Songs of praise
Folk roots, new routes. A master guitarist finds his spiritual voice. By John Mulvey.
Nathan Salsburg
★★★★ Psalms NO QUARTER. CD/DL/LP
THERE CAN be few people in the United States with a better working knowledge of folk music than Nathan Salsburg. For the past 20 years, his day job has been Curator of the Alan Lomax Digital Archive, dealing with the 24,000-odd tracks recorded by Lomax, the great American ethnomusicologist, over seven decades in the field. A professional life marinated in – blues and worksongs, proclamations and laments, the old-time tales and spiritual epiphanies of the American southeast; it’s not a bad way to make a living.
That weight of vernacular musical tradition couldn’t fail to have an impact on a musician, especially a virtuoso guitarist like Salsburg. But while his 2011 debut, Affirmed, proved he could trade fingerpicking smarts with the most fastidious John Fahey acolyte, Salsburg’s quiet and lovely sequence of albums has shown him skilled at evading such an obvious path. If there’s a more explicit debt to Lomax’s treasure trove in the music Salsburg has made alone and alongside Joan Shelley and James Elkington, it might be his efforts reframing folk music from Britain and Ireland; 2017’s Third, for instance, featured a take on an ancient Irish hornpipe tune, Planxty Davis.
Salsburg learned Planxty Davis from Nic Jones’s 1980 version, though, and he is all too aware of the pitfalls of being a mere revivalist and appropriator. Instead, the Louisville resident’s curatorial work has given him an understanding of cultural history that is careful and scholarly, but also alive to the possibilities of renewal. Hence Psalms, Salsburg’s fourth solo album proper, and a distinct career high. This time, the historical debt is textual: literally, Hebrew psalms, set to new melodies composed by Salsburg. He sings them, too, in a voice rarely heard on his previous records, while friends including Shelley and Elkington, Will Oldham, and the fine Israeli singer Noa Babayof provide nuanced support. The results conjure up an idea of Bert Jansch at his most warm and companionable, making new art from a liturgical tradition that may be unfamiliar to many of us.
The way Salsburg tells it, the genesis of
Psalms comes from a CD-R passed on by Oldham and labelled “Jewish Jams”, which contained a 2004 album called Dark’cho by Jonathan Harkham & David Asher Brook. The duo rearranged niggunim – Jewish religious songs – as a kind of mournful indiefolk, a little reminiscent of Sufjan Stevens. Over time, their example allowed Salsburg to tentatively re-engage with the music he remembered from childhood summer camps, until this project to rescore the Hebrew Book Of Psalms began around five years ago. Certain edits were made: Salsburg’s take on Psalm 47, as Jewish Currents writer Nathan Goldman has noted, excludes the line “[God] crushes peoples beneath us and nations beneath our feet.”
The nine tracks, then, feel like adaptations of tradition rather than replays. The music is airy chamber folk rock, for the most part, horns and strings dappling Salsburg’s crisp lead lines; Steve Gunn is probably the best contemporary analogue. Sometimes, as on Psalm 147 and the gorgeous end section of Psalm 90, Salsburg falls into gently evolving melodic loops, kin to the Landwerk records he released last year, where he improvised over samples from old 78s of 1920s klezmer bands and such. The standout, though, co-opts O You Who Sleep, by the medieval poet Judah Halevi, and grafts it onto Psalm 96 for something akin to an anthem, as Salsburg’s understated voice stretches towards a rousing tone, and Spencer Tweedy’s drums kick up the martial pace.
For those of us with little concrete faith, sacred music often appeals as a short-cut to transcendence, a vicarious way of tapping into the meditative and ecstatic states of true believers. Here, in contrast, the vibe is more rooted, unmystical, a celebration of collective purpose. Contextualising all recent music as the product of lockdown is already a cliché, but on Psalms the remote working, and the digitally amassed voices, are a way of sustaining communality through enforced isolation. It may not be folk music by the strictest academic definition, but Salsburg takes a solitary practice, rich with historical and cultural significance, and brings people together into what he refers to as a “chavurah – a collaborative fellowship”. Outside libraries, can folk music aspire to anything higher?