What Are They Doing In Heaven Today? –Reviews
Kathy Kallick has been one of the leading performers in Bay Area bluegrass, and this release is her 22nd album. Her original songs have tugged at listeners’ sensibilities and heartstrings, and few can match her ability to turn a gentle phrase into a heartfelt moment that transcends time. Kathy grew up with the folk music scene in Chicago with a talented mother who passed on a love of song and an ability to inspire others to make their own music. Kathy has been a part of this sharing process, and this collection of songs performed with friends and family showcase some of the traditional songs that need to be remembered, revised and passed on to the next generation of musicians.
Twenty years ago, Kathy released an album of songs that she learned from her mother, and this set features more songs and a recording of Dodi’s radio performances in the sixties is included. Dodi has a straightforward delivery with only a dulcimer or guitar accompaniment. “Cotton Eyed Joe” and “One Hundred Miles” are familiar songs, and “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains” is performed with members of the audience at a Frank Proffitt memorial concert. The “& Friends” part of the album title is especially poignant as Kathy has been a bridge between many musicians. The Good Ol’ Persons was a pioneering band (started in 1975!) with a female presence, and Kathy’s own role as a bandleader and songwriter has helped define West Coast bluegrass. While Dodi’s performances were mostly solo, Kathy has embraced the talents of others to give depth and dimension to the classic songs. Jim Hurst’s wonderful guitar playing and harmonies give new life to “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy,” and Cliff Perry and Laurel Bliss give a Carter Family vibe to the gospel song “Little Moses.” Molly Tuttle’s signature clawhammer style guitar and vocal harmonies add a modern touch to the sad “Put My Little Shoes Away,” and Tristan Scroggins adds a bluesy mandolin to “Sitting on Top of the World.” Kathy’s current bluegrass band joins her and her two daughters, Juniper Waller and Riley Thompson, in an all-encompassing rendition of “Wild Side of Life/It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Kathy joined voices with Laurie Lewis and Suzy Thompson in the glorious gospel song “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today,” and the fact that it was their first session after the Covid lockdown reminds us that our past flows into our present time, but we must also make our present time make inroads into our future. Kathy Kallick has given us the bridge between past, present, and future with a nod to her mother, her friends and fellow musicians, and the younger performers that will be our future (interesting that Molly, Tristan, Annie Staninec, Riley, and Juniper are all children of musicians and are carrying their family traditions as well). - Brenda Hough, Bluegrass Breakdown (8-11-22) |
Over the last fifty years, few bluegrass singers, songwriters, and performers have received less acknowledgement for their groundbreaking perseverance than has California’s Kathy Kallick.
With all due respect and realizing she has received awards (a Grammy and a pair of IBMA nods), Kallick has not been held in the same regard by the general bluegrass audience and industry as have several of her contemporaries and those who have followed in her path. I am informed that the Kathy Kallick Band albums have done well on the Bluegrass Unlimited charts, but I do not frequently encounter her music on satellite radio and other bluegrass broadcasters. One hopes What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? will bring greater attention to Kallick.
Since founding the Good Ol’ Persons in 1975, Kallick has released over twenty albums along with some 150 original songs. She has led her own Kathy Kallick Band, has toured the globe, and has mentored many. She is also one of the warmest of bluegrass personalities, affable, keen, and wise, and has collaborated with some of the best, including long-time friend Laurie Lewis.
More than twenty years ago, Kallick paid tribute to her folk-singing mother’s influence releasing My Mother’s Voice, a collection of songs pulled from Dodi Kallick’s folk repertoire, songs Kathy heard her mother singing. A formidable set it remains; the album revealed the foundation upon which Kallick built her bluegrass career. Following the discovery several years ago of recording of Dodi’s performances, Kallick has chosen to further define her mother’s legacy with What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?
This is a themed album with rather clear parameters. The first disc contains new recordings with Kallick and a variety of bluegrass and old-timey folk friends, featuring songs again drawn from her mother’s experiences. Completing the set is a second disc containing a series of songs featuring Dodi Kallick performing (mostly) solo with dulcimer in the mid- to late-60s in Chicago.
Kathy Kallick grew up in Illinois where Dodi was an early participant and instructor at the Old Town School of Folk Music. In the liner notes, Kallick writes, “ My mom’s pure, high, flawlessly in-tune singing earned her a fan base and a following, but she was mainly unknown outside of the greater Chicago area. While her influence was solid, and, of course, had a huge impact on me, she was not on any records, didn’t tour, and slowly moved to teaching more than performing.”
The archival recordings contained within the 24-minute bonus disc reveal these qualities captured in 1966 and/or 1969 tapings, as well as a take of “Down in the Willow Garden” recorded with Hobart Smith (fiddle) in 1963 and a live recording from a Frank Proffitt Memorial Concert (“My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains”) in 1966. The majority of the songs are familiar, and they provide a pleasant insight into a formative period many of us missed. Dodi Kallick’s interpretations are enjoyable, and they can be considered a gift through time.
The central component of What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? is a further nine songs from the Dodi Kallick songbook, interpreted to the stellar degree we have always encountered within Kathy Kallick recordings. A series of guests—friends really—are featured including Mike Compton and Joe Newberry (“Farther Along”), Jim Hurst (“Jimmy Brown, the Newsboy”), and the impeccable Molly Tuttle with a guitar and vocal duet on the album opening “Put My Little Shoes Away.” I’m not a student of Tuttle, but I absolutely love the sound she coaxes from her guitar here, playing guitar in a clawhammer style…something I never realized was a thing.
Taken individually, each of the performances is noteworthy and deserving of repeated radio play, but collectively they further reveal the benefits of bluegrass kindness—treat your colleagues and friends correctly, and they’ll find a way to shine for you.
Mandolin ace Tristan Scroggins (“Sittin’ On Top of the World”) appears, and Laurel Bliss (Dobro) and Cliff Perry (guitar) vocalize with Kallick on the Carter Family’s “Little Moses.” The Kathy Kallick Band are twice featured. “Footsteps in the Snow” is given a full and impressive bluegrass treatment; it includes an original verse often excluded. The Kathy Kallick Big Band, augmented by Paul Shelasky (fiddle) as well as Kallick daughters Juniper Waller and Riley Thompson (vocals) shine on “The Wild Side of Life/It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Annie Staninec, the KKB’s fiddler, joins Kathy for “Handsome Molly,” a standout number among an album replete with such.
Given my biases, it is not surprising that the highlight for me is the title track performed as a vocal trio between Kallick, Suzy Thompson (guitar) and the living legend, Laurie Lewis (fiddle). That’ll do! This is the first time they have joined as a recording trio and the intimacy of their harmonies, born of friendship, is spellbinding.
Bluegrass folk, pay attention. Kathy Kallick remains one of the music’s most inspiring voices and personalities. While Dodi’s voice was missing from My Mother’s Voice, she is given prominence here, reminding us that without guiding influence music doesn’t continue.
Crossing generations, What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? provides a Time Tunnel effect for this listener. We are taken back to the folk revival of the 60s via the archival recordings. The song selection across both discs takes us back even further. The participants provide a wonderful cross-section of today’s brightest bluegrass voices and approaches alongside more veteran members, those who have shaped the music for years. In some ways, it is like a living room guitar pull, friends trading off songs (to an incredible level of performance) bound together by Kathy Kallick’s timeless voice and faultless vision. And from the other room comes Mother’s voice …
Lovely.
- Donald Teplyske, Fervor Coulee (1-29-23)
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Given the mind-boggling number of albums issued since the format was invented, I'm sure there must be a few like What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? But if so, I haven't heard any quite like it. Here a newly recorded, full-length CD (36 minutes) coexists under the same cover with an EP (23 minutes) honoring live performances from the 1960s.
Kathy Kallick, the daughter, revives material, never intended for release, by her late mother Dodi Kallick. The latter was ubiquitous on Chicago's rich late-1950s/'60s folk scene before it evolved into a platform for singer-songwriters such as Steve Goodman and John Prine.
As some of you will know, Kathy is a much-admired, long-standing figure in the West Coast school of bluegrass. Over the years I've reviewed several of her releases on this site, some cut with a California friend and colleague, the equally revered Laurie Lewis. Her current album, or at least her part of it, eschews bluegrass; however, though fans of the genre will have heard the cuts in bluegrass arrangements. Most hail from the Carter Family repertoire. One other has Carter Family connections: the related songs "The Wild Side of Life" and "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" (hits in 1952, the first by Hank Thompson, answered by Kitty Wells) borrow the melody of the Carters' "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes," composed in the mid-19th century. Wilf Carter, the celebrated Canadian balladeer and yodeler (no relation to the Carters of Virginia), recorded the lachrymose "Put My Little Shoes Away" -- cheekily, the opening cut on the present disc -- during country music's second decade.
Kathy offers up country, folk and gospel standards with a crack acoustic band including, at different points, bluegrass and oldtime notables Lewis, Mike Compton, Molly Tuttle, Jim Hurst, Suzy Thompson, Joe Newberry and more. If you follow these strains of rooted Southern music, you will have heard every song considerably more than once. Which is the point. This is comfort food for those who've grown up on this stuff, a reminder perhaps of why you fell in love with these songs (and all they would encourage in your future listening habits) when you heard them the first time. I can attest that hearing these songs, especially as Kathy Kallick lovingly presents them, will go a long way toward curing your winter blues and whatever other blues infest your life.
Dodi Kallick sang occasionally on WFMT, Chicago's venerable classical station, which has run a Saturday-night, loosely defined folk-music show, The Midnight Special, since the 1950s. When I lived in Chicago, I knew its then-host, Rich Warren, casually, largely because he sometimes aired songs I'd written with Robin & Linda Williams, also because we were semi-regulars at a folk-club/bar in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Heaven's liner notes report that decades after their origin Warren stumbled upon tapes of Dodi's singing, the reason we have them for this EP.
Notwithstanding a couple of reservations, I liked them immediately. I suspect your reaction will be something like mine. For the most part these are familiar traditional songs. I qualify the characterization because two or three versions are not exactly standard and they occasion distracting thoughts about what happens when professionals clean up folk songs for popular consumption. "Cotton-Eyed Joe" carries lyrics the like of which I've never heard and which appear only dubiously, at least to my not-inexperienced ear, out of a rural past. The dark, mysterious "One Hundred Miles" (variants: "900 Miles," "500 Miles," "Reuben's Train," "Train 45," et al.), from the violent Reconstruction South, has been neutered into a bland break-up song.
Some of these numbers, we are informed, come from LPs Dodi checked out of the library and learned to sing herself, usually accompanied by dulcimer. I suspect that some of what she was exposed to were traditionals marketed by long-forgotten, smooth-harmony folk-pop groups. Still, Dodi would absorb more authentic performance, as in her chilling reading of the murder ballad "Down in the Willow Garden" backed by Virginia's Hobart Smith on solo fiddle.
Usually, though, she sounded like an especially appealing vocalist from the Folk Legacy label in the 1960s. "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?" -- which her daughter covers separately on her own section of the project -- is a stunner, and not the only one. (Try "Row Us Over the Tide," for example.) According to the daughter, her mother in later life disavowed the folk-singing period of her life, which makes the tapes' survival into the 21st century a happy, unlikely circumstance, maybe even a small miracle.
- Jerome Clark, Rambles (1-14-23)
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Kathy Kallick’s newest release is all about connections: between Kathy and her mom; between Kathy and her daughters; between older and younger musical generations; and between folk, old-time, and bluegrass musical styles. It is a double-CD set with the first disc featuring Kathy and friends on new studio recordings and the second featuring her mom Dodi Kallick on vintage tracks from the WFMT Chicago archives and the Old Town School of Folk Music archives.
For her tracks, Kathy chose songs that her mom used to sing; her conversational song notes lovingly detail the backstories. These renditions run the stylistic gamut from bluesy to bluegrass, Carter Family to plaintive fiddle with vocal. I especially appreciated the old country feel of “Wild Side Of Life”/“It Wasn’t Got Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Kathy and her daughters Juniper Waller and Riley Thompson trade verses, letting the feminine point of view powerfully counter the masculine as they burst into three-part harmony for the final chorus.
On disc two Dodi accompanies herself on dulcimer or guitar and sings in a beautiful, clear, folky voice. She performed in Chicago during the folk boom, but never released any recordings. These live shows were discovered fifteen years ago and now a broader audience can finally hear her music.
Some of Kathy’s numbers feature her regular band (Annie Staninec, Tom Bekeny, Greg Booth, Cary Black) while others have the relaxed atmosphere of old friends playing together (Cliff Perry and Laurel Bliss, Laurie Lewis and Suzy Thompson). Still others are collaborations with today’s rising stars (Molly Tuttle, Tristan Scroggins). It warms my heart to see Kathy, a young innovator of the 1970s, blossoming into a matriarch of the present, and reaching out to the young trailblazers of the 2020s, forging meaningful musical bridges.
This project warms my heart from start to finish. It showcases the intergenerational nature of our music, which is one of its greatest strengths.
- Casey Henry, Bluegrass Unlimited (4-1-23)
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I picked up the new double CD, What are They Doing in Heaven Today by Kathy Kallick and Friends and Dodi Kallick and at the 2022 California Bluegrass Association (CBA) Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival in Grass Valley. The first CD is Kathy with friends includes Annie Staninec, Cary Black, Cliff Perry, Greg Booth, Jim Hurst, Joe Newberry, Juniper Waller, Laurel Bliss, Laurie Lewis, Mike Compton, Molly Tuttle, Paul Shelasky, Riley Thompson, Suzy Thompson, Tom Bekeny, and Tristan Scroggins. The second CD contains 1960s archival recordings by Kathy’s late mom, Dodi. Hobart Smith plays fiddle with her on “Down in the Willow Garden.”
The first CD opens with Molly on guitar and harmony vocal on “Put My Little Shoes Away” (see below). Tristan then adds his cross-picked mandolin to “Sittin’ On Top of the World.” Cliff and Laurel join Kathy on the haunting Carter Family song “Little Moses.” Jim sings and picks the guitar on “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy.” Kathy’s full band (Annie, Tom, Greg, and Cary) backs her on “Footprints in the Snow” and on “The Wild Side of Life/It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Paul adds a second fiddle to that medley while Kathy’s daughters, Juniper and Riley, share lead vocals with their mom. Annie also fiddles on “Handsome Molly.” Mike and Joe add harmony vocals, mandolin, and banjo to “Farther Along,” and Laurie and Suzy add vocals, fiddle, and guitar to “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?”
The second CD begins with Dodi Kallick on dulcimer and vocal on “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?” It continues with “I’m a Long Time Traveling,” “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” “One Hundred Miles” on guitar, “Row Us Over the Tide,” “Red Clay Country,” “Down in the Willow Garden,” “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains,” and the a capella “The Parting Glass.” Dodi Kallick has a clear and sweet voice which well suits her folk repertory.
- Steve Goldfield, FolkWorks
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With all due respect and realizing she has received awards (a Grammy and a pair of IBMA nods), Kallick has not been held in the same regard by the general bluegrass audience and industry as have several of her contemporaries and those who have followed in her path. I am informed that the Kathy Kallick Band albums have done well on the Bluegrass Unlimited charts, but I do not frequently encounter her music on satellite radio and other bluegrass broadcasters. One hopes What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? will bring greater attention to Kallick.
Since founding the Good Ol’ Persons in 1975, Kallick has released over twenty albums along with some 150 original songs. She has led her own Kathy Kallick Band, has toured the globe, and has mentored many. She is also one of the warmest of bluegrass personalities, affable, keen, and wise, and has collaborated with some of the best, including long-time friend Laurie Lewis.
More than twenty years ago, Kallick paid tribute to her folk-singing mother’s influence releasing My Mother’s Voice, a collection of songs pulled from Dodi Kallick’s folk repertoire, songs Kathy heard her mother singing. A formidable set it remains; the album revealed the foundation upon which Kallick built her bluegrass career. Following the discovery several years ago of recording of Dodi’s performances, Kallick has chosen to further define her mother’s legacy with What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?
This is a themed album with rather clear parameters. The first disc contains new recordings with Kallick and a variety of bluegrass and old-timey folk friends, featuring songs again drawn from her mother’s experiences. Completing the set is a second disc containing a series of songs featuring Dodi Kallick performing (mostly) solo with dulcimer in the mid- to late-60s in Chicago.
Kathy Kallick grew up in Illinois where Dodi was an early participant and instructor at the Old Town School of Folk Music. In the liner notes, Kallick writes, “ My mom’s pure, high, flawlessly in-tune singing earned her a fan base and a following, but she was mainly unknown outside of the greater Chicago area. While her influence was solid, and, of course, had a huge impact on me, she was not on any records, didn’t tour, and slowly moved to teaching more than performing.”
The archival recordings contained within the 24-minute bonus disc reveal these qualities captured in 1966 and/or 1969 tapings, as well as a take of “Down in the Willow Garden” recorded with Hobart Smith (fiddle) in 1963 and a live recording from a Frank Proffitt Memorial Concert (“My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains”) in 1966. The majority of the songs are familiar, and they provide a pleasant insight into a formative period many of us missed. Dodi Kallick’s interpretations are enjoyable, and they can be considered a gift through time.
The central component of What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? is a further nine songs from the Dodi Kallick songbook, interpreted to the stellar degree we have always encountered within Kathy Kallick recordings. A series of guests—friends really—are featured including Mike Compton and Joe Newberry (“Farther Along”), Jim Hurst (“Jimmy Brown, the Newsboy”), and the impeccable Molly Tuttle with a guitar and vocal duet on the album opening “Put My Little Shoes Away.” I’m not a student of Tuttle, but I absolutely love the sound she coaxes from her guitar here, playing guitar in a clawhammer style…something I never realized was a thing.
Taken individually, each of the performances is noteworthy and deserving of repeated radio play, but collectively they further reveal the benefits of bluegrass kindness—treat your colleagues and friends correctly, and they’ll find a way to shine for you.
Mandolin ace Tristan Scroggins (“Sittin’ On Top of the World”) appears, and Laurel Bliss (Dobro) and Cliff Perry (guitar) vocalize with Kallick on the Carter Family’s “Little Moses.” The Kathy Kallick Band are twice featured. “Footsteps in the Snow” is given a full and impressive bluegrass treatment; it includes an original verse often excluded. The Kathy Kallick Big Band, augmented by Paul Shelasky (fiddle) as well as Kallick daughters Juniper Waller and Riley Thompson (vocals) shine on “The Wild Side of Life/It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Annie Staninec, the KKB’s fiddler, joins Kathy for “Handsome Molly,” a standout number among an album replete with such.
Given my biases, it is not surprising that the highlight for me is the title track performed as a vocal trio between Kallick, Suzy Thompson (guitar) and the living legend, Laurie Lewis (fiddle). That’ll do! This is the first time they have joined as a recording trio and the intimacy of their harmonies, born of friendship, is spellbinding.
Bluegrass folk, pay attention. Kathy Kallick remains one of the music’s most inspiring voices and personalities. While Dodi’s voice was missing from My Mother’s Voice, she is given prominence here, reminding us that without guiding influence music doesn’t continue.
Crossing generations, What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? provides a Time Tunnel effect for this listener. We are taken back to the folk revival of the 60s via the archival recordings. The song selection across both discs takes us back even further. The participants provide a wonderful cross-section of today’s brightest bluegrass voices and approaches alongside more veteran members, those who have shaped the music for years. In some ways, it is like a living room guitar pull, friends trading off songs (to an incredible level of performance) bound together by Kathy Kallick’s timeless voice and faultless vision. And from the other room comes Mother’s voice …
Lovely.
- Donald Teplyske, Fervor Coulee (1-29-23)
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Given the mind-boggling number of albums issued since the format was invented, I'm sure there must be a few like What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? But if so, I haven't heard any quite like it. Here a newly recorded, full-length CD (36 minutes) coexists under the same cover with an EP (23 minutes) honoring live performances from the 1960s.
Kathy Kallick, the daughter, revives material, never intended for release, by her late mother Dodi Kallick. The latter was ubiquitous on Chicago's rich late-1950s/'60s folk scene before it evolved into a platform for singer-songwriters such as Steve Goodman and John Prine.
As some of you will know, Kathy is a much-admired, long-standing figure in the West Coast school of bluegrass. Over the years I've reviewed several of her releases on this site, some cut with a California friend and colleague, the equally revered Laurie Lewis. Her current album, or at least her part of it, eschews bluegrass; however, though fans of the genre will have heard the cuts in bluegrass arrangements. Most hail from the Carter Family repertoire. One other has Carter Family connections: the related songs "The Wild Side of Life" and "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" (hits in 1952, the first by Hank Thompson, answered by Kitty Wells) borrow the melody of the Carters' "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes," composed in the mid-19th century. Wilf Carter, the celebrated Canadian balladeer and yodeler (no relation to the Carters of Virginia), recorded the lachrymose "Put My Little Shoes Away" -- cheekily, the opening cut on the present disc -- during country music's second decade.
Kathy offers up country, folk and gospel standards with a crack acoustic band including, at different points, bluegrass and oldtime notables Lewis, Mike Compton, Molly Tuttle, Jim Hurst, Suzy Thompson, Joe Newberry and more. If you follow these strains of rooted Southern music, you will have heard every song considerably more than once. Which is the point. This is comfort food for those who've grown up on this stuff, a reminder perhaps of why you fell in love with these songs (and all they would encourage in your future listening habits) when you heard them the first time. I can attest that hearing these songs, especially as Kathy Kallick lovingly presents them, will go a long way toward curing your winter blues and whatever other blues infest your life.
Dodi Kallick sang occasionally on WFMT, Chicago's venerable classical station, which has run a Saturday-night, loosely defined folk-music show, The Midnight Special, since the 1950s. When I lived in Chicago, I knew its then-host, Rich Warren, casually, largely because he sometimes aired songs I'd written with Robin & Linda Williams, also because we were semi-regulars at a folk-club/bar in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Heaven's liner notes report that decades after their origin Warren stumbled upon tapes of Dodi's singing, the reason we have them for this EP.
Notwithstanding a couple of reservations, I liked them immediately. I suspect your reaction will be something like mine. For the most part these are familiar traditional songs. I qualify the characterization because two or three versions are not exactly standard and they occasion distracting thoughts about what happens when professionals clean up folk songs for popular consumption. "Cotton-Eyed Joe" carries lyrics the like of which I've never heard and which appear only dubiously, at least to my not-inexperienced ear, out of a rural past. The dark, mysterious "One Hundred Miles" (variants: "900 Miles," "500 Miles," "Reuben's Train," "Train 45," et al.), from the violent Reconstruction South, has been neutered into a bland break-up song.
Some of these numbers, we are informed, come from LPs Dodi checked out of the library and learned to sing herself, usually accompanied by dulcimer. I suspect that some of what she was exposed to were traditionals marketed by long-forgotten, smooth-harmony folk-pop groups. Still, Dodi would absorb more authentic performance, as in her chilling reading of the murder ballad "Down in the Willow Garden" backed by Virginia's Hobart Smith on solo fiddle.
Usually, though, she sounded like an especially appealing vocalist from the Folk Legacy label in the 1960s. "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?" -- which her daughter covers separately on her own section of the project -- is a stunner, and not the only one. (Try "Row Us Over the Tide," for example.) According to the daughter, her mother in later life disavowed the folk-singing period of her life, which makes the tapes' survival into the 21st century a happy, unlikely circumstance, maybe even a small miracle.
- Jerome Clark, Rambles (1-14-23)
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Kathy Kallick’s newest release is all about connections: between Kathy and her mom; between Kathy and her daughters; between older and younger musical generations; and between folk, old-time, and bluegrass musical styles. It is a double-CD set with the first disc featuring Kathy and friends on new studio recordings and the second featuring her mom Dodi Kallick on vintage tracks from the WFMT Chicago archives and the Old Town School of Folk Music archives.
For her tracks, Kathy chose songs that her mom used to sing; her conversational song notes lovingly detail the backstories. These renditions run the stylistic gamut from bluesy to bluegrass, Carter Family to plaintive fiddle with vocal. I especially appreciated the old country feel of “Wild Side Of Life”/“It Wasn’t Got Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Kathy and her daughters Juniper Waller and Riley Thompson trade verses, letting the feminine point of view powerfully counter the masculine as they burst into three-part harmony for the final chorus.
On disc two Dodi accompanies herself on dulcimer or guitar and sings in a beautiful, clear, folky voice. She performed in Chicago during the folk boom, but never released any recordings. These live shows were discovered fifteen years ago and now a broader audience can finally hear her music.
Some of Kathy’s numbers feature her regular band (Annie Staninec, Tom Bekeny, Greg Booth, Cary Black) while others have the relaxed atmosphere of old friends playing together (Cliff Perry and Laurel Bliss, Laurie Lewis and Suzy Thompson). Still others are collaborations with today’s rising stars (Molly Tuttle, Tristan Scroggins). It warms my heart to see Kathy, a young innovator of the 1970s, blossoming into a matriarch of the present, and reaching out to the young trailblazers of the 2020s, forging meaningful musical bridges.
This project warms my heart from start to finish. It showcases the intergenerational nature of our music, which is one of its greatest strengths.
- Casey Henry, Bluegrass Unlimited (4-1-23)
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I picked up the new double CD, What are They Doing in Heaven Today by Kathy Kallick and Friends and Dodi Kallick and at the 2022 California Bluegrass Association (CBA) Father’s Day Bluegrass Festival in Grass Valley. The first CD is Kathy with friends includes Annie Staninec, Cary Black, Cliff Perry, Greg Booth, Jim Hurst, Joe Newberry, Juniper Waller, Laurel Bliss, Laurie Lewis, Mike Compton, Molly Tuttle, Paul Shelasky, Riley Thompson, Suzy Thompson, Tom Bekeny, and Tristan Scroggins. The second CD contains 1960s archival recordings by Kathy’s late mom, Dodi. Hobart Smith plays fiddle with her on “Down in the Willow Garden.”
The first CD opens with Molly on guitar and harmony vocal on “Put My Little Shoes Away” (see below). Tristan then adds his cross-picked mandolin to “Sittin’ On Top of the World.” Cliff and Laurel join Kathy on the haunting Carter Family song “Little Moses.” Jim sings and picks the guitar on “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy.” Kathy’s full band (Annie, Tom, Greg, and Cary) backs her on “Footprints in the Snow” and on “The Wild Side of Life/It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” Paul adds a second fiddle to that medley while Kathy’s daughters, Juniper and Riley, share lead vocals with their mom. Annie also fiddles on “Handsome Molly.” Mike and Joe add harmony vocals, mandolin, and banjo to “Farther Along,” and Laurie and Suzy add vocals, fiddle, and guitar to “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?”
The second CD begins with Dodi Kallick on dulcimer and vocal on “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?” It continues with “I’m a Long Time Traveling,” “Cotton-Eyed Joe,” “One Hundred Miles” on guitar, “Row Us Over the Tide,” “Red Clay Country,” “Down in the Willow Garden,” “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains,” and the a capella “The Parting Glass.” Dodi Kallick has a clear and sweet voice which well suits her folk repertory.
- Steve Goldfield, FolkWorks
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