Jim Ringer – The Band of Jesse James: The Best of Jim Ringer

Like ghosts we roam without friends or a home

These tramps and hawkers and me

–Jim Ringer

This collection is a welcome resurrection of Jim Ringer, an underrated artist who died in 1992 at the age of 56. Ringer’s recordings have the sometimes bruisy, sometimes sweet feel of Guthrie, Owens and Haggard.

In fact, his early lifeline parallels The Hag’s: In the 1940s, he and his family left middle America for California, where they worked the fields and played old-time music, and where Ringer came of age, no stranger to prisons, trains, and well-hitched roads. Ringer began playing in California string bands and participating in honky-tonk and folk jams in the ’60s; in the ’70s, he found a home on Philo Records and took to the steady work of the folk circuit. In 1972, he met Mary McCaslin, who became both his wife and musical partner for many years.

Ringer’s all-too-few recordings place him alongside Si Kahn, Bill Staines and Utah Phillips as an eminent but oft-neglected country-folk composer. Displacement and homesickness are his main themes: From the westward migrations of the ’30s and ’40s, to the ever-present drifting of peddlers and loners, his music chronicles, with working class acumen, all who never blended with the ’60s counterculture. His song “Tramps and Hawkers” is a masterpiece, an archetypal melody given to a tale of desire and wanderlust, with the sweep and detail of Guthrie’s best work, and an edge of disillusion and erosion that “This Land is Your Land” only barely suggests.

Ringer’s voice seems to rise from deep, sun-warmed soil, resonant as rosewood and never polished, always coarse and rusted by liquor and the years. His phrasing can be fearsome, knowing, or wistful as a lost dream. On Larry Murray’s “Hubbardville Store”, his voice breaks, capping the cinematic feel of words like “Look yonder mama, here comes hard times.”

Ringer also mastered the country alchemy of turning sentimentality into conviction. He could give a sweet idyll such as “New Harmony” the stature of myth, or make you believe “Rank Strangers” was his and his alone. An archive of country and folk, his every interpretation reveals years in the Ozarks and years of desolation. When he tackles “Saginaw, Michigan”, he rivals Frizzell; in Ringer’s dusky breath, it sounds less like a song than a chapter in his life.

The 17 songs here are culled from five Philo recordings from 1978-88. Originals are balanced with standards such as “Streamlined Cannonball”, “Amanda”, and the sublimely harmonized “Strawberry Roan” (with McCaslin, who contributed excellent liner notes to this package). Ringer’s own songs stand deservingly beside the classics, consistently showing secrets of economy and completeness.

Though this CD will likely appear in your record store’s folk section, Ringer was a country songwriter and singer who anticipated the lyrical depth and roots reverence of mature insurgent country. Those who’ve recently found revelation in the traditional yet tough sound of Steve Earle’s Train A’Comin or Gillian Welch’s Revival should turn to this collection. Jim Ringer’s voice is still aching to be heard.