In 1941, on some of his first recordings, 22-year-old
Pete Seeger
joined with the other members of the
Almanac Singers
to perform union songs on the album
Talking Union and Other Songs
. Forty-five years later, a 67-year-old
Seeger
teamed up with
Jane Sapp
and
Si Kahn
to record a new album for
Flying Fish Records
in the same spirit and even using some of the same songs. Most of the disc was recorded at the studio of
Fred Hellerman
(like
Seeger,
a former member of
the Weavers
) in Connecticut with a small band including
Hellerman
on synthesizer,
Arlen Roth
on guitar, and
John Miller
on bass, accompanying
's banjo and 12-string guitar,
Sapp
's piano, and
Kahn
's acoustic guitar. But a few tracks (
"Talking Union,"
"I'm Gonna Be an Engineer
,"
"De Colores,"
"Joe Hill"
) come from a live recording of
alone made at the People's Church in Chicago. On those songs,
is his usual song-leader self, interacting with an audience. But the studio tracks, on which he uncharacteristically has to deal with other musicians, are the most interesting. As producer
Bruce Kaplan
acknowledges in his liner notes, this is not "a smooth record" or "a sophisticated record," and what he means is that the players are more concerned with getting their messages of labor solidarity across than in coming up with cooperative arrangements or doing a lot of takes. It sounds like
Kahn,
who has a good conversational tenor, and
, with her soulful wail, are, like
, accustomed to performing by themselves, and the backup musicians usually seem to be winging it. But this just gives the album a frisky charm. It's as if a bunch of workers who can sing and play happen to have gotten together to swap union songs. And so they do, chronicling the unfair practices of corporate bosses and the struggles of employees to get fair pay and working conditions.
the Almanacs
made these points nearly a century earlier, and sound perfectly relevant today. ~ William Ruhlmann