LooGAR'sFailsgivingDinner Wrote:
billy g Wrote:
[img][350:350]http://www.bobfranksongs.com/graphics/redneckcover.jpg[/img]
What's this all about, BG?
Bob Frank is dark country/folk singer songwriter from Memphis. He cut one record in 1972 and toured with Townes Van Zandt in the early 70's and then largely disappeared until the early '00's when he discovered his one album was a cult collector's favorite and decided to give it another go.
Jim Dickinson was good friends with him and a big fan as well. He's called Bob, "The best songwriter you've never heard." I think he's covered Bob a few times and when Bob returned to music in the 00's, Jim produced a couple of his albums. This is a compilation of some of his 00's work.
I discovered Bob from his colloboration with John Murry on the "World Without End" album which I posted about
here. I since tracked down his self titled 72 release from some blog. Its pretty great with lots of mongerish themed songs. If I ever get around to doing another country mong mix, "She Sold Her Diamond For Some Gold" from the '72 S/T album in which Bob sings about trying to talk his girl into selling her engagement ring for drug money will likely make it.
This was my first listen to the comp. I don't know that I like it as much as the other two but its good.
Here's what Jim Dickinson wrote in the liner notes:
Jim Dickinson Wrote:
I have known Bob Frank through back and forth - through up and down since the summer of '63 in Memphis when less than a dozen of us were singing folk songs in an old butcher shop in Crosstown Farmers' Marker. Bob was different. He was writing his own. Not like Bob Dylan up in Greenwich Village. Not abstract, pre-psychedelic art poems, but songs like the ones in the Lomax songbook. Songs about working-class heroes, and evil villains of the industrial North, Civil War, trian wrecks, and the old Chisholm trail. He was maybe twenty years old but his voice and style were that of a saged hillbilly hermit from Stone Country.
Bob went to Vietnam and Nashville. I don't know which was worse. You would have to ask Bob. But they were both pretty bad. We ran into each other off and on for a while - then nothing - he seemed to disappear somwhere around San Francisco. He married and raised a family, working basically as a ditch digger.
Here he is all these sordid years later, still rolling his own. There is something noble about a man whose art is unchanged after nearly half a century. Bob Frank still amazes me. Sit back, put some gin in your glass, and listen to the story-songs and Zen wisdom of Bob Frank. "Rally once again."
[img][350:350]http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_8V9yhz_3tb8/SJld6w0_PJI/AAAAAAAABHw/oa-ulFnVqvw/s400/Girls.jpg[/img]
