Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger
(image from the Grammy Museum, courtesy of the Highlander Education Center)

Big news!

We’re on our annual holiday hiatus this month, but wanted to add one more post for 2014 to announce that we are moving! We’re joining forces with Sing Out! magazine. We are tremendously excited and honored to join Sing Out!. For almost 65 years, Sing Out! has been advancing the causes of songs and singing, and has been supported by leading musicians and songwriters from its early days, including by the two esteemed gentlemen above.

“One little issue of Sing Out! is worth more to humanity than any thousand 

tons of dreamy dopey junk dished out from the trees of our forests along 

every Broadway in this world. I don’t know of any magazine, big or little, 

that comes within a thousand million miles of Sing Out! when it comes to doing 

good around the world.” — Woody Guthrie, NYC, 1951

Click here to read about the first 50 years of Sing Out!‘s history.

A few months ago, Matt Hengeveld, SO!‘s Managing Editor, reached out to us to learn more about our blog. He’s been following us on our Facebook page for a while, and the magazine has kindly promoted a few of our posts. After a few emails, he extended the offer for us to move over to their family of blogs, and have our content hosted on their blog engine. Mark Moss, SO!’s Editor and Executive Director, and I talked over a few details, and we put together a plan.

Here’s the plan. Soon, and perhaps as an update to this post, we’ll announce a new URL for Murder Ballad Monday. Please stay tuned. We’ll have a link on Sing Out!‘s home page as one of their affiliated blogs.

Other than that, we’ll be the same, evolving Murder Ballad Monday. We’ll be switching over from one blogging platform to another, so our look will change. This will present some welcome opportunities for enhancements–not the least of which being some expert design help. We may have some tinkering to do as we transition our old content over to the new platform, so please be patient with us.

Our faithful cadre of bloggers will continue to bring you periodic reflections on music, meaning, and mortality; and we’ll enrich the conversation with a broader group of readers…and perhaps a new writer or two. Our content will continue to move between the traditional and the contemporary, folk and popular, focusing on just how and why these songs do what they do for us. You may also start seeing our writers in other areas of Sing Out! online or in the print publication.

Woody Guthrie (image from Michael Ochs Archives, Getty Images)

As always, our focus will continue to be on the music. We’re already developing content for the coming year, and look forward to continuing the conversation with you.

I didn’t imagine this particular path when we started this work almost three years ago. I’m grateful for how things have turned out so far, and especially grateful for my fellow contributors–Pat, Shaleane, Tom, Alison, Becky, and Maureen. Pat deserves special mention here not only for his excellent work in writing many, many posts over the years, but for sharing with me all along the management load and the vision of what we are and what we might be. Thanks also to the musicians and artists who have enriched our posts immensely.

That’s the news. We’ll let you know soon where to find us.

Finally, both because we’re committed to providing good music with every post, and because this particular song first found its way into print through the pages of Sing Out!, we’ll leave you with Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” The song is well worth a write up of its own, so consider this a foretaste of things to come.