The Folklords — “Jennifer Lee”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — November 18, 2023

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

1,019) The Folklords — “Jennifer Lee”

A haunting song from a rare “Canadian folk/psych classic” album (Light in the Attic Records, https://lightintheattic.net/products/release-the-sunshine) filled with “[d]reamy sunshine-infused-yet-with-clouds-passing-by pop psychedelia with a folk bent and a futuristic sound”. (Return to Analog, https://returntoanalogrecords.com/products/copy-of-love-cry-want-s-t-lp)

Transparent Radiation enthuses:

[P]ossibly the finest Acid-Folk psych LP ever released . . . one of those fine gem’s which seemed to have gone astray in the corridors of time and is a work which is quite unlike anything that has been created. . . . The . . . album is a product of beauty, down to the last note, mystical lyricism, psychedelic ambience, mind altering chiming via the sounds of Autoharp, tripped-out melancholy, blurry visioned hope and a wonderful array of rich and textured harmonies, complemented entirely by Martha Johnson who anchors the whole thing.

http://thetransparentradiation.blogspot.com/2011/12/folklords-release-sunshine-1969.html

Bruce Eder says that “[t]his pretty if somewhat low-key album is a nice piece of folk/sunshine pop with resonant Autoharp and guitar, a kind of reflective male/female vocal mix that recalls the first Jefferson Airplane album, and some diverting psychedelic lyrics.” (https://www.allmusic.com/album/release-the-sunshine-mw0001128225)

Waxidermy incisively adds:

Basically, it’s a group of serious people in paisley singing morosely about a girl named Jennifer Lee and other such things. The autoharp features prominently and that’s a good thing. Toronto’s Yorkville pre-gentrification must have been a swell place, man.

http://waxidermy.com/blog/folklords/

About the Folklords, Canuckistan Music tells us:

The Folklords were a sort of tripped-out We Five. . . . The group actually got their start sometime around early 1968 when guitarist Tom Martin and bassist Paul Seip, who had been aping sounds from across the pond with their mod cover band the Chimes of Britain, decided to move things in a much more westerly direction. As the renamed Folklords, they added Martin’s wife Martha Johnson on vocals and autoharp and recorded an insanely obscure seven-inch for their own COB label (‘Forty Second River’ b/w ‘Unspoken Love’). Release the Sunshine came out later that year on Jack Boswell’s Allied imprint, but curiously slipped under the radar at the time, garnering absolutely no mention at all in any of the Canadian music publications of the day. What’s more, Boswell’s teenage son Craig was a last-minute stand-in after the band’s original drummer went mysteriously AWOL from these recording sessions, thus forever forfeiting his own brief fifteen minutes of fame. Though it is steeped – or mired, take your pick – in the sober, overly earnest folk traditions of the early sixties, Release the Sunshine thankfully manages to untether itself somewhat with some dreamy folk motifs and sweet harmonies that recall the very early, pre-Grace Slick Jefferson Airplane. Add to that Johnson’s haunting vocals and delicately played autoharp and the results are some interesting, if hardly essential, psych-folk.

http://www.canuckistanmusic.com/index.php?maid=119

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