Maurice Hope – August 2, 2016 at 12:38PM
Tags:_AMERICANA
1960s folk artist, Toronto-born, Canadian singer-songwriter Bonnie Dobson started out in a group called The Travellers, Canada’s answer to America’s the Weavers. It was through her love of their music, and admiration for one member especially Pete Seeger (who she first met aged 13 at a summer camp back home) that she felt compelled to further her interest in music. Singing while still at high school Dobson, and later on attending University. Her stay there was short-lived, as she turned her back on her studies to perform, aged twenty solo dates in the States.
An amazing vocalist Dobson’s opening line on “The Bonnie Lass Of Kenmore Town” (Bob Coltman) is enough to leave the listener spell-bound through its beauty, my first time hearing it left me gobsmacked! Her vocals, acoustic guitar aided by Hennie Kubik’s delightful harmony vocals, Pete Gardner (acoustic guitar) produce a spare purity of rare splendour. Israel Gardner (flute) though not on this track does gain space on selected tracks.
Apart from Dobson’s attraction to American and English folk material she also had an ear and love for those of French Canadian extraction, which she recorded, in the former. Plus for good measure she has one from Yugoslavia (“Vranyanka”) and another Czechoslovakia (“Vertsa Dievcha”); talk of someone being able to sing from the telephone book, Bonnie Dobson is just that kind of performer and more beside. Others of note include “Dinks Song”, and there is the small matter of Dobson’s interpretation of perennial mountain ballad “Girl Of Constant Sorrow”. Her version may not posses the hard, keen edge of Ralph Stanley (one he covered years previously with his brother, Carter Stanley as the other half of The Stanley Brothers) and the like who for years performed it as “Man Of Constant Sorrow”, but it is nevertheless a version worthy of attention. In 1961 Dobson shared coverage in Time Magazine about four female folk singers, this at a time when the idiom was pretty much in its infancy, the others were Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Carolyn Hester.
Maurice Hope
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