Bill LaCroix | Simpler Times
Published: March 24, 2009
Victor musician Bill LaCroix lives out of his time. Check that. Rather, he’s a time traveler, a storyteller steeped in the folk sensibility of Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and others who survived the Depression and were made stronger by it, including his Oklahoma relative and Dustbowl escapee, the poet Wilma E. McDaniel.
Besides including some of McDaniel’s poems set to music, this second effort by the longtime folk artist features some LaCroix originals that explore our nation’s past (and ruminate on its future), and a few hoppin’ traditional tunes that help establish the old-time feel.
Bare-bones arrangements populate this immaculate recording, and notable Montana musicians lend a hand, including fellow Bitterrooter and dobro player Jack Mauer, and Bozemanites Chris Cunningham and fiddle player Tom Robison.
Robison provides mournful lead on the opening number, McDaniel’s “In Memory of Old Cowboy” – a fine complement to McDaniel’s slow, measured cadence.
LaCroix is a talented historian, and echoes the themes of heartbreak and endurance and survival in this nation, and wars that steal the soul of America. Singing in his coffee-grounds baritone that sounds like it’s coming over an old radio, and providing guitar, banjo and mandolin accompaniment besides, LaCroix opines about the trappings of modern life.
He is vexed by our embrace of “dumbing-down” technology (read television and its odious electronic relatives) that has disconnected us from each other and nature (“Stories That We Sing”), and urges a return to those simpler times. Times which, although devoid of leisure, stiffened our backbones and grounded us.
He has a romantic side, though, and shows it on the traditional banjo tune, “I’m Goin’ to the West,” in which he warbles to his recalcitrant lady love to join him on the Westward-ho journey toward a better life. His own composition, “Follow Me,” is a love song in the best Maybelle Carter style; and what LaCroix calls a “quirky version” of “Sally Goodin” is prettified, romaticized, modern.
“The Curlew Maid“ brought goosebumps, then tears. It’s got LaCroix words set to his friend Shirley Jacobs’s music, which she said was inspired by the 1963 extinction of the Eskimo Curlew.
LaCroix fashioned it into a love song, wherein a female curlew, maybe the last of her kind, is looking for a mate. It’s a wistful and sweet waltz (“featherbreast love”), an ode to our continuing disregard for other species, that ends with a child reciting a list of the birds that have gone extinct since 1878. There’s just enough silence afterward to let it hit you. Wow.
LaCroix does a great version of “Deportees,” the Guthrie/Hoffman song about migrant farmworkers in California; and “Cumberland Gap” gets good old-time treatment, thanks to a version LaCroix got from an inebriated “hillbilly fiddle player” at Weiser, Idaho, during a fiddle festival.
This is a thoughtful album that weaves music and history, and makes you think. It also has the musical chops to pull it off. It’s a fine achievement in the folk tradition.
The recording was produced by Chris Cunningham and LaCroix at Basecamp Recording in Bozeman. You can hear LaCroix perform songs from the new CD with fiddler Tom Robison, 7:30 p.m. April 25 at Pilgrim Congregational Church in Bozeman; call 406-586-4123 for details.
– Mariss McTucker
