Biography/Autobiography
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This Day in (Protest-Song) History
“Matron Felled by Cane in ‘Old Plantation’ Setting” ran a 1963 headline in the Baltimore Afro-American. The report was about the murder of 51-year-old Hattie Carroll at the hands of 24-year-old William Zantzinger, who struck Mrs. Carroll at a costume ball in downtown Baltimore. Zantzinger, white son of Maryland’s tobacco farming elite, drunkenly lashed out…
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More Moe
Note the preceding photo. That envelope was sent to Moe Asch’s recording studio in Manhattan by Woody Guthrie. Moses “Moe” Asch (the original Mel Novikoff from Inside Llewyn Davis, see December posts) began putting Guthrie’s singing and playing on acetate master discs in 1944. The producer was “impressed with the man’s ability to make the…
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Moe Asch
Try Saying Something. One of the funny side characters in the movie Inside Llewyn Davis is Mel Novikoff, a record producer running a mom-and-pop label in New York. Half musicologist and half fly-by-night businessman, he is shown fussing behind his cluttered desk and evading poor Llewyn Davis’ attempts to be paid for his work. There was…
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Don, Bobby, and the Pact
A Friendship Fractured. For the screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart (see previous post), it was not always easy to toe the Communist Party line. Doing so estranged him from admired friends like Robert Benchley (pictured above, with magazine to which he contributed). The 1939-1941 alliance between the supposedly anti-fascist leader Josef Stalin and the biggest…