Brooks Williams & Aaron Catlow
Ready For The Times
Red Guitar Blue Music
2022
For their first collaborative album, Cambridge-based American guitarist Brooks Williams and Bristol fiddler Aaron Catlow recorded Ghost Owl, an all instrumentals set inspired by the barn owl. In contrast, their follow-up, Ready for the Times, recorded live in the studio, is almost entirely of a vocal persuasion with both original numbers and covers combining Americana, old-time music, British folk and European jazz.
It opens with vocals on a fine, gathering in power reading of I’ve Endured, an autobiographical song of endurance written in 1975 by the late North Carolina banjo player Ola Belle Reed. It’s followed, in bluesy pizzicato fingerpicked style, by Allen Reynolds’ similarly themed Ready For The Times To Get Better, from which the title comes and features a Catlow solo.
Riding the same train of thought, Jackson Greyhound is Rab Noakes’s tribute to the freedom riders, opening and proceeding with bluesy guitar notes while Catlow switches between pizzicato and bowed violin flourishes.
Dating back to 1988, Summer Fly was written by American folk singer Cheryl Wheeler, a wistful lament for how quickly youth passes, here recast as an Eastern European coloured fiddle lament. The first of three numbers written by Williams comes with the jaunty old-time strains of the romance-themed Love Too Soon, following on with the first of the two instrumental, the mournful Elk River Blues by West Virginia fiddler Ernie Carpenter.
Striking a playful note with the wry message “If you want the rainbow, you must have the rain”, a quote often attributed to Dolly Parton but coming from If You Want The Rainbow, written by Oscar Levant, Billy Rose and Mort Dixon back in 1928, the musical setting here very much in keeping with the era.
A co-write by Williams and Boo Hewerdine, Snake Oil is a bluesy, fiddle and fingerpicked revisiting of the song about smooth-tongued dodgy salesmen the pair recorded for their State Of The Union album nine years ago, the album then plunging into traditional waters for, first, Norman Blake’s 70s ragtime Church Street Blues, and then a bluesily strummed arrangement of Jean Ritchie’s song about the decline of the Kentucky coal industry, The L&N (Don’t Stop Here Anymore). That’s followed by a second railroad song, CC&O Blues, by South Carolina blues singer Pink Anderson whose first name, as trivia fans will know, Syd Barrett borrowed as half of Pink Floyd, ending with a bonus track, the second instrumental, Nightshift, a lively Williams-penned concoction of circling acoustic guitar runs and folksy, Swarbrick-like fiddle adornments.
A testament to both their individual musical talents and the chemistry they spark in each other as a duo, here’s hoping that, having been brought together by happenstance, that fate and fortune have further collaborations planned in their grand design.
Read for the Times is out on 24th June 2022
Order here: https://brookswilliams.com/store