âThe way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard them first while still we were working wireless, when there was a ragtime tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating … Continue reading →
Introduction â âDearly Departed Friendâ For the past five years, we here at MBM have managed to bring you a new post on the last Monday of May. Memorial Day 2017 is no exception. As with those posts, todayâs featured song … Continue reading →
âPrepare to take a ride âŚâ Iâm just shy of fifty years old. My father died at ninety-one a month ago, and my older brother, tragically, three months before that. My mother passed less than two years ago, just a … Continue reading →
Real things in the darkness seem no realer than dreams. â Murasaki Shikibu Nacht und Wind The first sound is a rhythm, a staccato burst of piano triplets beneath a brief, rising and falling melody evoking hoof-beats. A horse races … Continue reading →
âWhen he was on, no one could auto-desecrate better. âHe who is not busy being born is busy dying,â he famously intoned in âItâs Alright Ma (Iâm Only Bleeding),â and way before the aphorism became worthy of inclusion in Bartlettâs … Continue reading →
Introduction â âVictim or the Crimeâ It is human to feel like a victim when suffering arrives. Â Traditional ballads almost always place such emotion within a dualistic worldview. Â There is good and evil â and a clear, if thin, line … Continue reading →
âI would think that a movement without music would crumble. Music picks up peopleâs spirits. Anytime you can get something that lifts your spirits and also speaks to the reality of your life, even the reality of oppression, and at … Continue reading →
âA stunningly beautiful autumn morningâ Bob Boilenâs âTiny Desk Concertâ series introduced me to the Drive-By Truckers song âGuns of Umpqua.â The song grabbed me right away with the warm bounce of the acoustic guitar before the âlights came upâ on … Continue reading →
Written in the spring of 1978 by the Canadian singer-songwriter Stan Rogers, âThe Flowers of Bermudaâ is a disaster ballad on a small scale, telling the story of a ship that founders with nineteen people aboard. Weâve looked at shipwreck songs … Continue reading →
Blood on the mountain And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brotherâs keeper? â Genesis 4:9 Truly old Watauga is making for herself a dark and bloody … Continue reading →
