Folk, World, & Country

Crockett Sings The Valley

In 1962, Karen summoned Richard Tucker to join her in Colorado, extolling the healthier lifestyle, and plentiful gigs at Boulder folk club The Attic. Upon his arrival, the pair solidified their personal and professional relationship, riding horses in the mountains, and performing as a duo at parties and venues throughout Denver and Boulder. Stories of the spell they conjured - and rumours of tapes! - have circulated among friends and musicians who witnessed them, but until now, no recorded evidence had turned up. Shuckin' Sugar is the glorious result of three reel to reel tapes that miraculously found their way to us in November, 2018; which featured two complete shows from The Attic in January '63, and a benefit concert for The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) recorded the following February. Their gigs would often include brief solo sets from Karen and Richard, in addition to the duets, and all seven solo songs of Karen's found on the three reels are included here, as well as five duets, sequenced as close to how it all went down as humanly possible. To describe the record would take a poet, but all I can say is that unveiling a missing chapter in the Karen Dalton story - with six songs we've never heard her sing before - is cause for celebration in Delmore's world.

Here’s another choice reissue forthcoming from the Canadian label, We Are Busy Bodies – with this meeting of Motown and West African musicians – on Eboni Band’s self-titled 1980 debut album. It’s the first reissue of the album, featuring musicians such as Fred Wesley, first released more than 40 years ago. This label has hit the ground running hard with some choice picks of South African jazz and Ghanian grails recently. Eboni Band is out June 18th. Worth noting, as one or two bits from the Busy Bodies catalogue have quickly sold out on vinyl.

The album is a tour-de-force of cross continental soul and funk, an outernational classic and featuring session musicians from Motown and Ivory Coast’s Eboni Records – alongside the legendary Wesley, one of the all-time funkateers who kicked it with The J.Bs and Parliament/Funkadelic. It was produced by Motown great, Art Stewart (producer of Marvin Gaye’s Got To Give It Up and Rick James’ breakthrough album, Come Get It!) and arranged by Greg Middleton

The horns and hum of Detroit and Motown – with vocals, harmonies and traditions of West Africa (djembe, kora) – makes this record such a significant one, and was a product of a casual meeting between Motown Studios alumni Gerald Theus (who set up Eboni Records in Ivory Coast in the 1970s) and Abdoulaye Soumare, who was based in the US, but met with Gerald on a whim and a stopover in Abidjan. Theus not only convinced Soumare to stick around Abidjan, but to immediately begin work on a series of four concurrent recordings by the label’s roster of local talent. It wasn’t long before a group of musicians flew from the Ivory Coast to Los Angeles.

Motown musicians – alongside James Brown’s bandleader, Wesley – included Nolan Smith (Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder), Ernie Fields, Jr. (Rick James, Marvin Gaye) and Quentin Dennard (Aretha Franklin, BB King). Their musicianship, when combined with the production and arrangments of Stewart and Middleton, is simply irresistible.

The musicians comprising the four musical groups signed to the Ivory Coast-based Eboni Records were Mamadou Doumbia, Gun Morgan, Amadou Doukoure, Abdoulaye Soumare, Lamine Konte and Fode Drame. The album was later mastered at Motown’s Hitsville Studios.

This time, the album has been remastered by Noah Mintz of Lacquer Channel Mastering for vinyl and digital, released via We Are Busy Bodies, on 18th June.

Tracks

Cloudy Dark Blue Vinyl. Field Medic is the lo-fi folk project of Kevin Patrick. His first release on Run For Cover Records, Songs From the Sunroom, compiles material he's recorded and released over two years from a small sunroom in San Francisco which doubled as his bedroom. At eighteen, Patrick discovered the music of Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan, who changed his perspective on what a song could be and led to him developing his own style which he describes as "freak folk/post country with an emphasis on finger style guitar and lyrics."