Listening to Feral Foster singing Tell Old Bill, a song from 1927’s The American Songbag book, is to hear something that sounds like a forgotten relic from the 1960’s “folk scare” (as Dave Van Ronk called it). This powerful version takes a song that you’ve probably heard sung a hundred different ways and gives it a new frission of threat and dread. That Folk Scare comment seems appropriate too – as Feral Foster does have a little of Van Ronk about him, and that’s no bad thing either since it implies what? That Foster really inhabits the song and delivers it with an unflinching gusto. This live version comes from New World Blues the new release which features recordings made at the Brooklyn Folk Fest and at the former underground bar Brooklyn Rod & Gun.
New World Blues is Foster’s first album in a dozen years, and features ten songs of which only today’s and 44 Blues are covers, the rest are Feral Foster originals which draw from that same deep well of folk, gospel, jazz and blues. Feral himself has run and hosted an eclectic, hootenanny-like series, “Roots n’ Ruckus“, reminiscent of the Greenwich Village “basket house” culture at the old Gaslight or Gerde’s Folk City, for over two decades at the Jalopy Theatre (Roots n’ Ruckus got its start in 2005 on MacDougal St. in Greenwich Village). Artists such as Alynda Segarra (Hurray for The Riff Raff), The Deslondes, Nora Brown, Charley Crockett, Nat Myers, and Miriam Elhajli either got their start there or tried out new material in the intimate format.
New World Blues is out October 23rd on Jalopy Records.
