Robbie Bankes is a Calgary folk musician whose talents span an impressive array of instruments from around the globe. According to this feature by The Calgary Collective, he plays in groups that make a diversity of folk music, from traditional Quebecois to age-old Celtic stuff. But on this solo album, Through February Snow, which he released earlier this year, Bankes focuses on what sounds to me like american folk music, playing guitar, 5-string banjo and fiddle to make what he himself describes as, “sings songs of the dusty prairie and high mountain peaks.”
The entire album is peppered with great lyrics, which is as important to folk music as guitars are to rock. Opening track ‘Alice’ is a beautifully written and poetic (lost) love song, which utilizes the classic minimal folk formula – just one man and his guitar. It opens with the lines:
“Oh my Alice I’ve been dreaming ’bout your sea-blue eyes
All the letters that I’ve sent that have not met with replies
Maybe you got lucky or you just can’t find the time.
Oh my Alice I’ve been dreaming about our lives”.
The second song is ‘February Snow’ which sounds warm and cosy during the persisting winter chill. The songwriting is great again, see for example the refrain:
“There is a place that’Il like to go
To watch the city far below
And to hear the sounds and to see the show
And to wait for you and the February snow
Well you took off your shoes and showed me your soul
You gave me a lot of warm socks to keep out the cold”
‘Little Sadie’ is a change of direction, a throwback to old-timey Gothic folk, with a morbid atmosphere straight out of a Flannery O’Connor story. It tells the tale of a murder subsequent events from the perspective of the perpetrator:
“I went out last night to make a little round
I met little Sadie I blowed her down
Went back home and jumped into bed
.44 pistol under my head.”
Bankes shows his proficiency for writing sad and pretty folk songs again on ‘As I Walked Out’ (e.g. “I’ll pack my bags and I’m moving on to soft summer nights of silver and gold, long rides and hillsides and shivering cold.“), before providing a decidedly Canadian take on the classic folk song ‘Hang Me Oh Hang Me’ (“Up on the Rocky Mountains it’s there I’ll make my stand, with a rifle on my shoulder and a sixshooter in my hand”). ‘Up to Skoki’ is a banjo/fiddle instrumental, the soundtrack to a lively Appalachian celebration, and ‘The Blackest Crow’ sees things out with a wistful flourish, the musical equivalent of an evening with no company except the lonely pines and two foot of snow.
Music can be used to say a lot of different things but folk musicians are poets at heart and (to meat least) are best suited writing these kinds of songs. Lonely and lovelorn they may be, but they’re also songs of hope, of finding beauty in everyday life and the natural world, and a realization that our lives are not isolated events put the products of hundreds of years of history. Folk music paints a romanticized version of a life that is actually attainable. It doesn’t shy from sadness and hurt, in fact it can dwell on them, but it dwells on other things too, like how the town looks from the hillside or the sound of the river.
You can get Through February Snow via the Robbie Bankes Bandcamp page.