Laughlin McDonald - Sings Ballads and Folk Songs

Laughlin McDonald was born and raised in Winnsboro, South Carolina. He graduated from Columbia University in 1960 and the University of Virginia Law School in 1965. For the past 40 or more years he has worked as a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union doing civil and voting rights work, mainly litigation on behalf of racial and language minorities in the South and West. He has argued cases before the United States Supreme Court as well as federal and state district and appellate courts. He has written numerous articles and several books including -A Voting Rights Odyssey: Black Enfranchisement in Georgia, and American Indians and the Fight for Equal Voting Rights. From the very beginning music has been an important part of my life. I sang in boy's choirs, glee clubs, men's quartets, church choirs, Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, country clubs, and bars. I got involved in folk music in the 1950s and became a fan of Pete Seegar, the Carter Family, the New Lost City Ramblers, Woody Guthrie, Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, Ian & Silvia, The Kingston Trio, The Weavers, and others. I also met Art Rosenbaum, the producer of this CD and who accompanies me on several songs, during our freshman year in college. Art stoked my interest in folk music by teaching me how to play the guitar. I was thus able to accompany myself and began to learn a lot of the songs that are on this recording. I have always had a special fondness for the old ballads collected by, among others, Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles in the Appalachian Mountains during 1916-1918, and by Alan Lomax and Francis James Child. In the course of six or eight verses you get a compelling and complete, and often tragic, life story. "Lord Randall," "Lord Thomas and Fair Ellinor," "The House Carpenter," and "Lord Lovel" are classic examples of that. A broadside version of another famous ballad, "The Golden Vanity," was published by Samuel Pepys, the author of the 'Pepys diary,' in 1682. There are many versions of the ballad, but the one I included is the traditional American one which tells of the betrayal of the ship's cabin boy, who saves the ship from a Spanish enemy, by the ship's captain, Sir. Walter Raleigh. Not all ballads are tragedies. "John Riley" is the tale of a young man who returns to England from Pennsylvania to reunite with his lover and take her back to the United States. One of the most beautiful and moving of the songs that tells of love and the power of nature is "Wild Mountain Thyme." It was written by Francis McPeake as a variant of a poem by Robert Tannahill, known as the 'Weaver Poet,' who was born in Paisley, Scotland in 1774. I also included: some folk songs from the West, "I Ride an Old Paint" and "Streets of Laredo," a classic song about a cowboy's misadventures; a slave song from St. Helena Island in South Carolina, "Michael Row the Boat Ashore," about the journey to freedom and salvation; a textile workers song, "Cotton Mill Girls," about the burdens of working in a cotton mill; songs from the Northwest, including "The Pinery Boy," about the dangers of working in the logging business, and "Frozen Logger," a tale of a woman looking "for a man who stirs his coffee with his thumb" to replace her lover who was frozen to death when the temperature dropped to a thousand degrees below zero; and two bird songs, "The Cuckoo" and "The Bird Song." The bird songs assume birds talk to each other about their lives and loves just as humans do. And here is a short poem on what these songs mean to me. Much can be learned from reading, And the visual arts are compelling, But nothing can move the soul Like music, so complex and so bold, With it's stories so wonderfully told.