Earthy!

AMG Review of Earthy!

Richie Unterberger
All Music Guide

Earthy! was the first of two folk LPs Darin released in 1963 (the other, Golden Folk Hits, would follow four months later). It's a solid folk-pop effort, though the arrangements and singing can get a little hokey at times. While this is not folk-rock, the settings are fuller and more flexible than they were on the average early-'60s folk LP, using some light drums, bass, and backup vocals (the latter element the most dated aspect). The better songs include the lively, playful, biblical retelling of "The Sermon of Samson," one of several cuts on the album that Darin co-wrote with arranger Walter Raim. "Work Song," the classic Nat Adderley-Oscar Brown, Jr. collaboration, gets a pretty gutsy, jazz-accented interpretation, and "When Their Mama Is Gone" has an effectively moody and subdued feel, complete with campfire harmonica and gloomy cowboy choral backup singers. There's also an obscure early Tom Paxton composition, "Strange Rain," one of several songs of the period to allude to nuclear danger with rain imagery. Less impressive are "Why Don't You Swing Down" and "The ER-I-EE Was Rising," which have the gospel revival-cum-music revue tempo and delivery common to numerous of the more commercial folk recordings of the era. Earthy! and Golden Folk Hits were combined onto a single-disc CD reissue in 2002 on Exemplar Music.