Given the mind-boggling number of albums issued since the format was invented, I'm sure there must be a few like What Are They Doing in Heaven Today? But if so, I haven't heard any quite like it. Here a newly recorded, full-length CD (36 minutes) coexists under the same cover with an EP (23 minutes) honoring live performances from the 1960s.

Kathy Kallick, the daughter, revives material, never intended for release, by her late mother Dodi Kallick. The latter was ubiquitous on Chicago's rich late-1950s/'60s folk scene before it evolved into a platform for singer-songwriters such as Steve Goodman and John Prine.

As some of you will know, Kathy is a much-admired, long-standing figure in the West Coast school of bluegrass. Over the years I've reviewed several of her releases on this site, some cut with a California friend and colleague, the equally revered Laurie Lewis. Her current album, or at least her part of it, eschews bluegrass, however, though fans of the genre will have heard the cuts in bluegrass arrangements. Most hail from the Carter Family repertoire. One other has Carter Family connections: the related songs "The Wild Side of Life" and "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" (hits in 1952, the first by Hank Thompson, answered by Kitty Wells) borrow the melody of the Carters' "I'm Thinking Tonight of My Blue Eyes," composed in the mid-19th century. Wilf Carter, the celebrated Canadian balladeer and yodeler (no relation to the Carters of Virginia), recorded the lachrymose "Put My Little Shoes Away" -- cheekily, the opening cut on the present disc -- during country music's second decade.

Kathy offers up country, folk and gospel standards with a crack acoustic band including, at different points, bluegrass and oldtime notables Lewis, Mike Compton, Molly Tuttle, Jim Hurst, Suzy Thompson, Joe Newberry and more. If you follow these strains of rooted Southern music, you will have heard every song considerably more than once. Which is the point. This is comfort food for those who've grown up on this stuff, a reminder perhaps of why you fell in love with these songs (and all they would encourage in your future listening habits) when you heard them the first time. I can attest that hearing these songs, especially as Kathy Kallick lovingly presents them, will go a long way toward curing your winter blues and whatever other blues infest your life.

Dodi Kallick sang occasionally on WFMT, Chicago's venerable classical station, which has run a Saturday-night, loosely defined folk-music show, The Midnight Special, since the 1950s. When I lived in Chicago, I knew its then-host, Rich Warren, casually, largely because he sometimes aired songs I'd written with Robin & Linda Williams, also because we were semi-regulars at a folk-club/bar in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Heaven's liner notes report that decades after their origin Warren stumbled upon tapes of Dodi's singing, the reason we have them for this EP.

Notwithstanding a couple of reservations, I liked them immediately. I suspect your reaction will be something like mine. For the most part these are familiar traditional songs. I qualify the characterization because two or three versions are not exactly standard and they occasion distracting thoughts about what happens when professionals clean up folk songs for popular consumption. "Cotton-Eyed Joe" carries lyrics the like of which I've never heard and which appear only dubiously, at least to my not-inexperienced ear, out of a rural past. The dark, mysterious "One Hundred Miles" (variants: "900 Miles," "500 Miles," "Reuben's Train," "Train 45," et al.), from the violent Reconstruction South, has been neutered into a bland break-up song.

Some of these numbers, we are informed, come from LPs Dodi checked out of the library and learned to sing herself, usually accompanied by dulcimer. I suspect that some of what she was exposed to were traditionals marketed by long-forgotten, smooth-harmony folk-pop groups. Still, Dodi would absorb more authentic performance, as in her chilling reading of the murder ballad "Down in the Willow Garden" backed by Virginia's Hobart Smith on solo fiddle.

Usually, though, she sounded like an especially appealing vocalist from the Folk Legacy label in the 1960s. "What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?" -- which her daughter covers separately on her own section of the project -- is a stunner, and not the only one. (Try "Row Us Over the Tide," for example.) According to the daughter, her mother in later life disavowed the folk-singing period of her life, which makes the tapes' survival into the 21st century a happy, unlikely circumstance, maybe even a small miracle.

[ visit Kathy Kallick online ]