ALBUM: Roger Manning (1988)
MVC Rating: 3.5/$$$
This is not your grandfather’s folksinger.
Roger Manning is a New York-based artist who went around the world busking — singing for donations. He comes off sounding a bit like a higher pitched kid brother of Bob Dylan.
And he’s angry and sad, good traits for street level busking. Every one of the 12 songs on this self-named album have the ‘Blues’ in the title. In other words there’s the #14 Blues, the #16 Blues, Strange Little Blues, the Pearly Blues and the Lefty Rhetoric Blues and so on.
Funny lines in many backed by a hard strummed acoustic guitar that sounds pretty much the same on every song.
From ‘Lefty Rhetoric Blues:’ Lefty folksinger rhetoric has such a boring ring, they make me sick, they oversimplify everything ….but, then on the other hand they were right about Vietnam
WIkipedia says Manning was part of the ‘anti-folk movement’ and his legal challenge in 1985 overturned New York’s longstanding ban on music in the subway, and launched the Music Under New York program. He is currently a web designer in NYC, according to Wikipedia.