A Mighty Concert: Tom Rush What I Know Tour

by Cordley Coit


What to give a fourteen year old. This birthday it was a Tom Rush concert. Of course the kid is musically aware and able to understand the folk genre . Knowing the performer does help and having business with him helps more. Mutual self aid is a way of life with performers.

The music business so busy reinventing it's self it gives rise to thoughts of the enterprise involved with doing a tour....

Tom grew up a natural performer which means he worked very hard for his place at the head of the folk table. He knows about timing his work is about loss, No Regrets, rivers: Merrimack County, River Song, aging, love .

His folksy patter carried the folk message humorously which is missing from many folk followers.

Tom's strong musicianship and wicked sense of timing made the evening slip away quickly.

The newer material focus is on new beginnings and endings. Leavings, there are many empty chairs as the New Folk pass into their sixties and some are in their seventies.

Folk music is the realism of the music 'industry', a soul polluting industry, feeding off the spring of creativity. What folk musicians have done is to use the new Internet model to make money on recordings. The sales not hand over fist, but a comfortable aid to a professional career, without having been totally debilitated by industry contracts which have seldom paid anything to the artist.
The economics are Libertarian, the artist must work harder but the money proves out the IWW adage that “Labor is entitled to all the profits.”


As a consumer of music I have always felt guilty about giving cash to Warner's for their predatory practices but who can fell bad about giving money to Elenore Ellis, Julie Monley, Tom Rush or Tom Waites. I am not a pod person but the same goes for the pod product.


This system is a far cry from the artist as an aloof unreachable person removed from their audience coddled and protected. Writers and poets ought to see real people and real people ought to meet writers and poets. Here's the break down: a family of three spends a hundred and thirty for a night with a couple of CDs to show for an evening of enjoyment. Including a few words with the artist.

I don't like to classify Rush as a folk musician because he reaches other places Blues, Country, Poetry, singer songwriter sounds trite. There are several things that music does when it rings true. One has to do with the direct access tunes have with the brain. Another is when the brain knows what it hearing is true. Tom is hitting true, breaking new ground.


His stand towards returning soldiers touches a place with me. I live in a town where they hide the survivors away rather than have them be the people they are. How to we heal ourselves and our veterans when they are hidden away and uncared for?


Tom's music is as affirming as his words, as are the other authors of his songs. As with past albums this contains some of the tastiest side musicians and harmony singers one can find. Putting it together is Jim Rooney producer and man with the music. Rooney and Rush pull off a must hear, a must learn from musical experience. Good to watch, good to listen to, learned a lot from the show, a lot more from the recording.


More At: www.Appleseed Music.com, www.TomRush.com