The English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) received £585,400 in funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to archive, conserve, and digitize material from six different archives containing some of the country’s most important folk music collections. The project … Continue reading →
Steve Earle and Townes Van Zandt After such a long post last time, I plan for this one to be long on music and short on text. If there’s a narrative to capture here, it’s that I think “Pancho and … Continue reading →
Walking Man, by Alberto Giacometti A Work of Betrayal I’m about to spill a good bit of ink, figuratively speaking, on a song that is only around 270 words long (including repeated words). I want to (re)introduce you to “Pancho … Continue reading →
Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead – by Irving Penn, 1967 Janis Joplin – James Gurley – Ron McKernan – Jerry Garcia (This week’s first set.) (This week’s second set.) When I look at portraits from the … Continue reading →
Concert Poster, Oakland Coliseum – Peter Barsotti, 12/31/91 I recently wrote about “Jack Straw” as the Grateful Dead’s only true murder ballad. That effort spurred me to begin this week with a broader look at the act of murder in the Dead’s … Continue reading →
The Union Grove Old Time Fiddler’s Convention was started by H.P. VanHoy as a way to help raise funds to support North Carolina’s Union Grove School in 1924. This charity fiddle contest grew exponentially, attracting some of the top bluegrass … Continue reading →
“Listening for the secret, searching for the sound…” I am one of those people who early in life, somewhere around age four, started grappling with the existential ‘problem’ of death. I don’t know why. Maybe it was because my grandmother … Continue reading →
As I mentioned in my first post, “Ballad of Hollis Brown” was presented and received as a sad story about something that happened to a man, not about what that man did to six other people. The song brings us … Continue reading →
The Times They Are a’Changin’ included numerous songs that addressed current events and real crimes. “Only a Pawn in their Game” deals with the assassination of civil rights worker Medgar Evers by Byron De La Beckwith; “The Lonesome Death of … Continue reading →
At the end of this week, I’ll return to the key issues that Dylan addresses in “The Ballad of Hollis Brown.” As part of that, I’ll look at one of if not the worst versions of the song ever sung … Continue reading →
