Search - Mike Seeger :: True Vine

Lovely, mysterious sounds from the lost America

Jerome Clark | Canby, Minnesota | 05/25/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Mike Seeger has been immersed in traditional Southern music for so long that you can hardly call him a "revivalist" anymore. His role in the history of the music is by now so large that he is, no doubt about it, a significant link in the tradition. It has become mere detail that he was city-born and -bred, raised in a family of urban intellectuals. Most artists with this background turn to folk music and try to modernize it. Seeger does the opposite. In his singing, playing, and arranging, he makes old songs seem even older. In his performance, for example, the venerable blues tune "Spoonful," probably created in the early 20th Century, sounds early 19th Century; even if, strictly speaking, we don't really know how American folk music sounded then, Seeger's reading is surely a good approximation. Seeger reimagines "Sail Away, Ladies," a fiddle-and-banjo song from middle Tennessee usually associated with Uncle Dave Macon, as an autoharp-and-quills piece. The effect is almost eerie, and almost unbearably beautiful. Even if you think you know American folk music, Seeger always surprises you with obscure songs and tunes, or familiar ones with unexpected lyrics and melodies, often played on antique instruments set to unusual (or forgotten) tunings. As you hear it, you're taken away to a lost America of strange but weirdly compelling music. True Vine is a stunning achievement -- brilliant, deeply moving, and not quite like anything you've ever heard."

Simple Greatness

Tony Thomas | SUNNY ISLES BEACH, FL USA | 01/28/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Mike Seeger is a great man. He's also a modest, almost quiet spoken man. I was lucky enough to buy this CD directly from him.



All along the nearly 50 years he has been playing, recording, training, inspiring, collecting, writing, and gathering people around this music, he's had a simple dedication to the real people who created this music, to white and Black working people of the South and places therabouts. Mike has used the term, home made music, front porch music, back porch music to describe the music he heard and later captured with his tape recorder in teh 1950s and early 60s. That is what this is, though the person making it at home is a master.





This is music made at home and that has what he has always tried to capture in his field recordings, in the collections he put out, in his work with the New Lost City Ramblers and the Strange Creek Singers, but above all on his solo albums. Sometimes his choice and variety of instruments leads us to renditions that are not as much of a performance as we become sadly used to even on old time music cds, but an iteration of the song being played in the old traditions as it might have been in somebody's living room or front porch 50 60 70 years ago.





Indeed some of the renditions here like "Did You Ever See the Devil Uncle Joe" done on the Jews Harp or Sail Away done with autoharp contrast with versions Mike recorded decades ago with the NLCR gives us a more personal, more home made sound than even the string band music.





Once of the more interesting things on the album are the Coo Coo Bird, Spoonful, and Shout in Jerusalem, where Mike shows his growing interest in African American banjo styles as well as his ability to bring gourd banjo playing to life.



Vonnegut once wrote about how television eliminated the recognition of the fellow in the neighborhood who could whistle or do a card trick, or could sing a few old country songs as someone who got listened to, celebrated, and taken around. This album is a celebration of when that person is an old time musician with a guitar, a fiddle, an autoharp, a quill, a banjo or a jews harp."

True, indeed

Pharoah S. Wail | Inner Space | 09/16/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This one was on my Christmas list last year and I have been enjoying it ever since. At first I felt it wasn't as good as his other recent solo Smithsonian/Folkways disc, Southern Banjo Sounds, but I think that was due to my being in such a banjo mood all the time for a while there, and True Vine not being all banjos. From banjo to quills & shakers, fiddle, fiddle & harmonica, solo vocals (just one track), guitar, autoharp, etc... pretty much everything from the Mike Seeger universe is represented here. Represented very well, I might add.



I have to give special thanks to Mr. Seeger for making mention in the liner-notes of who inspired this version of Spoonful. If you have (or even if you don't) the excellent Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia disc and want to hear more of the various unfortunately-not-often-recorded black styles of banjo playing, I have to recommend the disc mentioned in the liner-notes. Will Slayden: African-American Banjo Songs from West Tennessee. It's a nice little disc with almost no distribution and is not available here. If you want to hear it for yourself, go to [...]. That is the site for the Tennessee Folklore Society. They released it. I don't know why they have never listed the disc on their site but trust me, it is still for sale. It wasn't listed on the site when I bought it, either. Just e-mail the address given lower down on that main page and ask about it.



I should think most any old-timey music fan will love True Vine, as it is packed full of great tunes and masterful performances. Even when Mike plays an arrangement or combines two instruments you probably wouldn't have thought of yourself, he still always manages to make it sound and feel as if it's 150-years-old."