MARTHA REDBONE ROOTS PROJECT
The Garden of Love: Songs of William Blake
Blackfeet Productions 93001

www.martharedbone.com/
 

With the knife guitar slashes’ ominous undertones that open this disc, we know that long-ago London’s bard, artist and mystic William Blake (1757-1827) might have found a home in the rustic hollows of Appalachia. Blake never visited the New World but still could write:

Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me
I was born a slave but I go to be free.

An excerpt from “Why Should I Care for the Men of Thames,” which Redbone opens and closes with Native American chanting.

Folkies have repeatedly turned to Blake’s free-spirited poetry. Back in 1965, the East Village’s erudite neopunks The Fugs did two of his pieces on The Fugs’ First Album. A collaboration with Peter Schickele (AKA P.D.Q. Bach), Joan Baez’s 1967 Baptism brought baroque backup to “London” and, on its expanded CD reissue, “The Angel.” Greg Brown devoted Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1986) to Blake’s work.

Yes, his poetry is on the Internet, but still it was thoughtful of Martha to include a lyric sheet on her Blake CD, where musical arranger John McEuen takes a multitude of string instruments far deeper into the back woods than he went during his years with Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.

Part black and part Native American, Redbone calls on her ancestors’ styles – especially gospel – in her interpretations, shifting from sweet soprano on one poem to gutsy alto on another. When she lingers and quavers on the final line of “A Poison Tree,” an intriguing possibility crosses my mind: Could Ralph Stanley too do William Blake?

— Bruce Sylvester