One of the things that struck me about the categories I’m covering for the GRAMMY Awards is how many tribute albums are nominated this year:
For Best Traditional Folk Music Album:
- Singing Through The Hard Times: A Tribute To Utah Phillips (various artists)
- High Wide & Handsome: The Charlie Poole Project by Loudon Wainwright III
For Best Contemporary Folk Music Albums
- Townes by Steve Earle
So, three of the ten albums nominated in the Folk categories are tribute albums and two of them are one-person tribute projects as opposed to various artist projects. Even more surprisingly, the Steve Earle tribute to Townes Van Zandt is nominated in the category typically featuring singer/songwriters performing their own work. One of the dividing lines between “traditional” and “contemporary” folk is that traditional folkies often perform other people’s songs and contemporary folkies perform their own songs.
Only one tribute album has won this category since it began with the 29th GRAMMY Awards (1986) , and that was the first year, when A Tribute to Steve Goodman won. Cover albums have won this category, most notably Nanci Griffith’s Other Voices, Other Rooms and Johnny Cash’s American Recordings (both landmark albums in their own way), but no tribute album has won this category in over 20 years.
The artists being honored with nominated tributes this year are all noted songwriters and performers who never received the level of popular success that they deserved while they were alive. Townes Van Zandt was a hard-living troubadour whose songs were admired and often covered by first-rank popular artists (Emmylou Harris, Cowboy Junkies, Guy Clark, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson), but whose destructive lifestyle struggles with heroin and alcoholism often derailed his own attempts to achieve stardom. He died in 1997 at age 52, and has since been the subject of several tribute albums.
Van Zandt was a mentor to Steve Earle, and Earle is famously quoted as saying “Townes Van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world, and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.” One of the major differences between the two, though, is that Earle got sober and found a new level of success, while Van Zandt never did, achieving “legend” status only after his death.
Charlie Poole was the banjo player for the North Carolina Ramblers in the late 1920s and is credited with recording the first major country hit. According to Wikipedia, “Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down Blues” sold 102,ooo copies at a time when there were only an estimated 600,000 phonographs in the entire Southeast of the US. His North Carolina Ramblers pioneered the string band and “high lonesome” sounds that later manifested themselves as staples in country and bluegrass music, yet he is not well-known to average music fans today. Like Van Zandt, Poole was known for his hard living, and died of a heart attack at age 39 after a long alcoholic bender.
As for why Wainwright chose to honor Poole, he says this in an article in New York Magazine: “Well, he was such a remarkable musician, singer, banjo player, and performer — if you care about country music and bluegrass music, you know he was a pioneer. And one of the interesting things about him is that he was a pioneer that was overlooked. There were other entities like the Carter Family and Jimmy Rodgers who are much more well known and famous, but Poole for some strange reason was overlooked. We decided to get into that stuff and do a tribute record.”
Utah Phillips, on the other hand, was best-known as a troubadour, labor organizer and mentor to many within the folk music community, and died in 2008 at age 73. He was a proud member of the Wobblies (International Workers of the World) and spent years riding the rails. His songs were recorded by many artists, including Emmylou Harris, Flatt and Scruggs and Levon Helm. He was noted as a magnificent and compelling storyteller, telling stories from his remarkable life, with his concerts often containing more of his engaging stories than actual songs. He was introduced to a younger audience in his later life when he recorded with Ani DiFranco in the 1990s.
The purpose of tribute albums is not only to pay tribute to a great or under-appreciated artist, but also to encourage fans to seek out the original recordings. In all three of these cases, folk music fans would be well-rewarded to track down recordings by any of these great artists, and it would not surprise me to see any of these albums win their category and bring even more exposure to these great artists.
