Folk Music

Too many posts, too little time.

Dylan started as a folk singer and morphed into something different every other year. 
I never understood why people got so upset when he went electric.  If these people were "purists" then they probably wouldn't have seen Dylan as a folk singer by then anyway.  I think they just needed something to cling to.  What I like most about Dylan is how he would hear a song, a melody or lyrics and changed them into something entirely different and usually much better.  That's how he came up with "Girl From the North Country" and "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright"  (my favorite Dylan song). 

There were several folk music -indigenous music - preservationists acting independently throughout the first half of the century and even into the 50s and 60s. Alan Lomax and his father were probably the best known.  One of the earlier ones was the poet Carl Sandburg. 

Carl Sandburg, ok. I didn't know.

I wrote about Three Ravens and Little Matty Groves here - https://www.chess.com/blog/batgirl/three-old-songs 

Sandburg published his American Songbag book back in 1927. Sandburg also liked to sing these songs for audiences:

I 've seen today you posted something about folk music before batgirl.  And you like that kind of music .  I did some research when Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in 2016 that's why I have the infos that I have on Bob Dylan , folk music and the Nobel Prize. Rereading my notes, I think I have funny anecdotes too like what Ramblin' Jack Elliot had  to say when Dylan won:

“He owes me $12.”

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, the folk singer, is 85 years old. He sits on a couch in a small dressing room upstairs at Hugh’s Room, a comfortable acoustic-music venue for the supper-club set in west-end Toronto. He is impish, round-shouldered and fairly adorable, with a red cravat, a full head of snowy-white hair and a story or seven on his mind. Right now he’s talking about Bob Dylan.

“He owes me $12,” he goes on, “but that’s okay.” He’d been asked about Dylan’s recent winning of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and he figures Bob deserves it – “I’ve always thought his songs were beautifully put together, though I don’t try to understand what the words mean” – and that the award would fetch him a pretty penny.

When he mentions Dylan’s pile of Grammy awards, Pulitzers and whatnots, Elliott’s long-time road manager Rick Robbins, sitting nearby, shakes his head in agreement. “Bob’s got enough belt buckles,” he says.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/ramblin-jack-elliott-talks-about-the-debts-between-him-and-bob-dylan/article32516437/

"You're Having My Baby" by Paul Anka????

"Leadbelly  who toured with Lomax."

Here Huddie and Woody on the radio

I've always liked Rambin' Jack's cover of Guthrie's "Hard Travelin'" 

Very Good. Love it. It's true what you're saying that Dylan is changed not only the times were a changin'

http://www.redpepper.org.uk/the-politics-of-bob-dylan/

The protest songs that made Dylan famous and with which he continues to be associated were written in a brief period of some 20 months - from January 1962 to November 1963. Influenced by American radical traditions (the Wobblies, the Popular Front of the thirties and forties, the Beat anarchists of the fifties) and above all by the political ferment touched off among young people by the civil rights and ban the bomb movements, he engaged in his songs with the terror of the nuclear arms race, with poverty, racism and prison, jingoism and war. He also penned love songs that mingled delicate regret with brutal candour ("we never did much talkin' anyway").

This creative firestorm gave us 'Let Me Die in My Footsteps', 'Blowin' in the Wind', 'A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall', 'Only a Pawn in Their Game' (class rule as the root of racism), 'With God on Our Side' (rejecting American fundamentalism), 'Masters of War' (taking on the military-industrial complex), the gleefully vindictive 'When the Ship Comes In' and the magnificent 'Hattie Carroll', a clear-eyed account of a single injustice that becomes an indictment of a system and its liberal defenders.

Thanks to his sharp-edged radicalism and unique poetic gifts (as well as no little musical craft) Dylan renewed the protest genre and helped it reach a new mass audience. When The Times They Are A-Changin' album came out in January 1964, the 22 year old from Minnesota found himself crowned as the laureate of a social movement, hailed as "the voice of a generation".

In the meantime, however, Dylan had decided that this was not what he wanted to be. The new Woody Guthrie was mutating into something else - something that made some of his early acolytes uncomfortable. For Dylan is not only the most renowned protest singer of his era but also its most renowned renegade. In mid-1964, he explained to critic Nat Hentoff: "Me, I don't want to write for people anymore - you know, be a spokesman. From now on, I want to write from inside me ...I'm not part of no movement... I just can't make it with any organisation..."

  Probably talking about work songs or the songs of Joe Hill who was in the labor movement

In a college literature class, my professor played a recording of Sandburg reading his poem, “Cool Tombs”. A couple of years later, I saved my tips from delivering Dominos pizza for six weeks so I could buy The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. At that time in my life, $25 was a lot of money. I then read the book cover-to-cover over the course of a couple of months. That was the mid-1980s.

I have the "American Songbook." 
Here an image from page 22 that I used in a blog
(https://www.chess.com/blog/batgirl/histe-them-sails).  

Very good batgirl. I didn't know the Kingston Trio had been such an influence on so many people, including Bob Dylan.

https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/bob-shane-behind-stripes/

From the beginning, the Kingston Trio decided to avoid protest songs and material with a political bent.  The only problem they ever had was when it happened that nobody in the Trio could recount how they happened to learn their most famous song, “Tom Dooley.”

https://www.kingstontrioplace.com/tdooleydoc.htm>

"Tom Dooley," topped the music industry charts in 1958   and paved the way for countless singer-songwriters such as Bob Dylan who found in this basically do-it-yourself music an antidote to the commercialism that pervaded not only the recording industry of the day but Western society at large.

The Kingston Trio appeared on the scene in a post-McCarthy America.  Joe McCarthy had been censored for abuse of power in the mid 50s, but the House Committee on un-American Activities was in full force and promoters were afraid to touch people tainted by communism-- or other activist activities by extension.  For instance even in the early 60s Pete Seeger, the premier folk singer, was blocked from appearing on the Folk Music tv program Hootenanny (which is even more bizarre since Seeger had coined the term). This resulted in a boycott of the show by some of the biggest names in folk music at the time (including the Kingston Trio).  That and the Beatles put the show off the air in 1964. In seems reasonable to assume the Trio wanted to avoid castigation, but it's probably also true that activism wasn't their thing - which is ok. 
Seeger, btw, after Hootenanny folded, went on to host a far better program, Rainbow Quest.  You can search youtube and see most of these fabulous programs. 

How the came upon the song -they had different stories at different times. The lyrics by Erik Darling's group, the Tarriers, are almost identical, but with one significant difference: the referral to Sherriff Jason instead of Grayson.  Grayson appears in Lomax's book, as given to him by Frank Proffitt. It seems impossible to get around the idea that they used both sources.  

Get is while it's hot
Rainbow Quest

I was joking ... a play on words