Adam Hill
Album: Old Paint
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.adamhillmusic.com

An independent folk and roots artists from British Columbia, Hill is what you might call a recomposer. Which is to say that, while he records traditional folk songs, he gives them new chords and lyrics with the aim of making them relevant for the present day. I'm not sure that the Carthys and Watersons of this world would agree that traditional songs aren't relevant in the original forms, but I'm equally sure they'd appreciate Hill's 'new-timey' approach.

Of the 12 cuts here, I suspect most will only be familiar half of them, and, even then, Hill's arrangements and readings might initially make them less immediately recognisable, case in point being the sparse percussive (he turned his guitar into a dulcimer - or dulcitar - by attaching paperclips and hitting it with chopsticks) Three Hundred Miles, which is essentially the evergreen 500 Miles, just 200 miles shorter and with different words to the same sentiments.

Other popular selections revisited include The Cuckoo, the use of trilling recorder recalling the song's British origins within Appalachian folk setting, a spooked All The Pretty Horses with its deliberately dissonant guitar and single plucked string, a rework of Cindy (better known as Get Along Home Cindy) with a nifty fingerpicked solo, but without any mention of apples and in which the girl in question has no intention of marrying her suitor, and relatively faithful takes on Down By The Riverside (albeit with a mandolin interpolation of When The Saints Go Marching In and some variations on what he's not gonna study no more) and an acoustic waltz through Tex Ritter's Rye Whiskey.

Talking of Ritter, he also recorded a version of the old cowboy tune Goodbye Old Paint, an instrumental version of which ends the album. It's not the only instrumental. The classic reel cum hornpipe, Soldier's Joy gets a lively mandolin treatment with the usually more predominant fiddle playing a supporting role, while Fortune is a fingerpicked duel between guitar and mandolin.

I've not come across the latter and the three remaining numbers are equally obscure. Bentonville Blues (interestingly also recorded under the same title by Lisa Mann) is an almost jug band feel version of Winnsboro Cottonmill Blues (likely dating from around the 1930s), a song about wage slave culture on which Hill creates percussion using nickels and dimes. Likewise, the rough, world weary waltzing Burleson County Farewell is a rewritten version of "Fare Thee Well" (or "Dink's Song"), a song relating to the migrant workers on the Brazo River levees project in 1912 (which breached and flooded the following year) learned by John Lomax from a woman named Dink, while the strummed, harmonica-blowing The Stampede Trail isn't about the Alaskan hiking trail featured in Sean Penn's film, Into The Wild, about Christopher McCandless, but a rework of cowboy storysong The Trail to Mexico about those who joined the 1896 Yukon gold rush searching for a better life and wound up on their uppers. I'm not sure that every one of them "is probably on some dusty Folkways record", but Hill's adaptations certainly warrant being added to the archives

Mike Davies