Bob Frank Red Neck Blue Collar CD

Veteran singer/songwriter Bob Frank began to record prolifically in the early years of the 21st century, perhaps in part to make up for his having dropped out of the music business for nearly three decades after his self-titled debut album in 1972. Between 2001 and 2006, he put out five CDs on his own Bowstring Records label, including three solo albums of original songs, the folk-rock collection Keep on Burning (2002); the voice-and-guitar disc Pledge of Allegiance (2004), containing several topical songs; and 2005's Ride the Restless Wind, featuring country music. Memphis International Records has signed Frank up and put out Red Neck, Blue Collar, which is a compilation drawn from those three albums with some of the tracks (particularly ones from the spare Pledge of Allegiance) boasting new overdubs to make the overall sound more consistent. So, for example, there is now a Jew's harp twanging away on the hilarious Biblical rewrite "Judas Iscariot" from Keep on Burning and a steel guitar on the trucker song "Coming into Glen Rock." As a result, Frank sounds more like a country artist, even if his perspective lacks most of the right-wing politics typical of country music, notably on the title song and especially "One Big Family," which is an attack on the rich-poor divide in America. Politics is only one element of Frank's concerns, however. He is perfectly capable of writing touching and funny story-songs, cowboy songs, and traditional country songs, all in a way that makes them sound like standards. Frank started his musical career as a Nashville songwriter, if a highly individual and idiosyncratic one, and he still puts the song first. This album contains some of his best. ~ William Ruhlmann

'There is something noble about a man whose art is unchanged after nearly half a century. Bob Frank still amazes me. - Jim DickinsonBob Frank is, unabashedly, a folk singer. While others cloak their musical identity in such euphemisms as 'singer/songwriter,' 'Americana' or 'roots,' Bob represents nothing so much as a continuation of the folk music movement that reached its apogee more than forty years ago -- about the same time Bob started writing and singing songs, songs that told stories, songs that decried injustice. Folk songs.

As a kid, he wanted to play the songs he'd heard Gene Autry do and, so, he got himself a guitar and cowboy songbook. When the folk boom happened, he realized that those 'cowboy' songs were really American folk songs. Bob Frank had found his calling and became part of the nascent folk scene in Memphis, his home town. After kicking around Memphis in the early '60s, playing the folk circuit there with the likes of his friend Jim Dickinson, he went off to college in Nashville. He didn't last long at Vanderbilt U. as he was summarily kicked out of that august institution for playing his guitar in the dorm - the acoustic equivalent of disturbing the peace.

Bob hit the proverbial Big Time with a major label deal that saw the release of 'Bob Frank' on Vanguard Records in 1972. Bob, ever the contrarian, saw fit to perform an entire set of songs NOT on the album at the release party the label threw for him at Max's Kansas City in New York. Needless to say, there was no Bob Frank follow-up album from Vanguard.

In fact, there was no Bob Frank follow up from anybody else for quite a while. Bob moved out west and took up residence in the East Bay where he worked as an irrigation specialist for the City of Oakland (a 'ditch digger,' according to Jim Dickinson). His folk music career lay fallow for about thirty years when he discovered - via the miracle of the internet - that he had a cult following. Yes, the album that Vanguard released in '72 had spawned a cadre of Bob Frank obsesives both here and in Europe, Australia and Asia who spent considerable time online speculating what had become of the enigmatic troubadour. When Bob appeared at a clandestine folk festival deep in the Carolina woods thereafter,