Frank Fairfield's backstory is the stuff of old American legend: A troubled vagabond who eventually made his way home to Los Angeles, Fairfield rooted through the city as a street musician, pulling bow across fiddle and hammering away at a banjo or acoustic guitar on corners or in flea markets. One afternoon, the right musician saw him play, became his manager, hitched him to a tour with champions Fleet Foxes, and landed him a record deal with one of the country's most trustworthy syndicates of old sounds, Tompkins Square. Now, he's the subject of a documentary and a touring musician with audiences in multiple continents. In a time where musicians and their managers attend workshops on going viral, and when the companies that own the music plan album leaks in advance, Fairfield simply played because he somehow had to talk about his feelings. Everything else just found him.
Fairfield's debut collected his interpretations and arrangements of 11 traditional tunes; Out on the Open West, the follow-up to his 2009 entrée, features three arrangements of traditional tunes, and they're all instrumentals-- the halting "Haste to the Wedding/The Darling True Love", the ebullient "Turkey in the Straw/Arkansas Traveler", and the foot-stomping "Texas Farewell". But the best songs here are Fairfield's own, and they're tremendous achievements from a guy who once said he wasn't a songwriter: "But That's Alright" is a sad, spirited bit of self-medication, the title phrase muttered in the chorus with the same kind of bitter resolve that tides people through strings of bad news.
On "Kings County Breakdown", he bows with a get-out-of-town abandon, like he's racing away from a hard week's work for his favorite vacation spot, or more likely, his baby. "Ruthie" is a tender, torturous goodbye. Fairfield is a strong player, but here, he smartly fumbles along the banjo's neck, the lament's lyrical depression mirrored by the broken technique. "Who will set her coffin? Lord, who will lay her down? Who will lay sweet Ruthie in that cold rocky ground?" he sings before answering that he will. The despair is overwhelming. Out on the Open West, then, not only cements Fairfield as a remarkable performer but also suggests that he's an evocative writer with his own stories to share.
It also puts Fairfield squarely in the folk tradition of collaboration. His self-titled debut was mostly Fairfield. On "Kings County Breakdown", though, he's sawing his fiddle alongside mentor and guitarist Tom Marion. That's young colleague Jerron "Blind Boy" Paxton singing perfectly content harmonies on "But That's Alright" and Old Crow Medicine Show's Willie Watson doing the cheery picking on the title track. But the most remarkable moment in Fairfield's slender catalog is "Poor Old Lance", a stunning bit of sadness that puts him squarely in the league of his heroes. Assisted by a trio of fiddle players, Fairfield sings with the sort of human moan that you can hear in Doc Watson's blues or any number of Harry Smith or Alan Lomax's field recordings. These troubles have never seemed more like Fairfield's own.
Fairfield is worthy of your consideration, even if you've never heard or considered the old-time music. He plays with a rare integrity, offering up his life in a way that does exactly what folk music must do-- it relates the world as the singer sees it, mixing sadness with sweetness, excitement with low-down and miserable depression. This has nothing to do with genre; hip-hop, jazz and rock all feel this way, too. Like the best of it all, Fairfield's music seems inexorably real and entirely necessary.
