Jayber Crow CD Release Show with The Floorbirds and Spider John Koerner at Nomad World Pub on 4/19/08

By: Carl Atiya Swanson

Jayber Crow - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

Jayber Crow’s release of their Two Short Stories LP seemed like wandering to the crossroads, a meeting of divergent paths of music under the same tent. Spider John Koerner, granddaddy of the old guard leaned over to several people trough the night to ask, mostly seriously, “What kind of music do they call this?” Apparently, it is folk music.

How does a genre define itself? The Floorbirds’ Daniel and Alyssa have invested themselves in a definitively anachronistic form of folk music. Daniel’s MySpace header reads “Help me, I’m lost. Please return me to 1932.” Their opening set was a mix of Daniel’s solo work and songs with Alyssa accompanying on mandolin and harmony. Their plaintive, straightforward songs of the farm and the working man wax nostalgic for the organizing songs of Joe Hill and mimic that form precisely, if coldly. Allen Ginsberg was already nostalgic for the Wobblies in 1956 when he wrote his poem “America” and when Daniel announced, “I learned this song from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot,” it seemed more like an attempt to establish his bona fides as opposed to it sing for the masses.

The crowd of family and friends who had packed the Nomad needed little encouragement to gather in as Pete Nelson and Zach Hawkins of Jayber Crow played. Nelson joked that people should come in close, as “we like it quiet.” Listening to Hawkins sing—he takes lead vocals and rhythm guitar as Nelson provides mandolin and harmonica accompaniment and harmony—there is warmth and graciousness bestowed by youth spent on the farm and growing up around the folk music of church potlucks and summer camps.

Nelson and Hawkins are mostly folk by virtue of using a mandolin and their acoustic guitar structure, but they do sing fierce choruses together. Grassroots, unarguably, they have built their fan-base in the places where the folk explosion of the ‘60s took root; touring college campuses, coffee houses and porch parties. Their first plugged-in show of the tour; they were wrapping 10 days of touring colleges across the Midwest. Their pop-inflected songs have a bent towards local history, poems about the ecosystem and biblical lamentations of modern living. Songs like “Devil and the Desert” and “Song of the Jack Pine” steer towards topical songwriting, but unlike the protest songs of Joan Baez, these are ruminations, as opposed to answers.

Spider John Koerner - Photo by Stacy Schwartz

Nelson said that he and Hawkins have been engaging in a Postal Service type collaboration over the last year as Hawkins moved to Indianapolis last summer. The analogy extends beyond a working method. Encore songs “Eugene, Oregon” and “Of Indiana” from their The Farmer and the Nomad EP took direct cues from acoustic Death Cab for Cutie, right down to Ben Gibbard’s inflections. Afterwards, Nelson called their songs “indie-folk,” and when these songs had the crowd singing together, these were the most powerful moments of the show. The unity of Nelson and Hawkins’ voices was a beautiful reminder why the words “folk” and “music” are inherently plural.

Spider John Koerner wrapped the night, a man who means every note he plays and is dead serious when he talks about the old bar halls where he got his education. It’s blues and folk, big hands moving across thin necks, a disappearing piece of America. Those bars are no longer around and the rambling men must still exist, but the history is becoming fragile. What stays the same and is still (and evermore) powerful is the desire of people to sing together and play music to joy. This is why The Mad Ripple Hootennany can seem like church, why acoustic shows bring people out and why the widening swing of “folk,” with all its specifying prefixes and suffixes, still holds sway. As Louis Armstrong said, “All music is folk music. I ain’t never heard a horse sing a song.”

Location Info: Nomad World Pub
Artist Info: Jayber Crow, Spider John Koerner, The Floorbirds

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