Review: Joan Baez / Bill Wood / Ted Alevizos - Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square (1959)
Tracks: 1) On The Banks Of The Ohio; 2) O What A Beautiful City; 3) Sail Away Ladies; 4) Black Is The Color; 5) Lowlands; 6) What You Gonna Call Your Pretty Baby; 7) Kitty (w. Bill Wood); 8) So Soon In The Morning (w. Bill Wood); 9) Careless Love (w. Bill Wood); 10) Le Cheval Dans La Beignoire (Bill Wood); 11) John Henry (Bill Wood); 12) Travelin’ Shoes (Bill Wood); 13) The Bold Soldier (Bill Wood); 14) Walie Walie (Ted Alevizos); 15) Rejected Lover (Ted Alevizos); 16) Astrapseni (Ted Alevizos); 17) Lass From The Low Country (Ted Alevizos); 18) Don’t Weep After Me (w. Bill Wood & Ted Alevizos).
REVIEW
For most people, Joan’s recording career probably starts in 1960, with the release of her proper self-titled debut LP on the Vanguard label. However, if one has any interest at all to dig a little deeper, there is no reason to ignore this curious little historical artifact — even if it was never thought worthy of a proper CD release (Discogs lists a truncated issue from 2012 which only includes Joan’s solo and collaborative tracks, erasing the other two guys’ solo efforts, which is a bit insulting and sort of misses the point of the record altogether), but in the modern world, this is really no longer a problem, as you can probably locate a ripped vinyl digital copy on the Web in half an hour’s time.
This album, recorded in some dark, well-isolated cellar around May 1959 and semi-officially issued on Joan and her friends’ own «Veritas Records» label, actually predates Joan’s long-term association with Greenwich Village; at the time, she was actually living in Boston, where her father had a faculty position at MIT, and although she did briefly attend Boston University, her interest in music and in political activism was seemingly much stronger than her interest in getting a college degree. I suppose that the chief reason for this album to have appeared at all was promotional — I mean, she had to have something under her belt to be allowed to perform at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1959, which more or less launched her proper career — yet, much to my surprise, I found myself enjoying it, let’s say, much to the same extent that I typically enjoy a Joan Baez record; and the collaborative side of it is exceptionally welcome, since I can usually handle Joan only in small doses, and the Joan dose on Folksingers ’Round Harvard Square is just perfect for me.
Of Joan’s two friends on this album, relatively little is known, since they disappeared off the musical radar fairly quickly. Bill Wood is today probably far more familiar to the scientific circles, as he is a biology professor with a serious pedigree involving a whole slew of universities; ironically, his principal contribution to the world of music was giving birth to Chris and Oliver Wood — The Wood Brothers, much revered in the world of jazz music (Chris is also one of the founding members of Medeski Martin & Wood, the just-as-revered avant-funk-jazz-prog-whatever combo). Ted Alevizos, a young student of Greek descent, stayed on a bit longer, recording a couple of albums for various small folk labels on which he sang and interpreted traditional Greek folk songs, then disappeared from the music business just as well (I found an obituary from 2009, from which it may be understood that he stayed on at Harvard, teaching Greek and other courses and doing library work; his only specific achievement to be remembered is apparently helping smuggle Mikis Theodorakis’ score for Costa-Gavras "Z" movie out of Greece in 1968!).
Clearly, even at this early date there was no question about who was the crown jewel in the trio: Joan dominates the record, singing six songs on her own and three more in a duet with Wood; then Wood and Alevizos get only four solo numbers each, and then there’s one last number on which all three sing in unison (yet Joan’s voice still lilts high and wide above the two others). Technically, Wood is the weakest of them all, with a rather ordinary set of vocal cords; Alevizos has an impressive Greek crooning voice, but with a bit less personality than Baez. Even so, the contrast between the three is enjoyable — Joan Baez, the «Madonna» of Holy Light and Eternal Beauty; Wood, with a humble, slightly trickster-ish vocal tone that makes him feel a bit like the grinning jester in the Queen’s retinue; and Alevizos, the sentimental Court Troubadour in the same retinue. Three very different styles of delivery which, in between themselves, are obviously more representative of the late 1950s’ folk scene across Ivy League colleges than any one of them on its own.
The barely 18-year old Joan Baez here is already quite the Joan Baez we all know, love and/or hate — the girl with the powerhouse angelic voice who sings each note in each song as if she were graduating musical school with God himself presiding in the commission. Her selection alternates mainly between Appalachian ballads and spirituals; her tone never varies, be it the murder horror of ‘The Banks Of The Ohio’ or the visions of God’s transcendental beauty in ‘Oh What A Beautiful City’; her steady and well-practiced guitar runs carry each song from start to finish without any notable deviations or experiments (compare her rendition of ‘Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair’, for instance, with Nina Simone’s performance of the same song At Town Hall the very same year — the latter is like an action-packed Hollywood movie in comparison). But with six good, classic songs stretching over sixteen minutes, this slice of formal beauty is perfectly acceptable; I am happy to say that, by the time Bill Wood comes in for his duets, Joan has not even begun to properly annoy or irritate my ears, and that’s a big achievement.
The duets in question are certainly nowhere near as weird as all those times when Joan would duet with Dylan — Bill Wood has a far more «normal» voice, and he does not have Dylan’s wicked penchant for constantly trying to throw his partner off key — but the mix is still pleasant, and the selection of material is not totally predictable: ‘Kitty’ is a uniquely appearing ballad, marked as «South African Folksong» (no idea where they really unearthed it from), and ‘So Soon In The Morning’ is also a new creation, concocted by Joan and Bill from several 19th century spirituals and featuring quite an admirable vocal weave for its fast tempo, if any extra proof was needed that these guys took their cellar-recording business seriously.
Wood’s solo section on Side B starts out really weirdly — perhaps he thought that it was necessary to compensate for Baez’ complete lack of humor straight away, which he does with ‘Le Cheval Dans La Beignoire (original orthography retained —G.S.)’, singing a silly anecdote about a horse in the bathtub in French while also politely offering a complete spoken translation in English before the song. I don’t know where he took it from; hopefully, Georges Brassens never sang anything of the kind. On its own, it’s just a joke; in the context of the album, it’s a nice defusing of the seriousness of Side A, followed by Wood’s similarly lightweight, less-than-reverential retellings of ‘John Henry’ (which includes some really fast and fluent acoustic picking, by the way — Big Bill Broonzy might have rated this an A) and two other ballads (no spirituals).
Finally, Alevizos steps in with his Mediterranean operatic tenor voice; this is really not my thing, but, again, it is at least curious to be able to diversify the experience in such an out-of-the-blue manner. He mostly lends this tenor voice to the same sentimental Anglo-Saxon ballads as Joan did (‘Lass From The Low Country’, etc.), but one of the songs (‘Astrapseni’) is a Greek folk tune delivered in the native tongue of Alevizos’ original homeland (I assume that he was a second-generation immigrant, since his Greek seems to have a bit of an English accent and his English betrays no Greek); thus we throw in a bit of «world flavor» as well, making the record into a veritable mini-Odyssey of styles, from Scotland to the Appalachians to France and over to Greece, before the three singers finally come together in a joint, spirited rendition of ‘Don’t Weep After Me’ — on which, amusingly, the two male singers’ voices kind of merge into one, while Baez obviously maintains her own identity: once again, the Queen rises high and mighty over her collective retinue.
True to the message of that last song, the album has long since been dead and buried, and nobody ever really wept after it, except for a curious incident when in 1963, on the heels of Joan’s rise to national fame, it was re-released (with a truncated song list in changed order) by the short-lived Squire Records under the title of The Best Of Joan Baez (!!!) and even managed to chart before Joan had it removed from the shelves through legal action. That weird bit of sordid business practice aside, the record is still a curious cultural artifact — after all, not a lot of people made «indie» albums like that back in 1959, let alone having three such different individual styles on a single one of them. If you really love Joan Baez, this is totally recommended — as I said, she already comes across as a fully formed and self-confident folk singer — and if you really don’t, well, just think of it as a souvenir of what all those young people were really doing on campus back in 1959 (correct answer: locking themselves down in a basement to sing ‘Oh What A Beautiful City’).