For Lil' Rev, recording an album with Larry Penn was a wish come true. Rev is one of Milwaukee's younger standard-bearers of American folk music, and Penn has been an embodiment of folk music for longer than Rev has been on this planet. After knowing each other and sharing the stage on occasion, the two Milwaukeeans finally got around to making an album together.
Around the Campfire is as descriptive a title for their collaboration as anyone could have composed. The 14 songs on the CD—whether their authors have been forgotten or the work has fallen into public domain, or whether they were written by Rev or by Penn—all sound very much like the sort of tunes hobos carried in their knapsacks or strikers brought to the picket line in the early decades of the last century.
Penn's own songs, including the opener, “The Preacher's Whiskey Flask,” have a sort of simple but evocative poetry sung in an everyman's voice and accompanied by guitars tuned to the roots of the American experience. Rev's songs often sound like campfire sing-alongs built around homespun aphorisms (“Don't throw away your stick until you cross the river”). The old-time numbers are performed with living authority, whether the Jimmie Rodgers-like pathos of “Shorty George” or the carefree resolution of “Hallelujah I'm a Bum.”
Rev has been busy with other projects, too. Along with a poetry chapbook, Lil Rev's Lil Gold Poem Book (To Fan the Flames of Idle Time), Rev has put together a show called “Fountains of Uke,” running May 19-21 and May 26-28 at the Sunset Playhouse. Rev has been at the forefront of a national revival of the ukulele, penning instruction manuals and organizing an annual festival in Milwaukee for the instrument. “Fountains of Uke” is an entertaining two-act show featuring the ukulele in many of its surprising permutations on a collection of songs both old and new. “I want it to be edutainment,” Rev explains. “It's not just for uke-aholics. I want to secretly teach people about our rich national history.”
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