Working on another CD

For the past few days I've been working on another CD. This one will use some tracks I have had on my computer for several years which are of a trio called The Merry Lyin'. The recordings were made back in about 1967 in Philadelphia - over 50 years ago! The wonderful thing about The Merry Lyin' is that one of its members was Tony Barrand. Tony was at that time an exchange student for one year at Swarthmore College. The other members of the trio, Laura Hassler and Mike Greenwald, were freshmen students at Swarthmore. Tony was in his early twenties, but his voice is unmistakenly the one we are so familiar with as we have heard it again and again for over 30 years (I actually first met Tony at Marlboro College in the mid-1970s and first heard him sing not too long after that). As my regular readers know, Tony died a few days ago and I want to do something to honor his memory. I don't think many people around here have heard these recordings, so it feels like a good time to make them available. The embarassing thing is that I can't remember who gave me these recordings. I don't think it was Tony himself. I think it was someone in Ellen's circle of Swarthmore friends. If one of my readers is that person, let me know - and forgive me for forgetting! It hasn't been easy putting this playlist together because these tracks (of which there about 16 or so) were on my older MacBookPro, which crashed a few months ago, and while I had a backup external drive that restored the data, it totally transformed the iTunes app into something unrecognizable. These tracks were a playlist on iTunes before the crash - all nicely in their folder. Not now. They are all there, I guess, but they are scattered and hidden in with hundreds of other songs. So I have had to search them out and regroup them. And not only that: since the crash, iTunes no longer works on the MacBookPro. The data is there, but when you click on a song, nothing happens. You can't play it. So I've had to use a thumb drive to transfer all these tracks onto my other laptop - the MacBookAir - which has a working iTunes app. All that has taken a LOT of time. But, WELL WORTH the effort. There are some wonderful recordings here. One of the best is a ravishing solo rendtion of Bob Dylan's North Counry Fair, sung by Tony. He already knew how to deliver a song! The concert as a whole is a cultural time-bomb. It's fantastic - American and British folk songs, some well-known, some not: Tom Paxton's Letter from LBJ,, Bert Jansch's Needle of Death, Dylan's If Only my true love, Buffy St. Marie's, You're Not a Dream, Ewan MacCall's Ye Jacobites By Name and Bonnie Moor Hen, No John, No, So Early, Early in the Spring, Ballad of Bethnel Green, etc. It's a wonderful collection, and The Merry Lyin' were good! Their name is a play on the name of a dormitory at Swarthmore, "Mary Lyon," named after a famous (in her time) educator who was the founder of Mount Holyoke College. A private school was named for her in the town of Swarthmore and the college acquired their buildings; one (ML#4 as it was known) became a dorm, and it was also a venue for folk music concerts because it had a very large lounge. The group was going to use Tony's background in Britain and call the group The Merry Lion (after the British Lion), but that didn't take, and someone suggested that "Lion" become "Lyin' " as a clever nod to the group's outrageousness. That stuck. The tracks I have turn out to be from two sources (it took me a while to figure that out). Evidently, in one evening (date unknown), the group played a concert at a small but famous folk music coffee house in Bryn Mawr, PA (near Swarthmore) called The Main Point. After finishing there, they scooted to a Philadelphia radio station, and close to midnight, they were interviewed by the well-known host of The Folk Show, Gene Shay, and sang several of the songs they had just performed. That much I have gleaned from listening to the patter between songs. The tracks I have are a mix - some have applause (at The Main Point), some just have Gene Shay commenting after the song. It has been challenging to put all that together so it has a good flow. Also, I have a little more than will fit on one CD, so I'll have to edit it down. It is a project, but a good one!

The Main Point Coffee House

A bit of information about The Main Point