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MP3 Si Kahn - Threads
13 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Political Folk, COUNTRY: Country Folk
Show all album songs: Threads Songs
Details:
His new album, "Threads," is a song-cycle about cotton mills and the folks who work in them - a series of variations on the theme of "Aragon Mill" - and this return to his most familiar subject yields his best crop of songs in years.
Typical of the album is "Down On The Merrimack River." The verses are filled with sharp storytelling details about a 17-year old farm girl who followed the river down from New Hampshire to the mills of Lowell, Masschusetts, in 1846. But the chorus boasts a simple, sing-along melody and catch-phrase in the best tradition of the Carter Family. Kahn uses this approach again and again, whether singing about a restless Arkansas sharecropper on "High Cotton," a lecherous West Virginia mill owner on "In The Spinning Mill," or the Korea veterans drinking beers down at the "Moose Lodge." The vivid specifics of the verses are always balanced by the rousing universality of the chorus.
Kahn doesn''t own the world''s most handsome voice, but he works well within his limitations, and Switzerland''s top bluegrass band, the Kruger Brothers, provide strong, tasteful support. Just as Wallace Stevens wrote some of the best American poems of the last century in his spare time while working a full-time job as an insurance executive in Hartford, Connecticut, Kahn wrote some of the finest political folk songs of the 1970s and ''80s in his spare time while working a full-time job as a community organizer in Charlotte, North Carolina. This part-time approach may have lowered his profile, but it has not curtailed the quality of his art.
Geoffrey Himes
From: No Depression, November-December 2002
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