Ben Bedford

Here's yet another example of an artist who's already several albums down the line before I get to hear his music, and instantly prompting a "how and why have I missed out on such a talent?" reaction. In this case, What We Lost turns out to be Ben's third studio album. I can't tell you much about Ben however, beyond the fact that he hails from Illinois, is a storyteller par excellence, and seems to take his inspiration from all the right people, notably his literary idols John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison, in the act of "casting individual people in the theatre of the American landscape". These individuals are all seeking meaning in life, whether a life already lived or a dream of a life yet to be lived, and all share dreams of something better; the time-honoured dichotomy of personal loss and private victory is explored ever insightfully by Ben in his songwriting.

The title track is a fine demonstration of Ben's skilful storytelling, a poignantly simple expression of his grandfather's musings following the death of his brother during the Second World War. Fallen and Guinevere Is Sleeping both tenderly convey the longing of parted lovers, to meltingly beautiful melodies, while Empty Sky, which sports harmony vocals from Kari Bedford, is a semi-autobiographical take on the Garden Of Eden story. Biblical allusions occur on other tracks too: Cloudless is a complex allegory that neatly references the temptations, and John The Baptist fires off at empty prophets and pseudo-evangelism. The bluesy Fire In His Bones pays tribute to the delta blues legend Charley Patton (a change from the usual Robert Johnson eulogies), whereas Vachel concerns the life of now-almost-forgotten Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay. The musical settings Ben adopts are detailed and crisply focused, with the warm colourings of cello (Ron De La Vega) and Hammond organ (Dennis Wage) prominent in the softly guitar-drenched texture - the characterful electric guitar work of former Nanci Griffth sideman Chas Williams (the album's producer) forms a signature thread that binds many of the songs together.

The knowing breadth of Ben's inspirations certainly has the desired effect of stimulating the listener into seeking out information on his unsung heroes, just as the captivating nature of the whole of this album will have the (also desired?) effect of stimulating the listener into seeking out Ben's previous two albums.

David Kidman - Fatea

If, like me, you’re not familiar with the Illinois storyteller then this, his third album, is likely to have you scouring stores and websites to find the previous two. Taking inspiration from literary heroes John Steinbeck and Toni Morrison and such musical influences as Gordon Lightfoot, Harry Chapin, Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt (two whose younger self he bears a resemblance), Bedford writes about the people, the ghosts, the places, and the memories of America’s heartland, investing his tales with poignant observation and insightful portraits of lives lived and dreams lost or broken.

The title track, for example, is written from his grandfather’s perspective, remembering his childhood ("didn’t know that we were poor") and the brother who died in WWII while the bluesy Vachel documents the tormented life of Vachel Lindsay, dubbed the Prairie Troubador in the 1910s and generally regarded as the father of modern speaking poetry, once one of America’s best known poets but, committing suicide in 1931, now a largely forgotten figure.

Likewise, Fire In His Bones pays tribute to screamin’ and a hollerin’ Delta Blues singer Charlie Patton while the dramatic The Ballad of Hartington Wood recalls the Assistant District Attorney credited with the defusion of the 1973 ten week Native American protest at Wounded Knee. Looking considerably further back in time, bluesy, organ backed opening track John The Baptist clearly draws a line between the prophet and today’s fire and brimstone evangelists, while, echoing the religious references, the allegorical Cloudless alludes to both the ordeal in the wilderness and the crucifixion. And, although it’s not about a historical figure, Cahokia (where he recalls Steve Goodman) keeps faith with his style in telling of the famous Illinois mounds, the remains of a sophisticated prehistoric native civilisation, and the secrets that they keep.

Not all his stories are rooted in biographical soil. The gentle Guinevere Is Sleeping is a tender love song from an absent lover, Empty Sky with its cascading guitar figure and tumbling drums rewrites the story of the Garden of Eden to banish God from the heavens and celebrate the light of love (and presumably sex) while the finger-picked knowingly ironically titled Fallen is a touching account of a homosexual summer love between a couple who meet while working the flatboats on the Illinois and Sangamon rivers.

Musically, his songs are simple melodic affair, rarely adorned with much more than an acoustic guitar, but the stories they contain are as rich and as honest as the voice in which they’re sung.

www.benbedford.com

Mike Davies October 2012 - NetRhythms

Springfield, Illinois-based songwriter Ben Bedford finds his muse in the Midwest - the landscape, the people, the diction, the names of the rivers and towns. Across three albums, and especially on the just-released What We Lost, he transcends local color and the minutiae of his considerable, even bookish knowledge of history (he studied at the University of Illinois in Champaign and could have been a history professor) and brings characters and stories -- from Harlington Wood to Vachel Lindsay to Charley Patton -- into stark, dramatic relief.

If you don't know who these people are, you will by the end of the album. Not because Bedford has a lesson plan, but because his music and lyrics are so evocative. Through elegant, finger-picked guitar work, blues and country-influenced melodies and lucid vocal phrasing, all of these people and places become fully alive.

Bedford heads south from his Springfield home on Thursday, November 1 for a CD release party at Off Broadway. He shared some of his songwriting sources and philosophies in this interview.

Roy Kasten: What was Chatham, Illinois like growing up?

Ben Beford: It's a small town but a fast-growing community on the outskirts of Springfield. It was probably 7000 people when I grew up there. It was a typical Midwestern town, surrounded by cornfields, all that kind of stuff.

It's a bit of a generalization, but for a lot of musicians who grow up in small Midwestern towns the first thing they want to do is get the hell out of there.

I didn't have that experience. I feel really at home here. I love going out West, to Oregon and Wyoming, the mountains, but my heart jumps a little bit when I get back in the cornfields and the hardwoods, the typical Midwestern landscape.

You could make an exception to that desire for folk musicians. Bob Dylan had to get the hell out of Minnesota, but in so much of his music he never left it that far behind.

In terms of my songwriting, the Midwestern landscape heavily colors my approach. The geography, the people and places where I'm from show up in my songs. There was a time when I wanted to go to Nashville or wherever and ply my trade and try to go about the music business from that standpoint, to enter the big ocean of songwriters. But after doing this for a while, getting a taste of what it's like to travel, I love it, but I learned that being a songwriter in this genre you can live anywhere and do this. You don't have to live in Chicago or LA. You can live in Springfield, Illinois, travel to those places, come home, and do it all over again the next month.

There's that strong Midwestern sense of place in your songs, but it's as if your mission is to make the Midwest more interesting than it's given credit for being. Exotic is the wrong word, but there's so much drama, a kind of magical realism to the people and places that you're uncovering. It's hard to believe some of these stories happened. The figure of Harlington Wood [a Springfield, Illinois judge and negotiator during the Wounded Knee standoff] for example, people don't remember him, but his story of his experience on the reservation is amazing.

It's a great story. My mom encouraged me to write a song about Harlington Wood. She was from around here, and she was in a young women's horse troupe with Harlington's daughter. He was the adult leader of the troupe. They were called the "Lincoln Land Lassies." They were in parades and things like that. My grandfather was also friends with him. It's a story that's chock full of drama and suspense. And it happened to someone right here in the Midwest.

In that song, there's this image: "the flash of light on aviator glasses." It's so unexpected. Do you think about augmenting your stories with those kinds of images?

I was trying to get into the head of Harlington Wood, and a detail like that adds a certain realism, I hope. Here's something minute and interesting that really takes the listener there. For that detail I was looking at photographs from the event, and many of the members of the American Indian Movement were wearing those sunglasses. I could just see that cold, late winter, South Dakota sun shining down on them.

Can you tell me the story behind "Fire in the Bones"? It's a story of blues musicians. Is it grounded in something specific?

It's about Charley Patton, one of the fathers of the Delta blues, and I used him as a jumping off point. It's a song about him and one of his bluesmen friends. It's the same thing, getting into the headspace of that time and place, to capture that person and their surroundings.

In the notes to your first record there's a quote about "not needing to be on the ship to understand the journey." That would seem to be true both for you as a writer and for the audience. How do the songs become personal rather than just historical?

You've probably heard it before, but there's a saying in writing classes that you should write what you know. People get hung up on that. They think all they can write about is their life and their experience. If I was doing that my songs would be pretty boring. I don't think they would have the gripping nature that I hope they have. Whether it's a historical event or whatever, I'm trying to find the human element to any story. Then I try to get into the mind of the person that experienced it. I try to draw out the human element of that experience.

For example, the title track to the album, is told from my grandfather's perspective. He lost his younger brother in the Second World War. I found a photograph of the two of them in a big trunk after my grandma died. I wanted to write about him from his perspective, knowing what I knew then. It's a historical event from World War II, his brother was in the D Day invasion of Normandy. But it's not about that. It's about a guy, my grandpa, losing his brother. It's about the experience and life they had together. That's what I try to do with every song that I write.

I've always thought that "write what you know" is the worst advice ever. I like the other version: That you write what you don't know about what you know.

You can almost know too much and kill the vibe of the song. Guy Clark always says that a great song is determined not by what you say but by the hole you leave in a song. You can put too much information in a composition and kill it for people. It's what we don't know that's interesting. It's more about getting into that uncomfortable territory in a song.

Roy Kasten - The Riverfront Times- Interview with Roy Kasten

Ben Bedford is a folk singer who hails from the broad lands of the American Midwest and this is his third album, a rich collection of American tales sung in a strong authoritative voice and set to some stirring arrangements. He reminds me in his writing of some of the greats from the 60s folk revival; he picks a story that interests him and tries to get inside the heads of the characters involved, drawing out the broader significance from a small moment in history. Thus we get The Ballad of Harlington Wood, which is built around the everyman courage of the government legal officer who brokered the first moves toward ending an armed standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973. The lyric focuses on the tense moments as Wood walked into Wounded Knee, armed men from both sides within sight; he pins down the aspect of the story that has caught his eye, and Bedford displays this storyteller’s knack for finding the telling moment time and again. There are other songs built around half-forgotten episodes from public life – a song about Illinois poet Vachel Lindsay, for example, who made several long distance walking trips, declaiming his poetry to earn his supper and roof for the night. If there are personal songs in this collection they don’t really leap up and bite you - Ben Bedford himself is not really revealed in his own songs.

Several songs here have religious allusions that are possibly attempts to unpick a strongly religious background, but an ambiguity persists which suggests that he hasn’t yet really worked out what to make of it all. The album opens with John the Baptist, a song that seems so urgent and so packed full of striking imagery but that seems to me to be deeply ambivalent about being confronted by the certainties of a wild-haired preacher like The Baptist. This is one of several songs where Dennis Wage’s Hammond organ swirls magnificently, building atmosphere but not intruding on the man who holds the centre. Mind you, it would take some work to overshadow Ben Bedford’s singing because the warmth, sincerity and, above all, authority that he brings to delivering a lyric does rather command your attention. His chief musical compadre here is guitarist and co-producer Chas Williams, who does a great job of embellishing what Ben Bedford does without ever making it all about Chas Williams. A typically ego-free bit of electric guitar work on Empty Sky, for example, brings a widescreen grandeur to the song even whilst your attention is held by Ben Bedford’s voice and finger-picked acoustic guitar.

My favourite song is probably the title song, which was written, apparently, from the point of view of Bedford’s own grandfather who lost his brother in World War Two. It’s a typically thoughtful bit of writing, but it’s the deeply felt tenderness of his singing which really strikes home. All in all, this is a really good album and, though he’s distinctive enough that I don’t really want to put names in at this point, he will remind older folk fans of several old heroes, both in the quality and the tone of his work.

John Davy - Flyinshoes Review

“Captivating songs, one after another.”


- Ray Pieters--Rootstime Radio-Belgium

With his freshman effort, Lincoln's Man, Ben Bedford gave himself a hard act to follow. Rarely has a first CD been so well written and recorded. Fortunately, his second project sends him straight to the varsity class.....Bedford's song about Till captures the injustice and sorrow far better than Bob Dylan's song on the subject..... Springfield, Illinois, resident Bedford writes about what he knows; he writes about the history of people and places in Illinois. He lives on the Sangamon and lets the river help him write the song about those on its banks. Best of all, Bedford "gets it." He turns history into compelling and poetic drama. He co-produced the CD with Chas Williams, and they rely on a crew of four or fewer musicians, along with Bedford's own acoustic guitar.....If you're in search of fresh and original talent, listen no further than Ben Bedford.

for full article see Volume 53 No. 1 issue of Sing Out! - Rich Warren/Sing Out!

Here's the thing: a couple of albums into his recording career Ben Bedford has proven himself to be a truly inspired and talented storyteller. Line after line he pieces together his character(s) and their backdrop, fictional or factual. Those based on fact are richly decked with historic and geographic references. Drawing on what is familiar to him, Bedford's a son of Illinois and the state looms large in his (lyrical) canon. His words draw the listener in with stealth and a calculated inevitability.

A farmer, husband, and father, now a union soldier who longs for home (Illinois, naturally) is the narrator of the opening track. Aged "Twenty One" and set during the siege of Vicksburg, (Bedford only reveals the location in the closing verse), among many issues raised relating to men's conflicts, the destruction of Southern homes by cannon fire looms large - "Last night we climbed up to the levee top/We could see the holes in the houses/Where the balls had dropped" - and following the poetic allusion to sustained fire "a symphony of crashes with the town hall bell" the narrator recalls where his heart truly lies - "And it makes my heart stop every time, the iron hits a white framed house like mine." Track two, "The Cherry Mine," ploughs what has in past decades been a rich vein for songwriters. I'm thinking of classics like Bill Ed Wheeler's "Coal Tattoo" and the Merle Travis pairing "Nine Pound Hammer" and "Sixteen Tons." In Bedford's "The Cherry Mine" the year is 1909, Saturday, November 13, to be precise, the setting the North Central Illinois town of Cherry. Four year earlier the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad had opened a mine in order to supply coal for their trains. Employing the voice of a woman whose husband survives the disaster - over 200 men and children were saved that day, but 259 perished including a dozen rescue workers on their seventh journey into the inferno - "The Cherry Mine" eerily echoes the events of that fateful day.

"You're The Weather" is a song for the wind and the ever-changing weather, and is followed by "The Sangamon." Already referenced in "Twenty One," the Sangamon is a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile long tributary of the Illinois River and Bedford's words portray a heart-sore widower casting into its waters his late wife's belongings - she perished in childbirth - because of the memories they hold. An unaccredited female voice supports Bedford's lead vocal, while I wonder if the oft repeated "One day I'll cross the Sangamon" hints at some future Styx-like reunion. Mary Harris, born in Cork, Ireland, on the first day of May 1830, crossed the Atlantic with her family eight years later. Close on a quarter of a century later, having qualified as a teacher, Mary settled in Memphis, married George Jones (a member of the Iron Workers' Union), and in the ensuing years became a labour and community organizer. Driven principally by Chas Williams' Dobro, the rhythmically energetic "Mother Jones On The Line" is set before worker's rights were firmly embraced in legislation and Bedford's lyric references her ground-breaking work via the voice of a striking mine worker - "I've had enough of crooked promises and forked tongued words." I mentioned Travis' "Sixteen Tons" earlier and his lyric included "I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine/I loaded sixteen tons of Number Nine coal." "Number Nine" surfaces in Bedford's lyric, as does the narrator's intention "Ain't gonna swing that pick no more" and "Ain't gonna buy from the company store" (Travis' lyric also alluded to this exploitative mine-owned monopoly).

Located midway through the album, "Ten Paces" is an instrumental penned by Chas Williams, who co-produced the album with Bedford, and it features Bedford (acoustic guitar), Williams (banjo), and one time Dead Reckoning recording artist Tammy Rogers (fiddle). "Amelia" Earhart, the pioneering aviator, has been eulogised in song before, notably, in recent times, by Iain Matthews and Andy Roberts as Plainsong, and by Joni Mitchell's "Amelia." Bedford's lyric initially poses questions as to the aviatrix's state of mind immediately prior to her May 1932 transatlantic flight from Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, to Ireland, a feat for which Congress subsequently awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross. Co-written by Bedford and Kari Abate - Abate supplies a harmony vocal - "Land Of The Shadows (For Emmett Till)" recalls the horrific August 1955 homicide in Money, Mississippi, of Till, a fourteen-year-old African American from Chicago, a heartrending occurrence that galvanized the American Civil Rights Movement.

Waltz-paced, "One Night At A Time" wistfully reflects on cold Illinois winter days, while the sound of a wailing wind introduces the ensuing "Fisher's Hall," another Bedford creation set during the American Civil War that presents, on this occasion, the other side of the coin - the thoughts of a amputee Southern soldier. Australian bush poet Andrew Barton "Banjo" Paterson (1864-1941), the author of "Waltzing Matilda" and "The Man From Snowy River," penned the words to "As Long As Your Eyes Are Blue," a song for lovers mature in years and Ben furnished the music. It closes another memorable album by this Illinois composer. - Maverick-Arthur Wood

Bedford goes deeper into Till's mythos as scapegoat than Hughes, Kramer or Dylan ever did....of all the songs about Emmett Till, "Land of the Shadows" ranks as one of the most daring, poetic and artfully crafted.

For full essay, Haunting America: Emmett Till in Music and Song, see the Fall 2009 issue of Southern Cultures, available from the University of North Carolina Press. - Southern Cultures Journal (University of North Carolina Press)

"Beautiful and unusual story songs that take the listener to the heart of the matter".



- Diana Jones-singer/songwriter