Mountain City Four - ST

Tracks

		Track Name	Length
	1	Jesulein Süss - May the Circle be Unbroken	02:32
	2	Mean Old Frisco	03:13
	3	Erev Shel Shoshanim	04:18
	4	Motherless Children	01:58
	5	Dark as a Dungeon	02:59
	6	Blue Moon of Kentucky	02:17
	7	Reuben Ranzo	01:30
	8	Walk That Lonesome Valley	03:00
	9	En filant ma quenouille	01:56
	10	This Train	03:05
	11	Log Driver's Waltz	02:28
	12	V'là l'bon vent	02:00
	13	Need Somebody On Your Bond	03:17
	14	All the Good Times	02:49
	15	Sam Hall	03:41
	16	Shenandoah	04:13

Photos

Videos

No Video

Information/Write-up

Historic, early recordings from Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s beginnings as members of the Mountain City Four.

In 1963, Jack Nissenson and Peter Weldon recruited Kate McGarrigle to form a trio. A few months later, Kate’s sister Anna joined, and the group became the Mountain City Four. Playing locally at Montreal folk clubs, the band developed a loyal and substantial following and played into the 1970s.

Kate and Anna began writing songs which were passed from friend to friend, and eventually found their way into the repertoires of Maria Muldaur and Linda Ronstadt. While in L.A singing backups on Maria’s first record, they were invited by Greg Prestopino to record a few of their other compositions. Greg passed the demo on to Warner Brothers Records who quickly offered Kate and Anna their own recording contract and they were off and running. For several years, the Mountain City Four continued as the opening act for Kate and Anna’s live shows and contributed backup vocals and instrumentals to the sisters’ early studio recordings.

The McGarrigles origins shine brightly on Mountain City Four which contains sixteen previously unissued recordings from 1963–1964, 1969–70, and a final one in 2012 two years after Kate’s passing which featured members of the Mountain City Four’s extended family. The tracks include classics like Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon Of Kentucky,” the traditional “Will The Circle Be Unbroken,” Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s “This Train,” and “All The Good Times,” written by Lead Belly and Alan Lomax.

Mountain City Four is produced by original member Peter Weldon and Jane McGarrigle. The packaging contains photos and liner notes from Weldon, both Jane and Anna McGarrigle, and Joe Boyd, outlining the history and sharing memories of the Mountain City Four. Not only is Mountain City Four a window into the origin of one of the world’s foremost singer/songwriting sisters, but a look into the incredible folk music scene of the 1960s.

They were a big deal in the 1960s Montreal folk scene and have a mythic status, because it was the first time Kate and Anna McGarrigle sang together professionally. The Quebec sisters would go on to be among the most acclaimed figures in the global singer-songwriter scene in the 1970s.

“I think of endless rehearsals, which also happened to be our social life,” said Anna. “Just making music all the time. That was the main thing. That’s why we were all attracted to each other — because we all liked to sing. It was fun. We wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t fun.”

Mountain City Four reunited for a magical concert at Ursa last Thursday. Original members McGarrigle and Peter Weldon were joined by friends and family on stage, including two longtime members of the band who joined later in the ’60s, McGarrigle’s husband Dane Lanken and Chaim Tannenbaum. Others performing included McGarrigle and Lanken’s daughter Lily Lanken, Wainwright, and Kate and Anna’s sister Jane on piano.

The original lineup of Mountain City Four consisted of Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Weldon and Jack Nissenson. Kate died in 2010, Nissenson in 2015. Thursday’s live set was held to mark the release of the first-ever album by Mountain City Four, featuring live and studio recordings from the ’60s and ’70s, plus one track from 2012.

That evening, listening to the songs, Anna was feeling the loss of her sister, who died of sarcoma at age 63.

“Just now it was playing over the loudspeaker and I could hear Kate’s voice, and obviously I miss her terribly and I miss Jack,” she said. “It would have been great if they could have been here. It’s kind of funny that Martha and Kathleen Weldon (Peter Weldon’s daughter) are going to be singing one of the songs that Kate and I sang, Motherless Children. I spend a lot of time with Martha, and to me she is just like Kate. When I’m at her house, it just feels like I’m with Kate.”

Mountain City Four didn’t write their own material. They covered folk, blues and traditional songs, and the eclectic repertoire is evident on the self-titled album, which includes several songs recorded live in 1963 at the Fifth Dimension, a coffeehouse on Ste-Catherine St. There’s The Log Driver’s Waltz, one of the most famous songs written by their friend Wade Hemsworth, sung here by Kate; the Bill Monroe-penned Elvis Presley hit Blue Moon of Kentucky, with Kate and Anna on lead vocals; the Lead Belly song All the Good Times. The album ends with a 2012 recording from La Sala Rossa of the traditional number Shenandoah, with Nissenson on lead.

The band continued to play in the ’70s, often opening for Kate and Anna and playing on many of their studio recordings. The new album includes the first-ever recordings of Kate and Anna.

The driving forces behind the album’s release were Weldon and Jane McGarrigle, who are a couple. Weldon had a bunch of old reel-to-reel tapes lying around, and they felt this music had to be heard. Engineer Fred Bouchard cleaned up the original tapes, which “were almost beyond repair; the stuff on the original tapes was almost unlistenable,” said Weldon.

“What I like about it is that it’s so damn eclectic,” said Weldon, who worked for years as a professor of physiology at McGill. “None of us were considering a career in music, and so we just sang anything and everything. Anything that took our fancy, from an Elvis Presley transcription of a Bill Monroe song to a piece of Bach to an Israeli song. A lot of gospel songs. We loved the Staple Singers and the old archival recordings of blues and gospel singers from the ’20s and ’30s like Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson.”

“Peter played this for me and I thought this is criminal that this is not put out in the world for people to hear, because I thought it was beautiful,” said Jane McGarrigle. “The beautiful young voices and some intricate original harmonies, and the playing on it was beautiful. It just sounded fresh and had a real snap to it. I was just determined that one way or another we would get this out. And by god, we did.”

The album has been put out by a Los Angeles-based legacy recording company, Omnivore Recordings. For more information, see omnivorerecordings.com.
-Brendan Kelly, Montreal Gazette, Sept 27, 2022

Comments