August 2007
By Steve Boisson

Bill Morrissey has often drawn inspiration from the bleak New England winter. He has mined it for metaphors in songs about ice fishing, wood burning, cabin fever, and other things born of short, cold days. On Come Running, Morrissey’s first original CD in six years, he explores the season’s darkest implication. “And these days the sun don’t rise, as much as it goes down,” he sings on a lament for his late friend, the fiddler Johnny Cunningham. On another tune, a washed-up musician rues, “Thirty years of thank you and please, ’til all you get is the smoker’s cough and the alcohol disease.” The material could be depressing in lesser hands, but Morrissey always manages to make sadness go down sweetly. On the lighter side, Dave Alvin—more or less Morrissey’s West Coast counterpart as regional balladeer—lends some shimmering electric-guitar fills on jaunty numbers such as “I Ain’t Walking” and “Dangerous Way.” But nothing animates the music so much as Morrissey’s keen eye for detail and ear for the telling phrase. And, of course, there’s that voice. When Morrissey wraps his quivering, whiskey-burnished croak around a line, it feels as warm as the first breath of spring. Highly recommended.

February 23, 1992

RECORDINGS VIEW; From Bill Morrissey, Blue-Collar Angst With a Folk Touch

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
In the title song on Bill Morrissey's fourth album, "Inside," the narrator admits to his companion that their treadmill life certainly "ain't Hollywood." Singing in a quiet, gravelly voice against which Suzanne Vega's softer harmony rings like a mournful echo, Mr. Morrissey, a 40-year-old folk singer and songwriter from New England, describes the dreary existence of an unemployed worker who has recently given up drinking. He fixes dinner each night when his wife, a waitress, returns to their furnished room. Then they wait up to watch the late movie on a black-and-white television set.

Winding through the stark, matter-of-fact language is a solo violin played by Johnny Cunningham that evokes all the regrets and disappointments that cannot be stifled. Despite adversity, however, the relationship seems to be holding. "And you won't leave soon/ Because I know/ You're just like me/ With no place to go," the singer reminds her. "Call it love if you think you should/ There's no need to explain."

"Inside," like Mr. Morrissey's best songs, has a terseness, precision of detail and a tone of laconic understatement that relate his lyrics to the fiction of writers like Raymond Carver and Richard Ford. In the lineage of pop, Mr. Morrissey belongs to a modern acoustic folk tradition that goes back to Woody Guthrie and that includes not only the early Bob Dylan and John Prine but also Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits in their more folkish, songs-of-the-common-man modes.

Mr. Morrissey, who grew up in Acton, Mass., and Hartford and attended Plymouth State College in New Hampshire, is no overnight sensation. He has performed for two decades on the New England coffeehouse circuit while drifting from job to job and town to town, punching factory time clocks and working on fishing boats, in gas stations and fast-food parlors.

Many of his songs are steeped in a mood of stiff-upper-lip, blue-collar angst. Their grayness is often augmented by stark images of the landscape of industrial New England in winter. The pervasive chill is frequently thawed by whisky and a playfully ironic sense of humor.

Mr. Morrissey released his first album, "Bill Morrissey" (Philo/Rounder 1105; CD and cassette), in 1984, and re-recorded its songs last year with improved sound, adding three new selections. Two albums, the austere "North" (Philo/Rounder 1106; all three formats), and the more rollicking "Standing Eight" (Philo/Rounder PH 1023; all three formats) followed. "Inside" (Philo/Rounder PH 1145; CD and cassette) is Mr. Morrissey's best-sounding record, largely because of Mr. Cunningham's expressive fiddle, which threads through five songs, pining dolefully on some numbers, dancing the jig on others.

The tight-lipped blue-collar realist is only one of several aspects of Mr. Morrissey's musical personality to be showcased favorably on the new album. Another side is a surreal trickster who suggests a milder mannered offshoot of the mid-1960's Bob Dylan. "Everybody Warned Me" is a gently phantasmagoric road song that recycles "look out kid," the same warning that punctuated Mr. Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues." "Gambler's Blues" is crowded with allegorical figures named the Jack of Diamonds, Miss Downtown and St. Louis, a fellow who toots a broken horn. The title character of "Sister Jo" is a close spiritual relative of the threatening harpies who appear in such Dylan songs as "She Belongs to Me" and "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."

On "Inside" Mr. Morrissey also has a streak of the blues singer in him, most strongly in "Robert Johnson," a tribute to the seminal blues guitarist in which John Jennings's electric twangs echo Johnson's signature sound. But it is in the sober confessional monologues of characters like the narrator of "Inside" and "Off-White" that Mr. Morrissey's talent burns most intensely.

A bare-bones waltz, "Off-White" describes two people who have been burned but who are still anticipating a second marriage. This time, the narrator promises, "We'll hire us a band/ That won't play 'Proud Mary'/ No matter how late it gets." He adds: "Maybe you weren't my first/ The way I wasn't yours. But the last love is the sweetest of all."

Even better is "Man From Out of Town," the story of a drifter who settles down only to watch his home and possessions go up in flames on a rainy night. In the middle of the fire he imagines he hears the telephone ringing inside. The story works as both a vignette and a bleak parable of a rambler's inability to put down roots once he has left home. In one verse, the man compares a priest heeding Jesus's voice to his own response to the alluring sound of a train in the distance.

Not the least of Mr. Morrissey's contributions to modern folk music is the way his songs imprint an indelible vision of working-class New England onto the broader map of American pop literature. At their best and leanest -- conjuring up a landscape of church steeples, silver maples and wind-blasted seacoast streets -- Mr. Morrissey's songs have the force of poetry.

Photo: Bill Morrissey -- The realist sings of regrets and disappointments. (William Haines for The New York Times)

BILL MORRISSEY
Come Running | Turn and Spin Media

By TED DROZDOWSKI
July 24, 2007


This disc marks the renaissance of New England musical poet Morrissey. Creatively, it revisits the strong emotional territory of his classics Standing Eight and Night Train (both on Rounder). And its release follows a visit to rehab that seems to have restored the singer-songwriter’s buoyant spirit, resulting in some of his warmest, wittiest live performances in years. The album features Dave Alvin on electric guitar, plus producer Billy Conway (drums) and Dana Colley (sax) of Morphine and Twinemen. The songs ricochet between joy and sadness. The triumphant opener “I Ain’t Walking” is an outright rocker — with Morrissey adding clarinet — and “Dangerous Way” and “New Walking Blues” have a similar blithe spirit. On the blue side, there’s “Johnny’s Tune,” a loving elegy for the late folk-violin wizard Johnny Cunningham, and the wistful “By the Grave of Baudelaire” and “Canal Street,” which use Morrissey’s trademark gift for novelistic detail to capture longing and a touch of lust. Alvin’s baritone guitar on the latter adds a layer of emotional resonance. References to Morrissey’s passion for classic Delta blues sneak their way into his lyrics, as does a tip to the Polish side of his ancestry. And he channels his passion for hot jazz into “He’s Not from Kansas City.” Come Running also marks Morrissey’s first venture into self-releasing an album after decades with Rounder. It’s available at cdbaby.com.

January 20, 2006

GUITAR FESTIVAL REVIEW | TRIBUTE TO JOHN HURT
Stepping Around the Pieties in a Tribute to a Bluesman

By BEN RATLIFF
Mississippi John Hurt was a reluctant blues musician, if he was one at all. He lived most of his life in Avalon, Miss., barely traveling; it is said that he never played in juke joints, which would explain why his voice and fingerpicked guitar style never developed the percussiveness he would have needed to cut through a commotion.
He made some curiously gentle early recordings in 1928, singing softly as he fixed alternating bass patterns with his thumb and syncopated a melody with three other fingers. They weren't successful. But nearly 40 years later, his luck changed; he was pursued, found and handed a ready-made audience. There was a vacancy for a nonpercussive blues singer, especially one as benign as John Hurt. There was even a name now for what he did: he was a folk-blues singer.
Anyone approaching his music another 40 years after that, as several performers did on Wednesday night at Merkin Concert Hall in a Hurt-centric concert devised by the New York Guitar Festival, faces a tricky job. There are social-consciousness pieties, blues-fan pieties, folk-singer pieties and even guitar-playing pieties to step around. Hurt's work is tight and specific; performers have to take it for what it is, and take themselves for who they are.
The folk singer Bill Morrissey got it right. A Hurt fanatic at 15 who came to perform Hurt's music publicly only much later in life, Mr. Morrissey, now in his mid-50's, is the kind of musician who doesn't show you all he can do. He played absolutely clean guitar, damping strings only where he desired to, working perfect sliding notes into the fingerpicking cycles; without elaborating on those patterns much, he let you hear their economy and beauty.
One got the impression that he secretly had a Hurt imitation down cold, but he sang in his own strange, quiet voice: vowels that came out in winces, flashes of a gargled baritone, each note snuffed out before its pitch became too apparent.
Mr. Morrissey's set included light songs like "Funky Butt," which Jen Chapin also sang during a short performance at the beginning of the concert. But another choice, "If You Don't Want Me Baby," one of the songs Hurt recorded after his rediscovery, got the serious performance it deserves. Its three lyric strains formed a composite statement about serene, lonely resignation; Mr. Morrissey used his full concentration and his power of understatement to transmit its emotion.
Jorma Kaukonen, the evening's big draw, played a far more casual and less satisfying set. Singing and fingerpicking, accompanied by Barry Mitterhoff on mandolin, banjo and tenor guitar, he opened up Hurt's repertory, including "Stack O' Lee," "Casey Jones" and Ernest Tubb's "Walking the Floor Over You," to jamming. It was careful work, but it amounted to letting the air out of a basketball; the tension inside the music collapsed.
More to the point was the guitarist Brandon Ross, who rearranged three Hurt songs compositionally. Mr. Ross, who used to direct Cassandra Wilson's band, seems to hear music as murmurs, or fog. He changed the thumb-pattern intervals so that they lightly clashed against the melodic material; he introduced more complex chords; with a voice that was cool to the point of evaporation, he made the songs both lighter and more droning.
Unscheduled, unvirtuosic and sweetly relevant was Dan Zanes, who appeared in the middle of the show with two adults and five children, some of them preadolescent. Calling themselves the How Not to Get Rich Orchestra, they played one song, "My Creole Belle": it was transparent, joyful and about as folk as possible.

Kerville Kronikles 2007 & 2004
     
Bill Morrissey was born in Hartford, Connecticut on 25th November 1951, and spent his childhood years in Hartford and Acton, Massachusetts. Midway through his teens he bought a Silvertone guitar and began writing songs. A few months after Mississippi John Hurt passed in November 1966, Morrissey purchased a copy of the album “Mississippi John Hurt Today.” It marked the beginning of a lifelong musical love affair. After graduating from high school, in 1969 Bill enrolled at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire, but didn’t stay long. For the short time in Plymouth, Bill was the folk show dj on the college radio station. Having begun to write his own songs, Morrissey would regularly hang out at the college coffee shop. The urge to be a performing musician became too great to resist, and Morrissey dropped out and moved to Philadelphia. He occasionally returned to Plymouth to visit friends, and it was there that he met fellow folk musician Cormac McCarthy who was, by then, attending the college.

Through the seventies and almost halfway into the following decade Morrissey was a journeyman musician picking up gigs wherever he could, while also taking odd jobs to help keep body, heart and soul together. He worked in factories, pumped gas, went to sea on a fishing vessel [in Alaska] and served in fast food outlets. In the early eighties Morrissey was signed by Rounder/Philo and his self-titled, solo acoustic debut appeared in 1984. While he had previously been restricted to touring the North-Eastern states with a recording now available, Bill began performing on a national basis and continued to record for Philo. He has referred to “Standing Eight” as his “divorce album” since it was cut soon after his first marriage ended. Later, Bill cut a covers album with his fly-fishing buddy Greg Brown, titled “Friend Of Mine.” His next solo outing “Night Train” was produced by his second wife, Ellen Karas, and it brought Morrissey a degree of commercial success. As for critical success, that had been a shoe in from the outset of his recording career.

“You’ll Never Get To Heaven” was recorded in New Orleans, and co-produced by Karas and Scott Billington. By way of taking stock of his, then, almost three decade long career in music, with “Songs Of Mississippi John Hurt,” Bill returned to his first love, interpreting the songs of his musical hero. The latter album was also recorded in New Orleans, at Ultrasonic Studios, and was nominated for a “Best Traditional Folk Album” Grammy. Produced by Karas, she also helped arrange the songs in association with Bill and blues musician, Peter Keane. A couple of years later, Morrissey contributed the song “Pay Day” to the Hurt tribute compilation “Avalon Blues” issued by Vanguard Records. Bill’s most recent studio recording for Philo “Something I Saw Or Thought I Saw” appeared in 2001. In the early summer of 2004, the Rounder label issued a twenty-track compilation that included three previously unreleased songs. Morrissey can be best characterised as a gravel voiced troubadour who, economically [and generally], through his songs, relates stories of the daily victories and defeats of the ordinary working man.

In 1993, and now a resident of Boston, Bill produced Ellis Paul’s debut album “Say Something,” and has occasionally continued to produce albums by young performers. In 2002 he produced Karaugh Brown’s full-length debut [she had previously recorded an e.p.] “One Round Orange.” Bill’s first novel “Edson” [Alfred Knopf, ISBN 0-679-44629-X] was published in 1996. It seems strange to relate that the main character, Henry Corvine, was a road-weary musician. Morrissey has been working on a second book, provisionally titled “Imaginary Runner,” for a number of years.

Recorded in the Spring/Summer of 2006, Bill Morrissey self-released on Turn And Spin Media the thirteen song “Come Running” during April the following year. Co-produced with Billy Conway – formerly the drummer with Morphine and now with Twinemen - and recorded in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the latter’s Hi-N-Dry Studios, it was Morrissey’s first solo outing in six years. The guest players on the album included Dave Alvin, Kent Allyn, Cormac McCarthy, Dana Colley [Morphine, Twinemen] and Jennifer Kimball. These days Morrissey makes his home near Tamworth in Maine. Having struggled for a number of years with the consumption of alcohol, during January 2007 Bill spent a month in a Long Island Rehab Clinic.



Arthur Wood
Copyright Kerrville Kronikles 05/04 & 07/07
 
 Following a twenty-one year sojourn with Rounder Records [1984 - 2004], and a six year silence since his last original work “Something I Saw Or Thought I Saw” [2001], Bill returns with “Come Running” a thirteen song collection released on his own label, Turn And Spin Media Records. Co-produced with drummer Billy Conway [Morphine, Twinemen] and recorded at the latter’s Hi-N-Dry Studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts the support players include Dana Colley [saxophone], Kent Allyn [bass], Cormac McCarthy [harmonica], Dave Alvin [guitar] and Jennifer Kimball [vocals].

In addition to guitar and vocal, Bill blows a bass clarinet on the funky sounding opener “I Ain’t Walking,” a song about parting, wherein Bill references The Miracles’ Holland, Dozier, Holland penned 1963 ten million selling hit “Mickey’s Monkey” and from the following year Major Lance’s “Um, Um, Um, Um, Um, Um” written by Curtis Mayfield. Set in a bus station, it’s two in the morning as the musician/narrator in “Thirty Years” reflects “Gotta get some sleep, gotta gig to make, It’s fourteen hours to the next town.” For Morrissey it’s an all to familiar scenario and in the refrain the narrator, who has seen better days, adds “Thirty year of thank you and please, Till all you get is the smokers’ cough and the alcohol disease.” In “Holden’s Blues” Morrissey poetically witnesses the turning of the seasons with “But summer days pack and move down south just to make room for the fall” and in the same verse continues with “They come running through the wheat and rye, And you cannot catch them all.” I guess that the album title and the song that features them, namely “Holden’s Blues,” may just possess a Salinger link. And wasn’t Holden’s middle name Morrissey?

While the lyric mentions Morrissey’s favourite sport – “I cast my line” - “Summer Jumped All Over Me” is actually a song for the seasons that concludes, “When you fall in love this time of year, there ain’t no room for doubt.” In “By The Grave Of Baudelaire” on a visit to Paris, Bill’s narrator reflects on the loss of love, and in the later “I Was A Fool” he explores the same theme. Morrissey employs the Son House song of the same name as his backdrop for “Death Letter,” while “Victory At Sea” finds Bill’s narrator reminisce about the television show of the same name, first aired during 1952/53, and of a seaman acquaintance and WWII veteran who once upon a time avidly watched the programme. The closing “Johnny’s Tune” is a tribute to Scottish born, American based fiddle player Johnny Cunningham, and occasional Morrissey collaborator, who died on 15th December 2003 in New York City. Here Morrissey employs allusions to time and the seasons in “And these days the sun don’t rise, as much as goes down,” as he warmly memorialises his friend.

Born November 25th 1951 in Hartford, Connecticutt, the index number of Bill’s debut release on his own record label is CD 1125. Some days you don’t miss a trick………………….

Score 8 out of 10

Arthur Wood.
Copyright Kerrville Kronikles 07/07.