hypersongs

John Hartford & Mark Howard

John Hartford and the Nashville guitarist Mark Howard, credited together on the 1991 fiddle-tune album Cadillac Rag; the Hartford song we hold is from 1971.

A credited pairing

John Hartford was born John Cowan Harford on December 30, 1937 in New York City and raised in St. Louis; he changed the spelling on Chet Atkins's advice. A banjo, fiddle, guitar and mandolin player, dancer and steamboat pilot, he moved to Nashville in 1965, signed to RCA in 1966 and wrote "Gentle on My Mind", which Glen Campbell made famous. He died on June 4, 2001, aged 63. Mark Howard is a Nashville guitarist, mandolinist, engineer and producer; Wikipedia credits him with guitar, mandolin and engineering on Annual Waltz (1987), as producer, engineer and guitarist on Hartford & Hartford (1991), and on mandolin on a 1988 basement session later released as Hartford, Rice and Clements (April 2011).

The only album billed to the pairing is Cadillac Rag, released in 1991 on Hartford's own Small Dog A-Barkin' label as John Hartford and Mark Howard, also the Hartford String Band; its tracks are fiddle tunes, among them "All American Rodeo Reel", "Cadillac Rag" and "Stones River". AllMusic's Thom Owen thought the sleek professional production sometimes made the traditional songs sound lifeless.

The song we hold, "Steam Powered Aereo Plane", is not on Cadillac Rag. It is a Hartford song from his 1971 Warner Bros. album Aereo-Plain, on which no Mark Howard is credited, so the pairing in our records is most likely a labeling artifact; we do not claim Howard plays on it.

Albums

  • Aereo-Plain 1971 · Warner Bros.

    Hartford's 1971 album with Norman Blake, Vassar Clements, Tut Taylor and Randy Scruggs.

  • Cadillac Rag 1991 · Small Dog A-Barkin'

    The one album billed to John Hartford and Mark Howard.

Songs

Sources

  1. John Hartford, Wikipedia
  2. Cadillac Rag, Wikipedia
  3. Hartford & Hartford, Wikipedia
  4. John Hartford, johnhartford.com