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A concert held last night at New York City’s Town Hall to benefit the National Recording Preservation Foundation celebrated traditional folk music as performed in Greenwich Village in the early ‘60s, illustrated how contemporary musicians have advanced the genre, and stoked the fire for the forthcoming Coen Brothers’ film “Inside Llewyn Davis.” It did so beautifully with a sense of joy conveyed with ease by three generations of considerable talent.
From early in the program, the concert, save for the venue, resembled an old-fashioned Greenwich Village hootenanny in which a flood of singers performed in dizzying sequence, as the Punch Brothers along with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings provided instrumental and vocal support to Joan Baez, Elvis Costello, Rhiannon Giddens of Carolina Chocolate Drops – who channeled gloriously the spirit of Odetta – Marcus Mumford, Conor Oberst, the Secret Sisters and actor Oscar Isaac, who plays the lead character in the forthcoming Coen Brothers film, out December 6 in the U.S.
But many of the show’s high spots were provided by self-contained units offering original compositions influenced by traditional and pre-Bob Dylan folk. With the remarkably facile Kenneth Pattengale on guitar, the Milk Carton Kids performed “New York,” a spry slice of folk that wouldn't have been out of place five decades ago down on Bleecker Street. Rawlings created a fiery medley of “I Hear Them All,” a song he wrote with Ketch Secor of Old Crow Medicine Show, and Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” With Welch and Rawlings, Oberst ripped into his “Men Named Truth,” which he recorded in ’09 with the Monsters of Folk. The intermission was bookended by the Avett Brothers, who mixed a Tom T. Hall tune in with two feisty originals, and Jack White, who paid tribute to Mississippi John Hurt with Tom Paxton’s “Did You See John Hurt” before performing his “We’re Going to Be Friends.”
At the core of the 40-song concert, dubbed “Another Day, Another Time: Celebrating the Music of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis,’” were tunes written in the mid-20th century but are so much a part of the folk tradition they seem to have existed always. Calling her “our undisputed humble and fierce queen,” Patti Smith invited Baez to join her for Anne Bredon’s “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You,” which Baez recorded more than a half-century ago, and Baez and Costello sang Florence Reese’s “Which Side Are You On?”
Emerging as the sole witness to the Greenwich Village folk boom of the early ‘60s, Baez performed “House of the Rising Sun.” At age 72, she is still in fine voice, and seemed less a diva-like icon and more a delighted participant whose presence confirmed the vitality of today’s folk re-interpreters.
The songs and actors of “Inside Llewyn Davis” and its soundtrack, to be released November 12, punctuated the program. Mumford performed the standard “Dink’s Song” and Dylan’s “Farewell,” and Isaac, a fine vocalist and guitarist, revived Dave Van Ronk’s take on “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me.” Filling in for “Davis” co-star Justin Timberlake, Costello led the ensemble in a reading of Hedy West’s “500 Miles.” John Goodman, Garrett Hedlund and Carey Mulligan, who appear in the film, served as masters of ceremony. And as if in tribute to the Coens, “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” and “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby,” which appeared in their films “The Big Lebowski” and “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?” respectively, were performed with a sincerity that translated to dry humor.
The evening was free of the demands for authenticity that could mute the joy in the ‘60s folk scene. Affection for the tradition carried the concert; as if to symbolize its cross-generational spirit, Smith performed with Baez and the ensemble a rousing “The People Have the Power” that Smith wrote with her late husband and recorded in ’87 – almost 25 years after the ‘60s folk revival waned. No one in the sold-out concert hall seemed concerned with chronology: As it was throughout the program, during the song the communal essence of folk was bright and alive.
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