By Shelly Romalis
Folklore legend Aunt Molly Jackson grew up a coal miner's daughter in eastern Kentucky. Witness to the terrible strife between miners and mine owners, Molly became a labor activist, writing songs that fused hard experience with rich Appalachian musical traditions to become weapons of struggle.
In 1931, at age fifty, Molly was "discovered" by the Dreiser Committee and brought north. There she was sponsored and befriended by an illustrious circle of left-wing intellectuals and musicians, including Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Alan Lomax, and Charles Seeger and his son Pete. Together with Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, her sister Sarah Ogan Gunning, and other transplanted folk musicians, Molly served as a cultural broker, linking the rural working poor to big-city left-wing activism.
Shelly Romalis's multidimensional portrait of Aunt Molly illuminates Southern Appalachia during the early decades of the twentieth century, New York during the Depression years, and the folk music revival and women's resistance movements.
"This lively book fills out a lot of history and makes a whole period come alive. It is really a thrilling story [and] has challenged us to think about our own work as collectors, educators, and students of folklore and American life."
-Guy and Candie Carawan, authors of Voices from the Mountains
"[Gives] a fresh twist to our understanding of the interaction of politics and culture from South to North through the twentieth century."
-Ronald D. Cohen, author of Wasn't That a Time! Firsthand Accounts of the Folk Music Revival
Shelly Romalis, an associate professor of anthropology at York University, Ontario, is the editor of Childbirth: Alternatives to Medical Control, as well as a singer and fiddler.
Excerpt
A new kind of singer-songwriter - Joan Baez, Phil Ochs, and Bob Dylan - became media celebrities. Baez's pure American tones rendered multi-versed English ballads emotionally accessible; Ochs's lyrics engaged politically disfranchised youth (although he never reached the popular audiences of the others); and a generation yearning for anchors in a choppy social sea elevated Dylan to a kind of mystical Poet Laureate.
[...]
Revivalist folk singers during these years spanned the interest spectrum from traditional American music (New Lost City Ramblers, Joan Baez), internationalism (Cynthia Gooding and Theodore Bikel) to singer-songwriters like Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs, whose personal/political identity probings characterized the cultural politics of the 1960s.
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Friday, 9 October 2009
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Monday, 5 October 2009
Philosophy at 33 1/3 rpm: Themes of Classic Rock Music
By James F. Harris
True friendship, true community, social and sexual alienation, the death of God, the importance of the present moment, individual autonomy, the corruption of the state, revolution, the end of the present age - such are the intellectual themes of classic rock.
Sixties rock music left behind the harmless bubblegum and surfing ditties of the 1950s to become a vehicle for thoughtful commentary upon the human condition. Theories and motifs from philosophy, theology, and literature were reshaped, refracted, and transfigured in this intelligent new popular art form.
Classic rock, argues James Harris, should be taken as seriously as the loftiest creations of art and literature. In Philosophy at 33 1/3 rpm, he lays the groundwork for an informed appreciation by exhibiting philosophical themes in the finest rock songs.
Professor Harris's examples encompass all the major rock artists of the classic period (1962-1974), including Paul Simon, Elton John, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Kinks, Cat Stevens, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Joni Mitchell.
His analyses draw upon the ideas of Aristotle, Bonhoeffer, Camus, Descartes, Freud, Kant, Laing, Marcuse, Marx, Nietzsche, Nozick, Rousseau, Sartre, Thoreau, and Tillich, as well as the Bible and other scriptures, to situate the preoccupations of the classic rock lyricists in the Western intellectual tradition.
James F. Harris is Chair of the Philosophy Department at the College of William and Mary and an amateur musician whose tastes have for 35 years included rock 'n' roll. He is author of the provocative and widely-acclaimed work of pure philosophy, Against Relativism, and of numerous philosophy articles. Professor Harris's outlook was profoundly shaped by his participation in the upheavals of The Sixties. He is co-author (with Mark Waymack) of Single-Malt Whiskies of Scotland (1992) and The Bourbon Book (forthcoming).
Excerpt
Crucifixion
Of all the many classic rock songs which acknowledge the delicate balance between deliverance and destruction, one of my favorites if "Crucifixion" by Phil Ochs from his 1967 album, Pleasures of the Harbor. A compelling version of "Crucifixion" was recorded by little-known duo Jim and Jean on their album entitled Changes. In "Crucifixion" Ochs tells the tale of the morbid delight which we all take in the sagas of our fallen heroes. Which heroes? Well, take your pick - from Jesus to John or Robert Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin. When iconoclastic rebels become "an assault upon the order" and represent "the changing of the guard", we embrace them and follow them and urge them on in their fight against "the establishment" and "them" and "evil". It's the battle of a hero of truth, justice, and right against overwhelming odds, and we love them for it. But the terrible truth is that "beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate", and "success is an enemy of the losers of the day", and "in the privacy of the churches, who knows what they pray?" Until finally, with "the cross trembling with desire", the rebel and savior is crucified and "the eyes of the rebel have been branded by the blind." We who are left and who, of course, are innocent of the rebel's death, must know every detail. "Do you have a picture of the pain?" we ask. And "as the cycle of sacrifice unwinds", the important thing is that it's "good to be alive when the eulogies are read." And "with the speed of insanity, then he dies."
True friendship, true community, social and sexual alienation, the death of God, the importance of the present moment, individual autonomy, the corruption of the state, revolution, the end of the present age - such are the intellectual themes of classic rock.
Sixties rock music left behind the harmless bubblegum and surfing ditties of the 1950s to become a vehicle for thoughtful commentary upon the human condition. Theories and motifs from philosophy, theology, and literature were reshaped, refracted, and transfigured in this intelligent new popular art form.
Classic rock, argues James Harris, should be taken as seriously as the loftiest creations of art and literature. In Philosophy at 33 1/3 rpm, he lays the groundwork for an informed appreciation by exhibiting philosophical themes in the finest rock songs.
Professor Harris's examples encompass all the major rock artists of the classic period (1962-1974), including Paul Simon, Elton John, Pink Floyd, The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, The Moody Blues, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Kinks, Cat Stevens, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, The Who, Jefferson Airplane, and Joni Mitchell.
His analyses draw upon the ideas of Aristotle, Bonhoeffer, Camus, Descartes, Freud, Kant, Laing, Marcuse, Marx, Nietzsche, Nozick, Rousseau, Sartre, Thoreau, and Tillich, as well as the Bible and other scriptures, to situate the preoccupations of the classic rock lyricists in the Western intellectual tradition.
James F. Harris is Chair of the Philosophy Department at the College of William and Mary and an amateur musician whose tastes have for 35 years included rock 'n' roll. He is author of the provocative and widely-acclaimed work of pure philosophy, Against Relativism, and of numerous philosophy articles. Professor Harris's outlook was profoundly shaped by his participation in the upheavals of The Sixties. He is co-author (with Mark Waymack) of Single-Malt Whiskies of Scotland (1992) and The Bourbon Book (forthcoming).
Excerpt
Crucifixion
Of all the many classic rock songs which acknowledge the delicate balance between deliverance and destruction, one of my favorites if "Crucifixion" by Phil Ochs from his 1967 album, Pleasures of the Harbor. A compelling version of "Crucifixion" was recorded by little-known duo Jim and Jean on their album entitled Changes. In "Crucifixion" Ochs tells the tale of the morbid delight which we all take in the sagas of our fallen heroes. Which heroes? Well, take your pick - from Jesus to John or Robert Kennedy to Martin Luther King, Jr. to Jim Morrison or Janis Joplin. When iconoclastic rebels become "an assault upon the order" and represent "the changing of the guard", we embrace them and follow them and urge them on in their fight against "the establishment" and "them" and "evil". It's the battle of a hero of truth, justice, and right against overwhelming odds, and we love them for it. But the terrible truth is that "beneath the greatest love is a hurricane of hate", and "success is an enemy of the losers of the day", and "in the privacy of the churches, who knows what they pray?" Until finally, with "the cross trembling with desire", the rebel and savior is crucified and "the eyes of the rebel have been branded by the blind." We who are left and who, of course, are innocent of the rebel's death, must know every detail. "Do you have a picture of the pain?" we ask. And "as the cycle of sacrifice unwinds", the important thing is that it's "good to be alive when the eulogies are read." And "with the speed of insanity, then he dies."
Saturday, 3 October 2009
Friday, 2 October 2009
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