February 17 2024
Jeff Talmadge is a Texas songwriter through and through. It's been ten years since Kind of Everything his last album. It's been even longer since he tried his last case as a board certified civil trial attorney.
He's been awarded the Academy of American Poets Award from Duke University and has won a number of accolades as a songwriter.
Sparrow is just about a perfect recording. Jeff's style is classic singer songwriter with strong melodies and lyrics that are easy to understand delivered in a relaxed style reminiscent of classic Tom Rush or John Prine. The recording is produced by Jeff along with J. David Leonard and Bradley Kopp who both offer tasty accompaniment to Jeff's fine fingerpicked guitar.
The recording opens with “Hurricane” which depicts life on the coastal plain on Texas where Jeff spent his childhood. The tune features gentle backing vocals and guitar from Koop. The song that lends the title to the CD “If I Was A Sparrow” is a classic singer/songwriter piece with a timeless quality to the tune and the lyric. The subject is a lost love and a relationship that despite the ending he would “do it all again”. I found myself listening to this track more than any other.
“Devil's Highway” is a is a collaborative effort from Talmadge and Austin songwriters Jim Patton and Steve Brooks. It's the story about a guy who took a wrong turn down the Devil's Highway to leave his family to travel into the unknown. How it turns out we'll never know for sure but by the conclusion of the story “he lives alone and he's down on his luck, life came at him like a semi-truck, he looks in the mirror and doesn't know the man with Halloween eyes and the midnight tan”. We've all been there.
“Katie's Got a Locket” is the story of a good girl and maybe her first “true” love. The song describes how she feels today when she thinks of those past days as she looks at the locket. It's unclear whether the two of them stayed together but it's clear that both of them have tender feelings for each other. A song for the one that got away.
This is just a few of the wonderful offerings on Sparrow by Texas songwriter Jeff Talmadge. Let's just not wait ten years for the next.
Tom has a long history with Sing Out! as a writer and regular contributor (for more than a decade) and deep and rich skills as a radio host and programmer of folk and roots music! He's been a folk musician and teacher for over forty years. Tom began playing and singing Bob Dylan and Tom Paxton songs, but fell in love with old-time music and the clawhammer banjo after hearing John McCutcheon at the legendary Bethlehem folk club Godfrey Daniels. He has studied with old-time music greats Dwight Diller, Riley Baugus and Norman and Nancy Blake … and has, himself, taught at many music camps and workshops including The Augusta Heritage Workshops (in Elkins WV), the Pocono Dulcimer Fest (in Stroudsburg PA) and the Maidencreek Old-Time Music Festival (in Blandon PA). Druckemiller’s continuing regular local radio gig “In The Tradition” has aired on WDIY-FM in Allentown PA for the past 16 years, and he also co-hosts the “Sunday Folk” program on the station.
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