Tuesday 17th December

In the continuing and seemingly never-ending series of Great Artists you have never heard of; let me introduce you to Mr. John Stewart.  Just step into the spotlight sir, you deserve it…oh, I forgot you died a couple of years ago.

Coming out of the new folk-tradition of the early sixties John joined the Kingston Trio and had a string of minor hits.  What we didn’t know then was that John wrote all their best songs.  He is a consummate and apparently unstoppable song-writer, far more prolific even than Bob Dylan, who actually played on a couple of his records, even if the record company had to disguise the fact.   In the late sixties the Trio broke up and John went solo, and through the early seventies (the true golden age of music) he had a string of brilliant albums.  Probably the most famous was ‘California Bloodlines’, with songs like ‘The Pirates of Stone County Road’,’Omaha Rainbow’ and ‘Mother Country’ he sings of a lost America and small town mid-west heroes just doing what was right.  You could call it Country, you could call it New Americana, you could call it folk, but with his simple guitar picking and yearning voice I call it just brilliant.

In the eighties he had a Hollywood phase when he was often backed by members of Fleetwood Mac – not my favourite sound.  As the nineties wore on he drifted from crap record company to even smaller independents; anyone who would put a record out because he was still pouring out songs.  Most are long deleted and hard to come by, but I keep finding one or two more, and unlike Dylan he never put out a bad record, even when his voice was a whisper he still sounded great.  And there are rumours of lots more recorded and never released.  Behind the scenes, never a big star, he quietly built up a body of work, a catalogue of an America that doesn’t scream to be heard but just gets on with it.

By the way he also wrote the best Monkees song too – ‘Daydream Believer’.