Caroling” – walking around our block each Friday evening, singing two songs to those families that requested it.  But by October, the weather was changing, and it was getting darker sooner, so “Sing Out the Darkness” closed for the season. 

Since early October, I have realized that I still need to keep practicing; having a goal/deadline is a good incentive for me.   I have come up with the following idea:  Each week, by Thursday at midnight, (yeah, I know - I missed the deadline by an hour this first time out!!) my plan is to send an email to those who are interested which will have an attached recording of me singing one of one of the 79 different songs I played during our “Sing Out the Darkness” gathering.  (Now I am posting these prior emails to this blog.)

My new plan is requiring me to relearn several of the songs I sang back in the Spring.  It also is leading me to make some home-grown recordings of each of the songs in my Rube Goldberg mini-recording booth/studio that I have set up. In future weekly emails, I may include a brief paragraph about that week’s song, and at times, I might include a link or two to other versions of the song, should you be interested.  So here it is … 

I wrote this song early in the pandemic, on March 19, 2020.  It is a reworking/rip-off of a great song by Arlo Guthrie that I had recently come across, called “In Times Like These”.  Arlo’s original lyrics included a couple of verses that focused on some other issues, so, in the long tradition of the “folk process”, I rewrote some of Arlo’s lyrics to fit our current situation. (I have attached the recording of my rewrite of the song to this email.)
  Right after I recorded the song, I decided to post it to YouTube, but to do that, I needed some video content to go along with the song.  Here is a link to what I came up with.  (Looking at the video now, I am somewhat disheartened at how accurate the images were that I had selected back in March about Trump and his response to the pandemic. )

Finally, here is a link to Arlo’s original song that inspired my rewrite.  (To skip Arlo's monologue introducing the song, you can scroll ahead to 2:40 in the video.)