Everyone loves an underdog. While Justin Vernon’s sadness-in-isolation tale feels a bit like marketing, stories like Robert Lester Folsom’s are as genuine as they come. After decades of toiling in obscurity, the musician from south Georgia has teamed up with Mexican Summer and Anthology Recordings to bring his lost ’70s work to a new generation of adoring fans. If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes Vol. 3, 1972-1975 is the latest collection of lo-fi, sun-kissed songs from the 71-year-old musician who spent most of his life working as a house painter.
Recorded on a 4-track tape, these songs bristle with the energy of love lost and found. These summery psych-folk nuggets feel familiar despite remaining unheard for decades. The songs on this collection (and the two others that preceded it) served as a warm-up for Folsom’s only studio album, Music and Dreams, released in 1978 with little notice until Anthology reissued it in 2010. Unlike the refined soft rock of Music and Dreams, these collections feel more immediate in their unpolished forms.
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Folsom wrote many of the songs on If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes as a teenager during summer break in his hometown of Adel, Georgia. Backed by a cadre of friends, Folsom demonstrates here that he was a fully formed songwriter, even as a young man. Recording between odd jobs in various locations, Folsom writes songs just as intimate as those by Ted Lucas and just as ambitious as Judee Sill.
The 13 tracks of If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes Vol. 3, 1972-1975 are a blend of sketches of the warm AM gold Folsom would perfect later in the decade, bittersweet paeans to tangled relationships, and brief bluegrass instrumentals.
Opening track “I Don’t Know” serves as the collection’s mission statement. Written during Folsom’s first year of college, the song opens on a songwriter adrift. Folsom and his girlfriend have drifted, and he is unsure whether to mourn the relationship or celebrate that he had a chance to love in the first place. “Sure would hate to lose you now / My love for you has grown / I couldn’t lose you anyhow / The feeling’s way too strong / I wonder if these thoughts somehow could ever do us wrong,” Folsom sings in his plaintive, honeyed voice. It is a startlingly mature take for someone believed to be, at the time, in his late-teens. Meanwhile, “What Are You Thinking Of?” is a downcast ballad designed to break hearts while “Burnt Carmine” is all Beach Boys sunshine until you listen to the sad lyrics.Despite the passing of the decades, you can catch Folsom on tour this spring. Though the days of If You Wanna Laugh, You Gotta Cry Sometimes Vol. 3, 1972-1975 are lost to the past, you can hear youthful hope and sadness on this new collection. Hopefully this latest chapter in Robert Lester Folsom’s story is a happy one.
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