Stefan Grossman

Album Reviews:

1969: The Gramercy Park Sheik

1970: Yazoo Basin Boogie

1970: The Ragtime Cowboy Jew

1971: Those Pleasant Days

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The Gramercy Park Sheik

Now learn to unlearn

As an ultra-technical fingerstyle guitarist, Grossman could have become a great many things during the folk revival of the 1960s. Had he been a weird loner, he could have reinvented blues and folk à la John Fahey; had he been a little wilder, he could have mixed up the hippie New York folk rock scene à la John Philips (with none other than Janis Joplin being his Mama Cass); had he had a more eclectic taste in music, colleague Taj Mahal could have nudged him to go more into the direction of global sponge Ry Cooder. Had he had charisma as a vocalist, there could have been a direct path to dylanesque singer-songwriter territory. But Grossman’s music venture took none of these turns. Instead, he focused on that last role of folk revivalist: Being an obsessive disciple of the intricate blues stylings of Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis, Grossman became one of the traditional folk and blues teachers that usually go under the radar as recording artists, but probably are among of the strongest and longlasting forces of that musical era.

One of his first proper albums (not focused on guitar teaching) puts Grossman somewhere between the transcriptions of piedmont blues fingerpicking („Crosseyed Blues“ is pure John Hurt) and Greenwich village singer-songwriting, leaving the impression that there are really two Grossmans at work here. The jaunty blues numbers mix well with his thoughtful, cautious songwriting since they all use the piedmont fingerstyle as a base – „Not You or I, My Dear“, „You’d Best Be Gentle“ and „Crow Black Squall“ are inconspicuous and heartfelt numbers, wistful in their introspective small-apartment-and-a-guitar vibe. The reason Grossman fell into the folk guitar teacher realm despite having a knack for songwriting is simply that he has a (totally decent but) forgettable voice. Grossman knew this (look at the album cover, positioning him as some nerdy, jovial bloke getting along with everybody the neighbourhood) and made the most of it. Another thing can be said about his guitar: Supertechnical and clean, his style lends itself to piedmont blues – the opener „Yola Blues“ is a negative example of supposedly raw, gritty delta blues slide guitar sounding incredibly forced – like a classroom exercise. This is how you play when you show someone the right chords, it doesn’t sound like the reckless affair this kind of blues needs to be. The album ends with a winner: the folk-mantra of „Requiem for Patrick Kilroy“ is pure Fahey in its swirling and hypnotic unravelling. Grossman is an important guitarist of the folk revival and an underrated songwriter – this album should be of minor interest to anyone interest in how the folk revival helped to pick up and spread acoustic blues and its baffling techniques.

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Yazoo Basin Boogie

Superbly constructed, crystal-clear fingerpicking revivalism

The Yazoo basin – a less famous name for the Mississippi delta – serves as the reference of an album where Grossman ditches two of his incarnations: the contemporary folk singer-songwriter and the purely didactic fingerstyle technician. The focus is on tight, pristine piedmont blues pieces (some traditional, many by Grossman but you wouldn’t notice) and on the early 1970s mini-craze of transcribing classic ragtime for guitars (David Laibman arranged some of the pieces here, with his The New Ragtime Guitar following in 1971). The title is a smart move: The music follows the intimate, slightly ethereal school of Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James – the odd ones out when juxtaposed to the brash prototype of delta blues (as incarnated by Charley Patton, Son House), so why not use a congruent, but lesser known name for their style? Anyhow, this is superbly constructed, crystal-clear fingerpicking revivalism – Grossman truly flies on Skip James’s “I’m So Glad” (this is something John Fahey would approve of), but its quiet understatement does come off as excellently executed as opposed to engaging.

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The Ragtime Cowboy Jew

The band plays a tune, but you know it might be just too soon

As the title suggests: Grossman wanted to do everything he could at this point as a recording artist: be a major force in surgical piedmont blues fingerpicking (ready-made for folk archives), be a singer-songwriter (sweetly chamberesque folk pop as well as the moody bonfire variety), and, through sheer passion and clout, get one of the towering figures of blues to play on his own record. How about that! The mix is rewarding – historically important folk and blues preservation paired with some of Grossman’s best songs (most notably “So They Say” and “Orphan Sunday” – bittersweet, cautious pieces with some emotional weight). And if you can get the star power of Sandy Denny, Linda Peters (later Thompson), Trevor Lucas and Tod Lloyd to sing background vocals on the swaying folk rock of “A Pretty Little Tune”, why wouldn’t you?

The sprawling approach also works to Grossman’s advantage. On his albums created for the 1970s singer-songwriter/folk pop market (such as 1971’s Those Pleasant Days), you can hear that he was a well-rounded, not a commanding singer. On his folk blues showcases (such as Yazoo Basin Boogie, earlier in 1970), his skill and passion for finger-picking blues technique places the music in the corner of instructional records, such as his debut How to Play Blues Guitar (1966). To present Grossman the singer-songwriter and Grossman the folk blues scholar in one place gives a welcome scope to his work. And there are even some hints at popular folk rock, as several numbers start out as acoustic, only to add drums and an electric (!) guitar in the second half. Recorded in England among the Brit-folk crowd, the album is testing the waters of Grossman’s appeal outside of nerdy preservationist roots music – needless to say that Grossman played exactly none of the e-guitar parts (Bernie Holland did).

With the addition of tunes like “High Society”, “Georgia Camp Meeting” and “Soldiers March”, Grossman makes early contributions to a quasi-classicist ragtime revival of the early 1970s, the most similar project being David Laibman & Eric Schoenberg’s The New Ragtime Guitar (1971) – indeed Laibman did the ragtime transcriptions and arrangements for guitar on Yazoo Basin Boogie and (probably) here. Even more interesting: This album contains some of the last recordings by none other than Son House, who takes the vocal lead on his “New Pony Blues” and “Yonder Comes the Blues”. Now, Grossman’s musical affinities do not primarily lie in the delta blues. Sure, he could play an oddly controlled slide-guitar (as demonstrated on “Morning Blues”, but check his contribution to “Paranoia Blues” on Paul Simon’s 1972 solo-album – Simon obviously heard this slide guitar here and wanted it), but his idol was the subdued gentleness of Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis. The tracks are therefore almost experimental: What would Son House’s brash delta riffing sound like when processed through John Hurt’s gentle picking? This might give you an idea. Good stuff, and kudos to Grossman for going all-in on this double album.

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Those Pleasant Days

If I find it hard to take the time, don’t you know I’ll regret it

After his expansive double album The Ragtime Cowboy Jew (1970), fingerpicking maestro Grossman evidently sought after more artistic and commercial (?) opportunities outside of the quasi-museal folk revival circuit, weirdly stressing the whimsical folk pop he was assumably surrounded by during his years in England – flutes, string sections and even something like muted bagpipes abound on the lemon curd of an album that is Those Pleasant Days. Jovially avuncular, Grossman does a number of different things here. He fuses ragtime piano, hints of western swing and carnevalesque music hall brass sections with piedmont blues picking (“Teddy Roosevelt”, “Hi Dum Diddle”, “Flowers on the Wall”) and acts out a Victorian chamber folk carried by carefree “la-la-la” choruses (“My Travelling Song”) – the man sure continued to try out some styles.

But The Cutesy gets overbearing with humdiddling and fiddlesticks the longer the short LP goes on, and as his voice simply can’t go up against thick music hall arrangements (not an acoustic guitar technique whose whole point is subtlety), it is a relief to find quality music here. Grossman retains his brooding, bluesy singer-songwriter persona for a good third of the material, much more in line with pal Richard Thompson (who makes invisible appearances on this album). The sombre “River of Jordan” has a pessimistic but grooving undertow to it (helped by a confusingly underused bluesy slide guitar), and the bright “Rise Up Lazarus” or “Those Pleasant Days” shows Grossman’s skills in the pop context of folk rock. An overall minor addition, aesthetically disoriented, but had the chips of his musical interest fallen a little different, there’s a world where Grossman would have entered singer-songwriter Elysium in the following years.