WAYFARING STRANGER: LONESOME HEROES - VARIOUS ARTISTS (LP)

The standard route for popular music, songwriter to publisher to label to artist, survived the '60s only to be overrun by a generation of folkies agog at giants strumming in the rearview. They were inspired by iconoclasts from Charley Patton to Woody Guthrie, artists entirely reliant on one guitar, one voice, and one’s own words. But our heroes were not the agrarian luddites of yesterfolk. They cheered when Dylan plugged in and were rapt when Lennon and McCartney modernized songcraft, making the studio process justas important to song creation as setting the chords and words down.

The resultant work wasn’t as readily reduced to words on paper as the Broadside pages that preceded them, success relied heavily on the way these songs were captured and transmitted: the sound of the room, the turn of a phrase, the odd way a piano got mic’ed, or the way a guitar fell perfectly out of tune. As long as the end result was somber, dark, and meditative, it didn’t matter if it was a conscious choice or a happily unhappy accident.

Each of our lonesome heroes began his journey from a wildly divergent place. Some of the stops may been similar, but each was made in different ways at different times for different reasons. All these travelers somehow found their ultimate destination on this disc. From artists who never played one professional gig to those that never stopped playing professionally, whose only shared experience is a journey set upon with no known end, sharing their thoughts, emotions and dreams with a lonely few along the way.

Wayfaring Stranger: Lonesome Heroes is the male singer/songwriter companion to Numero 008, Wayfaring Strangers: Ladies From The Canyon and Numero 018, Wayfaring Strangers: Guitar Soli.

Features 17 rare tracks by folk unknowns Jim Schoenfeld, Jim Ransom, Richard Smyrnios, Tucker Zimmermann, Kieran White, Les Moore, Rob Carr, Jack Hardy, George Cromarty, Jay Bolotin, Tony Trosley, Roger Lewis, Tim Ward, David Kaufmann, John Villemonte, Bob Brown and Robb Kunkel.

This deluxe 2LP gatefold set also includes 40 page booklet with extensive photo gallery, essay, artist bios and complete lyric sheet.