Woody Guthrie
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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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First Things has reprinted what your editor wrote a while back on Pete Seeger, who died Monday at the age of 94.
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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…
Painting the Culture Red 