Plain folk

The Holy Modal Rounders and Martin Carthy

by Douglas Wolk

Steve Weber and Peter Stampfel

Peter Stampfel and Steve Weber have been abusing acoustic instruments together as the Holy Modal Rounders for a long time, and Stampfel figured they deserved a theme song, so he recently wrote one called "We Are the Rounders." As usual, his voice sounds as if it were about to give out as he croaks and cackles about being in a band who made their first record the day before JFK was killed, but he somehow makes it to the far end of the song. The Rounders were the daffiest and most charming of the '60s folk-revivalists -- the ones who noticed that the musicians who made the dusty old 78s they loved were having a great old time and so preserved their spirit rather than their letter.

The Rounders continue to record and play in public intermittently, and they've just had their last quarter-century or so commemorated with an anthology, I Make a Wish for a Potato (on Rounder -- the back cover notes that "we kind of named our company after them"). The artists are listed as the Holy Modal Rounders and Friends, since a bunch of Potato comes not from Rounders records but from their collaborators Michael Hurley and the late Jeffrey Fredericks. The linchpin of that whole mid-'70s scene is Have Moicy!, a freewheeling 1976 album that's credited to Michael Hurley, the Unholy Modal Rounders, and Jeffrey Fredericks & the Clamtones; it's still in print on Rounder and is generally acknowledged to be the most fun record they, or pretty much anyone, ever made.

I Make a Wish for a Potato is a curious cross-section of the Rounders' work. Attesting to their ability to recognize a great old song when they hear it, the CD conveys Stampfel's free-associative wit ("Time is on my side/Slime is on my tide/I ride my time slide all the time, I'm lazy") and the euphoric enthusiasm of their fiddle and guitar and banjo playing. What it misses is their delirious anarchy -- the moments when everything shouldn't hold together and does anyway, like a coin that lands on its edge and stays there. The liner notes are a little weird too -- they'll make sense only to people who know the Rounders story already, and they praise Michael Hurley for writing "I'm Getting Ready To Go," which Riley Puckett had recorded before Hurley was born.

Weber is something of a wild card, so for the last eight years or so Stampfel has had another on-and-off duo, the Du-Tels, a collaboration with singer/guitar virtuoso Gary Lucas that's not all that dissimilar to the Rounders (with whom Lucas has been sitting in lately). The Du-Tels' long-delayed debut, No Knowledge of Music Required (Knitting Factory Works), was planned as a children's record, and a kid brought up on it would probably turn out very strange but very cool -- you don't often run across an album with high-energy covers of both Michelle Shocked and "Teletubbies Say Eh-Oh."

YOU COULD THINK OF the extraordinary singer and guitarist Martin Carthy as the British equivalent of Stampfel and Weber -- the voice that never left the folk revival. Where the Rounders' "folk" was American string bands and silliness, though, Carthy's was the British ballad tradition. Like the Rounders, he's had some near-misses with fame: Simon and Garfunkel's arrangement of "Scarborough Fair" was distinctly inspired by his, and the folk-rock group Steeleye Span had a couple of UK hit albums during his tenure with the band in the early '70s. Mostly, though, he's barely known outside folk circles, where he's rabidly adored. His daughter Eliza Carthy currently has an American label; he doesn't.

The new boxed set The Carthy Chronicles (on the British label Free Reed) is an astonishing summation of his work over roughly the same timespan as the Rounders' career. The sequence is thematic rather than chronological, with a disc apiece devoted to his best-known material, his collaborations with other musicians, his versions of modern songs, and his readings of traditional ballads. That obscures the major stylistic shifts he's made every few years -- quite a feat for a traditionalist -- but allows for some illuminating sequences, like three radically different takes on a begging song, "The Wren," followed by Steeleye Span's ballad "Hunting the Wren" and a juicy parody of it, "Hunting the Cutty Wren." The most pleasant surprise is that, as with the Rounders, there's no dropoff in quality over time. Carthy's guitar playing -- pin-sharp modal fingerpicking -- is a constant joy, and his singing has arguably improved.