Consumer Guide Album

Don White: Brown Eyes Shine [Lumperboy, 1999]
White gigs every weekend, mostly tiny folk venues and "private shows"--gather some friends in your rec room and he'll make it worth everybody's while. Yet though he lives just 220 miles away, he hasn't hit Manhattan since 1996, because his wife says he has to come home with more money in his pocket than when he left. And come home he does. Thus he stands as the only folkie I can think of who's never footloose or romantically bereft--his subject matter, most of it autobiographical, is domestic, focusing here on parent-teen relationships. The monologue where his brain explodes after a homework discussion with his 14-year-old can only be understood by someone who's been there, and anyone who's been there will immediately play it again. With or without his band he's a strained singer with an unmediated New England accent and barely a guitarist at all, and when he isn't funny he's corny. But usually he's original enough to turn corny into a virtue. A-