Yankee Dick Annegarn

Folk and blues cover collection

Paris 

11/02/2011 - 

One year after Soleil du soir, Dick Annegarn has brought out an album featuring covers of folk and blues greats, entitled Folk Talk. This highly personal homage to popular American culture smacks of a return to his roots.

Saint James Infirmary Blues, Down In the Valley, Georgia on my Mind, Worried Man Blues, Ox Driver’s Song… fourteen tracks that neatly sum up American folk and blues. With Folk Talk, Dick Annegard, that most Gallic of Dutchmen, uses one of the major sources of contemporary western music to explore the inexhaustible songbook of American folk. “I’ve been singing half of these songs for thirty or forty years without any lyrics, music score or even a guitar. I’m really interested in transmission, passage and forgetting. What’s left of a song that we’ve forgotten?”  

He doesn’t hide the fact that the idea of recording Folk Talk came from the director of his record label, Vincent Frèrebeau. “He’s been talking about it since at least 1998. When I go to eat at his place and I take my guitar, I sing folk and blues. They’re closer to my roots than Georges Brassens. I grew up with Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, Bukka White. As a teenager, I saw John Lee Hooker and a few others perform at Théâtre 140 in Brussels, at a time when there were more American artists in Belgium than French singers.” And he points out that the inspiration for Bébé elephant, one of his first hits in the early 70s, came from a song by an American he met in Brussels.

He sings in the folk tradition, but also picks works by some of the great creators and singers, like Bob Dylan (Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright) and Elvis Presley (Love Me Tender), always approaching songs and singing with the same freedom, claiming that he is only following a great tradition. “When they went back to their roots, they were also aiming to take things somewhere else – they had no problem with adding a verse or cutting things here or there. In House of the Rising Sun, my interpretation is as much of a signature as the lyrics themselves – I’ve added melismas in Arabic or Yiddish style. I have trouble singing like the originals, and I’ve purposefully reclaimed them. It’s also an album that takes you on a voyage. I didn’t want to make a phony cowboy or black record that I would only perform in France. I opted for something a bit wacky, mad and personal.”

Francophone singer

It’s true that Dick Annegarn is easily recognisable on each of the songs that make up Folk Talk, even though the instrumentation is strictly folk and the repertoire is firmly rooted back in the USA. There is an acoustic guitar, hardly any percussion, a couple of backing singers from time to time, and his own husky voice, which is so ductile, rough and lyrical all at once. “I started recording in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, but I was a bit stiff. We redid everything and tied things up in Los Angeles at Freddy Koella’s. ‘Right from the airport, I felt the shock’ (‘Dès l’aérogare, j’ai senti le choc’, a quote from Nougayork by Claude Nougaro): over there the drive, the swing, the tonic accent, the oomph, nothing’s the same. And we were able to get hold of New Orleans backing singers, who just blew me away.” For the tour, he’ll be setting off with two Caribbean backing vocalists. “For years, my musicians were from Gascony. That’s gonna really change the atmosphere, this Creole side of Central American girls.” 

He likes the lyrics of these American songs to be disarmingly simple at times. “There are waves of meaning, hidden significations that can be heard between the words. There is no dictionary for these songs. You have to give your own meaning, and not necessarily a universal one. Our folk is not American, it’s world folk, Obamist folk. In any case, even our European composers were thieves: Bartok and Varèse took their tunes from the illiterate. Here, I’m honouring a tiny part of our roots. Music can really circulate. I remember singing Le Roi Renaud to my Berber friends in Morocco; they thought it was one of their own songs.” And as to his own roots, Annegarn says he is also going to publish, on 19 May, a collection of his song lyrics, Paroles (published by Le Mot et le Reste). “Which just goes to show that I’m still a francophone singer.”

Dick Annegarn Folk Talk (Tôt ou Tard) 2011
Tour : 19 February in Paris (La Maroquinerie), 13 March in Luxey, 18 March in Soignies, 19 March in Givet, 31 March in Paris (Bataclan), etc.

Bertrand  Dicale

Translation : Anne-Marie  Harper