Joel Rafael – Baladista

Baladista, an album overflowing with gentle, melodic grace.

Baladista is Chicago born, Southern California based Rafael’s ninth recording and his third consecutive release on Jackson Browne’s imprint Inside Recordings. This ten-song set was recorded and mixed by Joel in his home studio and co-produced with wife Lauren. Joel (vocals, acoustic guitar, piano, harmonica) is supported on this occasion by Greg Leisz (electric guitars, dobro, pedal steel) and James ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson (bass). By the way, the Spanish male/female noun Baladista translates as singer/writer of songs. If the jacket fits…………….

The narrator recalls a flame from his schooldays in the gently paced album opener “She Had To Go,” while “…a broken heart knows how it is to lose” is the message embraced in the ensuing “Love’s First Lesson.” The latter was co-written by Joel and Jack Tempchin; they met some four decades ago while performing at the Blue Ridge Guitar Shop in Encinitas. A conscientious objector to America’s incursion in Vietnam (1965 – 1973), in the company of like-minded individuals, toward the close of the 1960’s, Joel relocated from Los Angeles to Oregon’s “Old Portland Town.” Doubling as a love song, the latter title principally recalls the fortnight Joel and three hundred compatriots spent in jail, following a police sweep of the city’s underground community. When obstacles are encountered in day-to-day life, in “Baby Let It Go” the narrator’s advice is to remain calm and not “carry those burdens upon your shoulder.”  

With America involved in WWII by 1942, the bracero program was initiated bringing manual labourers from Mexico to work in California’s factories and farms – already a to and fro process, America repatriated half-a-million Mexican workers following the Great Depression. The initial program expired in 1947, although further understandings existed until 1964. Woody Guthrie’s “Plane Wreck At Los Gatos” documented how twenty-eight Mexican migrant workers perished during January 1948 while being deported. Rafael learned of the unjust program four decades ago, and his El Bracero recalls a dark period in American history. Not that it has righted any of the many wrongs, during 2013 Joel attended the unveiling in San Joaquin Valley of a memorial that carries the names of the Los Gatos victims, while a portion of California Hwy 101 has now been designated Bracero Memorial Highway.

“When I Go” doubles as a road and love song, while “Sticks And Stones” recalls the late May 1911 lynching of a (possibly pregnant) coloured woman, Laura Nelson, and her son, in Okemah, Oklahoma. Onstage in the town’s Crystal Theatre during the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival, Rafael’s “Sticks And Stones” relates how his performance of Guthrie’s obscure composition – “Don’t Kill My Baby & My Son” – an observation of this terrible event, not only silenced a trio of dissenters in the audience, embarrassed they vacated the venue. Born during 1912, Guthrie later learned his father was party to the lynching. “The Good Samaritan” is a retelling of the parable, with the narrator concluding that, in future, he will attend to his neighbour’s needs. The penultimate and uplifting “Thanks For The Smiles” is obviously a song for Lauren, while with electric guitar support from a couple of classy exponents – John Inmon (Lost Gonzo Band) and Terry ‘Buffalo’ Ware (Ray Wylie Hubbard) – Hedy West’s nineteen-sixties folk classic “500 Miles” closes Baladista.

I fondly remember the first occasion I saw and heard the Joel Rafael Band. It was May 1999, the venue main-stage at the Kerrville Folk Festival. A low-key but truly inspired piece of work, Baladista possesses the revelatory feel of that decade-and-a-half old Texas summer evening. 

http://www.joelrafael.com/ and https://myspace.com/joelrafael

Brought to you from the desk of the Folk Villager.