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Top Ten tracks as voted by the listeners of the Online Folk Festival

Artist - "Song" - Album
1. Dave Sharp - "It Ain't Long for the Day" - Hard Travellin
2. Hannah Blaylock & Edens Edge - "California" - Lights of Home
3. Mark Heard - "We Have Let Freedom Ring" - Hammers & Nails
4. Cathie Ryan - "Oro Mo Bhaidin" - Cathie Ryan
5. Jerry Douglas - "From Ankara to Izmir" - Skip, Hop & Wobble
6. Greg Brown - "Downtown" - If I Had Known
7. Lynn Miles - "Unravel" - Unravel
8. Toni Price - "Cats and Dogs" - Sol Power
9. The Pentangle - "Sally Go Round The Roses" - Basket of Light
10 (tie). Silly Wizard - "The Queen of Argyll" - The Best Of Silly Wizard
10 (tie). Friction Farm - "Whole Heart Broken" - Believe
10 (tie). Dolly Parton - Travelin' Thru - TransAmerica Soundtrack
10 (tie). Cheryl Wheeler - Alice - Defying Gravity

How can you participate in determining the top tracks? Listen to the Online Folk Festival with any of the Live365 players and click thumbs up or thumbs down on the tunes you like and don't like. It's that simple - Live365 tallies all the votes.

Labels: Online Folk Festival

From the upcoming CD from Jeffrey Foucault, Ghost Repeater:

"But the wage of sin don't adjust for inflation
It's a buyer's market when you sell your soul."

"Ghost Repeater", Jeffrey Foucault, Signature Sounds Records
Now back to your regularly scheduled program.

My personal Top Ten for the first quarter of 2006. These are all albums I have received in the first quarter of 2006, though I don't think all have reached their general release date.

1) Railroad Earth: Elko - These guys may be the best currently working live band from New Jersey (yes - they may be better than those other guys). Their ability to play bluegrass, rock and country stylings, often within the same song, and their instrumental virtuosity are impressive.

2)Brooks Williams: Blues and Ballads - Brooks Williams has created an impressive collection of covers here, mixing traditional blues, jazz standards, and fiddle tunes, all restyled with Williams' world class fingerstyle guitar picking and his James Taylor-esque vocals. Brooks Williams is the complete package. Why he's not a star is beyond me.

3) Chuck Brodsky: Tulips for Lunch - Chuck Brodsky may be the most engaging storyteller working in folk music today. His stories range from the amusing to the poignant, with subject matters as diverse as baseball players on death row, undependable taxi drivers, circus elephants and their stupid handlers, and the general untruthfulness of US President #43. Each Chuck Brodsky albums seems to be better than the last one.

4) KT Tunstall: Eye to the Telescope - I was very impressed with this artist after hearing her interviewed on Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon, and I went out and bought the album. I like the way she's blending folk, pop and rock stylings.

5) Mark Erelli : Hope and Other Casualties - Another singer/songwriter whose albums are getting progressively better. It's no accident that the cover of this album is an homage to Dylan, because this album is very Dylanesque - a little personal, a little political. And while several songs do chronicle Erelli's disappointment with the way things are going (hence the title) he title of the album, he does offer an album of pragmatic hope in "The Only Way"

"So I'm gonna love
And I'm gonna believe
And I'm gonna dream
But I'm gonna roll up my sleeve
And give everything until there's nothing left to give.
That's the only way I know how to live."

6) Diana Jones: My Remembrance of You - The first thing that catches you about Diana Jones is her distinctive voice, in the same way that Iris DeMent and Gillian Welch have distinctive voices. The voice is so overwhelmingly fantastically suited to this music that it took me a couple times through this CD to realize just how well written the songs are. They sound like they came straight out of Appalachia, but Jones wrote them all. If you like Gillian Welch or Iris DeMent, or just great old-timey sounding music, go buy this album.

7) Tom Russell: Love and Fear - It's always exciting when Tom Russell releases an album completely consisting of originals. This album does not disappoint, full of the storytelling, wit and pathos that is a Tom Russell album.

8) Austin & Elliott: 13 Songs Plus - Totaling 21 songs, singer/songwriter Chris Elliott and his singing partner Lisa Austin have put together an impressive collection of acoustic folk. It's just two voices and an acoustic guitar, but the songs are impressive, particularly the mythic folk ballad "Blackwater Dam," which has a timeless quality difficult to achieve.

9) Laura Cortese: Even the Lost Creek - This album is a nice mix of acoustic-oriented singer/songwriter material and Cortese displaying some impressive fiddling. It also features two previously unreleased tunes by Josh Ritter.

10) The Queensberry Rules: Black Dog and Other Stories - Some of the best folk music is made by artists who write songs that reflect their surroundings, and this English band continues to do this admirably. Tackling subjects like small town decay ("Sinking Town") , pretenders to the throne ("Perkin Warbeck") and unrequited love among seasonal migrant workers ("The Herring Girl"), with warm, acoustic arrangements, this band deserves a much wider audience in the folk community. This album has not yet been released (but you can hear it on the Online Folk Festival).

Labels: Reviews

One of the cool features of the Online Folk Festival is that listeners have the ability to rate their favorite tracks. Based entirely on listener feedback, here are the current Top Ten tracks, as rated by Online Folk Festival listeners over the last 30 days:

Artist - "Song" - Album
1. Jerry Douglas, Russ Barenberg & Edgar Meyer - "From Ankara to Izmir" - Skip, Hop & Wobble
2. Magnolia Sisters - "Dedans le Sude de la Louisiane" - Chers Amis
3. Friction Farm - "Whole Heart Broken" - Believe
4. Fairground Attraction - "Don't Be A Stranger" - KAWASAKI Live In Japan
5. Dolly Parton - "Travelin' Thru" - TransAmerica Soundtrack
6. Joel Rafael Band - "Your Sandal Strings" - Woodyboye: Songs of Woody Guthrie (And Tales Worth Telling) Volume II
7. Jan Krist - "Decapitated Society" - Decapitated Society
8. Railroad Earth - "Elko" - Elko
9. KT Tunstall - "Black Horse and The Cherry Tree" - Eye To The Telescope
10. Kieran Kane and Kevin Welch - "Jersey Devil" - You Can't Save Everybody

Help select the next Top Ten by rating songs you like and don't like using the Live365 players when you listen to the Online Folk Festival.

Labels: Online Folk Festival