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THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING
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MUSIC REVIEW Folk singers show crowd their comic side in Somerville By Scott Alarik, Globe Correspondent, 1/31/2000
No artist on the coffeehouse circuit today is better than Don White at combining the heartfelt aesthetics of the singer-songwriter with side-splitting laughs. He mines the same regions for his jokes as he does for his serious songs: his streetwise, sometimes warring, sometimes loving family in Lynn.
The father of two teenagers, he claims he has been reduced to opening each statement to them with ''I'm not trying to oppress you, but ...'' He turned a litany of hilarious adolescent misadventures back on the parents with a chorus concluding: ''The curse your mama put on you is true/`I hope your kids turn out stupid like you.'''
Even his silliest jokes shimmered with emotional truth, healing barbs that allowed parents and kids to both laugh at and examine their own family struggles. Whether singing a wrenching ballad about unexpressed love or goofily imitating a broken eight-track stereo, White was always telling us the truth.
Nancy Tucker delighted the crowd with a set of inspired silliness, from an entire song made of animal puns to a cultural satire about being therapist-dependent. She had some sharp observations about consumer culture, many so absurd they required no punch lines, such as seeing a sign in a mall saying, ''Ears pierced while you wait.'' A simple ''How else?'' shrug was all the punch line she needed.
Though hugely likable, Camille West, who recently replaced Christine Lavin in the popular songwriter ensemble Four Bitchin' Babes, delivered the most disappointing set. She can be very funny, but has a penchant for overselling her punch lines in ways that create unfortunate distances between herself and her audience. Many of her tours de force simply went through the expected motions set up by the comic premise, such as a leftover in her refrigerator growing to epic fungus proportions, and a double-entendre-littered ditty about Viagra getting in a small town's water supply. The audience was so eager to like her, but she seemed almost to be hiding behind her wide-eyed punch lines. There's a much bigger talent in there fighting to get out.
Stand-up comic Julie Barr was exquisitely suited to host this four-hour songwriter marathon. She has the rare ability to appear to be simply chatting with pals while delivering artfully sculpted gags about urban anxiety, weight woes (''I'm trying to get back to my original weight: 7 pounds, 5 ounces''), and her madly dysfunctional family (including a Jehovah's Witnesses sister who has become a Mary Kay saleswoman on the theory, ''Why waste a trip to a stranger's home?''). Like White, Barr's humor springs from the same true, sometimes dark places where the audience lives their lives, and they loved her for showing them some ways to laugh the bad days away.
This story ran on page C08 of the Boston Globe on 1/31/2000.
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mong the most prevalant myths about modern folk music is that it is a dour, humorless world. Sullen songwriters abound, to be sure, but coffeehouse habitues know that the stars who last, from Greg Brown to Cheryl Wheeler to Dar Williams, pepper their sets with laughs. For the past eight Januaries, Songstreet Productions has offered relief from bleak winter with its Festival of Funny Songwriters, proof that giggles abound on the folk scene.