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Album cover

Wayfaring Strangers

Ladies From The Canyon

By 1970, the folk revival had all but ended. Gone were the heady days of “Will The Circle Be Unbroken” and “If I Had A Hammer.” Hootenanny had been cancelled. Broadside was out, Rolling Stone in. Richard Fariña was dead; Bob Dylan had plugged in. Paths paved by Joan Baez and Judy Collins had led a younger, more introspective generation of songwriters into the woods, while the ethos forged in weather-beaten hills and tempered on the lower east side of Manhattan was being reborn in the canyons of California, as songs for seagulls crafted in Joni Mitchell’s visage. Culled from beyond the crop of crit-revisionist darlings Linda Perhacs, Judee Sill, or Vashti Bunyan, Ladies From The Canyon examines the world of private folk via the works of 13 unlikely heroines who sang beneath the infrastructure of the music business, playing to coffeehouse chatter and church picnic silence. Each of these Wayfaring Strangers walk in the handmade aesthetic of lyrics scribbled into faded denim, of delicate movements captured and released.

The Ladies From the Canyon bonus EP featuring Susan Smith and Susan Pilsbury is now available as a stand-alone 45, limited to 100 copies.

Track List

  1. Becky Severson A Special Path
  2. Collie Ryan Cricket
  3. Linda Rich Sunlight Shadow
  4. Caroline Peyton Engram
  5. Propinquity And I A Fairy Tale Lady
  6. Judy Kelly Window
  7. Ginny Reilly Wildman
  8. Jennie Pearl Maybe In Another Year
  9. Mary Perrin Dedication
  10. Priscilla Quinby Miss America
  11. Marj Snyder Rain
  12. Barbara Sipple Song For Life
  13. Shira Small Eternal Life
  14. Susan Smith One Horse Town
  15. Susan Pilsbury Never Said Goodbye