Great American Road Trip: Oklahoma music

Oklahoma is a western, southern, southwestern, midwest state that’s been home to a range of musical giants. Woody Guthrie comes first to mind -- if you are asking yourself who that is, think This Land Is Your Land, Pastures of Plenty, or even a recent commercial about kids going back to school. Award winning country star Reba McEntire is from Oklahoma too, as is top songwriter and singer Vince Gill. All of them have music well worth your listening as the Great American Road Trip winds through Oklahoma.

So does Jack Guthrie. He was Woody’s cousin. His style tended more toward mainstream country and western swing than did the folk music and political broadsides of his well known relative. He wrote a quintessential song about Oklahoma, Oklahoma Hills.

Jimmy LaFave is an Oklahoma native too. He has a voice that speaks of the hills and prairies of his native state, and the wide open skies and rough places too. He’s a fine songwriter, as well, and brings his story telling abilities to bear both in the material he writes and in the songs he chooses to cover. A good place to hear him tell stories of the restless soul of the heartland in his album Cimarron Manifesto, which makes a fine soundtrack for travel through the Sooner state. Update: JimmyLaFave has passed on -- his music lives, though.

you may also wish to see
Music Road: Terri Hendrix
Music Road: reflections with Adrienne Young
Music Road: Road Trip Music: Arkansas and Missouri
and
check out our songwriter CD recommendations


This is part of The Great American Road Trip, in which I originally partnered up with A Traveler’s Library to add musical ideas to the book and film suggestions for journeys through the regions of the United States which you’d find there. The Library is closed now, but I think you will still find the journeys through music interesting.
For more about the road trip (and a look at some great road songs) see Great American Road Trip: Music begins

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songs of place: Canada

Ten songs with a place name in the title or content which is about a place: that was how travel writers Sophia Dembling and Jenna Schnuer started the discussion they've been hosting about songs for road trips over at Flyover America at World Hum. Many people have commented -- I’ve added a few from folk and bluegrass -- but it also occurred to me while reading the choices that they are, with the exception of one excursion I’ve seen to Mexico, all about the United States. Up Canada! I started to think. Here are ideas for songs of Canadian places.

*Alberta Bound from Gordon Lightfoot is not only a great song but a great sing along song for a road trip, as is
*Four Strong Winds from Ian Tyson
*Rolling Home Canadian from Eileen McGann takes in the Maritimes, Laurentians, the Shield, the Plains -- it’s about the Canadian Pacific Railway
*Canadian Railroad Trilogy, from Gordon Lightfoot. Every time I fly from Ireland to the United States I get to a point where the landscape out the window makes ‘up the Saint Lawrence all the way to Gaspe’ play in my mind.
*The Island, from the Barra MacNeils, is about Cape Breton
*We Were Good People, from Maria Dunn, is set in Edmonton
*Farewell Nova Scotia, from Ian and Sylvia
*Yellowhead to Yellowstone, from Ian Tyson
*Un Canadien Errant, Ian & Sylvia
*Two Rivers, Ian & Sylvia
*Apple Blossom Tyme, Aengus Finnan

What would you add?

photograph is from a concert at the firehouse/community center in Big Pond on Cape Breton

you may also want to see

music for a spring road trip: six albums
Cape Breton Radio Live take 02
now playing: Matt & Shannon & Ian & Sylvia

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Music for a spring road trip: six albums

One from Scotland, three from Texas, a duo from Massachusetts, and a vintage collection from top Irish American musicians. Love songs, songs about children, travels, journeys, questions, mountains, rivers, markets, birds, trains, fish, grits and fancy pears, and many other things....all fine companions for where your late spring roads are taking you now.

Tish Hinojosa’s own roads have taken her from the west side of San Antonio to the mountains of northern New Mexico, to Nashville’s Music Row, through a time in Austin’s lively music scene, and a current base in Germany. All these experiences play into the music she’s made for Our Little Planet. Sparked in part by her rediscovery of some old work tapes from her time in Nashville, it is in many ways a more country sort of record than Hinojosa has made in a long time. It’s not mainstream country, but it is country of the country, and of Texas and the southwest. There’s a knockout duet with Carrie Rodriguez called Mi Pueblo, and Mountain Lullabye, a song which sounds like a western sunset, and ten more.

Jeff Talmadge comes from Texas too, though he’s been living in Georgia for a while. One of the ways he looks back on At Least That Much Was True is through the evocative Austin When it Rains. Talmadge does not shy from life’s harder questions, as with the songs White Cross and Let Her Go. There’s always a perspective, though, however indirect, of hope and change for the better. The anthem for that, on this record, might be the understated, quietly sung story in Wrong Train.


Jim Malcolm does a good bit of quiet reflection on his album The First Cold Day,
including a tribute to Robert Burns and the gentle pleasures of fishing, in a song called An Hour in the Gloaming. There’s a taste of highland legend in Schiehallion, and a hilarious road trip of his own through the American south in Down in Alabama. That's where the grits and fancy pears come in.

If Hinojosa didn’t get you dancing with her title track for Our Little Planet, then her fellow Texan Terri Hendrix will with Posey Road Stomp, or Wallet, or Bottom of the Hill, or one of the ten other songs on Left Over Alls. One of the great things about Hendrix is that she knows how to be serious through being funny, and also when it’s the right moment o focus on one or the other side of that equation.

Massachusetts based husband and wife duo Matt and Shannon Heaton know how to look at a subject from many aspects, too. They base their work in Irish tradition, and for Lovers' Well they’ve sought out your not so usual love songs. A chance encounter is the hinge for the story in Where Moorcocks Crow, waiting and wondering about a lover for Bay of Biscay, love turned to jealousy tells the tale in Lily of the West, love found in taking chances begins the story of Golden Glove. These they interweave gracefully and naturally with traditional and newly composed tunes meant for dancing together, Shannon playing flute and Matt guitar and bouzouki.

Cherish the Ladies is now a a well known Irish American band, but they started before Riverdance, before Celtic Women, and before the work of women in Irish music had received much recognition or respect. They'd been at constant touring for several years before they made their first record as a group, and through changing line ups, they’ve made many since. That first one, The Back Door, catches the group of seventeen years ago in fine form, tunes and songs alike reflecting Irish and American style and connections. It’s worth a look and a listen, once again.

If you’d like to dance -- alone or together -- to sing along, to laugh, to reflect, or just to listen, all of these will serve you well on your late spring travels. What would you add?


you may also want to see

Terri Allard: Live from Charlottesville

season of change: music for autumn 2008

hanneke cassel

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Music from the Great American Road Trip

Following along with a virtual road trip across the United States organzed by A Traveler's Library, I offered a series of posts on music which inspires and reflects aspects of the American landscape. Along that music road trip you met artists as varied as country music star Josh Turner, classical violinist Rachel Barton Pine, the school children of the Kid Pan Alley Project in Charlottesville, Virginia, folk legend Judy Collins and her Colorado connection, and Montana based songwriter Stephanie Davis. Here's a round up of your favorite posts Music Road: road trips and road songs
and you can also do a search on the name of your favorite state here on Music Road to find other posts in the series.

Here are recordings from several artists whose music is part of this series. * an update to this post coming along soon..*

-->If you'd like to support my creative work at Music Road and elsewhere,
here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this.Thank you.