“Perfect” by Fairground Attraction [1988

As much as I want to post a follow-up to my reblog of that fantastic Giorgio Moroder piece (we could all use a little more mustache), I can’t. Alas, the random song for today is this catchy folk-jazz-pop ditty from the late ’80s. Still, you might say it’s “perfect” for tonight.

“Know” by Nick Drake from Pink Moon [1971]

The best book I read over my winter break was Joe Boyd’s White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s. Boyd started out as an ambitious young music fan with an adventurous streak that took him around the American South, to Newport, and to Europe. As his career peaked near the end of the Sixties, Boyd produced Pink Floyd’s debut single, albums for the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, and Vasthi Bunyan’s most noteworthy album Just Another Diamond Day. 

Of all the great musicians he worked with, none were as intriguing or multi-talented as Nick Drake. Drake could play complex guitar licks and sing in pitch without ever missing a pluck. But his severely introverted personality, his utter inability to interact with almost anyone, kept him from supporting his early albums with live tours. When it came time to record his third album Pink Moon, Drake somehow found the courage to challenge his supporting group at Island Records, including Boyd, to let him record his songs without the backing arrangements that had supported his playing on Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layter. No strings, no pianos, no percussion. Just Nick and his guitar. The song “Know” is exemplary. 

See Boyd’s great book for a much more personal account of the recording sessions and of Nick’s lonely final days.

“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” by Lead Belly [1944]

“Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (most commonly under the title “In the Pines”) stands as one of the most enduring songs in the American folk tradition. Surviving—no, thriving—through dozens of stylistic changes, the song has been sung and recorded under various titles from at least the 1870s. Most listeners in their 20s and 30s recognize it from Nirvana’s live MTV Unplugged show and subsequent album. This Lead Belly recording for the Musicraft label in 1944 is the one that inspired Cobain’s version. See this 1994 New York Times article for an in depth history of the song.

“It Isn’t Nice” (live) by Judy Collins from Fifth Album [1965] 

I just finished my first semester of graduate school with a whirlwind final three weeks (I read something like 20 full books and skimmed another 10 or so, wrote 50 pages in three papers, and gave two paper presentations). Thank you for sticking around in my Tumblr absence. I’m back, at least for a few weeks.

One of the seminar papers I wrote tried to answer the question, “why the folk boom?” Why did folk music become such a popular genre between 1958 and about 1965, and not something else (say, calypso, which threatened to become massively popular in 1957)? And why then, as opposed to some other time? I won’t rehearse the paper here, but I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading some of the books for it. To anyone interested in this era, I highly recommend Ronald D. Cohen’s Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), an incredibly detailed chronicle of the whole revival, and Robert Cantwell’s When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), a more eloquent history of the various strands of American culture that intersected to make the folk boom what it was. 

To inspire myself in the writing process, I also listened to a lot of urban folk music from the late ’50s and early ’60s. Above all, I found a new appreciation for the songs of Malvina Reynolds.

Popular memory usually recalls the images of famous young stars like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Peter, Paul & Mary. But this 60-some-year-old understood the changing world as well as any of the disaffected youngsters around her. Her songwriting captured much of the spirit and many of the concrete goals of the various freedom movements (Civil Rights, New Left, peace/anti-war, Free Speech, etc.). Like members of these related movements, Reynold’s became more upset as violence against the Civil Rights Movement escalated and as the Kennedy and Johnson administrations repeatedly failed to protect Freedom Riders and protesters in the South, and her lyrics became more acerbic and more cynical.

In 1964, Reynolds wrote “It Isn’t Nice” to explain and justify the direct action tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. In her own performance, the music is jaunty and light in contrast to the serious protest lyrics. Soon after she published the song, singer Barbara Dane changed the melody a bit, added a more consistent chorus, and overall made the song a much more direct attack on establishment policies. Judy Collins then recorded it for her creatively-titled Fifth Album, released in November of 1965. This is my favorite version and the one posted above.

It wouldn’t take too many lyrical changes, I think, for this to become an OWS anthem. The song is especially effective in its attack on lack of government action in addressing grave injustices:

You were quiet just like mice,
Now you say we aren’t nice, 
And if that is Freedom’s price, 
We don’t mind.

“The Rich Man and the Poor Man” by Bob Miller [1930]

This song is both class-related (I’m reading a book about the Great Depression) and topical.

They say history repeats itself. Compare the language being used currently in both Washington political rhetoric and the Wall Street protest to this 1930 song by hillbilly and popular songwriter Bob Miller.

“I Am a Rock” by Paul Simon [1965]

Before it became a Simon and Garfunkel anthem, “I Am a Rock” was Paul Simon’s first solo single under his own name. Released to coincide with The Paul Simon Songbook—released only in the UK—the song did little to draw attention to the struggling folk singer. But when Tom Wilson turned “The Sound of Silence” into a folk-rock #1 in the US in 1965, “I Am a Rock” became a top choice for a similar reworking. The Simon and Garfunkel version climbed to #3 in the US and #17 in the UK and proved the staying power of Wilson’s new sound for the duo.

“Hunting Song” by Pentangle [1969]

We are entering the season of the Renaissance Fair. Many of these pseudo-historical fantasy lands open each fall, including many of the largest (e.g. those in Texas, Minnesota, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Maryland). To help prepare you for your noble journey back to the 1500s, here is the band Pentangle retelling an old Arthurian legend in a style that at least superficially sounds like a troubadour song. 

If you’ve never heard Pentangle, it is difficult to place the band’s style. “Hunting Song” shows only one of many sounds the group produced. I recommend checking out their first four albums. This haunting version of “Hunting Song” comes from a live session the band recorded for the BBC show Top Gear, Aug 17, 1969. If you like the studio albums, the BBC compilation The Lost Broadcasts: 1968-1972 (where this recording can be found) is also a great collection.

“Willie the Weeper” by Dave Van Ronk [1961]

The vocal folk sound of groups like the Kingston Trio, The Weavers, or The Journeymen came across as tame compared to the rough jazz and blues vocals of Dave Van Ronk. While other solo folkies were still quietly strumming in the coffeehouse scene (see the first records by Joan Baez, Judy Collins and even Bob Dylan), Van Ronk was shouting covers of dirty blues songs about drugs (“Willie the Weeper”), sex (“Yas, Yas, Yas”), and hard labor (“Spike Driver’s Moan”). And those are just examples from his 1961 album Dave Van Ronk Sings.

In Van Ronk’s version of “Willie the Weeper” you can hear seeds of the more aggressive style of folk protest songs that emerged a few years later, as well as one source of inspiration for idiosyncratic singers like Captain Beefheart or Tom Waits.

Lastly, yes, you will no doubt have recognized that Cab Calloway’s huge 1931 hit “Minnie the Moocher” was based on the original “Willie the Weeper.”

“Ballad of Birmingham” by Jerry Moore [1967]

An Exploration of Music and Poetry, Day 14: Topical Song

Most of what I’ve posted in this playlist so far has been poetry about music, music about poetry, or some extension of those ideas. Today we look at poetry written about a real event. Since we’re dealing with the 1960s we get to look at the revival of broadsides, topical ballads published on the cheap, meant for distribution in public spaces.

Before I say anymore, you should all become acquainted with the Smithsonian anthology Best of Broadside 1962-1988:

89 songs, including some never commercially released. Compiled and annotated by Jeff Place and Ronald D. Cohen. 5-CD boxed set. It was a small underground magazine smuggled out of a New York City housing project in a baby carriage, filled with new songs by artists who were too creative for the folkies and too radical for the establishment. Underground—yet Bob Dylan, Janis Ian, Rev. Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, Phil Ochs, Malvina Reynolds, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Pete Seeger, and dozens of others first published songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Little Boxes,” and “Society’s Child,” in Broadside. The Best of Broadside features 89 songs from the Folkways collection, tapes from the Broadside magazine office, and some tracks released on other labels. The set contains a variety of performers, topics, and musical styles that tell tales spanning the 25 years of the Broadside era (1962-1988), but many of them address contemporary issues as well, since the new millennium has not see the end of warfare, nuclear threat, ethnic conflict, immigrants’ suffering, women’s unequal rights, ecological devastation, and social injustice. This is the underground music that fueled the innocent-sounding Folk Revival on the one hand and the explosions of angry rock and rap on the other. The Best of Broadside brings an era, its musicians, and its many stories to a new audience. The extensive notes feature the graphics of the original Broadside magazine and provide information on the careers of its many musicians with extensive discographies, the stories behind most of the songs as well as their full texts. They also describe the dramatic history of the magazine itself—a remarkable achievement of dedicated musicians and social activists. (Amazon product description)

“Ballad of Birmingham” does not come from that compilation, but it exemplifies this aspect of the 1960s folk scene and actually helped spark Broadside’s first major high-end publication. Here’s the story from the University of Illinois’s website on Modern American Poetry:

In 1962 [poet Dudley] Randall became interested in Boone House, a black cultural center which had been founded by Margaret Danner in Detroit. Every Sunday Randall and Danner would read their own work to audiences at Boone House. Over the years the two authors collected a group of poems which became the first major publication of Broadside Press, Poem Counterpoem (1966).

Perhaps the first of its kind, the volume contains ten poems each by Danner and Randall. The poems are alternated to form a kind of double commentary on the subjects they address in common. Replete with allusions to social and intellectual history, the verses stress nurture and growth.

In “The Ballad of Birmingham” Randall establishes racial progress as a kind of blossoming, as he recounts the incident, based on a historical event of the bombing in 1963 of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s church by white terrorists. Eight quatrains portray one girl’s life and death. (Four girls actually died in the real bombing.) When the daughter in the poem asks permission to attend a civil rights rally, the loving and fearful mother refuses to let her go. Allowed to go to church instead, the daughter dies anyway. Thus, there is no sanctuary in an evil world, Randall seems to say, and one may face horror in the street as well as in the church.

After folk singer Jerry Moore read the poem in a newspaper, he set it to music, and Randall granted him permission to publish the tune with the lyrics.

The website includes a much more detailed account of Randall’s “Ballad of Birmingham” (which was his very first broadside), of which I will only quote the following: 

Randall’s broadside reminds the audience of what is at stake in the struggle for civil rights—no sanctuary, no respect for innocence, the potential for violent resistance not just to social change, but even to the presence, new or continued, of blacks in community with whites. There is no such thing as staying out of the struggle in order to avoid trouble. The violence touches even this woman who would keep her family out of the danger of active political protests like the Freedom March. To read, buy, have, or give the card is to participate in the struggle she could not stay out of.

“A Poem on the Underground Wall” (demo) by Paul Simon [1966]

An Exploration of Music and Poetry, Day 13: What Constitutes a poem?

Art Garfunkel’s harmonies added color and depth to nearly every song Paul Simon wrote in the mid and late 1960s. One of the few where Garfunkel’s presence actually detracted from Simon’s storytelling was “A Poem on the Underground Wall” from the duo’s 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme. Compare the master take to Simon’s demo above. In the demo, Simon’s solo voice focusses the song sharply on the solitary nature of the character’s actions.

Related to the theme, not only are the lyrics overtly poetic (Simon was almost trying too hard with this one), but they pose a serious question for us: Can a single four-letter graffito be considered a poem?

Your thoughts?