Geoff Muldaur – The Secret Handshake

Geoff Muldaur’s genius sprawls messily across styles and genres, all of them grist for a creative mill now well into its fourth decade. Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music is a convenient starting point for understanding Muldaur’s music, but it’s only that. Over the years, that substrate of blues, jug-band and hillbilly music has accumulated layer after layer of popular music experience, everything from movie orchestration to electric blues-rock to classical-bluegrass fusion to disco. All of it is transmuted by a powerfully individual sensibility, and voice, into a body of work whose brilliance is matched only by its obscurity.

Now, after almost two decades, Muldaur returns with an album that reasserts his mastery of folk idioms and his ability to make songs his own. The Secret Handshake is subtitled “American Music: Blues And Gospel”; hiding behind that summary are ten cuts of rich, deep music that wrap Muldaur’s distinctive, reedy voice in settings that draw on his storehouse of knowledge.

Albert Brumley Jr.’s beloved hymn “This World Is Not My Home” is backed in succession by delicate finger-picked guitar, a smooth R&B-sounding rhythm section, organ, horns, and delicious electric guitar from Stephen Bruton — and to top it off, after the guitar solo, Muldaur interjects a verse from Woody Guthrie’s rewrite of the song “I Ain’t Got No Home In This World Anymore”. The ancient blues tune “Alberta” is transmuted from Lead Belly’s country blues arrangement by fiddle and accordion, joined after the first verse by a full-scale horn section (including tuba). A wistful, true story written by Muldaur, “Got To Find Blind Lemon — Part One”, is accompanied only by Muldaur’s guitar and some gentle congas. St. Louis bluesman Walter Davis’ “I Can’t See Your Face” is a blues done absolutely straight-up with piano and guitar.

On and on it goes, a modern journey through some of our most deeply rooted music, conducted by a guy with some pretty deep roots himself. Boy, is it good to have him back.