Chess for Oldtimers --- Good Idea !

and i'll throw this in too, just as a reminder for those who haven't played enough chess lately.

did Grace ever look better?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl89g2SwMh4

Thanks for the posts.

The City Of New Orleans is Arlo Guthrie's best song, but in all honestly Arlo doesn't hold a candle to his father, Woody, troubadour of the working man.  My cultural anthropology professor from the mid-1970s, a man who taught me the difference between knowledge and wisdom, knew Woody personally and even wrote articles about him.  He briefly spoke of Woody and Arlo, when Arlo was a skinny little kid, in one of his books.  Sadly, Woody Guthrie died of Huntington's chorea, a horrible disease, and Arlo has a 50 percent chance of inheriting it.  Apparently he's been lucky.

I heard that now that Arlo has become an oldtimer, the likelihood of him developing symptoms of the disease that killed his daddy and his grandma are virtually nonexistent.

I've always liked Arlo's tribute line in The City of New Orleans, "they ride their father's magic carpets/made of steel."

I've been hittin' some hard travellin'

I thought you knowed.

Thanks for the posts.

Fightingbob: I feel that it is often not fair to compare Famous fathers and sons. To me Woody Guthrie was a great song - writer ( eg: " This Land Is Your Land " ) but I'm not sure if he was a top performer on stage. Arlo had some success as a stage performer but is not that well known for writing songs. Also it is a bit difficult to follow a famous father, just ask Hank Williams Jr. 

Bigpoison: I spent a lot of years working on a major railway up here looking after locomotives. I often had to go out of town to try repair sick units and I had the chance to ride on a number of trains. Possibly that is one reason that I like railroad songs  lol.

Perhaps you are right, badenwurtca, but This Land is Your Land is the least of Woody's accomplishments.  Like I said, he was a troubadour of the working man and those who suffered through the Dust Bowl, The Great Depression and even the Ludlow Massacre.

He performed many of his songs on radio, and wrote real folk songs, "folk" being defined correctly as a homogeneous, isolated enclave separated from the mainstream culture by geography, economic status, language, religion, and a myriad of other factors.  Interestingly, Dolly Parton fits this description, having grown up dirt poor in rural Tennessee and penning Coat of Many Colors about her early life.  On the other hand, this description does not apply to Arlo and most of the "folk song" writers of the 1960s, though no doubt they were folksingers of traditional ballads and "folk" songs of those who came before.

By the way, genuine folk songs are usually not melodically complicated, having been written by unsophisticated "folk."  Alan Lomax made it his life's work to collect and record the songs of the "folk" by taking his recorder on location to where people lived and worked; these are called field recordings.

My late cultural anthropology professor interviewed and performed the songs of Aunt Molly Jackson, Pistol Packin' Mama of the Kentucky coal fields, as she was called.  This and other genuine folk recordings can be found at Smithsonian Folkways, as can those of Woody Guthrie.

I know I went far afield of your point, but now you know why I rate Woody as the real writer and singer of "folk" songs.  You might also find this article interesting.  It claims, with evidence, that Bob Dylan was inspired -- ripped off, really -- a record made by my professor called Talking Blues.

When Woody was about a goner, a young Robert Zimmerman made the journey to visit him. 

Woody's critique was something along the lines of, "the kid can really play and sing.  I'm just worried about his song writing."

Woody's book "Bound for Glory" is worth a read for anyone interested in his biographical information.

@Bob, floating verses are a staple of folk, particularly blues.  It's entirely possible that Dylan was exposed to some of these verses in the manner suggested by your linked article, but to imply that they originated with Greenway is a bit naive. 

If Dylan ripped off Greenway, Greenway ripped off somebody else.  Floating verses were not considered as "biting rhymes"; rather, as a tribute to the homogeneous culture of folk music.

I'm pretty jealous that you got to study with Greenway.  Those must have been some fun classes!

One final question:  do you consider Pete Seeger "folk"?  He wasn't, exactly, born in a cotton sack.

I really liked the '76 Guthrie bio-pic Bound for Glory, starring David Carradine.  This is a 2 min. clip, with singing -- 

<http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/192825/Bound-for-Glory-Movie-Clip-Union-Maid.html&gt 

There was no claim that Greenway originated the songs, but as a folklorist (He was editor of the Journal of American Folklore from 1964 to 1968) as well as a cultural anthropologist, he gathered them together, performed them, and gave credit where credit was due.  On the other hand, the article makes clear that "Even the sequence of the songs on Dylan's tape is exactly the same as on the Greenway album."  In other words, Dylan was "highly influenced" by the album and gave no attribution, not that he is required to do so as a performer.  I admit "ripped off," which is my expression, may be a bit strong, but Dylan isn't exactly the genius many claimed, and that is my point.

Granting that Pete Seeger was a driving force and essential part of The Weavers, he tried too hard to emulate Woody Guthrie as a single.  The PBS series American Masters honored Pete Seeger in 2011 with a program titled Pete Seeger: The Power of Song.  Our local affiliate allowed comments and I had my say, having learned quite a bit about the real man from John Greenway, who knew him.  Here is what I wrote:

"Pete Seeger, affectionately known to his friends as the Kremlin Songbird, has stirred up more stew over the years than Jacques Pépin. My cultural anthropology professor and author of American Folksongs of Protest (1953) knew him well in the 1960s, granting that by 1972 Seeger had all the winsome charm of any 53-year-old arrested adolescent. American Masters should honor Aunt Molly Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Joe Glazer, Leadbelly or even Alan Lomax, the collector of songs composed by those men and women who grew up in genuine folk enclaves that populated America, not this disingenuous, 1960s, silver-plated folkie."

Unkind?  Probably.  Indefensible?  Not necessarily.  I get upset with celebrities, especially when others are more deserving of recognition.  That said, I was always moved by Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

By the way, though a uniquely fine work, the scholarly American Folksongs of Protest (1953) is not Dr. Greenway's best book, that honor goes to his very personal and profound Down among the wild men;: The narrative journal of fifteen years pursuing the Old Stone Age aborigines of Australia's western desert.  Six of the Amazon reviews get it, the most recent one I'm afraid doesn't.

Best,
Bob

Definitely David Carradine's best work, Mil, and a fine film too.  Unfortunately, the "&gt" accidentally added to the end of the link made it unworkable.  I've embedded the link here for those who like Union Maid, with music borrowed from the popular song written in 1907, Red Wing.

Thanks for the posts and the info.

Fightingbob: I'm with you in what you have said. Going back to my example of Hank Williams Sr & Jr it seems that many people my age and older consider Hank Sr the greatest thing since the original Carter Family ( ie: AP and the ladies ), how could Hank Jr have measured up to that ? Yes Dolly Parton's life is also a great story. I'm glad that you mentioned Alan Lomax and the important work that he did. We have a local radio station here that used to play a lot of the older music ( Very late at night tho   lol ). I also remember seeing a film about Leadbelly some years back. They showed Leadbelly as being in jail and someone came along to record some of his songs, not sure if it was Lomax tho. Speaking of older music over on Youtube I found some songs by the Skillet Lickers, a fun group. Oh btw I have noticed some people didn't care for Pete Seeger due to his radical political views, that is a shame to be sure.  

Bigpoison: Thanks for the info on " Bob Zimmerman ", I remember he put out an interesting album with Johnny Cash many years ago. 

Motherinlaw: Thanks for the reminder about the film on Woody Guthrie's life, I also saw that one years ago. 

Ha!  Great post.  It isn't everyday that posts like this appear on chess.com.

The only part that surprised me was the lumping of Alan Lomax in with the actual performers.  I can't remember where I read it, but I seem to recall a Leadbelly quote claiming he wasn't real fond of being exploited by Lomax.

Gwine dig a hole

put the devil in

I didn't know Leadbelly felt like this.  Not knowing much about the life of Huddie William Ledbetter, I don't known if he would have been remembered to the extent he is without Lomax initially recording his songs.

Yes, badenwurtca, I also remember the film Leadbelly (1976) directed by Gordon Parks (The Learning Tree, Shaft).  It was broadcast on the Bravo cable station in the early 1980s before Bravo, and for that matter most cable stations, conjured up a reverse alchemy and transmuted gold into base lead for greater viewership.  Unfortunately, I only caught the very end, but a watchable if not great print can be seen on YouTube, at least for now.

By the way, a film written by the talented Budd Schulberg (The Harder They Fall, On the Waterfront) and directed by Elia Kazan, namely A Face in the Crowd (1957), begins with actress Patricia Neal as Marcia visiting a jail where Lonesome Rhodes, played to the hilt by Andy Griffith, is locked up.  In a part reminiscent of the work of Alan Lomax, Marcia is there to record the blues songs of this rough character.  That's where the similarity ends for Marcia falls in love with Lonesome Rhodes who is a sociopath enamored by his growing sense of power and influence through the relatively new medium of television.  A prescient, disturbing film on celebrity and the power of television.

Lastly, I heard an aphorism today that applies with great regularity across all cultures on the lasting influence of the scholar in the background: The significant are rarely famous, and the famous are rarely significant.

Seems Andy Warhol's prediction that everyone in the future would be famous for 15 minutes wasn't far off.  But he missed the exceptions to the rule:  now there's an opposite "fame duration" for the most egregiously "insignificant" subset of these people.  

It's the Least significant ones whose fame just keeps going on, and then going on longer, year after year after year..... think Trump, Palin, and an endless list of Kardashians. (I really don't know how many Kardashians there are ... maybe dozens ... I try not to keep track)....... sigh.