Bardou (note: sound on intro) is a Belgian band founded by
Jim Kline and Mariusz Radwanski combining medieval, baroque, folk, celtic and sea chanty in a beautiful sound. While strolling down the Cours Mirabeau in Aix-en-Provence this afternoon, I chanced upon these two musicians playing dulcet tones in a duet. As I drew closer, I saw the instruments were nothing I'd encountered before: a
nyckelharpa and an
arch guitar. The sound was
quite appealing (.mpg video).
posted by darkstar
on Apr 9, 2006 -
10 comments
Vera Hall was a black woman born near Livingston, Alabama at the turn of the century. She grew up in a supportive family and community, but in difficult, poor rural living conditions. At a young age, Hall became a respected and devout member of the church, and remained so for the rest of her years. But after leaving home, she also fell in with more worldly crowd, for whom blues, craps, and alcohol were the entertainments of choice. The tension between these two spheres-- that of spirituals and the church, on one hand, and that of blues and the juke-joint, on the other-- is a theme that recurred throughout her life and infused her music. She drew upon both perspectives to cope with and overcome her life's perennial difficulties; sadly, it was dotted with tragedy: she lost both parents, a sister, a husband, a daughter, and two grandchildren-- all before she herself passed away in 1964 at the age of 58.
The Vera Hall Project [+}
posted by y2karl
on Sep 17, 2005 -
5 comments
Scottish born singer Shelagh McDonald was part of the late 1960s British folk scene and recorded
two excellent albums in the early 70s with production not unlike that of Nick Drake. With favorable comparisons to
Sandy Denny, Joni Mitchell and Judee Sill, larger success seemed right around the corner for this talented young woman. Then she vanished.
It's still unknown whether she went back to Scotland or elsewhere entirely, but now her musical catalogue is
back in print, prompting renewed interest. Perhaps she'll come forward at last to receive the royalties she's owed or, if we're lucky, step onto the stage once again.
posted by ktoad
on Sep 1, 2005 -
6 comments
We kept changing the name. First it was the Total Quintessence Stomach Pumpers. Then the Temporal Worth High Steppers. Then The Motherfucker Creek Babyrapers. That was just a joke name. He was Rinky-Dink Steve the Tin Horn and I was Fast Lightning Cumquat. He was Teddy Boy Forever and I was Wild Blue Yonder. It kept changing names. Then it was the Total Modal Rounders. Then when we were stoned on pot and someone else, Steve Close maybe, said Holy Modal Rounders by mistake. We kept putting out different names and wait until someone starts calling us that then. When we got to Holy Modal Rounders, everyone decided by accumulation that we were the Holy Modal Rounders. That's the practical way to get named.The Story Of The Holy Modal Rounders. In 1965, they used the psychedelic in a lyric and channeled Charlie Poole. From 1999, Green Man reviews their
Too Much Fun!--&
Ink 19's take as well. From No Depression comes
Bohemian Rhapsody and from Richie Unterberger here's
an interview with Peter Stampfel and the liner notes he wrote for the CD re-issue of cult classic
The Moray Eels Eat The Holy Modal Rounders. In a related bonus, here you can find
Charlie Poole singing
Moving Day, a great song which I first heard by the Rounders.
posted by y2karl
on May 30, 2005 -
19 comments
On
"Love and Theft" & On
On "Love and Theft" and the Minstrel Boy &
The Annotated Love And Theft... In melody,
Bye and Bye comes by way of Billie Holiday's
Having Myself A Time and
Floater by way of Bing Crosby's
(& Eddie Duchin's & Kate Smith's & Isham Jones's...) Snuggled On Your Shoulder--and lyrically, by way,
in part, of Junichi Saga's
Confessions Of A Yakuza, which was not a crime novel, as
StupidSexyFlanders once surmised, but an outright
As told to memoir, which makes it four or five degrees from Yakuza to Dr. Saga to translator to Dylan to
Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage? Oh, who's going to throw that minstrel boy a coin ?
posted by y2karl
on Apr 14, 2005 -
18 comments
Jump Jim Crow, through the hoops of one Robert Christgau's erudition as he surveys the literature extant in
In Search of Jim Crow: Why Postmodern Minstrelsy Studies Matter, through multiple readings of
Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop,
Demons of Disorder: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World and and
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. Consider, too,
The Minstrel Cycle from
Reading The Commitments and other various and sundry attempts to peek
inside the minstrel mask—all multiple readings reading blackface minstrels from the
pejorative to the
explorative, subversive to oppressive, past to future, unfolding tesseractly, if not exactly, with singing, dancing
and extraordinary elocutions. Buy your tickets and step within for
The Meller Drammer of Minstrelsy in
The Minstrel Show 2.0…
posted by y2karl
on Mar 31, 2005 -
17 comments
Be careful what you wish for, the cliché goes. Having aspired from early youth to become stars, people who achieve that status suddenly find themselves imprisoned, unable to walk down the street without being importuned by strangers. The higher their name floats, the greater the levy imposed, the less of ordinary life they can enjoy. In his memoir, Bob Dylan never precisely articulates the ambition that brought him to New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961, maybe because it felt improbable even to him at the time. Nominally, he was angling for Leading Young Folksinger, which was a plausible goal then, when every college town had three or four coffeehouses and each one had its Hootenanny night, and when performers who wowed the crowds on that circuit went on to make records that sometimes sold in the thousands. But from the beginning Dylan had his sights set much higher: the world, glory, eternity—ambitions laughably incommensurate with the modest confines of American folk music. He got his wish, in spades... 'I Is Someone Else'
posted by y2karl
on Feb 19, 2005 -
34 comments
"It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat --someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me." -- from
Bob Dylan's new autobiography,
Chronicles, with a brief
interview, via
Newsweek
posted by digaman
on Sep 26, 2004 -
14 comments
My Back Pages--Interesting in his own right
Eyolf Østrem still maintains the fan's fan tab, chords and music site, the standard by which all others are judged. I just revisited it the other night, while trying to recall how that little run in Dylan's version of
Delia went, and dang, if it didn't have the
back story of that ballad. I love this kind of stuff. The source of that account, John Garst, is the folklorist king of such research--he puts
John Henry at a railroad tunnel near Leeds, Alabama, just east of Birmingham on September 20, 1887, for example. Murder and heroic death ballad back stories are of extreme interest to me, so I decided to post a few more here:
Frankie and Albert,
Frankie and Johnny,
Casey Jones and
Stagger Lee. Did I say I love this kind of stuff?
posted by y2karl
on Sep 23, 2004 -
10 comments
The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the 'Blonde on Blonde' album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.
Bob Dylan 1978
Blonde On Blonde--Seven mixes, four or five covers, four or five women,
some missing photographs and one leather coat...
(story within)
posted by y2karl
on Nov 19, 2003 -
26 comments
701 78s. A huge set of "old-time" music recordings from 1924-1946, made available in RealAudio format by honkingduck.com. Not high sound quality, but an invaluable collection for anyone with any interest in early recorded bluegrass, folk, country, blues, etc.
posted by staggernation
on Nov 10, 2003 -
23 comments
How To Be A Jug or String Band MVP - starting with guitar: It's all in
tablature, by the way, something easy enough to understand. Three finger fingerpicking guitar is easy to learn--start with
Mississippi John Hurt:
Payday was the first song I ever learned. Of course, it's a cinch, being in Open D--but
open tunings are a cinch, too. With open tunings, how about learning some
slide guitar? Beyond John Hurt, slide or not, open or standard, , there are the ever expanding
Fahey Tablatures at John Fahey.com, where Melissa keeps the flame burning ever brightly.
There's Much More Within...
posted by y2karl
on Sep 5, 2003 -
17 comments
Howard Armstrong,
artist and
black string band musician who played 22 instruments--excelling by far on violin and mandolin--who spoke seven languages, who first recorded in 1930 and was still an active performer up into this year, died last Wednesday of complications due to a heart attack he suffered in March. He was the subject of the P.O.V. film
Sweet Old Song, which will be reprised a week from today on August 12th, 2003. He was also the subject of
Louie Bluie--the first film by string band muscian and director of
Crumb and
Ghost World,
Terry Zwigoff--which is well worth your watching by itself. He was quite a character and
lived quite a life.
posted by y2karl
on Aug 5, 2003 -
7 comments
"Now What a Time": Blues, Gospel, and the Fort Valley Music Festivals, 1938-1943 Approximately one hundred sound recordings, primarily blues and gospel songs, and related documentation from the folk festival at Fort Valley State College (now Fort Valley State University), Fort Valley, Georgia. The documentation was created by John Wesley Work III in 1941 and by Lewis Jones and Willis Laurence James in March, June, and July 1943. Also included are recordings made in Tennessee and Alabama by John Work between September 1938 and 1941.
Audio Title IndexThe John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip Folk singers and folksongs documented during a three-month trip through the southern United States.
Audio Title IndexCalifornia Gold: Northern California Folk Music From the ThirtiesMaterials from the WPA California Folk Music Project Collection, including sound recordings, still photographs, drawings, and written documents from a variety of European ethnic and English- and Spanish-speaking communities in Northern California. The collection comprises 35 hours of folk music recorded in twelve languages representing numerous ethnic groups and 185 musicians.
Audio Title Index
(As Always, More Inside)
posted by y2karl
on Apr 14, 2003 -
12 comments
Labors Of LoveHere are some handmade pages, personal and corporate, on American Vernacular Music and more:
First, here's
Long Time Coming, with three separate shrines to
Dock Boggs,
Pretty Boy Floyd and
Gus Cannon's Jug Stompers, worthy subjects all. I have no idea what the
Eyeneer Records revenue model is or was but their
American Music Archive,
(Latest Update - August 20, 1999), albeit spotty, is still a must stop and see with pages on
Charley Patton,
Sleepy John Estes and
Lucille Bogan, for example, and that's just the blues section. It's a very promising sounding site--and it's too bad they never finished it, but, on the other hand, thank god,they have not yet pulled the plug.
Lea Gilmore's It's A Girl Thang's Historical Profiles has it goin' on with
Sister Rosetta Tharpe,
Big Maybelle and
Georgia White for examples. Catherine Yronwode, of course, is a name well known here, as is her wondrous
Lucky Mojo, cornucopica that it is. There, among much riches, is the extensive and authoritative
Blues Lyrics and Hoodoo --but that's Not All ! »→ »→ »→
posted by y2karl
on Feb 12, 2003 -
21 comments
John Hurt: Although it was not John (wrong sex anyway) who through a gentle voice and pleasant demeanor (yet he had this about him too) served as my primary impetus to play the guitar, it was nevertheless he, and others who played like him - but mainly he who provided me with my first technical model (emotional model to some extent also) for playing the guitar. He was the first I heard who played in the three-finger, non-choking, "picking" style, and he was one of the best. He was in his quiet way, a very great man, and I deeply mourn our loss of him. John Fahey
Mississippi John Hurt"I just make it sound like I think it ought to" (more
→)
posted by y2karl
on Feb 8, 2003 -
41 comments
My name's not Brian! Ryan Adams gives a fan a refund and asks him to leave a concert when said fan asks him to play
"Summer of '69". Have you ever been to a concert where the performer lost it at the audience? I guess even folk rockers can be divas...
posted by PenDevil
on Oct 17, 2002 -
119 comments
The Folk Den Archive In November, 1995, Roger McGuinn (yes,
that Roger McGuinn - the same guy, BTW, who was originally
Jim McGuinn) started uploading
original renditions of traditional folk songs for free distribution.
He's been doing it every month ever since. In seven years, he's covered American classics from
"John Henry" to
"Get Along Little Dogies" while also covering the rest of the world in tunes as diverse as
"Finnegan's Wake" and
"Waltzing Matilda". He also puts up an
appropriate holiday song each December. Each song is usually available in a variety of downloads, and is heavily annotated, so if you ever wanted to know the original 1829 lyrics to
"Stewball", this is the place to go.
posted by yhbc
on Oct 4, 2002 -
15 comments
Folk Music. Stefan Wirz and Hideki Watanabe pay homage to their favorites. Check out Hideki's
Muscle Shoals page for another slice of his Americana
pie. Or click on a name--
Eric Von Schmidt, say--on Stefan's completist, slow loading page and wallow in pictures and stories... Then there's the
Richard & Mimi Fariña website. Jan Hoiberg's
Band site is another.
I love labors of love. And don't forget
the Bauls of Bengal or
the secrets of John Wesley Harding revealed! And note, newsfilterians, you can now order Mickey Jone's
home movies from the '66 tour, too. I'm going to see the Bobster tomorrow, so I've been thinking of these things.
posted by y2karl
on Oct 3, 2002 -
18 comments
Bob Dylan Live at Newport, 1965: Maggie’s Farm. 10 MB Quicktime mp3 A
notorious and historic
moment, that began a legendary year of
touring , stolen moments of which are available in
several sometimes bootlegged formats .Sometimes, perhaps
revised ,
stories differ at
what happened, and, now,
post-
ironically enough, He appears at
Newport again
this Saturday.
posted by y2karl
on Aug 2, 2002 -
35 comments
Race/Music: Corrine Corrina, Bo Chatmon, and the Excluded Middle. Bo Carter is not the household name that, say, Robert Johnson is but he first recorded and most likely wrote one of the standards of the 20th Century. The essay linked deals with him, his song and the push me-pull you of race and culture in America. It's a post graduate thesis rife with postmodernist terminology--yet full of ideas and insights, not all of which I necessarily endorse or agree with--but which I've found thought provoking.
(Details Within)
posted by y2karl
on Aug 1, 2002 -
15 comments
American Magus Without Harry Smith I wouldn’t have existed!
Bob Dylan
… I put Harry Smith with the three most dear to me GRAND INTELLIGENCE!! Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harry Smith…These were sharp motherfuckers… and heavy… talk about heavy!!
Gregory Corso
Harry Smith, a central figure in the mid-20th-century avant-garde, was a complex artistic figure who made major contributions to the fields of sound recording, independent filmmaking, the visual arts, and ethnographic collecting. Along with Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, and Oskar Fischinger, Smith is considered one of America’s leading experimental filmmakers. He would often hand-paint directly on film creating unique, complex compositions that have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes. Smith began as a teenager to record Native American songs and rituals. He is best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, a music collection widely credited with launching the urban folk revival.
The Anthology is the focus here, but Harry Smith, the artist, avant garde film maker, polymath, musicologist and quintessential hipster must be mentioned, too.
Details Within
posted by y2karl
on Jul 10, 2002 -
32 comments
Mel Lyman 1938-1978. Mel Lyman was controversial. He was the brilliant folk musician who soothed the Dylan-ruffled crowd at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the Fort Hill guru whose prose in the undergound newspaper Avatar shocked conservative Bostonians of the late 60s... Many years of collecting, and help from numerous people has resulted in the large collection of articles reproduced here. Some say Lyman was God... others that he was a devil... but most of these articles show him as a charismatic individual somewhere between those two extremes.
An exhaustively authoritative page about a very interesting harmonica player who became God. And, man, does this bring back the 60s...(Details within)
posted by y2karl
on Mar 24, 2002 -
21 comments
John Fahey - American Primitive Guitar. I got an e-mail from a listener about a John Fahey song I played on my show today and it prompted me to revisit his website. I've been listening to him ever since '67 or so. He died last year due to complications during a coronary bypass operation--I realized again today how I miss him. (more inside)
posted by y2karl
on Mar 22, 2002 -
14 comments
The Minstrel Show The Minstrel Show presents us with a strange, fascinating and awful phenomenon. Minstrel shows emerged from preindustrial European traditions of masking and carnival. But in the US they began in the 1830s, with working class white men dressing up as plantation slaves. These men imitated black musical and dance forms, combining savage parody of black Americans with genuine fondness for African American cultural forms. By the Civil War the minstrel show had become world famous and respectable. Late in his life Mark Twain fondly remembered the "old time nigger show" with its colorful comic darkies and its rousing songs and dances. By the 1840s, the minstrel show had become one of the central events in the culture of the Democratic party..
The image of white men in blackface, miming black song, dance and speech is considered the last word in racist bigotry for some. And yet, standing at the crossroads of race, class and high and low culture, blackface minstrelsy is one fascinating topic in academic circles. It’s history is intertwined with the rise of abolitionism, the works of Mark Twain and the histories of
vaudeville,
American vernacular music, radio, television,
movies, in fact all of what is called popular culture. Details within.
posted by y2karl
on Mar 13, 2002 -
26 comments
Amazing collection of information on Folklife in Florida between 1937-1942. Audio files are stunning. They were originally recorded (with a portable acetate cutter!) by Zora Neal Hurston and Stetson Kennedy, working for the WPA. Does anyone else have other favorite Library of Congress sites?
first heard about on
npr last week.
posted by anathema
on Mar 7, 2002 -
12 comments
