The Rooftop Singers: The Best of the Vanguard Years

Old Saw — er, Song — with New Teeth”

This album is a pleasant surprise. Take as a given their one big hit (“Walk Right In”), add a surprisingly eclectic, bluesy repertoire, some generic patches, and one gorgeous rewrite of a children’s song, and the result is a pleasant surprise overall.

Even though the Rooftop Singers were a trio, the real star here, at least in the sense that she sets them apart from scores of other guitar picking folkies, is Lynne Taylor.

And, even though they had only one hit, their music was relatively distinct even without Taylor’s voice. They were musically more complex than most folk groups, favoring understated melodies sometimes and emphasizing their blues roots at others, as in the sly and lyrically suggestive “Tom Cat”. Indeed, it was their musical eclecticism and willingness to be suggestive that got “Tom Cat”, their second single, banned from conservative radio stations and prevented them from capitalizing on their breakthrough hit.

Not that they didn’t look safe enough. Erik Darling and Bill Svanoe, both with combed hair well above the shoulders, are pictured wearing polo shirts or even full suit and tie. With Taylor, dressed in similar shirts and (in the liner notes’ full-length photo of all three) form-fitting, not-too-short skirt, the image presented is united and friendly, pansexual and inclusive, in an impersonal way, with no clue of the relations between the three or even, ahem, individual personalities. Indeed, her presence with them only completes the utopian folk aspirations of the specific images and the movement: after all, it’s not as if music is some private boy’s club invented mainly for snagging groupies (banish the thought!). Rather, like lots of photos of other folk groups, co-ed or otherwise (even Pete Seeger’s Weavers if I couldn’t already identify them beforehand), the sense is of homogenized health and happiness drained of the sort of unhealthy imbalances and insecurities that fuel all sorts of good art.

Too many folk singers sound like undergraduate folk arts majors, singing with an eagerness that has little specific connection to the material actually being sung. Rather, they sound like students enthused by the sheer infectuousness of the music itself and of singing out, without feeling the emotions that the music initially was intended to convey.

It’s thus that Taylor’s cool voice (she’d previously sung with big bands in nightclubs) complements the complexities of the songs’ arrangements, with both her voice and those arrangements mitigating the folk tendency to be vapidly enthusiastic. I don’t know if she’d be able to sustain an entire album (even a compilation) on the strength of her vocal gifts alone (“Wild Mountain Thyme” works because the lyric supports the airy voice but who wants airiness for an entire album?), but, here, it certainly adds contrast to the usual fare. If Taylor’s jazzy cool lacks, say, the smoldering sensuality beneath Peggy Lee’s jazzy cool, it balances the Everyman enthusiasm of fellow voices Erik Darling and Bill Svanoe.

The buried gem here, though, is a version of “Ha Ha Thisaway” where Taylor is the only singer and where her cool is paired with deep feeling. The original public domain work was a play song for children, one that Leadbelly helped introduce to the New York folk scene that later produced the Rooftop Singers. It was a jolly, rollicking number about school, church, and parents and, depending on the singer, could be taken as either cheerfully moral or cheerfully mocking.

Here, it becomes Taylor’s take on female life, marriage, and love. It is Taylor’s take on her own childhood, one where she was raised in an isolated community that married her off at 14, a life that she ran away from to live in the big city. Whereas the original repeated “ha ha this a-way” as the refrain for all the verses, Taylor sings with measured, half-amused cool — against just a slow, persistent bass — about being a “young girl” who’d “primp primp this-away, primp primp that a-way”. Only after she is grown and married does she (just slightly) raise her voice and sing the title: “Then we married, man, o then: / Ha ha this a-way, ha ha that a-way”.

When she sings those lines with a volume utterly devoid of warmth, mincingly trilling each “ha ha”, the lines are an indictment of everything the song’s about: female life, marriage, and love and Taylor’s own experience. The anger is restrained and cold, less like Axl Rose spitting and screeching against the jungle and more like Yeats articulating an old man’s cold fury with perfect poise. It is an indictment of both a personal relationship and the society that gave her no other choice (note that both the action and mood of each verse is defined by the narrator’s relationship to a roster of changing, faceless males). It is social criticism exorcised in the timeless personal desolation of whistling in the dark. It’s also little more than a minute and a half.

But I couldn’t just unreservedly recommend what is, overall, a nice little album on the strength of a song that’s just 96 seconds. Could I?