Down that long, lonesome road
Jerome Clark | Canby, Minnesota | 10/04/2004
(5 out of 5 stars)
"This sounds about right. In this collection of traditional folk standards, Rob McNurlin reaches into the American Songbag and hands out treat after treat.
Except for a recitation -- an original Beat-style poem set to atmospheric sound effects -- on the last (hidden) track, the material will be not be novel to those who know the tradition (or, more likely, who recall the repertoires of mid-20th-Century folk revivalists). McNurlin's most immediately apparent mentor is Woody Guthrie's acolyte Ramblin' Jack Elliott, himself a large influence on the early Bob Dylan. Yet in the end, fortunately, that's simple detail; it is McNurlin's own distinctive voice that engages the attention and touches the heart.
Nothing here wearies the listener with the second-rate or frustrates with the merely imitative. Some of the selections sport happily unfamiliar verses, and others add a jaunty rockabilly kick which moves them along at just the right rate of accelerated speed. McNurlin's expressive singing is well suited to the telling of the stories, explicit or implicit, inside these songs. His extended version of the often-recorded murder ballad "Pretty Polly" turns an already grim narrative into a blacker shade of dark.
More than many practitioners, he grasps the fundamental truth of real folk music: that it only looks simple. McNurlin knows better. The old is new in his capable hands, and dead voices rise to pass their tales on to the living. It's all here: wisdom, folly, tragedy, love, hope, the beckoning road."
Track Listings (13) - Disc #1