walking upstream…
Ani DiFranco
photo: erinc salor · cc by-sa 2.0 ↗Ani DiFranco
sourcesWikipedia — Ani DiFranco (lead only) · Guitar World — Ani DiFranco on how playing in bars shaped her percussive playing style, 2024 (Meldrum, corroborating) · Guitar Player — Ani DiFranco guitar lesson (Meldrum bar apprenticeship and 'Both Hands' crescendo technique) · Premier Guitar — Ani DiFranco · NUVO — Ani DiFranco talks Pete Seeger, 2014 (origin of the song in her live shows)
Ani DiFranco was nine years old when a Buffalo guitar teacher started bringing her to his own bar gigs, and she learned fast that a folk singer nobody came to see has to fight for the room. She became an emancipated minor at fifteen and, at nineteen, founded her own label, Righteous Babe Records, so no executive could tell her what a "little chick in the corner with an acoustic guitar" was allowed to sound like. Through the 1990s her percussive, open-tuned playing and blunt, political-feminist songwriting made her folk's most consequential DIY auteur — a kinship older folk veterans like Pete Seeger recognized on sight, welcoming her into a tradition she was busy reshaping rather than imitating. The independent-label blueprint she built has guided countless singer-songwriters since.
the sound in question
1995
32 FlavorsAni DiFranco
walk the tributaries ↓
Pete Seeger1950s · Folk
Pete Seeger became one of DiFranco's mentors in the folk-protest tradition. Where she braced for wariness over her shaved head, jackboots, and nose piercing, Seeger, she recalled, saw through the "difference of uniform immediately" and said, "Comrade, come here." That kinship became a studio session in 2012: DiFranco called to ask if he'd play on her rewrite of his old union anthem "Which Side Are You On?," and — in his nineties — Seeger dropped the phone to grab his banjo before she'd finished asking, joining her on the recording that became her album's title track.
listen: upstream & heresource: Democracy Now! — Ani DiFranco on Trump, her memoir, and working with Pete Seeger and Prince, 2019 (Seeger's 'Comrade, come here') ↗
1955
Which Side Are You On?Pete Seeger
2012
¿Which Side Are You On?Ani DiFranco
listen forSeeger's own recording of the miners' anthem, cut for the Folkways album Talking Union, is just voice, banjo, and a chorus rallying behind one insistent melody line. DiFranco's 2012 remake keeps that same tune and call-and-response shape but rewrites the picket-line verses for new fights, and opens with Seeger's own banjo — recorded in two takes at a riverside union clubhouse — before an unannounced children's choir wanders into the session and gets folded into the closing chorus.
Michael MeldrumFolk
Michael Meldrum was DiFranco's guitar teacher in Buffalo, and starting around age nine he brought her along to his own bar gigs, billing her as his "little dancing monkey." The job was making a room of drinkers turn around: "Loud against silence makes somebody's conversation at the bar stick out," she told Acoustic Guitar, "and they're like—oops." Holding that attention alone, with no band behind her, forced the guitar to do a band's work. As she put it, "it was the early survival skills that influenced the way I played forevermore" — Meldrum's classroom, decades before anyone called it a technique.
listen: upstream & heresource: Acoustic Guitar / Mark Kemp — Ani DiFranco ↗
1979
No known recordingMichael Meldrum
1990
Both HandsAni DiFranco
listen forNo recording of Meldrum's own playing survives, so listen for what the bar gigs left behind instead. "Both Hands," the opening track of DiFranco's self-titled 1990 debut, builds its verses on the same loud-then-suddenly-soft plucking she described developing to catch a drinker's ear — a crescendo effect guitar teachers still transcribe today as a textbook example of her attack, the instrument swelling from a whisper to a shout and back inside a single phrase, doing a whole band's dynamics by itself.