2008 Woodie Awards
Langhorne Slim and Eagles land at the Iron Horse
Group brings folk sounds to Noho
S.P. Sullivan, Collegian Staff
Issue date: 10/7/08 Section: Arts & Living
Langhorne Slim needed a mythology.
Slim, who will perform at the Iron Horse Music Hall tomorrow, entered into a precedent when he started playing his blue-infused folk rock, popular form of a genre rooted in tall-tales and anonymously-penned ballads of grossly over exaggerated feats of strength.
A mythology is mandatory.
There were more stories for how Leadbelly got his name than there were songs in his repertoire. Woody Guthrie's biography is as entertaining as the ballads he wrote - spur of the moment - that can be found by the scores in the Library of Congress. Bob Dylan hijacked the first name of a Welsh poet and lied to anyone who asked him about it for decades.
But in an age where legal names can be found on the internet and the life of the ramblin' man must be buttressed by a couple grand in gas money, a mythology is hard to come by.
Sometimes you have to do it yourself.
"I was patiently waiting for somebody to give me a nickname that I thought suited me," Slim told NPR in May. "The truth of it is, when I was young, I really wanted to be a black blues singer, and it's taken me up to 27 [years] to realize that's not gonna' happen for me."
Slim, formerly Sean Scolnick, named himself after his hometown in Pennsylvania.
"I just thought it just sounded cool and sort of fit in the tradition of the music I was listening to at the time," he said.
His songs are often peopled with folksy love interests like "Mary" (who is "sweeter than corn on the cob") and "Loretta Lee Jones," - often pursued by first-person wanderlusts with a tendency to overindulge.
"I packed a picnic lacking seriously on food/had more wine than I knew what with to do," he sings in "Restless," off his self-titled album released this April.
Slim's music also focuses more on the simpler pleasures in life. In "Diamonds and Gold" also off "Restless," he warns, "you can have all the diamonds/and all the gold/but someday you're still gonna' get old/gotta learn to get happy along the way."
Slim, who will perform at the Iron Horse Music Hall tomorrow, entered into a precedent when he started playing his blue-infused folk rock, popular form of a genre rooted in tall-tales and anonymously-penned ballads of grossly over exaggerated feats of strength.
A mythology is mandatory.
There were more stories for how Leadbelly got his name than there were songs in his repertoire. Woody Guthrie's biography is as entertaining as the ballads he wrote - spur of the moment - that can be found by the scores in the Library of Congress. Bob Dylan hijacked the first name of a Welsh poet and lied to anyone who asked him about it for decades.
But in an age where legal names can be found on the internet and the life of the ramblin' man must be buttressed by a couple grand in gas money, a mythology is hard to come by.
Sometimes you have to do it yourself.
"I was patiently waiting for somebody to give me a nickname that I thought suited me," Slim told NPR in May. "The truth of it is, when I was young, I really wanted to be a black blues singer, and it's taken me up to 27 [years] to realize that's not gonna' happen for me."
Slim, formerly Sean Scolnick, named himself after his hometown in Pennsylvania.
"I just thought it just sounded cool and sort of fit in the tradition of the music I was listening to at the time," he said.
His songs are often peopled with folksy love interests like "Mary" (who is "sweeter than corn on the cob") and "Loretta Lee Jones," - often pursued by first-person wanderlusts with a tendency to overindulge.
"I packed a picnic lacking seriously on food/had more wine than I knew what with to do," he sings in "Restless," off his self-titled album released this April.
Slim's music also focuses more on the simpler pleasures in life. In "Diamonds and Gold" also off "Restless," he warns, "you can have all the diamonds/and all the gold/but someday you're still gonna' get old/gotta learn to get happy along the way."
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