TITLE: NO HIDING PLACE: OLD SONGS

ARTIST: LARRY HANKS AND DEBORAH ROBINS

LABEL: ZIPPETY WHIPPET MUSIC

RELEASE DATE: 2010

By Ross Altman

During the Bicentennial in 1976 there were a plethora of patriotic gestures on every front, a flag-waving resurgence of national pride after the recent debacle of Watergate and the ignominious end to the Vietnam War. Even the staid National Geographic Society got into the act, deciding to make a simple statement of enduring American values by releasing an album of cowboy songs. So whom did they get to represent the American Cowboy? Not Gene Autry, not Roy Rogers, and not Tex Ritter; they dug deeper than the silver screen, and roped Berkeley cowboy Larry Hanks into their cause.

Good choice; Larry Hanks sturdy, reliable earthy voice captures as well as anyone can the spirit of the American west—when he sang about Billy the Kid you found yourself looking over your shoulder, to make sure the Kid hadn’t snuck up behind you with a drawn six-gun. And when Larry wrapped his deep bass voice and guitar around The Brazos River, you had no trouble dreaming your way back to the anonymous hired hand from whom Irene Castle learned the song in 1921, who recorded it for Vance Randolph.

Before Larry appeared on the National Geographic Recording with Sam Hinton and Saul Brody, his distinctive bass voice and his virtuoso Jew’s harp playing had been featured on the Folkways album Berkeley Farms: Oldtime and Country Style Music of Berkeley (FW 2436), which was produced by Mike Seeger and two tracks from which were included in the New Lost City Ramblers 50 year retrospective on Smithsonian Folkways, Where Do You Come? Where Do You Go? And before that, in 1968 Michael Cooney recorded Larry’s now classic song Apple-Picker’s Reel, just a year after he had written it, on Cooney’s first Folk-Legacy album, The Cheese Stands Alone.

All of this before Larry got around to recording his own solo album, Tying a Knot In the Devil’s Tail in 1982, which is one of my prized LPs.

None of this of course did Larry even think worth mentioning on his brand new website. Rather like Thomas Jefferson neglecting to mention on his epitaph that he was the third President of the United States, Larry Hanks has been burying the lead for years—he recorded for Folkways Records? Fagetaboutit! He recorded for National Geographic? Fagetaboutit! His Apple-Picker’s Reel is in Rise Up Singing? Fagetaboutit!

Larry is not one to toot his own horn, so let me toot it for him: he is the real deal, a certified American Songster—the apt description he favors over folk singer.

He wrote his classic Apple Picker’s Reel the old fashioned way--after working up in Sebastopol for a season picking apples. He was standing in the upper branches of a tree reaching for an apple when the song came to him practically whole. Like Robert Frost’s poem After Apple-Picking it’s the fruit of hard-won experience.

During the recording sessions for his solo album Tying a Knot In the Devil’s Tail he did what one commentator described as a “raunchy” version of a Depression era protest classic, The Panic Is On, which nearly thirty years later sounds contemporary once again. But Larry did not just record the song about the onset of desperate economic times. He recreated the original recording session at the Library of Congress, when Hezekiah Jenkins “stepped right into the studio and walked right up to the microphone and this is what he said!” suddenly speaking truth to power right into the government microphone:

What this country is coming to

I really want to know

If they don’t do something bye and bye

You know the rich will live and the poor will die

Doggone, I mean the panic is on.

By the time Larry finished you felt you were back in 1931, not 1981 when it was recorded. It’s a bravura performance, as an actor, a singer and a finger-style guitar player.

If you are lucky enough to see him at a folk festival you may not recognize him as one of the performers—no fancy cowboy clothes, no Stetson hat, no snakeskin boots, or silver belt buckles, just his wire-rim glasses, a T-shirt with a silhouette of Leadbelly staring out, and an old Gibson guitar. But he hasn’t shaved his long, flowing beard, and as soon as he starts to sing you’ll realize you have heard that voice before, often on other people’s recordings—like I just did on a record by the late great John Herald, providing the bass anchor to John’s soaring tenor on Happy Sunny Side of Life.

Larry has been doing that for years too, making other artists sound better, filling out arrangements and making music with the likes of Jean Ritchie, Sam Hinton, Michael Cooney, Geoff Muldaur, Malvina Reynolds, Gordon Bok, Jody Stecher, Joe Hickerson, Utah Phillips, Mike Seeger, and even Janis Joplin.

After a lengthy hiatus from recording and touring, Larry is back in the saddle again with a “new album of brand spankin’ old songs,” No Hiding Place: Old Songs, lovingly recorded with his wife Deborah Robins, with whom he is now on tour throughout the country he has been singing about for forty-five years. It’s wonderful to be able to hear a rich sampling of favorite old songs, sung front and center with Deborah Robins.

One of the things I most like about Larry Hanks’ approach to folk music is that he doesn’t hide his sources. He wants you to know where he first heard a song, from whom, how he came to want to sing it, and what versions he may have pieced together in arriving at his own. Time and again you’ll discover something knew about what you thought was a traditional song, such as Clara Nolan’s Ball, which Larry and Deborah first encountered on Pete Seeger’s recording of Champlain Valley Songs, but then traced back to its original sheet music from 1885, as a composition by J.F. Mitchell. And that’s how they do it, as a parlor song rather than a folk song.

Similarly, while many folk and old-time string band performers have recorded Angeline the Baker—most notably Kenny Hall—Larry and Deborah give you Stephen Foster’s original song, Angelina Baker, from 1850.

It comes from the same period as Larry’s haunting solo version from his first album of the Gold Rush classic Days of 49, the epic tale of “Old Tom Moore, a relic of the bygone days,” and his colorful comrades New York Jake, Ragtag Jim, and Poker Bill, “who was always good for a game.”

Even older, from 1847, is S.S. Steele’s narrative waltz, Gum Tree Canoe, which they indicate was first published as Tombigbee River in 1909 in Heart Songs Dear to the American People. But Larry is also quick to credit Brendan Doyle and Maxine Gerber, from whom he first heard it. Their entire album is a treasure trove of such useful information, taking you on a journey of discovery that weaves a tapestry of song from its original authors and composers, publishers and performers, to the modern singers who have passed it on to them.

That’s a folk singer’s job, and no one does it better than Larry Hanks.

As soon as you put Larry Hanks and Deborah Robins’ new CD No Hiding Place: Old Songs in the tray and turn on the first cut, The Boll Weevil, you may well wonder what happened to your playback equipment—it sounds like the bass setting got stuck in high gear, the sound is out of balance and you have to reroute the treble to compensate. But there’s nothing wrong with your CD player—that’s Larry Hanks’ unaccompanied big boom box of a voice rolling out of the speakers. Trust me; you’ll get used to it, and it will lift you up off the floor with its rich resonant homespun authenticity.

You’ll revel as I did in Larry and Deborah’s inclusion of a great Dust Bowl ballad that Woody Guthrie did NOT write—Dear Okie, by Woody’s fellow Dust Bowl refugees, Doye O’Dell and Rudy Sooter: “Dear Okie, if you see Arkie/Tell him Tex has a job for him out in Californy.”

And on the other end of the musicological spectrum you will find an obscure one-of-a-kind Dr. Demento flavored hit from 1957, Green Door. If the title rings a bell, it may be due to a certain movie that I’m sure you never saw, but may have heard of. Green Door was a 1957 US hit by Jim Lowe (written by Bob Davie and Marvin J. Moore in 1956), and a hit in the UK as well by three different artists, which inspired the adult film Behind the Green Door.

Sex sells, but one does not expect it to sell records by old-time singer Larry Hanks and his wife Deborah Robins. So let’s just say their tongue-in-cheek and sweetly wholesome version of a fun-song from the nifty fifties filled with double entendres (is it a bar or a bordello?) was not intended to raise my eyebrows. But raise them it did.

Nonetheless, it’s not the most adult song on the album; for that one is struck by the Utah Phillips ballad Orphan Train, a heart-stopping narrative about a true American institution—a real train that took orphans out west searching for adoptive parents, almost like abandoned dogs and cats in an animal shelter, begging to be taken in. Written in the voice of the orphans themselves, as adults looking back on their early sorrows, Utah Phillips’ song is one he called “a great American story,” previously untold. Nowhere is his genius more abundantly displayed than in this late addition to his canon of nearly forgotten tales discovered, recovered and memorialized by the late great Wobbly troubadour.

Utah passed away in 2008, before he could put it on a new record (though a live performance was included in a recently released boxed compilation), so we are indebted to his friends Larry Hanks and Deborah Robins for preserving it for him. It’s a great song.

Two more Utah Phillips songs grace this lovely hearthside collection, his classic hobo dog song Queen of the Rails, and his paean to Big Bill Haywood’s less well-known love of his life—Nevada Jane, both beautifully and movingly performed.

There are three hard-hitting mill-worker songs, Weave Room Blues by Dorsey Dixon of The Dixon Brothers, Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine, which Pete Seeger included in his 1956 Folkways album American Industrial Ballads, and which Larry came across in an abandoned book he found in the rain, Proletarian Literature of the United States, and Cotton Mill Girls, another arrangement of which was copyrighted by Hedy West on Vanguard in 1962.

Larry and Deborah’s versions of all of these songs are wonderful, unpretentious and close to the bone. They have a genuine feel for protest songs that are not preachy, but derive their power from the innate dignity of the people who created them to tell the stories of unsung heroes who labored in the industrial south during the Great Depression. When Larry and Deborah sing them you believe you are listening to the real people whose lives they etch into being.

Their version of the album’s title song—No Hiding Place—is from a hymn adapted by A.P. Carter and recorded in 1934. It’s one of those songs that illustrate the sometimes closely integrated nature of Southern music, even as the society was officially and rigorously segregated. For the Carters collected songs from African-American informants as well as white, in particular Leslie Riddle and Pauline Gray. The original version of this particular song was first published in 1925 in James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Spirituals (with both texts and music). It was first recorded two years later in 1927 by the Famous Jubilee Singers. James Weldon Johnson, of course, was poet/composer of the “Negro national anthem,” Lift Every Voice and Sing.

Larry Hanks is one of the best in folk music, a road warrior who carries on these great songs of the people long after their originators have passed on. Deborah Robins’ voice blends beautifully with Larry’s; she sings both harmony and lead and plays guitar throughout, on two Jimmie Rodgers’ songs, a Stephen Foster classic, traditional songs such as The Old Woman and the Pig, a hymn from fretless banjo-maker Frank Proffit, and a train song recorded by The Maddox Brothers and Rose, Old Black Choo Choo.

According to a recent concert bio, “Deborah Robins comes from a singing family and the Chicago folk music tradition. She brings classical music training and a background in bass clarinet and baritone saxophone performance to her harmonic sensibilities. With a keen interest in American vernacular music as cultural anthropology, she co-developed a PBS television series, "The Music of America: History Through Musical Traditions" (WETA), and it's "Word of Mouth: The Journey of American Folk Music" Oral History Archive; soon to be housed at The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.”

I recently had the pleasure and honor of singing the closing song on the opening day of the San Diego Roots Festival with Larry and Deborah—Will the Circle Be Unbroken. When you are standing next to them at a microphone it is hard to concentrate on the part you are singing; you really just want to shut up and listen. Larry and Deborah’s outstanding new album gives you an ample opportunity to do just that.

With a generous 19 songs, No Hiding Place is a particularly welcome alternative to the all too common practice these days of putting ten songs on a CD and calling it an album. Used to be a pound of coffee meant 16 ounces; now you’re lucky to get 13; used to be a record meant 12 songs; now you’re more likely to get ten, even as the carrying capacity of the chosen format—the CD—can accommodate nearly 80 minutes of music.

With Larry Hanks and Deborah Robins you get what you pay for—a full album of great music. That’s what my uncle used to call good weight—giving the customer more, not less, than they expect. Larry Hanks and Deborah Robins come out of that old tradition, one that values the old songs they sing so well. I am delighted to recommend this album. There just aren’t that many folk singers any more who still sing folk songs, and very few with their authority and natural feel for the idiom. They have put this album out for the world to see, hoping like the orphans they so eloquently sing about, to be taken in.

You will thank me for making it a member of your family.

Larry Hanks may be reached via his website

No Hiding Place may be purchase from CD Baby.

Ross Altman may be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . Ross will be doing a concert at the Institute for Musical Arts on Saturday, August 27 at 2:00    pm. IMA is at 3210 W. 54th St., LA, CA 90043; 323-300-6578; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it