Eliza Gilkyson - Songs From the River Wind (2022)

Songs From the River Wind is a distinct departure from Eliza Gilkyson‘s previous, politically charged album “2020”. The album was inspired by her father, the celebrated folksinger Tony Gilkyson and his 50s folk trio The Easy Riders, with the songs spanning four decades. The album title refers to the mountain range of the Rocky Mountains in western Wyoming, and the songs offer a series of snapshots of people and places encountered during her days wandering the West, searching for somewhere to call home.

Eliza is joined by fiddler Warren Hood, mandolinist Kym Warner and multi-instrumentalist Don Richmond is in the producer’s chair while his band, The Rifters, are on harmonies. As you’d expect, it’s a very old-school folk-country album, opening with her softly sung, gently strummed arrangement of the Irish traditional Wanderin’, recorded by her dad back in 1958 and with a lyric that, taking a female perspective, speaks to her own travelling troubadour restlessness.

Another traditional rewritten to give a woman’s viewpoint, the old Western tune Buffalo Gals Redux takes the tempo up slightly with Michael Hearne on acoustic guitar and vocals and Richmond providing fiddle. Moving on to the first original is the whisperingly hushed Farthest End. The song is based around the backstory of a cowboy friend (“he ran away when he was just a kid/Joined up with the boys in the camp/And he roped and rode and he rodeo’d/ Married the girl on the ranch/Now there’s stock in the bank”). Another personal note is struck with the banjo accompanied mountain music ballad, Charlie Moore. The song is a tribute to an inspirational friend and Wyoming legend, the son of an Indian trader born in 1884 and raised as a tribal Indian whom she met as an old man, imparting his wisdom, telling stories and rescuing her and her brother when they got lost in the pines. Here she calls on his spirit to help her find herself once again and carry her back to the wilderness.

Continuing with the self-penned reflective originals, the slow waltzing, mandolin trilled Wind River And You, speaks to her romantic fantasies of living the life of a ranch girl that remained unconsummated (“I took some sweet sage, I took some turquoise/Juniper berries, a small crystal stone/I buried them out on that far-away mountain/Cried like a baby, lost and alone”) before turning to another western tune adaptation, Colorado Trail, a lost love number (“I think how hard I tried to make that restless gambler mine/I live for times I reached him/And I cry for times I failed”) written after driving down empty back roads one night after a show and featuring a weeping pedal steel solo from Richmond, the final verse taken from an old recording by the Sons of the Pioneers.

Another autobiographical memory comes with Warren Hood providing the uptempo fiddle swing of The Hill Behind This Town, a recollection of her first rental after leaving home, a $15 a month old wooden boxcar mounted on cinderblocks beside the railroad tracks in Lamy, New Mexico, the title and lyric reflecting on how she’d climb up the hill behind her ‘cabin’ to watch the sun go down. She stays in New Mexico but moves into a hotel for the spare, plucked banjo arranged Bristlecone Pine, a love letter to an ancient tree on the mountain timberline. It was written by Hugh Prestwood and previously recorded by Michael Johnson and Rumer, and the first contact she had with The Rifters, hearing them sing it from the bar as she stood on the hotel balcony. They, in turn, provide the harmonies on their own the five minute plus slow swaying ballad Before The Great River Was Tamed, a hymn to and lament for the Rio Grande in its wild glory days before it was reduced and controlled.

One of the more recent songs featuring Hearne on vocals, the sprightly mandolin-led At the Foot of The Mountain, was written after relocating to Taos after several years in Texas, a celebration of reimmersing herself in the western landscape. The music is evocative of Ian Tyson’s Darcy Farrow, composed by John Gorka.

The album approaches the end with her settled back in her beloved West (“Here is where we’ve made our last stand”), first with the self-penned dreamy, pedal steel lazy waltztime Don’t Stop Loving Me, Richmond’s whistling accentuating its 50s ambience, followed in turn by the equally crooned strum of Taoseña lullabye, a number written by Heather McRae, one of her workshop students, that perfectly captures Gilkyson’s feeling of finally coming home. The album ends with the brief crackly instrumental, CM Schottische, Richmond’s recreation of a fragment of a long lost square dance remembered from her childhood.

A pastoral ode to simpler times, a life shaped by the love of the land, it’s a truly wonderful evocation of the foundations of her heart and hearth, perhaps best listened to at twilight and letting it carry you away to the rivers and hills it so beautifully celebrates.