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Photos by Ebet Roberts

The last day at Folk Alliance dawned fraught with mixed emotions. Like the pop-up on a Thanksgiving turkey, we aren’t done yet, but  we’re trembling, and will surely be cooked soon.  Man, there are still many more groups still to hear….

The two highlights of the night played at Benton’s 20th Floor, the Weston Hotel’s snazzy penthouse dinner theatre. First, consummate songwriter and comedian John Gorka chatted between the brilliant songs from his new album True in Time. Gorka’s well-crafted songs feature changing tempos and shifting keys, but the message always remains straight and true, even as his patter stays light. In a perfect example, Gorka told his audience “These songs are new to me and maybe new to you, but you don’t have to play them,” then shortly gave us “Mennonite Girl,” the story of a long-ago love who recently died. During the song, Gorka, who hadn’t played it enough to become hardened to the poignant story line—and perhaps never will—choked up and pretended to forget the lyrics while he composed himself. Telling us where to buy True in Time, Gorka assured us “all proceeds from the CD will go to The Center for Advanced Learning…(pause) at my house. (Another pause). I have two kids in college.” Tears, laughter, music and stories, Gorka brings the whole package.

Next at Brennan’s, one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Jorma Kaukonen, led off with “Ain’t In No Hurry,” a song delivered more talking in tune than singing, but the rich sound of his guitar and vocals wafted out over the packed house, embracing us like a warmed blanket. Kaukonen makes virtuosity look easy: it’s almost impossible to imagine that the complex music we heard came from the seemingly effortless picking we witnessed. Kaukonen’s first commitment is to the guitar, and he frequently mumbles or skips over lyrics, even as his playing amazes. Song choices ranged from the witty and raunchy “Barbeque Kid” to his own tender ballad “Sleep Song,” which he plays with Jack Casady in Hot Tuna. Hearing Kaukonen regularly for these last 50 years or so, I would swear the man’s doing the impossible: He’s getting better. Why work so hard for so long? He answered the question before launching into a Roy Book Binder tune, “You Can’t Do That No More;” Kaukonen said of performing, “I get to talk about myself and play guitar all day. I can’t do that at home.”

Not that the rest of the day was downhill: We caught up with Tim Grimm one more time, where he gave us an hysterical song, “Blame It On the Dog.” You can guess some of the lyrics, but not all, and they’re priceless. Ruby Boots may evolve into a new Reba McIntire someday—she’s off to a good head start, and her guitar sings as well as she does. We’d have loved to have seen more of Sam Baker, but the room was too crowded, so we got a taste of “Jesus Take Me Now,” from out in the crowded hall.

In one of the big rooms, Dan Navarro had his posse of Steve Postell on guitar and Mark Dorn on bass as he gave us his own brand of history, like “Your Bulletproof Heart,” about a supermodel who wasn’t The One. Navarro’s rich vocals have just enough nasal roughness to add an element of the real to anything he’s singing—as if his stories weren’t enough.

Julia Othmer, a lovely lanky chanteuse who’d be at home in the Carlyle Room, accompanied herself on keyboards, waving her arms and rippling her pliable frame as much as she maneuvered the vocals—which was a lot. The tunes were her own and highly emotional, alternating in decibel levels from “Impressive” to “I Didn’t Get That.” I loved the pacing, which at one point turned from love-spurned to “The Bullying Song,” whose refrain is “I’m awesome/In my mind I’m fucking awesome,” which the sing-along audience took to heart.

The Welsh-born Jon Langford helped found punk rockers the Mekons in the ’80s and pioneered country-folk-punk fusion, which sounds positively unnatural, but isn’t. His current group, Jon Langford’s Four Lost Souls, wound up not only among the last acts we saw, but among the most fun, even if one member of The Four was AWOL, having taken, in Langford’s words “a better-paying gig.” I recognized Langford’s off-the-cuff humor as coming from a man who has nothing to prove and nothing to lose. “Forget those other rooms, with shampoo in the shower. We’ve got pizza and beer in the shower.” Finding a couple of people dancing in front of the “stage,” Langford brought them up to sing. In the audience, drummer Brady Blade (Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Dave Matthews) was grooving, then recognized, then pressed into service behind the kit. Between the catchy “Halfway Home” and the slower-paced, gospel-tinged “I Thought He Was Dead,” mostly sung by Tawny Newsome, the group reminded us that folk music isn’t so much a genre as a description: music by folks. Doesn’t that include everybody?

—Suzanne Cadgène