Cry Cry Cry is an ad hoc musical collaboration of Dar Williams, Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, all interesting artists in their own right, and even more interesting together. And it is also an album. Or the other way around. The second track on the album, Cold Missouri Waters, is by James Keelaghan, a strong Canadian artist I first saw at the Winnipeg Folk Festival and later at Mike Barker’s Folk Under the Clock concert series in Peterborough, Ontario.

You can year sound clips from the album at Barnes & Noble, Chapters and Amazon.com (Chapters has the most samples and the worst quality).

Kellaghan, who plays on PEI on occassion (next on August 6 as part of the Victoria Playhouse Concert Series, recorded the song on his 1995 album A Recent Future. You can read the lyrics on the Norman Maclean website, where we also learn:

Part mystery story, part investigative history, and part autobiography, Young Men and Fire was Norman Maclean’s last book. In it, Maclean examines the history of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire in Montana, in which twelve of a fifteen-man crew of Smokejumpers died.