Music
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Black Crepe, Red Myth
Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train left Washington to take his remains home to Springfield 150 years ago today. Among the commemorative works about the Lincoln cortège is one that suits this blog perfectly: The Lonesome Train. It was a 25-minute radio opera written in 1942 by Earl Robinson, a self-described “working class Communist composer.” Robinson and…
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Really Apt, O’Gara
Responding to my Lead Belly post, the highly alert James O’Gara brought up Joni Mitchell’s The Boho Dance. I hadn’t known of this song, or that Mitchell had weighed in on the perennial folk-music debate about authenticity—thanks James! The songwriters and musicians of her world, and going back at least to the 1930s, were at…
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Lead Belly
There’s a new documentary about the blues and folk genius Huddie Ledbetter (1888-1949) on the Smithsonian Channel. Legend of Lead Belly follows the career of the 12-string guitar wonder who absorbed the music of rural and small-town America in his travels through his native Louisiana and Texas. The writer and arranger who gave us Goodnight Irene,…
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The Year in Retro Commie Chic
The phrase “retro commie chic” was likely coined by Glenn Collins of the New York Times. Collins’ article about Greenwich Village’s K.G.B. Bar appeared in 1998; in the years since, the place has become a literary hub. According to a dining guide put out by New York magazine, “Today, the red menace congregates here—if graduate-level…
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Boris Morros
Two in a row. Airing on TCM right after the Dore Schary movie was a 1937 comedy with Carol Lombard, Fred MacMurray, and Dorothy Lamour called Swing High, Swing Low. “Music by Boris Morros,” it said in the credits. My bleary eyes opened and I perked up. Here was another Painting the Culture Red connection.…
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July Feature: A Response
Taken to Task. “What’s Going on Here?” by B. O. Goodbody rebuts what your editor wrote about “the great American folk scare.” It’s at the top left, the Pages list, in the Guest Essay Archive.
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Last Word on “Llewyn”
O Brother! Why Bother? The latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books has a masterful essay by the critic Martha Bayles. It’s framed by discussion of the Coen Brothers movie so often mentioned on this site. But this is more than a movie review. Bayles covers allied subjects—1930s folk music, 1960s folk music, figures like…
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Feature on Politics and Folk Music
New Left, Old Left, Left-Over Left. Our guest essayist this month is Bob Cohen, a veteran of the 1960s folk group the New World Singers. He discusses the Hollywood movie about folkies—and how things really were. Read “Strumming Along with Dylan and Seeger” by returning to top left, the Pages list.
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Baal-ieve It or Not
Oskar Homolka and David Bowie—not much in common there, right? Guess again. The Viennese actor (I Remember Mama, War and Peace, Funeral in Berlin) played Baal, the frolicsome sociopath in Bertolt Brecht’s play of that name, and so did the British rock star. Homolka, who died in 1978, was Baal during the Weimar Republic, not…
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First Things has reprinted what your editor wrote a while back on Pete Seeger, who died Monday at the age of 94.
Painting the Culture Red 