Mike Tod - Mike Tod (2023)

A Canadian ethnomusicologist and practitioner of old time music from Southern Alberta, this is Mike Tod’s full-length solo debut after his previous life as one half of old time duo Godfrey & Tod, working with Jeremy Gignoux on viola, violinist Laura Reid, Nathan M. Godfrey on banjo, bassist Keith Rodger and percussionist Travis Miller for a collection of primarily traditional numbers filtered through a modern lens.

Learnt from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, but with its origins in the southern Scotland borderlands, The Coo Coo, with its well-known Jack Of Diamonds refrain, variously addresses themes of addiction, potential homelessness, and obsession, the arrangement here suitably ominous with its spooked banjo and violin shrieks. And from one bird to another with The Blackest Crow, a parting song, versions which can be traced back to Scotland and England, is perhaps more associated with the Appalachians, here in 4/4 time with a sparse fiddle and picked acoustic arrangement to complement Tod’s dry, rusty tenor.

A fiddle tune of eighteenth-century Scottish lineage, Flower Of Edinburgh gets a lively arrangement with bowed bass underpinning twin dancing fiddles, while the album’s other instrumental is an old time banjo tune, Cold Frosty Morn, learnt from the playing of Doc Watson back when Tod and his wife were living on a Vancouver sheep farm, and carrying a Celtic flavour to the arrangement.

Of more recent provenance, given a waltz-time treatment with four-part harmony, Cigarettes And Whiskey dates from 1947, written by Tim Spencer and popularised by his group The Sons of the Pioneers as Cigareetes, Whusky, and Wild, Wild Women, and later recorded by the likes of Jim Croce, Martin Carthy and Buck Owens.

Relatively more obscure (with versions, however, by Crooked Still, The Lasses, and Meredith Moon) is the simply strummed, muted percussion and fiddle-backed Undone In Sorrow, a familiar traditional-styled tale of leaving a lover to seek fortune and returning to find them dead (“Over yonder in that graveyard/Where the wildflowers grow/Oh there they lay my own true lover/She’s gone from me forever more”) written by banjo player Ola Belle Reed, one of the most important figures in old-time music. The guitar line comes from a version by Reed’s cousin Hugh Campbell, while the melody is a little reminiscent of Man Of Constant Sorrow.

Opening the second side is the only self-penned track, Back To My Home, an urgent number with a banjo line inspired by the old-time Banjo Roustabout. It features twin banjos, one playing the repetitive melody and the other strumming the off-beat, with the lyrics wishing to return to simpler, better times.

Another ‘contemporary’ cover, Little Wheel Spin And Spin is a classic by Buffy Sainte-Marie, one of Tod’s prime inspirations; the circling guitar pattern echoes the title and theme of history repeating and society looking for scapegoats (“Blame the angels, blame the fates/ Blame the Jews or your sister Kate/Teach your children who to hate,”) the pizzicato and percussive intrusions adding to the fever dream feel.

The most obscure choice is the waltzing, yodelling Wait For Me, first recorded in 1933 by a little-known duo named Harold and Hazel; Tod is faithful to the duet original with wife Opal joining in for a cowboy campfire duet, the collection ending with My Alberta Rose, a country waltz written by The Romaniuk Family, a trio from Edson, Alberta, and contemporaries of and Canadian answer to the Carter Family (many of whose songs they covered), celebrating the scenery and seasons of the Alberta foothills.

This is an excellent addition to the increasing interest in old time American music, preserving its heritage and infusing it with contemporary musical relevance, I suspect and trust this is just the first committing Mike Tod’s ethnomusicological ventures to disc.