Tom Carter - Trade Your Headache for a Smile (2021)

As a folklorist focused on the traditional music of the United States, it’s always a pleasure to come across a project that exemplifies the folk process. This is the case with Tiki Parlour Recordings’ Trade Your Headache For a Smile, a two-disc set featuring Tom Carter and Tom Sauber with Blanton Owen, Leonard Coulson, and Patrick Sauber. Disc One encompasses a performance at the Brewery Arts Center of the Nevada Arts Council in Carson City, Nevada in February of 1998, four months before Blanton’s death in a plane accident in Washington State and twenty years before Disc Two was recorded in Salt Lake City and Los Angeles.