ROB LINCOLN PUTS 250 YEARS OF AMERICAN HISTORY TO MUSIC ON “AMERICAN TALES & PRESIDENTS”
I met Rob Lincoln at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, which is how I meet a lot of the most interesting people in music. Rob first hung out on the hill around 1979 and has been coming back ever since. By his count, this August will be somewhere around his 44th festival.
He is also the guy who released a 300-song debut album. “5 Cents A Song” ran more than 18 hours, and when he approached Guinness about it, nobody disputed that it was the longest debut record ever made – it just hadn’t sold enough copies to qualify as important. He has written consistently since 1975, when he was a teenager, and the number now sits somewhere past 1,088.
His new album, “American Tales & Presidents: 250+ Years of American History, Fact and Fiction,” came out July 1 and pulls 15 songs out of that vault into chronological order. It starts around 1740, at the chopping of a cherry tree that never happened, and runs to right now.
The opener, “History,” is a catalog of everything we were taught wrong in school. Rob wrote it in 1984 and had to graft a new final line onto the old recording to bring it current. What he realized while doing it surprised him 0=- Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah were sold to us with the same argument, just different weapons. Trace that line backward and you get the Mexican-American War, the sinking of the Maine, the Philippines in 1900. By his reckoning, only the Civil War and World War II were something other than wars of choice.
Lincoln is his actual middle name, and it’s the name he’s gone by in the music community for more than 40 years. “Father Abraham” lays out a case he’s held his whole life – that the South tried to kill Lincoln from the beginning because they understood exactly what he intended to do about slavery. A recent trip to Springfield confirmed something for him – Lincoln spent 25 years living in an integrated neighborhood, with free Black families as neighbors. The album’s liner notes date that song 1861 to 1865, then add a dash and a question mark, because we are still working it out.
“Teddy” is the oldest thing here, written in 1982 when Rob was 22, and the vocal and guitar you hear come off a cassette from 1986. “Chester Arthur” is a minute and 45 seconds of fingerpicking and nothing else. “Gold Rush Hill” sounds like a settler’s story and is actually an allegory he wrote during the Reagan-Mondale race, about a man who goes west for gold that never trickles down the stream and comes home four years later.
Then there’s “Glenn Andreotta.” Rob will tell you it isn’t close to his best song and is probably the one he’s proudest of. Andreotta was the least-known of the three men who intervened at My Lai – the one who pulled a boy out and put him in the helicopter, and who was killed two weeks later. Rob cannot get through the song without crying. You can hear him losing it at the end of the recording. After he posted it, Andreotta’s relatives found it. He now has a Wikipedia page he didn’t have before.
Two songs were made new for this project. “A Short Message From Harriet Tubman” was written on the spot during one of Rob’s weekly YouTube broadcasts, with blues harmonica from David C. Perry. The closer, “Echo Chamber,” is the only track produced separately – Jake Gussman produced it, Max Davey sings, and Steve Novoa plays the one banjo solo on the record that isn’t Rob himself.
We spent a while on production, because the album sounds far better than a bedroom archive has any right to. The tool is stem separation, which lets him lift a harmony off a 30-year-old recording and replace it. Every vocal, melody and guitar part is his. He has thought hard about where the line is, and the one programmed drum on the album is on “Teddy.”
The lyrics and chords are free to anyone who emails him. His reasoning is blunt and kind of moving: he doesn’t think his legacy is as a singer, he thinks it’s the songs, so anything that gets somebody else playing them is a win. I’m hoping a social studies teacher somewhere picks up a guitar and runs with it.
Rob will be at the Philadelphia Folk Festival Aug. 14-16 at Old Pool Farm, hanging around the Musical Artist Cooperative shows. His trio The Old Sea Cats – with Steve Lessick and Art Cohen – plays Lower Forge Brewing in Medford, New Jersey, on Friday, Aug. 28. He and Lessick are marking 50 years of playing together with a new Lessick & Lincoln album and a show at Jamey’s House of Music in Lansdowne on Thursday, Dec. 10. He also plays violin in Railroad Wings with Julian Ott.
There’s more in the episode, including two new songs every week for 137 straight weeks, why the cover art belongs to graphic artist Carol Worthington-Levy, the photo his wife took of him standing next to Lincoln’s campaign wagon, and a first-concert story involving Stevie Wonder, the Tower in Upper Darby and a men’s room full of 13-year-olds. Subscribe to Rob’s YouTube channel – it’s free, and it’s where the next thousand songs are going.
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Paul “Dawg” Dixon wrote, composed and recorded the intro and outro music. The voices you hear at the end are Graeme Armstrong, Steve Poltz and Keller Williams.
