The Authenticity Question
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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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Steinbeck’s Synthetic Grapes
One of the major social justice novels of the Depression era, The Grapes of Wrath, just turned 75. National Public Radio commemorated this milestone. John Steinbeck’s 1939 Dust Bowl epic about the Joad family was based on articles he wrote for the San Francisco News and the Nation on the plight of agricultural workers migrating from…
Painting the Culture Red 