The Haden Triplets – The Family Songbook
Thirty Tigers/Trimeter Records – 7 February 2020
Born in New York and raised in L.A., Petra, Rachel and Tanya Haden are the daughters of 50s jazz legend and Ornette Coleman sidesman bassist Charlie Haden, their harmonies having been lent to albums ranging from Beck and Green Day to Bill Frisell and The Decemberists. They also have their own career as a close harmony Americana trio, this being their second album, the follow-up to their 2014 self-titled debut, that, among others, includes contributions by pedal-steel player Greg Leisz, Don Was on Hammond bass pedals, Canned Heat’s late bassist Larry Taylor, and guitarists Bill Frisell, Doyle Bramhall II and producer Woody Jackson.
They don’t write their own material, although brother Josh, who fronts Spain, does contribute the slow waltzing, resonator-drenched Every Time I Try, playing bass on a number originally included on the soundtrack to Wim Wenders’ 1997 film The End of Violence, but their choice of songs to interpret is both apposite and eclectic.
They open in traditional territory with a sparse, five minute plus a reading of Wayfaring Stranger, spooked, echoey harmonies coloured by minimal piano notes, spectral desert nights guitar and rumbling, skittering percussion. It’s followed in turn by the even longer old-time sounding Who Will You Love with its keening pedal steel, brushed snare and a melody reminiscent of Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain. Musing on mortality and those left behind, it’s the first of four recently discovered songs written by their grandfather, family patriarch and singer on the Haden Family radio variety show, Carl E. Haden, in his 20s during the Great Depression.
The songs were gifted to the sisters by their uncle Carl Haden Jr., who had recovered his father’s sheet music and songbooks, such as Favorites of the Haden Family, and also include the joyous funeral brass-coloured homesick waltz-time shuffle Ozark Moon, Memories of Will Rogers, published in 1936 in tribute to the Oklahoma-born Cherokee celebrity cowboy, writer and film star who had perished in a plane crash the previous July, and, co-written by his obscure country-and-western singer partner Ernest Harvey, the old-timey There’s a Little Grey Mother Dreaming which sounds exactly as you might expect. Complete with whistling solo.
Dating back almost a century before that, Flee As A Bird, delivered as almost a slow Appalachian-tinted mazurka, comes from the 1842 Northern Harp, a collection of hymnals and religious songs collected or written by Mary Stanley Bunce Palmer Dana Shindler, the daughter of a South Carolina Congregationalist minister, and which remains her most enduring composition. Also drawing on the hymnal tradition, they offer a wonderful reverb feedback and harmonium drone-accompanied slow-paced rendition of I’ll Fly Away, while, by way of complete contrast in terms of source and authorship, featuring hollow click percussion, Say You Will is a stark, flamenco-tinged take on the Kanye West slow jam track from his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak, here perfectly and inspirationally transformed into melancholic Americana.
The three remaining numbers are all steeped in traditional American folk. Carl was a friend of the Carter Family, and it’s perhaps their mid-tempo, drum thump, vocally soaring version of Wildwood Flower, an adaptation of I’ll Twine ‘Mid the Ringlets published in 1860 by, as credited here, Joseph Philbrick Webster, that, first recorded in 1928, is the best known.
The shortest track at just under two minutes, the unaccompanied Pretty Baby is, in fact, Didn’t Leave Nothing But The Baby, written by Emmylou Harris and performed by her, Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch on the Oh Brother soundtrack. And, finally, diving back into the hymnals, What Would You Give (In Exchange For Your Soul) is three-four time waltz written in 1912 by J.H. Carr and E.J.Berry and previously recorded by both The Louvins and Bill Monroe.
The music, described as lost dispatches from a forgotten America, brilliantly captures the sibling kinship, vocally and emotionally, conjuring long-gone days when families would gather around the kitchen table to sing their favourite songs. Wonderful.
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