[We had so much fun making the first version of our Golden Biscuit teaser, we decided to expand it, with more music, to give you a better idea of what we have planned.]
If you’ve found this, you might be wondering: “What in in the world is the Golden Biscuit Hour?" So, we’re going to let you in on a little secret. When Billy & I were visiting my parents in North Carolina this Thanksgiving my Dad, Greg Hankins, and I came up with a harebrained scheme.
We were sitting around the dinner table, just basking in the glory of the holiday meal, when Dad & I started kicking around the idea of a folk music podcast. After all, we both love folk music of all kinds, and going to festivals with my Dad is how I got into the whole mess of being a traveling musician.
We were sitting in the Old Time Tent in 2002 when these two women and a big guy in bibbed overalls with an open-backed banjo took the stage. They called themselves Polecat Creek. And they blew our socks off. Have a listen.
That was Salt Sea Bound from Polecat’s first CD of the same name. Those harmonies, combined with that sweet clawhammer banjo sent shivers up my spine and then they told us that they wrote that song themselves. That’s when I thought: “This is what I want to do!"
When I heard Polecat, it took me back to the Friendly Chapel Church on Smith Ridge where I spent all of the summers of my childhood listening to Virginia Lowe sing
[Excerpt] HOLD FAST TO THE RIGHT - Virginia Lowe at the Friendly Chapel Church in 2014. You can hear the full song on our Jeni & Billy Soundcloud page.
Polecat Creek are Laurelyn Dossett, Kari Sickenberger, and Riley Baugus. They are all off doing other great things now, but they made a big, big impression on us at Merlefest. As did many other folks at that Merlefest and the ones that followed: Kim & Jim Lansford, Jake & Sarah Owen, The Avett Brothers, The Malpass Boys, Realtime Travelers, Carol Elizabeth Jones — so many great singers, so many great instrumentalists.
Excerpts from:
Billy & are so excited that we will be sharing our music at Merlefest this Spring, and sharing the stage with the likes of David Rawlings & Gillian Welch, The Wood Brothers, and John Prine.
My Merlefest conversion into a singer-songwriter put me on the track of other contemporary artists doing the same thing —people like Anna Egge, Laura Cantrell, and, especially, Rebecca Hall. Rebecca is now a dear friend and colleague. She and multi-instrumentalist Ken Anderson are Hungrytown. Have a listen:
Dad’s passion for folk music began with Arlo Guthrie’s album Hobo’s Lullaby — the first folk record — a cassette actually — he ever owned, and he was drawn from there deeper and deeper into the tradition, from Arlo to Woody to Alan Lomax’s field recordings.
Dad had Lomax’s Folk Song USA permanently checked out for all four years he spent at Richlands High School. The paperback version with the taped spine on my bookshelf has a permanent chasm marking the location of this song:
Woody's version, from the Smithsonian Folkways release Woody at 100 is almost word for word the same dong found in the Lomax book. And the ocean those whaling men traveled leads straight from Boston and New Bedford to Liverpool and a place that has become a second home to Billy and me. We tour in England every year. We love the people, the landscape, the folk clubs, and the music.
Here's a clip of Linda Harris leading the Barnsley Folk and Acoustic Club in a Yorkshire rendition of THE SUN AND THE MOON – a song written by Scotsman Bill Lowndes. Here’s a link to the lyrics for that song: http://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=25239#294471 Linda’s version is slightly different, but this will give you a start.
English and Irish folk music — traditional and contemporary — are special interests of Dad’s. A couple of years ago, he was wearing out his subscription to Spotify, cruising around for some new English folk when I blundered into Spiers & Boden’s version of Prickle-Eye Bush.
Now a great example of how you take an old folk song and bring it to life for a contemporary audience. Over the past decade these two guys have breathed new energy into English folk, whether performing as a duo, or with their eleven piece band Bellowhead. But the roots of Jon Boden energetic singing can be traced to Peter Bellamy and his 1960s folk revival colleagues The Young Tradition. And all those horns in Bellowhead’s arrangements come straight out of the silver bands you find in any English mining village.
Any ol’ ways, we want to share all of these people and their music with you. So, starting in January, we’re going to send out a new episode of the Golden Biscuit Hour every month, featuring original and traditional folk music from North America, the British Isles, Ireland, and Australia. We’ll put each two hour show on Mixcloud, a UK-based streaming service tailor-made for music cloudcasting.
You’ll be able to access Mixcloud on your computer or in apps for IOS and Android. We’ll have a website with all the information about everything you hear on the show, a Facebook page, and all the usual social media.
We have lots of other plans for the show, including a special segment each time from Billy,
so we hope you will be able to join us. For now, you can search for Golden Biscuit Hour on Facebook and like our page. That way you’ll be sure to get the word when the first edition is ready.
Until next time, here’s a hobo-wishing song from Billy & me, wishing you a great holiday. See you in 2016!
The Golden Biscuit Hour is produced by Jeni Hankins & Greg Hankins. It is edited, mixed, and mastered by Billy Kemp.
We use Evernote to keep our cloudcast notes in order because an elephant never forgets.
We use Dropbox for our record collection, to trade big files, and to keep them organized, because when Mom says the attic is full, Dropbox is there for you.
We record the Golden Biscuit Hour on our handy Zoom H2 portable recorders, because you never know where music might take you.
Nice extended podcast Jeni!
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