Grant Lee Phillips and Jeffrey Clark, natives of California's San Joaquim Valley, formed Shiva Burlesque in what is now Santa Clarita, 30 miles north of Los Angeles, in 1986. As you can hear from their eponymous debut album, released in 1988 to howls of approval from an enthusiastic fanbase at what used to be Melody Maker, Shiva were in thrall to the looming psychedelia of The Doors and Love.
It's an unlikely story: avant-garde cellist sees the light in a disco glitterball at New York gay club The Gallery and decides disco is the ultimate modern format for exploring minimalist composition. In the mid-'70s, Russell—conservatory-trained, a scholar of Eastern music forms, steeped in the ideas of Steve Reich and Terry Riley—was blown away by the engulfing quality of music transmitted over a massive club sound system and literally entranced by disco's use of repetition.
When Moby sampled Vera Ward Hall's "Trouble So Hard", he was merely the latest in a long line of musicians to use as a source the field recordings made in the Deep South between 1933 and 1959 by the folklorist Alan Lomax. The Popular Songbook collects together 22 such tracks and, perhaps to your surprise, you'll find you know almost every one of them—if not in these original versions then in covers by artists as diverse as Clapton, Miles Davis, Steve Miller, Dylan, Led Zep and The Grateful Dead. File alongside the Harry Smith's Anthology Of American Folk Music.
