Podcasts about Folkways Records

Show #1093 Got It Done 01. Joanne Shaw Taylor - Hell Of A Good Time (4:07) (Black & Gold, Journeyman Records, 2025) 02. Sunny Bleau & the Moons - Peacock Strut (3:15) (Passion & Regrets, Endless Blues Records, 2025) 03. Kid Ramos - An Answer For Isaac (4:56) (Strange Things Happening, Nola Blue Records, 2025) 04. Rick Revel - Son Of A Moonshiner (3:54) (That Muscle Shoals Sound, Tunesmith Records, 2024) 05. Jon Cleary & the Absolute Monster Gentlemen - So Damn Good (4:12) (The Bywater Sessions, Well Kept Secret, 2025) 06. Ben Hemming - Devil May Care (4:09) (The Meaning of All Things, self-release, 2025) 07. Emillia Quinn - Does She Know (3:55) (Dented Halos, self-release, 2025) 08. Jarkka Rissanen & Sons Of The Desert - Tailwind (4:07) (Mixed Waste, Humu Records, 2025) 09. Woody Crabapple - Thinkin' And Drinkin' (2:15) (Drowning Man Blues EP, The Orchard, 2025) 10. D. Scott Riggs - These Walls Don't Own Me (4:50) (Somewhere Not Here, Pure Panhandle Music, 2025) 11. Eric Johanson - Yellow Moon (4:35) (Live In Mississippi, Ruf Records, 2025) 12. Matt Andersen - Magnolia (4:20) (The Hammer & The Rose, Sonic Records, 2025) 13. Polyrhythmics - Mayo Con Yayo (4:44) (Life From Below, self-release, 2025) 14. Jim Brewer - It Hurts Me Too [1980] (3:04) (Take It Easy Greasy, Earwig Music, 2025) 15. GA-20 - It Hurts Me Too (2:46) (Try It... You Might Like It!, Colemine Records, 2021) 16. Danielle Miraglia - It Hurts Me Too (3:29) (Bright Shining Stars, VizzTone Records, 2020) 17. The Jujubes - It Hurts Me Too (3:52) (Where Are We Now, self-release, 2021) 18. First Aid Kit - It Hurts Me Too (2:58) (Single, Third Man Records, 2011) 19. Beaucoup Blue - It Hurts Me Too (3:16) (Hearts At Home, self-release, 2005) 20. Chuck Berry - It Hurts Me Too (2:59) (Chuck Berry In Memphis, Mercury Records, 1967) 21. Paul Geremia - When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too) (3:07) (Just Enough, Folkways Records, 1968) 22. Elmore James & his Broomdusters - It Hurts Me Too (3:17) (78 RPM Shellac, Chief Records, 1957) 23. Tampa Red - It Hurts Me Too (2:28) (78 RPM Shellac, Bluebird Records, 1940) 25. Tampa Red - You Got To Reap What You Sow (3:20) (78 RPM Shellac, Vocalion Records, 1929) Bandana Blues is and will always be a labor of love. Please help Spinner deal with the costs of hosting & bandwidth. Visit www.bandanablues.com and hit the tipjar. Any amount is much appreciated, no matter how small. Thank you.

A few years back, we had the pleasure of partnering with Smithsonian Folkways for a special two part series on Folkways Records founder Moses Asch, who was born 99 years ago earlier this month. To honor his legacy, we combined these two pieces and re-releasing them today. We'll traverse Moe's early career, bankruptcy, and the tumultuous yet tantalizing 40 years of iconic recordings with pioneering and lesser known artists of Folkways Records. You'll find out how what Moe accomplished became so woven with the cultural footprint of American Music as we know it today. Now… here's the story of Moses Asch. __ Support Educational Programming: ⁠Tax-Exempt Donations⁠ Join the⁠ Patreon Community⁠ One-time donations:⁠ Venmo⁠ or⁠ PayPal⁠ Follow ⁠American Songcatcher⁠ on ⁠Instagram⁠  Credits:  Nicholas Edward Williams - Production, research, writing, editing, distribution Collaboration Credits: Smithsonian Folkways  Full Moses Asch interview with Arhoolie Records' founder Chris Strachwitz Interviewees: Richard Carlin - Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways - Book Michael Asch -  Dom Flemons - Black Cowboys from Smithsonian Folkways Websites: Smithsonian | SF2 | NY Times | Redalyc | Arhoolie | Jstor.com | NPR | Routledge | AllPurposeGuru | NY TIMES 2 | University of Alberta | Haaretz | Folkworks Videos:FAI  Folkways: World of Sound Documentary  Books: Making people's music : Moe Asch and Folkways records - Peter D Goldsmith  --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/americansongcatcher/support

Join us for this episode where I speak with Pete Seeger's biographer, David Dunaway. We discuss David's early connection to Pete Seeger and his music, and how he came to publish three editions of Seeger's biography. We also talk about the archive of Pete Seeger material David has produced for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, as well Pete's involvement with Folkways Records, the legacy of the Clearwater, and David's perceptions of how Pete might be represented in the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown”. We conclude by discussing David's favorite Seeger records, in addition to what general message people should know about Pete Seeger now that we are a quarter of the way into the 21st century.

Bei der Kellen, Ralf www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de, Aus den Archiven

From Sourced Network Productions, it's the Hot Jazz Network, with host, George Cole. Welcome everyone to the Hot Jazz Network podcast. I'm your host George Cole. Today, our very special guest is the one and only Eric Schoenberg, proprietor of Schoenberg Guitars and the Dean of Acoustic Guitars in America.Eric is primarily a finger-style guitarist who started out 50 years ago as a folkie and has since broadened his scope to many other kinds of music. Basically, when a song perks up his ears, it will try to find a place on his guitar. In 1963, Eric started teaching, which continued till just a couple of years ago. In the late 60s he became the second half of a duo with his cousin, Dave Laibman, helping Dave perform his amazing, groundbreaking arrangements of classical ragtime. This resulted in their album, Contemporary Ragtime Guitar, on Folkways Records. In the early 70s he starting drifting into a life of performing, touring the US & Europe playing solo fingerstyle guitar, playing the classical rags, folk music, blues, country, Beatles, etc. Since then he has written a book, Fingerpicking Beatles, released two solo albums, Acoustic Guitar and Steel Strings, on Rounder Records, a duet CD, Late Night Conversations with Richard Scholtz, on Live Music Recordings, and several contributions to anthologies. He has run a concert series, owned and run a guitar shop, Eric Schoenberg Guitars, in Tiburon, CA, and produced a line of high-end classic steel-string guitars, Schoenberg Guitars.

Cab drivers, children's jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century.  In honor of Tony Schwartz's Centennial, The Kitchen Sisters Present an audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound. It was 1947 when Tony first stepped out of his apartment in midtown Manhattan with his microphone to capture the sound of his neighborhood. He was a pioneer recordist, experimenting with microphones and jury-rigging tape recorders to make them portable (some of these recordings were first published by Folkways Records). His work creating advertising and political TV and radio commercials is legendary. The Kitchen Sisters visited Tony in his midtown basement studio in 1999. He had just finished teaching a media class at Harvard by telephone — Tony was agoraphobic and hardly ever ventured beyond his postal zone. He was there in his studio surrounded by reel to reel tape recorders, mixing consoles, framed photographs and awards — and row upon row of audio tapes in carefully labeled boxes. Tony passed away in 2008. His collection now resides in the Library of congress — 90.5 linear feet, 230 boxes, 76,345 items — some 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialects from his surrounding neighborhood and 46 countries around the world. Tony's Centennial is being celebrated on April 27, 2023, at the Library of Congress, as part of the Radio Preservation Task Force Conference—A Century of Broadcasting: Preservation and Renewal. This story is part of the Lost & Found Sound series produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Jay Allison and NPR. Special thanks to The National Endowment for the Arts and The National Endowment for the Humanites.

Long before Harpers Ferry, Virginia became the emotional halfway point for Appalachian Trail thru hikers, it was the site of one of the most important events in 19th century American history.  In the fall of 1859, the abolitionist John Brown and 22 of his compatriots attacked the federal arsenal there, hoping to spark an insurrection against slavery in the American South on the eve of the Civil War. On today's episode, historian Jonathan Earle of Louisiana State University explores Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry and the landscape hikers now pass through today. Further Reading: AT hiker photographs: [https://athikerpictures.org/] Jonathan Earle, John Brown's Raid on Harpers Ferry: A Brief History with Documents (2008). Harpers Ferry Stories from the National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/stories.htm Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition, ed. Robert Pierce Forbes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022), 36-38.  Pete Seeger, America's Favorite Ballads, Vol. 3, Folkways Records, 1959, vinyl. https://folkways.si.edu/pete-seeger/american-favorite-ballads-vol-3/american-folk/music/album/smithsonian. Harpers Ferry Stories from the National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov/hafe/learn/historyculture/stories.htm.              

Part two of this special audio-documentary series on Folkways Records founder Moses Asch, in collaboration with Smithsonian Folkways, is now available. Part one walked us through Moe's childhood, teenage years, early career, the first two labels he created, bankruptcy, as well as the early years of Folkways Records. In part two, we traverse 40 years of iconic recordings with pioneering and lesser known artists, business hardships, milestones, the fledgling years of Folkways, and Moe's death. We'll also examine the acquisition of the massive Folkways catalog by Smithsonian, illustrate how Moe's legacy has intertwined with the identity of American music, and highlight some of the incredible work that Smithsonian has done to preserve and expand on what Moe accomplished. Support Independent Programming | Join the Patreon OR send a one-time donation through Venmo or PayPal Collaboration Credits: Smithsonian Folkways Full Moses Asch interview with Arhoolie Records' founder Chris Strachwitz Interviewees: Richard Carlin - Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways Michael Asch Jeff Place (Smithsonian Folkways) John Smith (Smithsonian Folkways) Dom Flemons Charlie Parr — Follow American Songcatcher Media Credits: Making people's music : Moe Asch and Folkways records - Peter D Goldsmith Smithsonian | SF2 | NY Times | Redalyc | Arhoolie | Jstor.com | NPR | Routledge --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

Today, American Songcatcher is proud to present a special two-part collaboration with Smithsonian Folkways, going behind the curtain of Folkways Records founder Moses Asch, who was born 117 years ago on this date. This is the story of a ceaselessly stubborn Jewish immigrant with unstoppable ambition. A pioneer who had a great respect for creative artists, whether they were commercially viable or not. A provider whose work was selfless, though he was often quite difficult to work with. A visionary that would turn the record industry on its head without producing any major hits, which was just the way he wanted it. Folkways Records, “The little label that could,” changed the course of American roots music by preserving folk songs from all over the world and having a major hand influencing the folk and blues revival of the 50's and 60's. Moe's mission was to create an encyclopedia of sound from around the world, quite literally. Folkways released records of frog noises, poetry, train whistles, cat noises and many others in addition to covering nearly every genre of world music, spanning over 2,100 records. Learn how his collection was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution and how his legacy lives on today. Support Independent Programming | Join the Patreon OR send a one-time donation through Venmo or PayPal In Collaboration with: Smithsonian Folkways Full Moses Asch interview with Arhoolie Records' founder Chris Strachwitz Interviewees: Richard Carlin | Worlds of Sound: The Story of Smithsonian Folkways Michael Asch American Songcatcher Source Credits: Smithsonian | Redalyc | Jstor.com | NPR | Routledge | AllPurposeGuru | Haaretz | Folkworks Worlds of Sound: Ballad of Folkways | Documentary Making People's Music | Book --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/americansongcatcher/support

Baby Dodds & Live at the Village VanguardPaul Motian's jazz influences and childhood stories. With readings by Ben Ratliff. Motian's band playing live at the Village Vanguard with Joe Lovano, Bill Frisell, Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Chris Potter, Masabumi Kikuchi and more.Set List: https://jazzcloset.blogspot.com/2022/08/baby-dodds-live-at-village-vanguard.htmlPhoto: Baby Dodds courtesy Folkways Records

Iniciamos un doble monográfico dedicado a la compositora, pianista y educadora Sorrel Hays (1941-2020), que nació con el nombre de Doris Hays (pero lo cambió en 1985 —es decir, con 44 años—, adoptando como nombre el apellido de su abuela, Sorrel). Hays estudió música en la Universidad de Tennessee en Chattanooga, graduándose en 1963. Continuó su formación durante tres años en la Hochschule für Musik de Múnich (Alemania). Posteriormente estudió con el pianista Paul Badura-Skoda y con Rudolf Kolisch en la Universidad de Wisconsin, en Madison, donde realizó su máster Tras completar esos estudios, Hays impartió docencia en el Cornell College de Iowa, para después trasladarse a Nueva York, donde estudió con la pianista Hilde Somer. En 1971 ganó el primer premio del concurso Gaudeamus para intérpretes de música contemporánea en Rotterdam, y comenzó una carrera internacional como pianista En 1998 Hays fue directora de un programa de posgrado en música electrónica en la Universidad Yildiz, en Estambul, y en los años siguientes también impartió clases como profesora invitada en instituciones como el Vassar College y el Brooklyn College. Como la artista señalaba en unas notas que acompañan a su disco "Voicings for Tape/Soprano/Piano" (publicado en 1983 por Folkways Records), ese trabajo —del que nosotros presentamos algunas muestras— "representa mis más destacados intereses y preocupaciones durante el final de la década de los años setenta: el Sur [de los Estados Unidos] que conocí durante mi infancia, y mi posicionamiento político. Dejé el Sur en 1963, y terminé en Nueva York en 1969 después de pasar por Múnich (Alemania), Madison (Wisconsin) y Mt. Vernon (Iowa). Desde el punto de vista de Manhattan, el Sur no era la flor llorosa y amarga que era cuando lo abandoné a los veintiún años. Más bien parecía un lugar agridulce y seductor. La música que compuse entre 1976 y 1981 refleja mis recuerdos de la infancia, mi afecto por todo lo que tenía que ver con la iglesia exceptuando las creencias, el desencanto con el lugar que me esperaba como mujer (es decir, como ama de casa de clase media) en la ciudad de Chattanooga en los años cincuenta, y mi odio hacia esa tendencia de clasificar a la gente en función de sus ingresos, de su raza, de su sexo y de su religión”. Además de la composición "Southern Voices", para cinta magnética, escuchamos “Celebration of NO”, una pieza fechada en 1982 que se inscribe dentro de la serie "Beyond Violence", clara muestra del firme compromiso antimilitarista de Hays —actitud desgraciadamente vigente y necesaria en nuestros días—. Concluimos esta primera parte del doble monográfico dedicado a Hays con una muestra de la brillante labor pianística de la autora, reflejada en sus interpretaciones de la música de Henry Cowell. Escuchar audio

This week's episode looks at “Tomorrow Never Knows”, the making of Revolver by the Beatles, and the influence of Timothy Leary on the burgeoning psychedelic movement. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Keep on Running" by the Spencer Davis Group. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata A few things -- I say "Fairfield" at one point when I mean "Fairchild". While Timothy Leary was imprisoned in 1970 he wasn't actually placed in the cell next to Charles Manson until 1973. Sources differ on when Geoff Emerick started at EMI, and he *may* not have worked on "Sun Arise", though I've seen enough reliable sources saying he did that I think it's likely. And I've been told that Maureen Cleave denied having an affair with Lennon -- though note that I said it was "strongly rumoured" rather than something definite. Resources As usual, a mix of all the songs excerpted in this episode is available at Mixcloud.com. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. For information on Timothy Leary I used a variety of sources including The Most Dangerous Man in America by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis; Timothy Leary: Outside Looking In by Robert Forte; The Starseed Signals by Robert Anton Wilson; and especially The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin. I also referred to both The Tibetan Book of the Dead and to The Psychedelic Experience. Leary's much-abridged audiobook version of The Psychedelic Experience can be purchased from Folkways Records. Sadly the first mono mix of "Tomorrow Never Knows" has been out of print since it was first issued. The only way to get the second mono mix is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Revolver. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before I start this episode, I'd like to note that it deals with a number of subjects some listeners might find upsetting, most notably psychedelic drug use, mental illness, and suicide. I think I've dealt with those subjects fairly respectfully, but you still may want to check the transcript if you have worries about these subjects. Also, we're now entering a period of music history with the start of the psychedelic era where many of the songs we're looking at are influenced by non-mainstream religious traditions, mysticism, and also increasingly by political ideas which may seem strange with nearly sixty years' hindsight. I'd just like to emphasise that when I talk about these ideas, I'm trying as best I can to present the thinking of the people I'm talking about, in an accurate and unbiased way, rather than talking about my own beliefs. We're going to head into some strange places in some of these episodes, and my intention is neither to mock the people I'm talking about nor to endorse their ideas, but to present those ideas to you the listener so you can understand the music, the history, and the mindset of the people involved, Is that clear? Then lets' turn on, tune in, and drop out back to 1955... [Opening excerpt from The Psychedelic Experience] There is a phenomenon in many mystical traditions, which goes by many names, including the dark night of the soul and the abyss. It's an experience that happens to mystics of many types, in which they go through unimaginable pain near the beginning of their journey towards greater spiritual knowledge. That pain usually involves a mixture of internal and external events -- some terrible tragedy happens to them, giving them a new awareness of the world's pain, at the same time they're going through an intellectual crisis about their understanding of the world, and it can last several years. It's very similar to the more common experience of the mid-life crisis, except that rather than buying a sports car and leaving their spouse, mystics going through this are more likely to found a new religion. At least, those who survive the crushing despair intact. Those who come out of the experience the other end often find themselves on a totally new path, almost like they're a different person. In 1955, when Dr. Timothy Leary's dark night of the soul started, he was a respected academic psychologist, a serious scientist who had already made several substantial contributions to his field, and was considered a rising star. By 1970, he would be a confirmed mystic, sentenced to twenty years in prison, in a cell next to Charles Manson, and claiming to different people that he was the reincarnation of Gurdjieff, Aleister Crowley, and Jesus Christ. In the fifties, Leary and his wife had an open relationship, in which they were both allowed to sleep with other people, but weren't allowed to form emotional attachments to them. Unfortunately, Leary *had* formed an emotional attachment to another woman, and had started spending so much time with her that his wife was convinced he was going to leave her. On top of that, Leary was an alcoholic, and was prone to get into drunken rows with his wife. He woke up on the morning of his thirty-fifth birthday, hung over after one of those rows, to find that she had died by suicide while he slept, leaving a note saying that she knew he was going to leave her and that her life would be meaningless without him. This was only months after Leary had realised that the field he was working in, to which he had devoted his academic career, was seriously broken. Along with a colleague, Frank Barron, he published a paper on the results of clinical psychotherapy, "Changes in psychoneurotic patients with and without psychotherapy" which analysed the mental health of a group of people who had been through psychotherapy, and found that a third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. The problem was that there was a control group, of people with the same conditions who were put on a waiting list and told to wait the length of time that the therapy patients were being treated. A third of them improved, a third stayed the same, and a third got worse. In other words, psychotherapy as it was currently practised had no measurable effect at all on patients' health. This devastated Leary, as you might imagine. But more through inertia than anything else, he continued working in the field, and in 1957 he published what was regarded as a masterwork -- his book Interpersonal Diagnosis of Personality: A Functional Theory and Methodology for Personality Evaluation. Leary's book was a challenge to the then-dominant idea in psychology, behaviourism, which claimed that it made no sense to talk about anyone's internal thoughts or feelings -- all that mattered was what could be measured, stimuli and responses, and that in a very real sense the unmeasurable thoughts people had didn't exist at all. Behaviourism looked at every human being as a mechanical black box, like a series of levers. Leary, by contrast, analysed human interactions as games, in which people took on usual roles, but were able, if they realised this, to change the role or even the game itself. It was very similar to the work that Eric Berne was doing at the same time, and which would later be popularised in Berne's book Games People Play. Berne's work was so popular that it led to the late-sixties hit record "Games People Play" by Joe South: [Excerpt: Joe South: "Games People Play"] But in 1957, between Leary and Berne, Leary was considered the more important thinker among his peers -- though some thought of him as more of a showman, enthralled by his own ideas about how he was going to change psychology, than a scientist, and some thought that he was unfairly taking credit for the work of lesser-known but better researchers. But by 1958, the effects of the traumas Leary had gone through a couple of years earlier were at their worst. He was starting to become seriously ill -- from the descriptions, probably from something stress-related and psychosomatic -- and he took his kids off to Europe, where he was going to write the great American novel. But he rapidly ran through his money, and hadn't got very far with the novel. He was broke, and ill, and depressed, and desperate, but then in 1959 his old colleague Frank Barron, who was on holiday in the area, showed up, and the two had a conversation that changed Leary's life forever in multiple ways. The first of the conversational topics would have the more profound effect, though that wouldn't be apparent at first. Barron talked to Leary about his previous holiday, when he'd visited Mexico and taken psilocybin mushrooms. These had been used by Mexicans for centuries, but the first publication about them in English had only been in 1955 -- the same year when Leary had had other things on his mind -- and they were hardly known at all outside Mexico. Barron talked about the experience as being the most profound, revelatory, experience of his life. Leary thought his friend sounded like a madman, but he humoured him for the moment. But Barron also mentioned that another colleague was on holiday in the same area. David McClelland, head of the Harvard Center for Personality Research, had mentioned to Barron that he had just read Diagnosis of Personality and thought it a work of genius. McClelland hired Leary to work for him at Harvard, and that was where Leary met Ram Dass. [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] Ram Dass was not the name that Dass was going by at the time -- he was going by his birth name, and only changed his name a few years later, after the events we're talking about -- but as always, on this podcast we don't use people's deadnames, though his is particularly easy to find as it's still the name on the cover of his most famous book, which we'll be talking about shortly. Dass was another psychologist at the Centre for Personality Research, and he would be Leary's closest collaborator for the next several years. The two men would become so close that at several points Leary would go travelling and leave his children in Dass' care for extended periods of time. The two were determined to revolutionise academic psychology. The start of that revolution didn't come until summer 1960. While Leary was on holiday in Cuernavaca in Mexico, a linguist and anthropologist he knew, Lothar Knauth, mentioned that one of the old women in the area collected those magic mushrooms that Barron had been talking about. Leary decided that that might be a fun thing to do on his holiday, and took a few psilocybin mushrooms. The effect was extraordinary. Leary called this, which had been intended only as a bit of fun, "the deepest religious experience of my life". [Excerpt from "The Psychedelic Experience"] He returned to Harvard after his summer holiday and started what became the Harvard Psilocybin Project. Leary and various other experimenters took controlled doses of psilocybin and wrote down their experiences, and Leary believed this would end up revolutionising psychology, giving them insights unattainable by other methods. The experimenters included lecturers, grad students, and people like authors Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, and Alan Watts, who popularised Zen Buddhism in the West. Dass didn't join the project until early 1961 -- he'd actually been on the holiday with Leary, but had arrived a few days after the mushroom experiment, and nobody had been able to get hold of the old woman who knew where to find the mushrooms, so he'd just had to deal with Leary telling him about how great it was rather than try it himself. He then spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Berkeley, so he didn't get to try his first trip until February 1961. Dass, on his first trip, first had a revelation about the nature of his own true soul, then decided at three in the morning that he needed to go and see his parents, who lived nearby, and tell them the good news. But there was several feet of snow, and so he decided he must save his parents from the snow, and shovel the path to their house. At three in the morning. Then he saw them looking out the window at him, he waved, and then started dancing around the shovel. He later said “Until that moment I was always trying to be the good boy, looking at myself through other people's eyes. What did the mothers, fathers, teachers, colleagues want me to be? That night, for the first time, I felt good inside. It was OK to be me.” The Harvard Psilocybin Project soon became the Harvard Psychedelic Project. The term "psychedelic", meaning "soul revealing", was coined by the British psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond, who had been experimenting with hallucinogens for years, and had guided Aldous Huxley on the mescaline trip described in The Doors of Perception. Osmond and Huxley had agreed that the term "psychotomimetic", in use at the time, which meant "mimicking psychosis", wasn't right -- it was too negative. They started writing letters to each other, suggesting alternative terms. Huxley came up with "phanerothyme", the Greek for "soul revealing", and wrote a little couplet to Osmond: To make this trivial world sublime Take half a gramme of phanerothyme. Osmond countered with the Latin equivalent: To fathom hell or soar angelic Just take a pinch of psychedelic Osmond also inspired Leary's most important experimental work of the early sixties. Osmond had got to know Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, and had introduced W. to LSD. W. had become sober after experiencing a profound spiritual awakening and a vision of white light while being treated for his alcoholism using the so-called "belladonna cure" -- a mixture of various hallucinogenic and toxic substances that was meant to cure alcoholism. When W. tried LSD, he found it replicated his previous spiritual experience and became very evangelistic about its use by alcoholics, thinking it could give them the same kind of awakening he'd had. Leary became convinced that if LSD could work on alcoholics, it could also be used to help reshape the personalities of habitual criminals and lead them away from reoffending. His idea for how to treat people was based, in part, on the ideas of transactional analysis. There is always a hierarchical relationship between a therapist and their patient, and that hierarchical relationship itself, in Leary's opinion, forced people into particular game roles and made it impossible for them to relate as equals, and thus impossible for the therapist to truly help the patient. So his idea was that there needed to be a shared bonding experience between patient and doctor. So in his prison experiments, he and the other people involved, including Ralph Metzner, one of his grad students, would take psilocybin *with* the patients. In short-term follow-ups the patients who went through this treatment process were less depressed, felt better, and were only half as likely to reoffend as normal prisoners. But critics pointed out that the prisoners had been getting a lot of individual attention and support, and there was no control group getting that support without the psychedelics. [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience] As the experiments progressed, though, things were becoming tense within Harvard. There was concern that some of the students who were being given psilocybin were psychologically vulnerable and were being put at real risk. There was also worry about the way that Leary and Dass were emphasising experience over analysis, which was felt to be against the whole of academia. Increasingly it looked like there was a clique forming as well, with those who had taken part in their experiments on the inside and looking down on those outside, and it looked to many people like this was turning into an actual cult. This was simply not what the Harvard psychology department was meant to be doing. And one Harvard student was out to shut them down for good, and his name was Andrew Weil. Weil is now best known as one of the leading lights in alternative health, and has made appearances on Oprah and Larry King Live, but for many years his research interest was in mind-altering chemicals -- his undergraduate thesis was on the use of nutmeg to induce different states of consciousness. At this point Weil was an undergraduate, and he and his friend Ronnie Winston had both tried to get involved in the Harvard Psilocybin Project, but had been turned down -- while they were enthusiastic about it, they were also undergraduates, and Leary and Dass had agreed with the university that they wouldn't be using undergraduates in their project, and that only graduate students, faculty, and outsiders would be involved. So Weil and Winston had started their own series of experiments, using mescaline after they'd been unable to get any psilocybin -- they'd contacted Aldous Huxley, the author of The Doors of Perception and an influence on Leary and Dass' experiments, and asked him where they could get mescaline, and he'd pointed them in the right direction. But then Winston and Dass had become friends, and Dass had given Winston some psilocybin -- not as part of his experiments, so Dass didn't think he was crossing a line, but just socially. Weil saw this as a betrayal by Winston, who stopped hanging round with him once he became close to Dass, and also as a rejection of him by Dass and Leary. If they'd give Winston psilocybin, why wouldn't they give it to him? Weil was a writer for the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's newspaper, and he wrote a series of exposes on Leary and Dass for the Crimson. He went to his former friend Winston's father and told him "Your son is getting drugs from a faculty member. If your son will admit to that charge, we'll cut out your son's name. We won't use it in the article."  Winston did admit to the charge, under pressure from his father, and was brought to tell the Dean, saying to the Dean “Yes, sir, I did, and it was the most educational experience I've had at Harvard.” Weil wrote about this for the Crimson, and the story was picked up by the national media. Weil eventually wrote about Leary and Dass for Look magazine, where he wrote “There were stories of students and others using hallucinogens for seductions, both heterosexual and homosexual.” And this seems actually to have been a big part of Weil's motivation. While Dass and Winston always said that their relationship was purely platonic, Dass was bisexual, and Weil seems to have assumed his friend had been led astray by an evil seducer. This was at a time when homophobia and biphobia were even more prevalent in society than they are now, and part of the reason Leary and Dass fell out in the late sixties is that Leary started to see Dass' sexuality as evil and perverted and something they should be trying to use LSD to cure. The experiments became a national scandal, and one of the reasons that LSD was criminalised a few years later. Dass was sacked for giving drugs to undergraduates; Leary had gone off to Mexico to get away from the stress, leaving his kids with Dass. He would be sacked for going off without permission and leaving his classes untaught. As Leary and Dass were out of Harvard, they had to look for other sources of funding. Luckily, Dass turned William Mellon Hitchcock, the heir to the Mellon oil fortune, on to acid, and he and his brother Tommy and sister Peggy gave them the run of a sixty-four room mansion, named Millbrook. When they started there, they were still trying to be academics, but over the five years they were at Millbrook it became steadily less about research and more of a hippie commune, with regular visitors and long-term residents including Alan Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and the jazz musician Maynard Ferguson, who would later get a small amount of fame with jazz-rock records like his version of "MacArthur Park": [Excerpt: Maynard Ferguson, "MacArthur Park"] It was at Millbrook that Leary, Dass, and Metzner would write the book that became The Psychedelic Experience. This book was inspired by the Bardo Thödol, a book allegedly written by Padmasambhava, the man who introduced Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, though no copies of it are known to have existed before the fourteenth century, when it was supposedly discovered by Karma Lingpa. Its title translates as Liberation Through Hearing During the Intermediate State, but it was translated into English under the name The Tibetan Book of the Dead, as Walter Evans-Wentz, who compiled and edited the first English translation was, like many Westerners who studied Buddhism in the early part of the twentieth century, doing so because he was an occultist and a member of the Theosophical Society, which believes the secret occult masters of the world live in Tibet, but which also considered the Egyptian Book of the Dead -- a book which bears little relationship to the Bardo Thödol, and which was written thousands of years earlier on a different continent -- to be a major religious document. So it was through that lens that Evans-Wentz was viewing the Bardo Thödol, and he renamed the book to emphasise what he perceived as its similarities. Part of the Bardo Thödol is a description of what happens to someone between death and rebirth -- the process by which the dead person becomes aware of true reality, and then either transcends it or is dragged back into it by their lesser impulses -- and a series of meditations that can be used to help with that transcendence. In the version published as The Tibetan Book of the Dead, this is accompanied by commentary from Evans-Wentz, who while he was interested in Buddhism didn't actually know that much about Tibetan Buddhism, and was looking at the text through a Theosophical lens, and mostly interpreting it using Hindu concepts. Later editions of Evans-Wentz's version added further commentary by Carl Jung, which looked at Evans-Wentz's version of the book through Jung's own lens, seeing it as a book about psychological states, not about anything more supernatural (although Jung's version of psychology was always a supernaturalist one, of course). His Westernised, psychologised, version of the book's message became part of the third edition. Metzner later said "At the suggestion of Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard we began using the Bardo Thödol ( Tibetan Book of the Dead) as a guide to psychedelic sessions. The Tibetan Buddhists talked about the three phases of experience on the “intermediate planes” ( bardos) between death and rebirth. We translated this to refer to the death and the rebirth of the ego, or ordinary personality. Stripped of the elaborate Tibetan symbolism and transposed into Western concepts, the text provided a remarkable parallel to our findings." Leary, Dass, and Metzner rewrote the book into a form that could be used to guide a reader through a psychedelic trip, through the death of their ego and its rebirth. Later, Leary would record an abridged audiobook version, and it's this that we've been hearing excerpts of during this podcast so far: [Excerpt: The Psychedelic Experience "Turn off your mind, relax, float downstream" about 04:15] When we left the Beatles, they were at the absolute height of their fame, though in retrospect the cracks had already begun to show.  Their second film had been released, and the soundtrack had contained some of their best work, but the title track, "Help!", had been a worrying insight into John Lennon's current mental state. Immediately after making the film and album, of course, they went back out touring, first a European tour, then an American one, which probably counts as the first true stadium tour. There had been other stadium shows before the Beatles 1965 tour -- we talked way back in the first episodes of the series about how Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a *wedding* that was a stadium gig. But of course there are stadiums and stadiums, and the Beatles' 1965 tour had them playing the kind of venues that no other musician, and certainly no other rock band, had ever played. Most famously, of course, there was the opening concert of the tour at Shea Stadium, where they played to an audience of fifty-five thousand people -- the largest audience a rock band had ever played for, and one which would remain a record for many years. Most of those people, of course, couldn't actually hear much of anything -- the band weren't playing through a public address system designed for music, just playing through the loudspeakers that were designed for commentating on baseball games. But even if they had been playing through the kind of modern sound systems used today, it's unlikely that the audience would have heard much due to the overwhelming noise coming from the crowd. Similarly, there were no live video feeds of the show or any of the other things that nowadays make it at least possible for the audience to have some idea what is going on on stage. The difference between this and anything that anyone had experienced before was so great that the group became overwhelmed. There's video footage of the show -- a heavily-edited version, with quite a few overdubs and rerecordings of some tracks was broadcast on TV, and it's also been shown in cinemas more recently as part of promotion for an underwhelming documentary about the Beatles' tours -- and you can see Lennon in particular becoming actually hysterical during the performance of "I'm Down", where he's playing the organ with his elbows. Sadly the audio nature of this podcast doesn't allow me to show Lennon's facial expression, but you can hear something of the exuberance in the performance. This is from what is labelled as a copy of the raw audio of the show -- the version broadcast on TV had a fair bit of additional sweetening work done on it: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Down (Live at Shea Stadium)"] After their American tour they had almost six weeks off work to write new material before going back into the studio to record their second album of the year, and one which would be a major turning point for the group. The first day of the recording sessions for this new album, Rubber Soul, started with two songs of Lennon's. The first of these was "Run For Your Life", a song Lennon never later had much good to say about, and which is widely regarded as the worst song on the album. That song was written off a line from Elvis Presley's version of "Baby Let's Play House", and while Lennon never stated this, it's likely that it was brought to mind by the Beatles having met with Elvis during their US tour. But the second song was more interesting. Starting with "Help!", Lennon had been trying to write more interesting lyrics. This had been inspired by two conversations with British journalists -- Kenneth Allsop had told Lennon that while he liked Lennon's poetry, the lyrics to his songs were banal in comparison and he found them unlistenable as a result, while Maureen Cleave, a journalist who was a close friend with Lennon, had told him that she hadn't noticed a single word in any of his lyrics with more than two syllables, so he made more of an effort with "Help!", putting in words like "independence" and "insecure". As he said in one of his last interviews, "I was insecure then, and things like that happened more than once. I never considered it before. So after that I put a few words with three syllables in, but she didn't think much of them when I played it for her, anyway.” Cleave may have been an inspiration for "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)". There are very strong rumours that Lennon had an affair with Cleave in the mid-sixties, and if that's true it would definitely fit into a pattern. Lennon had many, many, affairs during his first marriage, both brief one-night stands and deeper emotional attachments, and those emotional attachments were generally with women who were slightly older, intellectual, somewhat exotic looking by the standards of 1960s Britain, and in the arts. Lennon later claimed to have had an affair with Eleanor Bron, the Beatles' co-star in Help!, though she always denied this, and it's fairly widely established that he did have an affair with Alma Cogan, a singer who he'd mocked during her peak of popularity in the fifties, but who would later become one of his closest friends: [Excerpt: Alma Cogan, "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"] And "Norwegian Wood", the second song recorded for Rubber Soul, started out as a confession to one of these affairs, a way of Lennon admitting it to his wife without really admitting it. The figure in the song is a slightly aloof, distant woman, and the title refers to the taste among Bohemian British people at the time for minimalist decor made of Scandinavian pine -- something that would have been a very obvious class signifier at the time. [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] Lennon and McCartney had different stories about who wrote what in the song, and Lennon's own story seems to have changed at various times. What seems to have happened is that Lennon wrote the first couple of verses while on holiday with George Martin, and finished it off later with McCartney's help. McCartney seems to have come up with the middle eight melody -- which is in Dorian mode rather than the Mixolydian mode of the verses -- and to have come up with the twist ending, where the woman refuses to sleep with the protagonist and laughs at him, he goes to sleep in the bath rather than her bed, wakes up alone, and sets fire to the house in revenge. This in some ways makes "Norwegian Wood" the thematic centrepiece of the album that was to result, combining several of the themes its two songwriters came back to throughout the album and the single recorded alongside it. Like Lennon's "Run For Your Life" it has a misogynistic edge to it, and deals with taking revenge against a woman, but like his song "Girl", it deals with a distant, unattainable, woman, who the singer sees as above him but who has a slightly cruel edge -- the kind of girl who puts you down when friends are there,  you feel a fool, is very similar to the woman who tells you to sit down but has no chairs in her minimalist flat. A big teaser who takes you half the way there is likely to laugh at you as you crawl off to sleep in the bath while she goes off to bed alone. Meanwhile, McCartney's two most popular contributions to the album, "Michelle" and "Drive My Car", also feature unattainable women, but are essentially comedy songs -- "Michelle" is a pastiche French song which McCartney used to play as a teenager while pretending to be foreign to impress girls, dug up and finished for the album, while "Drive My Car" is a comedy song with a twist in the punchline, just like "Norwegian Wood", though "Norwegian Wood"s twist is darker. But "Norwegian Wood" is even more famous for its music than for its lyric. The basis of the song is Lennon imitating Dylan's style -- something that Dylan saw, and countered with "Fourth Time Around", a song which people have interpreted multiple ways, but one of those interpretations has always been that it's a fairly vicious parody of "Norwegian Wood": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Fourth Time Around"] Certainly Lennon thought that at first, saying a few years later "I was very paranoid about that. I remember he played it to me when he was in London. He said, what do you think? I said, I don't like it. I didn't like it. I was very paranoid. I just didn't like what I felt I was feeling – I thought it was an out and out skit, you know, but it wasn't. It was great. I mean he wasn't playing any tricks on me. I was just going through the bit." But the aspect of "Norwegian Wood" that has had more comment over the years has been the sitar part, played by George Harrison: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood"] This has often been called the first sitar to be used on a rock record, and that may be the case, but it's difficult to say for sure. Indian music was very much in the air among British groups in September 1965, when the Beatles recorded the track. That spring, two records had almost simultaneously introduced Indian-influenced music into the pop charts. The first had been the Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul", released in June and recorded in April. In fact, the Yardbirds had actually used a sitar on their first attempt at recording the song, which if it had been released would have been an earlier example than the Beatles: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (first version)"] But in the finished recording they had replaced that with Jeff Beck playing a guitar in a way that made it sound vaguely like a sitar, rather than using a real one: [Excerpt: The Yardbirds, "Heart Full of Soul (single)"] Meanwhile, after the Yardbirds had recorded that but before they'd released it, and apparently without any discussion between the two groups, the Kinks had done something similar on their "See My Friends", which came out a few weeks after the Yardbirds record: [Excerpt: The Kinks, "See My Friends"] (Incidentally, that track is sometimes titled "See My Friend" rather than "See My Friends", but that's apparently down to a misprint on initial pressings rather than that being the intended title). As part of this general flowering of interest in Indian music, George Harrison had become fascinated with the sound of the sitar while recording scenes in Help! which featured some Indian musicians. He'd then, as we discussed in the episode on "Eight Miles High" been introduced by David Crosby on the Beatles' summer US tour to the music of Ravi Shankar. "Norwegian Wood" likely reminded Harrison of Shankar's work for a couple of reasons. The first is that the melody is very modal -- as I said before, the verses are in Mixolydian mode, while the middle eights are in Dorian -- and as we saw in the "Eight Miles High" episode Indian music is very modal. The second is that for the most part, the verse is all on one chord -- a D chord as Lennon originally played it, though in the final take it's capoed on the second fret so it sounds in E. The only time the chord changes at all is on the words "once had" in the phrase “she once had me” where for one beat each Lennon plays a C9 and a G (sounding as a D9 and A). Both these chords, in the fingering Lennon is using, feel to a guitarist more like "playing a D chord and lifting some fingers up or putting some down" rather than playing new chords, and this is a fairly common way of thinking about stuff particularly when talking about folk and folk-rock music -- you'll tend to get people talking about the "Needles and Pins" riff as being "an A chord where you twiddle your finger about on the D string" rather than changing between A, Asus2, and Asus4. So while there are chord changes, they're minimal and of a kind that can be thought of as "not really" chord changes, and so that may well have reminded Harrison of the drone that's so fundamental to Indian classical music. Either way, he brought in his sitar, and they used it on the track, both the version they cut on the first day of recording and the remake a week later which became the album track: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"] At the same time as the group were recording Rubber Soul, they were also working on two tracks that would become their next single -- released as a double A-side because the group couldn't agree which of the two to promote. Both of these songs were actual Lennon/McCartney collaborations, something that was increasingly rare at this point. One, "We Can Work it Out" was initiated by McCartney, and like many of his songs of this period was inspired by tensions in his relationship with his girlfriend Jane Asher -- two of his other songs for Rubber Soul were "I'm Looking Through You" and "You Won't See Me".  The other, "Day Tripper",  was initiated by Lennon, and had other inspirations: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] John Lennon and George Harrison's first acid trip had been in spring of 1965, around the time they were recording Help! The fullest version of how they came to try it I've read was in an interview George Harrison gave to Creem magazine in 1987, which I'll quote a bit of: "I had a dentist who invited me and John and our ex-wives to dinner, and he had this acid he'd got off the guy who ran Playboy in London. And the Playboy guy had gotten it off, you know, the people who had it in America. What's his name, Tim Leary. And this guy had never had it himself, didn't know anything about it, but he thought it was an aphrodisiac and he had this girlfriend with huge breasts. He invited us down there with our blonde wives and I think he thought he was gonna have a scene. And he put it in our coffee without telling us—he didn't take any himself. We didn't know we had it, and we'd made an arrangement earlier—after we had dinner we were gonna go to this nightclub to see some friends of ours who were playing in a band. And I was saying, "OK, let's go, we've got to go," and this guy kept saying, "No, don't go, finish your coffee. Then, 20 minutes later or something, I'm saying, "C'mon John, we'd better go now. We're gonna miss the show." And he says we shouldn't go 'cause we've had LSD." They did leave anyway, and they had an experience they later remembered as being both profound and terrifying -- nobody involved had any idea what the effects of LSD actually were, and they didn't realise it was any different from cannabis or amphetamines. Harrison later described feelings of universal love, but also utter terror -- believing himself to be in hell, and that world war III was starting. As he said later "We'd heard of it, but we never knew what it was about and it was put in our coffee maliciously. So it really wasn't us turning each other or the world or anything—we were the victims of silly people." But both men decided it was an experience they needed to have again, and one they wanted to share with their friends. Their next acid trip was the one that we talked about in the episode on "Eight Miles High", with Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, and Peter Fonda. That time Neil Aspinall and Ringo took part as well, but at this point Paul was still unsure about taking it -- he would later say that he was being told by everyone that it changed your worldview so radically you'd never be the same again, and he was understandably cautious about this. Certainly it had a profound effect on Lennon and Harrison -- Starr has never really talked in detail about his own experiences. Harrison would later talk about how prior to taking acid he had been an atheist, but his experiences on the drug gave him an unshakeable conviction in the existence of God -- something he would spend the rest of his life exploring. Lennon didn't change his opinions that drastically, but he did become very evangelistic about the effects of LSD. And "Day Tripper" started out as a dig at what he later described as weekend hippies, who took acid but didn't change the rest of their lives -- which shows a certain level of ego in a man who had at that point only taken acid twice himself -- though in collaboration with McCartney it turned into another of the rather angry songs about unavailable women they were writing at this point. The line "she's a big teaser, she took me half the way there" apparently started as "she's a prick teaser": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] In the middle of the recording of Rubber Soul, the group took a break to receive their MBEs from the Queen. Officially the group were awarded these because they had contributed so much to British exports. In actual fact, they received them because the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a government with a majority of only four MPs and was thinking about calling an election to boost his majority. He represented a Liverpool constituency, and wanted to associate his Government and the Labour Party with the most popular entertainers in the UK. "Day Tripper" and "We Can Work it Out" got their TV premiere on a show recorded for Granada TV,  The Music of Lennon and McCartney, and fans of British TV trivia will be pleased to note that the harmonium Lennon plays while the group mimed "We Can Work it Out" in that show is the same one that was played in Coronation Street by Ena Sharples -- the character we heard last episode being Davy Jones' grandmother. As well as the Beatles themselves, that show included other Brian Epstein artists like Cilla Black and Billy J Kramer singing songs that Lennon and McCartney had given to them, plus Peter Sellers, the Beatles' comedy idol, performing "A Hard Day's Night" in the style of Laurence Olivier as Richard III: [Excerpt: Peter Sellers, "A Hard Day's Night"] Another performance on the show was by Peter and Gordon, performing a hit that Paul had given to them, one of his earliest songs: [Excerpt: Peter and Gordon, "A World Without Love"] Peter Asher, of Peter and Gordon, was the brother of Paul McCartney's girlfriend, the actor Jane Asher. And while the other three Beatles were living married lives in mansions in suburbia, McCartney at this point was living with the Asher family in London, and being introduced by them to a far more Bohemian, artistic, hip crowd of people than he had ever before experienced. They were introducing him to types of art and culture of which he had previously been ignorant, and while McCartney was the only Beatle so far who hadn't taken LSD, this kind of mind expansion was far more appealing to him. He was being introduced to art film, to electronic composers like Stockhausen, and to ideas about philosophy and art that he had never considered. Peter Asher was a friend of John Dunbar, who at the time was Marianne Faithfull's husband, though Faithfull had left him and taken up with Mick Jagger, and of Barry Miles, a writer, and in September 1965 the three men had formed a company, Miles, Asher and Dunbar Limited, or MAD for short, which had opened up a bookshop and art gallery, the Indica Gallery, which was one of the first places in London to sell alternative or hippie books and paraphernalia, and which also hosted art events by people like members of the Fluxus art movement. McCartney was a frequent customer, as you might imagine, and he also encouraged the other Beatles to go along, and the Indica Gallery would play an immense role in the group's history, which we'll look at in a future episode. But the first impact it had on the group was when John and Paul went to the shop in late 1965, just after the recording and release of Rubber Soul and the "Day Tripper"/"We Can Work It Out" single, and John bought a copy of The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Dass, and Metzner. He read the book on a plane journey while going on holiday -- reportedly while taking his third acid trip -- and was inspired. When he returned, he wrote a song which became the first track to be recorded for the group's next album, Revolver: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] The lyrics were inspired by the parts of The Psychedelic Experience which were in turn inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Now, it's important to put it this way because most people who talk about this record have apparently never read the book which inspired it. I've read many, many, books on the Beatles which claim that The Psychedelic Experience simply *is* the Tibetan Book of the Dead, slightly paraphrased. In fact, while the authors use the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a structure on which to base their book, much of the book is detailed descriptions of Leary, Dass, and Metzner's hypotheses about what is actually happening during a psychedelic trip, and their notes on the book -- in particular they provide commentaries to the commentaries, giving their view of what Carl Jung meant when he talked about it, and of Evans-Wentz's opinions, and especially of a commentary by Anagarika Govinda, a Westerner who had taken up Tibetan Buddhism seriously and become a monk and one of its most well-known exponents in the West. By the time it's been filtered through so many different viewpoints and perspectives, each rewriting and reinterpreting it to suit their own preconceived ideas, they could have started with a book on the habitat of the Canada goose and ended with much the same result. Much of this is the kind of mixture between religious syncretism and pseudoscience that will be very familiar to anyone who has encountered New Age culture in any way, statements like "The Vedic sages knew the secret; the Eleusinian Initiates knew it; the Tantrics knew it. In all their esoteric writings they whisper the message: It is possible to cut beyond ego-consciousness, to tune in on neurological processes which flash by at the speed of light, and to become aware of the enormous treasury of ancient racial knowledge welded into the nucleus of every cell in your body". This kind of viewpoint is one that has been around in one form or another since the nineteenth century religious revivals in America that led to Mormonism, Christian Science, and the New Thought. It's found today in books and documentaries like The Secret and the writings of people like Deepak Chopra, and the idea is always the same one -- people thousands of years ago had a lost wisdom that has only now been rediscovered through the miracle of modern science. This always involves a complete misrepresentation of both the lost wisdom and of the modern science. In particular, Leary, Dass, and Metzner's book freely mixes between phrases that sound vaguely scientific, like "There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles", things that are elements of Tibetan Buddhism, and references to ego games and "game-existence" which come from Leary's particular ideas of psychology as game interactions. All of this is intermingled, and so the claims that some have made that Lennon based the lyrics on the Tibetan Book of the Dead itself are very wrong. Rather the song, which he initially called "The Void", is very much based on Timothy Leary. The song itself was very influenced by Indian music. The melody line consists of only four notes -- E, G, C, and B flat, over a space of an octave: [Demonstrates] This sparse use of notes is very similar to the pentatonic scales in a lot of folk music, but that B-flat makes it the Mixolydian mode, rather than the E minor pentatonic scale our ears at first make it feel like. The B-flat also implies a harmony change -- Lennon originally sang the whole song over one chord, a C, which has the notes C, E, and G in it, but a B-flat note implies instead a chord of C7 -- this is another one of those occasions where you just put one finger down to change the chord while playing, and I suspect that's what Lennon did: [Demonstrates] Lennon's song was inspired by Indian music, but what he wanted was to replicate the psychedelic experience, and this is where McCartney came in. McCartney was, as I said earlier, listening to a lot of electronic composers as part of his general drive to broaden his mind, and in particular he had been listening to quite a bit of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stockhausen was a composer who had studied with Olivier Messiaen in the 1940s, and had then become attached to the Groupe de Recherche de Musique Concrète along with Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Edgard Varese and others, notably Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. These composers were interested in a specific style of music called musique concrète, a style that had been pioneered by Schaeffer. Musique concrète is music that is created from, or at least using, prerecorded sounds that have been electronically altered, rather than with live instruments. Often this would involve found sound -- music made not by instruments at all, but by combining recorded sounds of objects, like with the first major work of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer's Cinq études de bruits: [Excerpt: Pierre Schaeffer, "Etude aux Chemins de faire" (from Cinq études de bruits)] Early on, musique concrète composers worked in much the same way that people use turntables to create dance music today -- they would have multiple record players, playing shellac discs, and a mixing desk, and they would drop the needle on the record players to various points, play the records backwards, and so forth. One technique that Schaeffer had come up with was to create records with a closed groove, so that when the record finished, the groove would go back to the start -- the record would just keep playing the same thing over and over and over. Later, when magnetic tape had come into use, Schaeffer had discovered you could get the same effect much more easily by making an actual loop of tape, and had started making loops of tape whose beginnings were stuck to their ending -- again creating something that could keep going over and over. Stockhausen had taken up the practice of using tape loops, most notably in a piece that McCartney was a big admirer of, Gesang der Jeunglinge: [Excerpt: Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Gesang der Jeunglinge"] McCartney suggested using tape loops on Lennon's new song, and everyone was in agreement. And this is the point where George Martin really starts coming into his own as a producer for the group. Martin had always been a good producer, but his being a good producer had up to this point mostly consisted of doing little bits of tidying up and being rather hands-off. He'd scored the strings on "Yesterday", played piano parts, and made suggestions like speeding up "Please Please Me" or putting the hook of "Can't Buy Me Love" at the beginning. Important contributions, contributions that turned good songs into great records, but nothing that Tony Hatch or Norrie Paramor or whoever couldn't have done. Indeed, his biggest contribution had largely been *not* being a Hatch or Paramor, and not imposing his own songs on the group, letting their own artistic voices flourish. But at this point Martin's unique skillset came into play. Martin had specialised in comedy records before his work with the Beatles, and he had worked with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan of the Goons, making records that required a far odder range of sounds than the normal pop record: [Excerpt: The Goons, "Unchained Melody"] The Goons' radio show had used a lot of sound effects created by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a department of the BBC that specialised in creating musique concrète, and Martin had also had some interactions with the Radiophonic Workshop. In particular, he had worked with Maddalena Fagandini of the Workshop on an experimental single combining looped sounds and live instruments, under the pseudonym "Ray Cathode": [Excerpt: Ray Cathode, "Time Beat"] He had also worked on a record that is if anything even more relevant to "Tomorrow Never Knows". Unfortunately, that record is by someone who has been convicted of very serious sex offences. In this case, Rolf Harris, the man in question, was so well-known in Britain before his arrest, so beloved, and so much a part of many people's childhoods, that it may actually be traumatic for people to hear his voice knowing about his crimes. So while I know that showing the slightest consideration for my listeners' feelings will lead to a barrage of comments from angry old men calling me a "woke snowflake" for daring to not want to retraumatise vulnerable listeners, I'll give a little warning before I play the first of two segments of his recordings in a minute. When I do, if you skip forward approximately ninety seconds, you'll miss that section out. Harris was an Australian all-round entertainer, known in Britain for his novelty records, like the unfortunately racist "Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport" -- which the Beatles later recorded with him in a non-racist version for a BBC session. But he had also, in 1960, recorded and released in Australia a song he'd written based on his understanding of Aboriginal Australian religious beliefs, and backed by Aboriginal musicians on didgeridoo. And we're going to hear that clip now: [Excerpt. Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise" original] EMI, his British label, had not wanted to release that as it was, so he'd got together with George Martin and they'd put together a new version, for British release. That had included a new middle-eight, giving the song a tiny bit of harmonic movement, and Martin had replaced the didgeridoos with eight cellos, playing a drone: [Excerpt: Rolf Harris, "Sun Arise", 1962 version ] OK, we'll just wait a few seconds for anyone who skipped that to catch up... Now, there are some interesting things about that track. That is a track based on a non-Western religious belief, based around a single drone -- the version that Martin produced had a chord change for the middle eight, but the verses were still on the drone -- using the recording studio to make the singer's voice sound different, with a deep, pulsating, drum sound, and using a melody with only a handful of notes, which doesn't start on the tonic but descends to it. Sound familiar? Oh, and a young assistant engineer had worked with George Martin on that session in 1962, in what several sources say was their first session together, and all sources say was one of their first. That young assistant engineer was Geoff Emerick, who had now been promoted to the main engineer role, and was working his first Beatles session in that role on “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Emerick was young and eager to experiment, and he would become a major part of the Beatles' team for the next few years, acting as engineer on all their recordings in 1966 and 67, and returning in 1969 for their last album. To start with, the group recorded a loop of guitar and drums, heavily treated: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] That loop was slowed down to half its speed, and played throughout: [Excerpt: "Tomorrow Never Knows", loop] Onto that the group overdubbed a second set of live drums and Lennon's vocal. Lennon wanted his voice to sound like the Dalai Lama singing from a mountaintop, or like thousands of Tibetan monks. Obviously the group weren't going to fly to Tibet and persuade monks to sing for them, so they wanted some unusual vocal effect. This was quite normal for Lennon, actually. One of the odd things about Lennon is that while he's often regarded as one of the greatest rock vocalists of all time, he always hated his own voice and wanted to change it in the studio. After the Beatles' first album there's barely a dry Lennon solo vocal anywhere on any record he ever made. Either he would be harmonising with someone else, or he'd double-track his vocal, or he'd have it drenched in reverb, or some other effect -- anything to stop it sounding quite so much like him. And Geoff Emerick had the perfect idea. There's a type of speaker called a Leslie speaker, which was originally used to give Hammond organs their swirling sound, but which can be used with other instruments as well. It has two rotating speakers inside it, a bass one and a treble one, and it's the rotation that gives the swirling sound. Ken Townsend, the electrical engineer working on the record, hooked up the speaker from Abbey Road's Hammond organ to Lennon's mic, and Lennon was ecstatic with the sound: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", take one] At least, he was ecstatic with the sound of his vocal, though he did wonder if it might be more interesting to get the same swirling effect by tying himself to a rope and being swung round the microphone The rest of the track wasn't quite working, though, and they decided to have a second attempt. But Lennon had been impressed enough by Emerick that he decided to have a chat with him about music -- his way of showing that Emerick had been accepted. He asked if Emerick had heard the new Tiny Tim record -- which shows how much attention Lennon was actually paying to music at this point. This was two years before Tim's breakthrough with "Tiptoe Through the Tulips", and his first single (unless you count a release from 1963 that was only released as a 78, in the sixties equivalent of a hipster cassette-only release), a version of "April Showers" backed with "Little Girl" -- the old folk song also known as "In the Pines" or "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?": [Excerpt: Tiny Tim, "Little Girl"] Unfortunately for Emerick, he hadn't heard the record, and rather than just say so he tried bluffing, saying "Yes, they're great". Lennon laughed at his attempt to sound like he knew what he was talking about, before explaining that Tiny Tim was a solo artist, though he did say "Nobody's really sure if it's actually a guy or some drag queen". For the second attempt, they decided to cut the whole backing track live rather than play to a loop. Lennon had had trouble staying in sync with the loop, but they had liked the thunderous sound that had been got from slowing the tape down. As Paul talked with Ringo about his drum part, suggesting a new pattern for him to play, Emerick went down into the studio from the control room and made some adjustments. He first deadened the sound of the bass drum by sticking a sweater in it -- it was actually a promotional sweater with eight arms, made when the film Help! had been provisionally titled Eight Arms to Hold You, which Mal Evans had been using as packing material. He then moved the mics much, much closer to the drums that EMI studio rules allowed -- mics can be damaged by loud noises, and EMI had very strict rules about distance, not allowing them within two feet of the drum kit. Emerick decided to risk his job by moving the mics mere inches from the drums, reasoning that he would probably have Lennon's support if he did this. He then put the drum signal through an overloaded Fairfield limiter, giving it a punchier sound than anything that had been recorded in a British studio up to that point: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows", isolated drums] That wasn't the only thing they did to make the record sound different though.  As well as Emerick's idea for the Leslie speaker, Ken Townsend had his own idea of how to make Lennon's voice sound different. Lennon had often complained about the difficulty of double-tracking his voice, and so Townsend had had an idea -- if you took a normal recording, fed it to another tape machine a few milliseconds out of sync with the first, and then fed it back into the first, you could create a double-tracked effect without having to actually double-track the vocal. Townsend suggested this, and it was used for the first time on the first half of "Tomorrow Never Knows", before the Leslie speaker takes over. The technique is now known as "artificial double-tracking" or ADT, but the session actually gave rise to another term, commonly used for a similar but slightly different tape-manipulation effect that had already been used by Les Paul among others. Lennon asked how they'd got the effect and George Martin started to explain, but then realised Lennon wasn't really interested in the technical details, and said "we take the original image and we split it through a double-bifurcated sploshing flange". From that point on, Lennon referred to ADT as "flanging", and the term spread, though being applied to the other technique. (Just as a quick aside, some people have claimed other origins for the term "flanging", and they may be right, but I think this is the correct story). Over the backing track they added tambourine and organ overdubs -- with the organ changing to a B flat chord when the vocal hits the B-flat note, even though the rest of the band stays on C -- and then a series of tape loops, mostly recorded by McCartney. There's a recording that circulates which has each of these loops isolated, played first forwards and then backwards at the speed they were recorded, and then going through at the speed they were used on the record, so let's go through these. There's what people call the "seagull" sound, which is apparently McCartney laughing, very distorted: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Then there's an orchestral chord: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] A mellotron on its flute setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And on its string setting: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] And a much longer loop of sitar music supplied by George: [Excerpt: Tomorrow Never Knows loop] Each of these loops were played on a different tape machine in a different part of Abbey Road -- they commandeered the entire studio complex, and got engineers to sit with the tapes looped round pencils and wine-glasses, while the Beatles supervised Emerick and Martin in mixing the loops into a single track. They then added a loop of a tamboura drone played by George, and the result was one of the strangest records ever released by a major pop group: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] While Paul did add some backwards guitar -- some sources say that this is a cut-up version of his solo from George's song "Taxman", but it's actually a different recording, though very much in the same style -- they decided that they were going to have a tape-loop solo rather than a guitar solo: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Tomorrow Never Knows"] And finally, at the end, there's some tack piano playing from McCartney, inspired by the kind of joke piano parts that used to turn up on the Goon Show. This was just McCartney messing about in the studio, but it was caught on tape, and they asked for it to be included at the end of the track. It's only faintly audible on the standard mixes of the track, but there was actually an alternative mono mix which was only released on British pressings of the album pressed on the first day of its release, before George Martin changed his mind about which mix should have been used, and that has a much longer excerpt of the piano on it. I have to say that I personally like that mix more, and the extra piano at the end does a wonderful job of undercutting what could otherwise be an overly-serious track, in much the same way as the laughter at the end of "Within You, Without You", which they recorded the next year. The same goes for the title -- the track was originally called "The Void", and the tape boxes were labelled "Mark One", but Lennon decided to name the track after one of Starr's malapropisms, the same way they had with "A Hard Day's Night", to avoid the track being too pompous. [Excerpt: Beatles interview] A track like that, of course, had to end the album. Now all they needed to do was to record another thirteen tracks to go before it. But that -- and what they did afterwards, is a story for another time. [Excerpt, "Tomorrow Never Knows (alternate mono mix)" piano tag into theme music]

To kick off season 3 of the Dust + Dignity Podcast we thought we would do something a little different and focus on a single album. We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Freedom Riders and the Sit-Ins on Folkways Records . This 1961 recording of spirituals, gospel and new music to "express the spirit of freedom" was the result of an effort by producer and performer Guy Carawan to bring together singers representative of hundreds of thousands African American students from the south participating in sit-ins, stand-ins and freedom rides for "first class citizenship" during the civil rights movement. The songs are performed by The Montgomery Gospel Trio, comprised of three high school girls from Alabama, as well as four seminary students who call themselves "The Nashville Quartet" in an impromptu session as recorded by Moses Asch.

María Sabina, mujer mazateca que con ayuda de sus "niños santos", hongos sagrados, levantaba el silencio y miraba en la oscuridad. Mujer curandera, mujer sabia, mujer guerrera, mujer famosa alrededor del mundo por sus cantos y sus pajaritos. Mujer que sufrió, mujer que sabía que el universo es una sola voz. Hablemos de esta célebre oaxaqueña y escuchemos sus hermosos cantos. Contenido: Lectura de canto chamánico: Soy la mujer remolino. Almadía, Oaxaca, Méxic. 2008. Primer canto: Soso Soso. María Sabina. Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians of Mexico ℗ 2004 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings / 1957 Folkways Records Released on: 1957-01-01 Segundo canto: Canto suave. (Lento, bajo, triste). Álbum. Mushroom Ceremony of the Mazatec Indians of Mexico.The Orchard Music (en nombre de Folkways Records).

In the early 1980s, Californian trombonist and composer Craig Kupka recorded a pair of gorgeously flowing instrumental albums for Folkways Records. Clouds and Crystals were created with the express purpose of accompanying the cool down period of modern dance classes taught by his romantic partner, and have become celebrated releases in the cosmos of new age. Our conversation jumps from Craig’s early inspirations to his use of cannabis to inspire creativity, and concludes with some stories of his second life as a polka musician. If you enjoy this interview, please leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts, share it with a friend, and consider donating to our Patreon linked below. As an added bonus, we are now offering our patrons 15% off all releases from Telephone Explosion Records. Tracing Spaces is a labour of love and we can only keep making it with your support. https://www.patreon.com/tracingspaces https://www.telephoneexplosion.com/

Episode 12   David Tudor: From piano to electronics   The transition of a pianist to electronic music   David Tudor (1926-1996)   In which we listen to works created while Tudor transitioned from playing piano to composing works for homemade electronics.   Playlist Bo Nilsson, Quantitäten (1958), for “electronically fortified” piano. Recording from Swedish Radio made in 1960. This is an abbreviated performance of the work made for Swedish Radio. John Cage, Cartridge Music (1960). For amplified small sounds; also amplified piano or cymbal; any number of players and loudspeakers; parts to be prepared from score by performers. Recording by John Cage and David Tudor, Time Records (1963). John Cage, Variations II (1961), Parts to be prepared from the score, for any number of players, using any sound-producing means. Piano and electronics by David Tudor. Recorded in Japan in 1962. Christian Wolff, For 1, 2, or 3 People (1964), Piano by David Tudor. Recorded live by KPFA Radio in 1965 at the San Francisco Museum of Art. David Tudor, Bandoneon ! (A Combine) (1966), for bandoneon and live electronics. Recorded live in October 1966 at E.A.T.'s at Nine Evenings: Theatre and Engineering. From the collection, The Art of David Tudor released by New World Records and Radio Bremen.   The Archive Mix in which I conclude the podcast by playing two additional tracks at the same time, to see what happens. This time, I am once again drawing up David Tudor and John Cage from the Folkways recording in 1959 of the lecture Indeterminacy. John Cage and David Tudor, Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, the first three minutes of the lecture recorded in 1959 for Folkways Records. John Cage and David Tudor, Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, the last three minutes of the lecture recorded in 1959 for Folkways Records.   Read my book: Electronic and Experimental Music (sixth edition), by Thom Holmes (Routledge 2020).   Contact Composers Inside Electronics, c/o John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein, longtime Tudor associates beginning in the 1970s for a history of the group and updates about their ongoing activities.   Read You Nakai's new book about Tudor: Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music(Oxford 2020)   Full disclosure: I work for Oxford University Press by day, although not in the trade book division that has published You Nakai's new book.

Moses Asch created Folkways Records in 1948 to document the beautiful and extraordinary diversity of human expression through sound.

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Song To Woody” by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Sherry” by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan’s first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan’s mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin’ Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I’ve also used Robert Shelton’s No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we’re going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We’re going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we’re also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we’re going to look at Bob Dylan, and at “Song to Woody”: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we’ve had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we’ve looked at only in passing before. We’ve barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we’re going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we’ve not touched on before. I’ll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them — in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we’ll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there’s a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray — and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and “Dylan has surely mixed up his names” and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because “Ray’s main period of chart success” was 1956-58. Heylin’s books are usually very, very well researched, but here he’s showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray’s biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray’s hits, like “Cry”, were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, “Cry”] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray’s music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams’ songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry”] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow’s son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard’s band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly’s head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn’t listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called “Suzy Baby”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Suzy Baby”] Dylan joined Vee’s band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I’ve read), and he didn’t stay in Vee’s band very long. But while he was in Vee’s band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like “Rubber Ball”: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, “Rubber Ball”] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn’t until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself — he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, “Muleskinner Blues”] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta’s repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly’s, with a friend, “Spider” John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, “Hangman”] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother’s apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner’s house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we’ve talked about before — he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, “It’s Alright, Baby”] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we’ve only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn’t really a distinction made between country music and folk — that distinction is one that only really came later — and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he’d bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he’d travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he’d hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don’t have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, “Oakie Boogie”] Woody and Jack weren’t musically compatible — this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one — but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn’t successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as “Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou”. The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today’s Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job — the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined — he wasn’t all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist’s fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer — a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like “Ida Red”, “Stackolee”, and “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?” – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics — and sometimes, but not always, the music — creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Pretty Boy Floyd”] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “Talking Fishing Blues”] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “The Great Dust Storm”] And of course, there was “This Land is Your Land”, a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, “This Land is Your Land”] It’s not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day — he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren’t ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie’s songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie’s playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up — Ramblin’ Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy — in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin’ Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers’ Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he’d recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan’s acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, “1913 Massacre”] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot’s persona as well as Guthrie’s. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard — Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The lyrics were things like “Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how” Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name — she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn’t Mr. Gravy’s birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you’ll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill — he had Huntington’s disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington’s causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend’s house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie’s own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this — Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records — all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier — but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith’s collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams’ Washboard Blues Singers, “Baby Please Don’t Go”] To the Carter Family’s country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, “Black Jack Davey”] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, “Stand By Me”] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith’s Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers — many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn’t charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan’s first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, “Everybody’s Talkin'”] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like “Hava Nagilah”. There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan — those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views — while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists — Seeger’s camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups — the narcissism of small differences — but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “Cocaine Blues”] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he’d started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, “Death Don’t Have No Mercy”] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk’s couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk’s wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around — but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was — the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn’t need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan’s talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”, he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Let Me Die in my Footsteps”] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour — one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin — and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan’s vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular — as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie — was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie’s friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan’s big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond’s son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan’s, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he’d played at Gerde’s Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo’s letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, “I’ll Fly Away”] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he’d been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he’d just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, “Today I Sing the Blues”] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia’s head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond’s track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn’t come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called “King of the Delta Blues Singers” by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “Crossroads Blues”] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it’s almost impossible to give anyone who’s heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson’s place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is “How come you didn’t start with Robert Johnson?”, and if you don’t know about him, you’ll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There’s a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it’s simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential — but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who’ve listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson’s biographer Elijah Wald — a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson’s musicianship, has said “knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles.” I’d agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson’s reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier — they’d got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson’s records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy’s later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond’s friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson — he’d gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you’d asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we’ll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him — and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind — he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests — Ramblin’ Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson “a polka hound, man”. And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, “They’re Red Hot”] But the music wasn’t the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed — musically, Johnson just didn’t seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn’t sound particularly original in that context — but he also didn’t care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson’s performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure — the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that’s a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there’s no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time — and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself — in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan’s version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson’s style into his own songwriting, and we’ll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn’t be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, “Talkin’ New York”, was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie’s talking blues songs. The other, “Song To Woody”, was a rewrite of his earlier “Song For Bonny”, which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie’s “1913 Massacre”. The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “Song to Woody”] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan’s first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as “Hammond’s Folly”, but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It’s a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it’s one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan’s artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we’ll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

  Episode ninety-seven of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "Song To Woody" by Bob Dylan, and at the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early sixties. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode.   Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Sherry" by the Four Seasons. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created a Mixcloud streaming playlist with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This might not be available in the US, due to the number of Woody Guthrie songs in a row. Dylan's first album is in the public domain in Europe, so a variety of reissues of it exist. An interesting and cheap one is this, which pairs it (and a non-album single by Dylan) with two Carolyn Hester albums which give a snapshot of the Greenwich Village scene, on one of which Dylan plays harmonica. The Harry Smith Anthology is also now public domain, and can be freely downloaded from archive.org.  I have used *many* books for this episode, most of which I will also be using for future episodes on Dylan: The Mayor of MacDougal Street by Dave Van Ronk and Elijah Wald is the fascinating and funny autobiography of Dylan's mentor in his Greenwich Village period. Escaping the Delta by Elijah Wald is the definitive book on Robert Johnson. Information on Woody Guthrie comes from Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray. Chronicles Volume 1 by Bob Dylan is a partial, highly inaccurate, but thoroughly readable autobiography. Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   1962 is the year when the sixties really started, and in the next few episodes we will see the first proper appearances of several of the musicians who would go on to make the decade what it was. By two weeks from now, when we get to episode one hundred and the end of the second year of the podcast, the stage will be set for us to look at that most mythologised of decades. And so today, we're going to take our first look at one of the most important of the sixties musicians, the only songwriter ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, a man who influenced every single performer and songwriter for at least the next decade, and whose work inspired a whole subgenre, albeit one he had little but contempt for. We're going to look at his first album, and at a song he wrote to his greatest influence. And we're also going to look at how his career intersected with someone we talked about way back in the very first episode of this podcast. Today we're going to look at Bob Dylan, and at "Song to Woody": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Song to Woody"] This episode is going to be a little different from several of the other episodes we've had recently. At the time he made his first album, Dylan was not the accomplished artist he quickly became, but a minor performer whose first record only contained two original songs. But he was from a tradition that we've looked at only in passing before. We've barely looked at the American folk music tradition, and largely ignored the musicians who were major figures in it, because those figures only really enter into rock and roll in a real way starting with Dylan. So as part of this episode, we're going to have very brief, capsule, looks at a number of other musicians we've not touched on before. I'll only be giving enough background for these people so you can get a flavour of them -- in future episodes when we look at the folk and folk-rock scenes, we'll also fill in some more of the background of these artists. That also means this episode is going to run a little long, just because there's a lot to get through. Bob Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman in the Minnesota Iron Range, an area of the US that was just beginning a slow descent into poverty, as the country suddenly needed a lot less metal after the end of World War II. He was born in Duluth, but moved to Hibbing, a much smaller town, when he was very young. As a kid, he was fascinated with music that sounded a little odd. He was first captivated by Johnnie Ray -- and incidentally, Clinton Heylin, in his biography of Dylan, thinks that this must be wrong, and "Dylan has surely mixed up his names" and must be thinking of Johnny Ace, because "Ray’s main period of chart success" was 1956-58. Heylin's books are usually very, very well researched, but here he's showing his parochialism. Johnnie Ray's biggest *UK* hits were in 1956-8, but in the US his biggest hits came in 1951, and he had a string of hits in the very early fifties.  Ray's hits, like "Cry", were produced by Mitch Miller, and were on Columbia records: [Excerpt: Johnnie Ray, "Cry"] Shortly after his infatuation with Ray's music, he fell for the music of Hank Williams in a big way, and became obsessed with Williams' songwriting: [Excerpt: Hank Williams, "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry"] He also became a fan of another Hank, Hank Snow, the country singer who had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker, and through Snow he became aware of the songs of Jimmie Rodgers, who Snow frequently covered, and who Snow admired enough that Snow's son was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow.  But he soon also became a big fan of rhythm and blues and rock and roll. He taught himself to play rudimentary piano in a Little Richard style, and his ambition, as quoted in his high school yearbook, was to join Little Richard's band. He was enough of a fan of rock and roll music that he went to see Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on the penultimate date of their ill-fated tour. He later claimed to have seen a halo over Holly's head during the performance. His first brush with fame came indirectly as a result of that tour. A singer from Fargo, North Dakota, named Bobby Vee, was drafted in to cover for Holly at the show that Holly had been travelling to when he died. Vee sounded a little like Holly, if you didn't listen too closely, and he had a minor local hit with a song called "Suzy Baby": [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, "Suzy Baby"] Dylan joined Vee's band for a short while under the stage name Elston Gunn, playing the piano, though he was apparently not very good (he could only play in C, according to some sources I've read), and he didn't stay in Vee's band very long. But while he was in Vee's band, he would tell friends and relatives that he *was* Bobby Vee, and at least some people believed him. Vee would go on to have a career as one of the wave of Bobbies that swarmed all over American Bandstand in the late fifties and early sixties, with records like "Rubber Ball": [Excerpt: Bobby Vee, "Rubber Ball"] While Dylan made his name with a very different kind of music, he would always argue that Vee deserved rather more respect than he usually got, and that there was some merit to his music. But it wasn't until he went to university in Minneapolis that Robert Zimmerman became Bob Dylan, and changed everything about his life. As many people do when they go to university, he reinvented himself -- he took on a new name, which has variously been quoted as having been inspired by Marshall Dillon from the TV series Gunsmoke and by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. He stopped studying, and devoted his time to music and chasing women. And he also took on a new musical style. The way he tells it, he had an epiphany in a record shop listening booth, listening to an album by the folk singer Odetta. Odetta was an astonishing singer who combined elements of folk, country, and blues with an opera-trained voice, and Dylan was probably listening to her first album, which was largely traditional folk songs, plus one song each by Lead Belly and Jimmie Rodgers: [Excerpt: Odetta, "Muleskinner Blues"] Dylan had soon sold his electric guitar and bought an acoustic, and he immediately learned all of Odetta's repertoire and started performing her songs, and Lead Belly's, with a friend, "Spider" John Koerner, who would later become a fairly well-known folk blues musician in his own right: [Excerpt: Ray, Koerner, and Glover, "Hangman"] And then, at a coffee-shop, he got talking with a friend of his, Flo Castner, and she invited him to come round to her brother's apartment, which was nearby, because she thought he might be interested in some of the music her brother had. Dylan discovered two albums at Lyn Castner's house that day that would change his life. The first, and the less important to him in the short term, is one we've talked about before -- he heard the Spirituals to Swing album, the record of the 1938 Carnegie Hall concerts that we talked about back in the first few episodes of the podcast: [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, "It's Alright, Baby"] That album impressed him, but it was the other record he heard that day that changed everything for him immediately. It was a collection of recordings by Woody Guthrie. Guthrie is someone we've only mentioned in passing so far, but he was pivotal in the development of American folk music in the 1940s, and in particular he was important in the politicisation of that music. In the 1930s, there wasn't really a distinction made between country music and folk -- that distinction is one that only really came later -- and Guthrie had started out as a country singer, singing songs inspired by the Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, and other 1920s greats. For most of his early twenties he'd bummed around Oklahoma and Texas doing odd jobs as a sign painter, psychic, faith healer, and whatever else he could pick up a little money for. But then in 1936 he'd travelled out to California in search of work. When there, he'd hooked up with a cousin, Jack Guthrie, who was a Western singer, performing the kind of Western Swing that would later become rockabilly. We don't have any recordings of Jack from this early, but when you listen to him in the forties, you can hear the kind of hard-edged California Western Swing that would influence most of the white artists we looked at in the first year or so of the podcast: [Excerpt: Jack Guthrie, "Oakie Boogie"] Woody and Jack weren't musically compatible -- this was when country and western were seen as very, very different genres, rather than being lumped into one -- but they worked together for a while. Jack was the lead singer and guitarist, and Woody was his comedy sidekick, backing vocalist, and harmonica player. They performed with a group called the Beverly Hillbillies and got their own radio show, The Oakie and Woody Show, but it wasn't successful, and Jack decided to give up the show. Woody continued with a friend, Maxine Crissman, who performed as "Lefty Lou From Old Mizzou". The Woody and Lefty act became hugely popular, but Lefty eventually also quit, due to her health failing, and while at the time she seems to have been regarded as the major talent in the duo, her leaving the act was indirectly the best thing that ever happened to Guthrie. The radio station they were performing on was owned by a fairly left-wing businessman who had connections with the radical left faction of the Democratic Party (and in California in the thirties that could be quite radical, somewhere close to today's Democratic Socialists of America), and when Lefty quit the act, the owner of the station gave Guthrie another job -- the owner also ran a left-wing newspaper, and since Guthrie was from Oklahoma, maybe he would be interested in writing some columns about the plight of the Okie migrants?  Guthrie went and spent time with those people, and his shock at the poverty they were living in and the discrimination they were suffering seems to have radicalised him. He started hanging round with members of the Communist Party, though he apparently never joined -- he wasn't all that interested in Marxist theory or the party line, he just wanted to take the side of the victims against the bullies, and he saw the Communists as doing that. He was, though, enough of a fellow traveller that when World War II started he took the initial Communist line of it being a capitalist's fight that socialists should have no part of (a line which was held until Russia joined the war, at which point it became a crusade against the evils of fascism). His employer was a more resolute anti-fascist, and so Guthrie lost his newspaper job, and he decided to move across the country to New York, where he hooked up with a group of left-wing intellectuals and folk singers, centring on Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, and Lead Belly. It was this environment, centred in Almanac House in Greenwich Village, that spawned the Almanac Singers and later the Weavers, who we talked about a few episodes back. And Guthrie had been the most important of all of them. Guthrie was a folk performer -- a big chunk of his repertoire was old songs like "Ida Red", "Stackolee", and "Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet?" – but he also wrote songs himself, taking the forms of old folk and country songs, and reworking the lyrics -- and sometimes, but not always, the music -- creating songs that dealt with events that were happening at the time. There were songs about famous outlaws, recast as Robin Hood type figures: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Pretty Boy Floyd"] There were talking blues with comedy lyrics: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "Talking Fishing Blues"] There were the famous Dust Bowl Ballads, about the dust storms that had caused so much destruction and hardship in the west: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "The Great Dust Storm"] And of course, there was "This Land is Your Land", a radical song about how private property is immoral and unnatural, which has been taken up as an anthem by people who would despise everything that Guthrie stood for: [Excerpt: Woody Guthrie, "This Land is Your Land"] It's not certain which records by Guthrie Dylan heard that day -- he talks about it in his autobiography, but the songs he talks about weren't ones that were on the same album, and he seems to just be naming a handful of Guthrie's songs. What is certain is that Dylan reacted to this music in a visceral way. He decided that he had to *become* Woody Guthrie, and took on Guthrie's playing and singing style, even his accent. However, he soon modulated that slightly, when a friend told him that he might as well give up -- Ramblin' Jack Elliot was already doing the Guthrie-imitation thing. Elliot, like Dylan, was a middle-class Jewish man who had reinvented himself as a Woody Guthrie copy -- in this case, Elliot Adnopoz, the son of a surgeon, had become Ramblin' Jack the singing cowboy, and had been an apprentice of Guthrie, living with him and learning everything from him, before going over to Britain, where his status as an actual authentic American had meant he was one of the major figures in the British folk scene and the related skiffle scene. Alan Lomax, who had moved to the UK temporarily to escape the anti-Communist witch hunts, had got Elliot a contract with Topic Records, a folk label that had started out as part of the Workers' Music Association, which as you can probably tell from the name was affiliated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. There he'd recorded an album of Guthrie songs, which Dylan's acquaintance played for him: [Excerpt: Ramblin' Jack Elliot, "1913 Massacre"] Dylan was shocked that there was someone out there doing the same thing, but then he just took on aspects of Elliot's persona as well as Guthrie's. He was going to be the next Woody Guthrie, and that meant inhabiting his persona utterly, and giving his whole repertoire over to Guthrie songs. He was also, though, making tentative efforts at writing his own songs, too. One which we only have as a lyric was written to a girlfriend, and was set to the same tune we just heard -- Guthrie's "1913 Massacre". The lyrics were things like "Hey, hey Bonny, I’m singing to you now/The song I’m singing is the best I know how" Incidentally, the woman that was written for is yet another person in the story who now has a different name -- she became a moderately successful actor, appearing in episodes of Star Trek and Gunsmoke, and changed her name to Jahanara Romney shortly after her marriage to the hippie peace activist Wavy Gravy (which isn't Mr. Gravy's birth name either). Their son, whose birth name was Howdy Do-Good Gravy Tomahawk Truckstop Romney, also changed his name later on, you'll be unsurprised to hear. Dylan by this point was feeling as constrained by the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as he had earlier by the small town Hibbing. In January 1961, he decided he was going to go to New York, and while he was there he was going to go and meet Woody Guthrie in person. Guthrie was, by this time, severely ill -- he had Huntington's disease, a truly awful genetic disorder that had also killed his mother. Huntington's causes dementia, spasmodic movements, a loss of control of the body, and a ton of other mental and physical symptoms. Guthrie had been in a psychiatric hospital since 1956, and was only let out every Sunday to see family at a friend's house.  Bob Dylan quickly became friendly with Guthrie, visiting him regularly in the hospital to play Guthrie's own songs for him, and occasionally joining him on the family visits on Sundays. He only spent a few months doing this -- Dylan has always been someone who moved on quickly, and Guthrie also moved towards the end of 1961, to a new hospital closer to his family, but these visits had a profound effect on the young man. When not visiting Guthrie, Dylan was spending his time in Greenwich Village, the Bohemian centre of New York. The Village at that time was a hotbed of artists and radicals, with people like the poet Allen Ginsberg, the street musician Moondog, and Tiny Tim, a ukulele player who sang Rudy Vallee songs in falsetto, all part of the scene. It was also the centre of what was becoming the second great folk revival. That revival had been started in 1952, when the most important bootleg ever was released, Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: [Excerpt: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean"] Harry Smith was a record collector, experimental filmmaker, and follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. His greatest work seems at least in part to have been created as a magickal work, with album covers designed by himself full of esoteric symbolism. Smith had a huge collection of old 78 records -- all of them things that had been issued commercially in the late 1920s and early thirties, when the record industry had been in a temporary boom before the depression. Many of these records had been very popular in the twenties, but by 1952 even the most popular acts, like Blind Lemon Jefferson or the Carter Family, were largely forgotten. So Smith and Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records, took advantage of the new medium, the long-playing album, and put together a six-album set of these recordings, not bothering with trivialities like copyright even though, again, most of these had been recorded for major labels only twenty or so years earlier -- but at this time there was not really such a thing as a market for back catalogue, and none of the record labels involved seem to have protested. Smith's collection was an idiosyncratic one, based around his own tastes. It ran the gamut from hard blues: [Excerpt: Joe Williams' Washboard Blues Singers, "Baby Please Don't Go"] To the Carter Family's country recordings of old ballads that date back centuries: [Excerpt: The Carter Family, "Black Jack Davey"] To gospel: [Excerpt: Sister Clara Hudmon, "Stand By Me"] But put together in one place, these records suggested the existence of a uniquely American roots music tradition, one that encompassed all these genres, and Smith's Anthology became the favourite music of the same type of people who in the UK around the same time were becoming skifflers -- many of them radical leftists who had been part of the US equivalent of the trad jazz movement (who were known as “mouldy figs”) and were attracted by the idea of an authentic music of the working man. The Harry Smith Anthology became the core repertoire for every American folk musician of the fifties, the seed around which the whole movement crystallised. Every folkie knew every single song on those records. Those folkies had started playing at coffee shops in Greenwich Village, places that were known as basket houses, because they didn't charge for entry or pay the artists, but the performers could pass a basket and split whatever the audience decided to donate.  Originally, the folk musicians were not especially popular, and in fact they were booked for that reason. The main entertainment for those coffee shops was poetry, and the audience for poetry would mostly buy a single coffee and make it last all night. The folkies were booked to come on between the poets and play a few songs to make the audience clear out to make room for a new audience to come and buy new coffees. However, some of the people got good enough that they actually started to get their own audiences, and within a short time the roles were reversed, with the poets coming on to clear out the folk audience. Dylan's first gigs were on this circuit, playing on bills put together by Fred Neil, a musician who was at this point mostly playing blues songs but who within a few years would write some of the great classics of the sixties singer-songwriter genre: [Excerpt: Fred Neil, "Everybody's Talkin'"] By the time Dylan hit the scene, there were quite a few very good musicians in the Village, and the folk scene had grown to the point that there were multiple factions. There were the Stalinists, who had coalesced around Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the scene, and who played a mixture of summer-camp singalong music and topical songs about news events. There were the Zionists, who were singing things like "Hava Nagilah". There were bluegrass players, and there were the two groups that most attracted Dylan -- those who sang old folk ballads, and those who sang the blues. Those latter two groups tended to cluster together, because they were smaller than the other groups, and also because of their own political views -- while all of the scene were leftists, the blues and ballad singers tended either to be vaguely apolitical, or to be anarchists and Trotskyites rather than Stalinists. But they had a deeper philosophical disagreement with the Stalinists -- Seeger's camp thought that the quality of a song was secondary to the social good it could do, while the blues and ballad singers held that the important thing was the music, and any political or social good was a nice byproduct. There was a huge amount of infighting between these small groups -- the narcissism of small differences -- but there was one place they would all hang out. The Folklore Centre was a record and bookshop owned by a man named Izzy Young, and it was where you would go to buy every new book, to buy and sell copies of the zines that were published, and to hang out and find out who the new musicians on the scene were.  And it was at the Folklore Centre that Dylan met Dave Van Ronk: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "Cocaine Blues"] Van Ronk was the most important musician in the blues and ballads group of folkies, and was politically an anarchist who, through his connection with the Schachtmanites (a fringe-left group who were more Trotskyite than the Trotskyites, and whose views sometimes shaded into anarchism) was becoming converted to Marxism. A physically massive man, he'd started out as a traditional jazz guitarist and banjo player, but had slowly moved on into the folk side of things through his love of blues singers like Bessie Smith and folk-blues artists like Lead Belly. Van Ronk had learned a great deal from Rev. Gary Davis, a blind gospel-blues singer whose technique Van Ronk had studied: [Excerpt: Rev. Gary Davis, "Death Don't Have No Mercy"] Van Ronk was one of the few people on the Village scene who was a native New Yorker, though he was from Queens rather than the Village, and he was someone who had already made a few records that Dylan had heard, mostly of the standard repertoire: [Excerpt: Dave Van Ronk, "See That My Grave is Kept Clean"] Dylan consciously sought him out as the person to imitate on the scene, and he was soon regularly sleeping on Van Ronk's couch and being managed for a brief time by Van Ronk's wife. Once again, Dylan was learning everything he could from the people he was around -- but he had a much bigger ambition than anyone else on the scene. A lot of the people on that scene have been very bitter over the years about Dylan, but Van Ronk, who did more for Dylan than anyone else on the scene, never really was -- the two stopped being close once he was no more use to Dylan, as so often happened, but they remained friendly, because Van Ronk was secure enough in himself and his own abilities that he didn't need the validation of being important to the big star. Van Ronk was an important mentor to him for a crucial period of six months or so, and Dylan always acknowledged that, just as Van Ronk always acknowledged Dylan's talent. And that talent, at least at first, was a performing talent rather than a songwriting one. Dylan was writing songs by now, but hardly any, and when he did perform them, he was not acknowledging them. His first truly successful song, a song about nuclear war, "Let Me Die in my Footsteps", he would introduce as a Weavers song: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Let Me Die in my Footsteps"] For the most part, his repertoire was still only Woody Guthrie songs, but people were amazed by his personal charisma, his humour -- one comparison you see time and again when people talk about his early performances is Charlie Chaplin -- and his singing. There are so many jokes about Dylan's vocals that this sounds like a joke, but among the folk crowd, his phrasing in particular -- as influenced by the R&B records he grew up listening to as by Guthrie -- was considered utterly astonishing. Dylan started publishing some of his song lyrics in Broadside, a magazine for new topical songs, and in other magazines like Sing Out! These were associated with the Communist side of the folk movement, and Dylan had a foot in both camps through his association with Guthrie and Guthrie's friends. Through these people he got to know Suze Rotolo, a volunteer with the Congress of Racial Equality, who became his girlfriend, and her sister Carla, who was the assistant to Alan Lomax, who was now back from the UK, and the Rotolos played a part in Dylan's big breakthrough.  The timeline that follows is a bit confused, but Carla Rotolo recorded some of the best Village folk singers, and wrote to John Hammond about the tape, mentioning Dylan in particular. At the same time, Hammond's son John Hammond Jr, another musician on the circuit and a friend of Dylan's, apparently mentioned Dylan to his father. Dylan was also working on Robert Shelton, the folk critic of the New York Times, who eventually gave Dylan a massive rave review for a support slot he'd played at Gerde's Folk City. And the same day that review came out, eight days after Carla Rotolo's letter, Dylan was in the recording studio with the folk singer Carolyn Hester, playing harmonica on a few of her tracks, and Hammond was the producer: [Excerpt: Carolyn Hester, "I'll Fly Away"] Hammond had, of course, organised the Spirituals to Swing concerts which had influenced Dylan. And not only that, he'd been the person to discover Billie Holiday, and Count Basie. And Charlie Christian. He was now working for Columbia Records, where he'd just produced the first secular records for a promising new gospel singer who had decided to turn pop, named Aretha Franklin: [Excerpt: Aretha Franklin, "Today I Sing the Blues"] So Hammond was an important figure in many ways, and he had a lot of latitude at Columbia Records. He decided to sign Dylan, and even though Mitch Miller, Columbia's head of A&R at the time, had no clue what Hammond saw in Dylan, Hammond's track record was good enough that he was allowed to get on with it and put out an album. Hammond also gave Dylan an album to take home and listen to, a record which hadn't come out yet, a reissue of some old blues records called "King of the Delta Blues Singers" by Robert Johnson: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "Crossroads Blues"] There has been a hell of a lot of mythology about Johnson over the years, so much so that it's almost impossible to give anyone who's heard of him at all an accurate impression of Johnson's place in music history. One question I have been asked repeatedly since I started this podcast is "How come you didn't start with Robert Johnson?", and if you don't know about him, you'll get an idea of his general perception among music fans from the fact that I recently watched an episode of a science fiction TV series where our heroes had to go back in time to stop the villains from preventing Johnson from making his recordings, because by doing that they could stop rock and roll from ever existing. There's a popular perception that Johnson was the most important blues musician of his generation, and that he was hugely influential on the development of blues and R&B, and it's simply false. He *was* a truly great musician, and he *was* hugely influential -- but he was influential on white musicians in the sixties, not black musicians in the thirties, forties, and fifties. In his lifetime, his best selling records sold around five thousand copies, which to put it in perspective is about the same number of people who've listened to some of my more popular podcast episodes. Johnson's biographer Elijah Wald -- a man who, like I do, has a huge respect for Johnson's musicianship, has said "knowing about Johnson and Muddy Waters but not about Leroy Carr or Dinah Washington [is] like knowing about, say, the Sir Douglas Quintet but not knowing about the Beatles." I'd agree, except that the Sir Douglas Quintet were much, much, bigger in the sixties than Robert Johnson was in the thirties. Johnson's reputation comes entirely from that album that Hammond had handed Dylan. Hammond had been one of the tiny number of people who had actually listened to Johnson at the time he was performing. Indeed, Hammond had wanted to get Johnson to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts, only to find that Johnson had died only a short time earlier -- they'd got Big Bill Broonzy to play in his place, and played a couple of Johnson's records from the stage. That had, in fact, kickstarted Broonzy's later second career as a folk-blues musician playing for largely white audiences, rather than as a proto-Chicago-blues performer playing for Black ones. Hammond's friend Alan Lomax had also been a fan of Johnson -- he'd gone to Mississippi later, to try to record Johnson, also without having realised that Johnson had died. But far from Johnson being the single most important blues musician of the thirties, as he is now portrayed in popular culture, if you'd asked most blues musicians or listeners about Robert Johnson in the twenty-three years between his death and the King of the Delta Blues Singers album coming out, most of them would have looked at you blankly, or maybe asked if you meant Lonnie Johnson, the much more famous musician who was a big inspiration for Robert. When King of the Delta Blues Singers came out, it changed all that, and made Robert Johnson into a totemic figure among white blues fans, and we'll see over the next year or two a large number of very important musicians who took inspiration from him -- and deservedly so. While the myth of Robert Johnson has almost no connection to the real man, his music demonstrated a remarkable musical mind -- he was a versatile, skilled guitarist and arranger, and someone whose musical palette was far wider than his recorded legacy suggests -- Ramblin' Johnny Shines, who travelled with Johnson for a time, describes him as particularly enjoying playing songs like "Yes, Sir, That's My Baby" and Jimmie Rodgers songs, and polkas, calling Johnson "a polka hound, man". And even though in his handful of recording sessions he was asked only to play blues, you can still hear elements of that: [Excerpt: Robert Johnson, "They're Red Hot"] But the music wasn't the main thing that grabbed Dylan. Dylan played the album for Dave Van Ronk, who was unimpressed -- musically, Johnson just didn't seem very original to Van Ronk, who played Dylan records by Skip James, Leroy Carr, and others, showing Dylan where Johnson had picked up most of his musical ideas. And Dylan had to agree with him that Johnson didn't sound particularly original in that context -- but he also didn't care, reasoning that many of the Woody Guthrie songs he loved were rewrites of old Carter Family songs, so if Johnson was rewriting Leroy Carr songs that was fair enough. What got to Dylan was Johnson's performance style, but also his ability with words. Johnson had a very sparse, economical, lyrical style which connected with Dylan on a primordial level. Most of those who became fans of Johnson following the release of King of the Delta Blues Singers saw Johnson as an exotic and scary figure -- the myth commonly told about him is that he sold his soul at a crossroads to the Devil in return for the ability to play the guitar, though that's a myth that was originally told about a different Mississippi blues man called Tommy Johnson, and there's no evidence that anyone thought that of him at the time -- and so these later fans see his music as being haunted. Dylan instead seems to see Johnson as someone very like himself -- in his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan talks about Johnson being a bothersome kid who played harmonica, who was later taught a bit of guitar and then learned the rest of his music from records, rather than from live performers. Dylan's version of Johnson is closer to the reality, as far as we know it, than the Johnson of legend is, and Dylan seems to have been delighted when he found out much later that the name of the musician who taught Johnson to play guitar was Ike Zimmerman. Dylan immediately tried to incorporate Johnson's style into his own songwriting, and we'll see the effects of that in future episodes. But that songwriting wouldn't be seen much on his debut album. And nor would his Woody Guthrie repertoire. Instead, Dylan performed a set of traditional ballads and blues numbers, most of which he never performed live normally, and at least half of which were arrangements that Dylan copied wholesale from Dave Van Ronk. [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “See That My Grave is Kept Clean”] The album was recorded quickly, in a couple of days. Hammond found Dylan incredibly difficult to work with, saying he had appalling mic technique, and for many of the songs Dylan refused to do a second take. There were only two originals on the album. One, "Talkin' New York", was a comedy talking blues about his early time in New York, very much in the style of Woody Guthrie's talking blues songs. The other, "Song To Woody", was a rewrite of his earlier "Song For Bonny", which was itself a rewrite of Guthrie's "1913 Massacre". The song is a touching one, Dylan paying tribute to his single biggest influence: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Song to Woody"] Dylan was moving on, and he knew he was moving on, but he had to say goodbye. Dylan's first album was not a success, and he became known within Columbia Records as "Hammond's Folly", but nor did it lose money, since it was recorded so quickly. It's a record that Dylan and Hammond both later spoke poorly of, but it's one I rather like, and one of the best things to come out of the Greenwich Village folk scene. But by the time it came out, Dylan's artistic heart was already elsewhere, and when we come back to him in a couple of months, we'll be seeing someone who had completely reinvented himself.  

Aaron Dilloway takes us on a time traveling journey, as far back as the 1920s, to get into some of the earliest roots of experimental music with “Sounds of New Music” on the legendary Folkways Records. This compilation features works from avant garde composers like John Cage and Edgar Varese, as well as some strange instructional tracks and other primitive sonic experiments. Hear the sounds of the distant past and understand the sounds of the future.

Сегодня в подкасте программы Дельта Миссисипи возвращаемся к прослушиванию акустического блюза. Послушаем пластинку под названием «Sings Folk Songs» от Big Bill Broonzy, которая была издана 1962 на лейбле Folkways Records. Найдете разницу какая часть материала была записана в студии, а какая на концерте?

Сегодня в подкасте программы Дельта Миссисипи возвращаемся к прослушиванию акустического блюза. Послушаем пластинку под названием «Sings Folk Songs» от Big Bill Broonzy, которая была издана 1962 на лейбле Folkways Records. Найдете разницу какая часть материала была записана в студии, а какая на концерте?

Clarita and Scott talk The Shape of Sound, his 100 mid-century record cover exhibit featuring 20 designers. Plus, Ronald Clyne's origin story as a horror illustrator for Arkham House Publishing, and his time at Columbia and Folkways Records. –Joseph Albers' Persuasive Percussion–Scott gives his tips for storing records!–Being goth in the 40's!Check out the exhibit catalog (in PAST exhibits) at https://non-breaking.space/Tons of info on his collection on Instagram @dcmnts

Clarita and Scott talk The Shape of Sound, his 100 mid-century record cover exhibit featuring 20 designers. Plus, Ronald Clyne's origin story as a horror illustrator for Arkham House Publishing, and his time at Columbia and Folkways Records. –Joseph Albers' Persuasive Percussion–Scott gives his tips for storing records!–Being goth in the 40's!Check out the exhibit catalog (in PAST exhibits) at https://non-breaking.space/Tons of info on his collection on Instagram @dcmntsSupport the show (https://www.venmo.com/Clarita-Hinojosa)

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) is a leftist student organization. It was founded in 1960, but originated in the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, which was founded in 1905. SDS rapidly grew and had more than 300 chapters in 1969, when it fractured into factions. Among other things, members of the organization disagreed about whether it should prioritize feminism, or anti-racist and anti-war activities. SDS still exists today, albeit in a much diminished form.One of the more radical elements of SDS was the Revolutionary Youth Movement (RYM), which split from SDS in 1969, and renamed itself "Weatherman," based on a line from the Bob Dylan song "Subterranean Homesick Blues": "You don't need a Weatherman to know which way the wind blows." Weatherman soon renamed itself the Weather Underground Organization and pursued increasingly radical and violent actions with the stated goal of Communist revolution. Among other things, the Weather Underground staged a riot in Chicago on October 8, 1969, which they dubbed "Days of Rage," broke Timothy Leary out of prison in 1970, and a string of bombings from 1969 through the 1970s, including a bombing of the Pentagon. Unsurprisingly, the FBI considered the Weather Underground a domestic terrorist organization, and the members of the group went underground in order to avoid arrest.By 1975, the Weather Underground was beginning to unravel. The radical documentary filmmaker Emile de Antonio convinced cinematographer Haskell Wexler and editor Mary Lampson to co-direct a documentary film about the Weather Underground. The result was Underground (1976), an 87 minute documentary in which members of the Weather Underground explains their ideas and political philosophy. Notably, Wexler filmed them from behind or through a screen, in order to conceal their identities. The members of the Weather Underground featured in the film include: Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn, Jeff Jones, and Cathy Wilkerson. Notably, De Antonio was relatively critical of the organization and its tactics.When the film was finished, the FBI tried to subpoena all of the material, but after considerable litigation, the subpoena was quashed, primarily on First Amendment grounds.Later in 1976, Folkways Records released the "soundtrack" of Underground as a 2xLP set. Here is the track list:A1Statement By The UndergroundA2Violence Is Necessary - H. Rap Brown, Malcolm X, M. L. King Jr., F. CastroA3The Viet War - Ho Chi Minh, N.T.Dinh, J. FordA4SDS, Chicago 1969, Days Of RageB1Attitudes Of The UndergroundB2Self CriticismB3Puerto Rico - "Mongo Affair" (Miguel Algarin)B4Making The FilmB5We Are Professional RevolutionariesB6The West 11th Street ExplosionC1Capitol Bombing - Returning MedalsC2Fear And CommitmentC3Class Origin And Class StanceC4The Publication Of The Praire FireD1Make Up Of Capitalistic Power & The New RevolutionD2The Prison Movement And AtticaD3It Is The People Who Make The ChangeD4We Are A Small OrganizationD5Interview At A L.A. Unemployment CenterD6Why We Are Communists & Speak Collectively See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

William Palmer (1824-56) was an English doctor found guilty of murder in one of the most notorious cases of the 19th century. Palmer was also known as the "Prince of Poisoners," and was called "the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey" by Charles Dickens. In 1856, Palmer was convicted of murdering his friend John Cook by strychnine poisoning in 1855. He was also suspect of poisoning his brother, his mother-in-law, and four of his children. Palmer's trial was a great spectacle that was covered by all of the newspapers of the day. He was represented by Mr. Serjeant William Shee and prosecuted by Alexander Cockburn and John Walter Huddleston, before Judge John Campbell, 1st Baron Campbell. After his conviction, Palmer was executed by hanging on June 14, 1856 at Stafford Prison. Scholars dispute whether the evidence was sufficient to convict Palmer and whether the court's summation was prejudicial.In 1958, Folkways Records released this dramatization of the trial as a 2xLP set. The trial transcript was edited and abridged by Bernard Rosenberg of the New York Bar. Rosenberg's script was adapted and directed by Wallace House, and performed by Eric House, Wendy Carter, Kenneth Buckridge, and Wallace House. Here is the tracklist:The ProsecutionA1The Attorney General, Ishmael FisherA2Elizabeth MillsA3William Henry Jones, Charles NewtonA4William Vernon Stevens, Dr. John Thomas Harland, Charles John DevonshireB1John Boycott, John MyattB2Samuel Cheshire, Captain John Haines Hatton, George BatesB3Thomas Blizzard Curling - SurgeonB4Dr. Robert Todd, Sir Benjamin BrodieB5Caroline Hockson, Francis Taylor - SurgeonB6Dr. Alfred Taylor, Professor Robert Christison, Thomas Pratt - Solicitor, Thomas Smedon StrawbridgeThe DefenseC1Defense AttorneyC2Thomas Nunneley - SurgeonC3Dr. Francis Wrightson, Richard Partridge - SurgeonC4Dr. George RobinsonC5George MyattThe SummationD1Attorney GeneralThe Charge To The JuryD2Lord CampbellThe SentenceD3Lord Campbell See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this Special Event Broadcast of WoodSongs, we’re honoring one of the most important legacy’s in all of recorded music… Smithsonian Folkways in celebration of their 70th anniversary. As Michael Johnathon notes, “Smithsonian Folkways is the musical treasure box of America's roots music. It is Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy. It's what WoodSongs aspires to be. Our show was even based on Pete's old TV series Rainbow Quest. It's like WoodSongs is coming full circle as we present the great work of Smithsonian Folkways to a worldwide audience.” Appearing on the broadcast will be three incredible Folkways artists that continue the tradition that Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records in 1948 to document the "people's music”, carry forward. Artists appearing on the broadcast include: Dom Flemons co-founding member of the GRAMMY-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, Grenadian-Canadian songwriter and tradition bearer Kaia Kater and Iraqi-American oud player Rahim AlHaj. Folkways’ Huib Schippers, (Curator and Director) and Jeff Place (Curator and Senior Archivist) will join Michael to share the label’s mission, story and cultural heritage with WoodSongs’ global audience. WoodSongs Kid: Mya Hunt is a thirteen-year-old vocalist from the Appalachian community in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky.

Ficha Técnica Hosts: Leticia Dáquer e Thiago Corrêa Convidada: Liliam de Oliveira Edição: Thiago Corrêa Capa: Leticia Dáquer Data da gravação: 28/02/2019 Data da publicação: 15/03/2019 Músicas: Beyoncé - Run the world (girls) Renee Goust - La Cumbia Feminazi Rita Lee e Zélia Duncan - Pagu Elza Soares - A Mulher do Fim do mundo Angela Rô Rô - Agito e Uso ZAZ - Je Veux Which Side are you on? (civil rights version) Links relacionados ao episódio Dissertação da Liliam A Balada do Pistoleiro Liliam de Oliveira Livro: Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (Machado de Assis)  Leticia Dáquer Kevin Hart's Guide to Black History (Netflix) Thiago Corrêa Site da Folkways Records, a gravadora da Smithsonian Institution Gravação da WNEW para “Which Side Are you on?” de Len Chandler and The Freedom Voices na versão feita para a marcha dos direitos civis de Selma Jabás Liliam de Oliveira Podcast OmegaCast Twitter: @likamoon Instagram: @lica_moon E-mail: liliam.oliveira@ueg.br Leticia Dáquer Twitter: @pacamanca Blog: www.pacamanca.com Papo Cético do site Mitografias Thiago Corrêa Twitter: @thiago_czz Episódio do É Pau, É Pedra sobre Rosa Luxemburgo, com nossa participação como narradores   O Bom, o Mau e o Feio O Bom:  Leticia:  Como tijolos de urina e fungos remodelados podem ajudar no combate à poluição por plástico (BBC, 07/03/2019) Thiago:  Milkmen are returning to London as millenials order glass milk bottles in a bid to slash plastic waste (Evening Standard, 25/02/2019) O Mau: Leticia:  La destra raduna antiabortisti e antigay, a Verona il meeting della famiglia sovranista (La Repubblica, 09/03/2019) Thiago America's post-9/11 wars have cost 5.9 trillion (The Nation, 21/11/2018) O Feio: Leticia:  Bilionário dos diamantes morre em cirurgia de aumento peniano (GQ Brasil, 06/03/2019) Thiago:  Chickens ‘teamed up to kill fox' at Brittany farming school (The Guardian, 12/03/2019)   #MULHERESPODCASTERSMulheres Podcasters é uma ação de iniciativa do Programa Ponto G, desenvolvida para divulgar o trabalho de mulheres na mídia podcast e mostrar para todo ouvinte que sempre existiram mulheres na comunidade de podcasts Brasil. O Pistolando apoia essa iniciativa.  Apoie você também: compartilhe este programa com a hashtag #mulherespodcasters e nos ajude a promover a igualdade de gênero dentro da podosfera. ************************************ Este programa faz parte da campanha #OPodcastÉDelas2019, uma iniciativa criada para inserir e promover mais mulheres na mídia podcast. A campanha ocorre sempre no mês de março e esta é a sua terceira edição. Pra encontrar mais podcasts participantes, procure pelas hashtag #OPodcastÉDelas e #OPodcastÉDelas2019 nas mídias sociais e siga o @opodcastedelas.   Links do Pistolando www.pistolando.com contato@pistolando.com Twitter: @PistolandoPod Instagram: @PistolandoPod #acc Capa do episódio é um quadrado dividido em duas partes desiguais por uma linha vertical. A parte à esquerda, mais estreita, é dividida em três partes iguais por duas linhas horizontais. As três têm fundo preto. A parte de cima tem a logo do Pistolando, branca. A do meio tem o número do episódio, em fonte sem serifa. A de baixo tem o selo da campanha O Podcast É Delas 2019, uma mão segurando um microfone, sobre um círculo azul com duas pequenas curvas azuis paralelas à borda do círculo, simulando sinal de wi-fi. Embaixo, a hashtag OPodcastÉDelas2019. A parte à direita, mais larga, é dividida em duas partes desiguais por uma linha horizontal, continuação da linha horizontal inferior da coluna esquerda. Na parte de cima, maior, uma foto em sépia de Dona Francisca, personagem do podcast. É uma foto antiga, a foto de uma foto, que está em um porta-retratos oval, do qual se vêem as bordas. Ela é uma mulher branca, de cabelos presos para trás, olhos castanhos, rosto bastante comum. Está usando roupas da época, obviamente, uma espécie de jaqueta com botões ou enfeites no colarinho e uma blusa clara, aparentemente de renda, por baixo. A foto está em tons de sépia. Na parte inferior, abaixo da linha que divide esta seção do quadrado, está uma foto da primeira página do semanário que ela dirigia e escrevia, 'O Sexo Feminino', mostrando somente o título e o resto do cabeçalho. Também está em tons de sépia.

Women of color and their songs! Playlist: 1. Hurdy Gurdy Man-Eartha Kitt (Spark) 2. Water Boy-Odetta (Top Rank International) 3. Freight Train-Elizabeth Cotten (Volume 3: When I'm Gone, Folkways Records) 4.Disrespect-Chaka Khan and Mary Blige 5. Deep Vein Trombosis-Neneh Cherry (Broken Politics) 6. The Sound Mirror, feat. June Tyson-Sun Ra and His Arkestra Taking (Enterplanetary Koncepts) 7. Ecué-Ruth Fernandez 8. Raza Pura-Lucesita Benitez Herencia Revolucionaria 9. Soy de una Raza Pura-Lucesita Benitez 10. Bemba Colorá- Celia Cruz, Música Tradicional Cubana Vol. 3 11. Miriam's Goodbye to Africa - Miriam Makeba 12. Take a Message to the Captain- Fanny 13. Bitter Sweet-Isis

On this Special Event Broadcast of WoodSongs, we're honoring one of the most important legacy's in all of recorded music… Smithsonian Folkways in celebration of their 70th anniversary. As Michael Johnathon notes, “Smithsonian Folkways is the musical treasure box of America's roots music. It is Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly and Big Bill Broonzy. It's what WoodSongs aspires to be. Our show was even based on Pete's old TV series Rainbow Quest. It's like WoodSongs is coming full circle as we present the great work of Smithsonian Folkways to a worldwide audience.” Appearing on the broadcast will be three incredible Folkways artists that continue the tradition that Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records in 1948 to document the "people's music”, carry forward. Artists appearing on the broadcast include: Dom Flemons co-founding member of the GRAMMY-winning Carolina Chocolate Drops, Grenadian-Canadian songwriter and tradition bearer Kaia Kater and Iraqi-American oud player Rahim AlHaj. Folkways' Huib Schippers, (Curator and Director) and Jeff Place (Curator and Senior Archivist) will join Michael to share the label's mission, story and cultural heritage with WoodSongs' global audience. WoodSongs Kid: Mya Hunt is a thirteen-year-old vocalist from the Appalachian community in Mt. Vernon, Kentucky.

The film "Cold War" serves as the inspiration and exploration of Polish national identity through cultural mixture and romance. Here's the playlist (also on Spinitron.com): 1. Chór Dana “Oj Dana, Dana” from Pierwsi Polscy Rewelersi on 4everMUSIC 2. Witold Lutoslawski, Pawel Lukaszewski, SWR “10 Polish Folk Songs” from 10 Polish Folk Songs 3. Nina Simone “I Loves You, Porgy” from Nina Simone and Her Friends (Remastered 2013) (1959) 4. Arthur Rubenstein “Fantasie Impromptu in C Sharp Minor, Op. 66” from 8 Polonaise 5. Bill Haley & His Comets “(We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock (Single Version)” from Salut les copains : Les pionniers du rock on Universal Music Division MCA 6. Magda Umer, Anna Maria Jopek “Dwa Serduska Cztery” from Pleiades 7. Dave Brubeck Quartet “My Favorite Things” from take five 8. Louis Jordan & His Tympani Five “IS YOUR IS OR IS YOU AIN'T MY BABY (LIVE 2015)” from LIVE AT COTTON CLUB 9. Bobby Jaspar “I remember you” from Clarinescapade on TP4 Music 10. Natasza Zylska “Bajo-Bongo” from 40 Piosenek Nataszy Zylskiej on WM Poland/WMI 11. Alexandrov Ensemble & Viktor Eliseev “Katyusha” from The Soul of Russia - The Ultimate Collection (2014) 12. Krosno Ensemble “Johnny Sits On a Chestnut Horse - Mountain Song” from Polish Folk Songs and Dances (1954) on Folkways Records. Special thanks to Marzanna Poplawska!

In 1957, Folkways Records released Album No. FC 7350, "Interview with William O. Douglas, Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court." Howard Langer, associate editor of Scholastic Teacher magazine, interviewed Douglas in his chambers in the Supreme Court building, via closed-circuit television. Douglas explains the role of the Supreme Court, especially in relation to interpreting the United States Constitution, and the mechanics of how the Court hears and decides cases. He also explains his own life experiences, his travels, and his thoughts on the relationship between the United States and the rest of the world. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

From Washington Square Park and the Gaslight Cafe to WNYC Radio and Folkways Records, New York City's cultural, artistic, and commercial assets helped to shape a distinctively urban breeding ground for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s. Folk City explores New York's central role in fueling the nationwide craze for folk music in postwar America. It involves the efforts of record company producers and executives, club owners, concert promoters, festival organizers, musicologists, agents and managers, editors and writers - and, of course, musicians and audiences.  In Folk City, authors Stephen Petrus and Ron Cohen capture the exuberance of the times and introduce readers to a host of characters who brought a new style to the biggest audience in the history of popular music. Among the savvy New York entrepreneurs committed to promoting folk music were Izzy Young of the Folklore Center, Mike Porco of Gerde's Folk City, and John Hammond of Columbia Records. While these and other businessmen developed commercial networks for musicians, the performance venues provided the artists space to test their mettle. The authors portray Village coffee houses not simply as lively venues but as incubators of a burgeoning counterculture, where artists from diverse backgrounds honed their performance techniques and challenged social conventions. Accessible and engaging, fresh and provocative, rich in anecdotes and primary sources, Folk City is lavishly illustrated with images collected for the accompanying major exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York in 2015.

Anton Schwartz is a Jazz musician and son of the late Tony Schwartz who was a pioneer of the communications revolution of the 20th Century. He is the editor of the second edition of seminal book on media: The Responsive Chord: How Media Manipulates You: What You Buy, Who You Vote for, and How You Think (Mango Publication 1973-2017)Tags: Anton Schwartz, Tony Schwartz, media, communications, hard sell, soft sell, advertising, marketing, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, jingles, indoor media, outdoor media, Folkways Records, Media, History, Social Change, Politics

Cab drivers, children’s jump rope rhymes, folk songs, dialects, controversial TV ads, interviews with blacklisted artists and writers during the McCarthy Era — Tony Schwartz was one of the great sound recordists and collectors of the 20th Century. An audio portrait of a man who spent his life exploring and influencing the world through recorded sound. It was 1947 when Tony first stepped out of his apartment in midtown Manhattan with his microphone to capture the sound of his neighborhood. He was a pioneer recordist, experimenting with microphones and jury-rigging tape recorders to make them portable (some of these recordings were first published by Folkways Records). His work creating advertising and political TV and radio commercials is legendary. The Kitchen Sisters visited Tony in his midtown basement studio in 1999. He had just finished teaching a media class at Harvard by telephone — Tony was agoraphobic and hardly ever ventured beyond his postal zone. He was there in his studio surrounded by reel to reel tape recorders, mixing consoles, framed photographs and awards — and row upon row of audio tapes in carefully labeled boxes. Tony passed away in 2008. His collection now resides in the Library of congress — 90.5 linear feet, 230 boxes, 76,345 items — some 30,000 folk songs, poems, conversations, stories and dialects from his surrounding neighborhood and 46 countries around the world.

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie (1912-67) was one of the most important folk composers in American history. This podcast features rare outtakes and stories from Smithsonian archivist Jeff Place give new meaning to the life and music of American folk icon Woody Guthrie and his relationship with Folkways Records.

Moses Asch was a steadfast and passionate advocate for underdogs who spoke up for themselves. He cared deeply about unions, civil rights, fights for freedom, and fights against oppression. On this show, his son Michael Asch explores the catalogue looking for songs that exemplify this commitment. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

On this show I feature piano recordings on Folkways Records. Piano is my favourite instrument, and there is no doubt that my father’s three record companies, Asch, Disc and then Folkways, recorded some of the very best jazz and blues pianists of the 30’s 40’s and 1950’s. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

In this program, we focus on children’s music. My father, Moe Asch, produced a huge collection of children’s recordings, but, as I hope you’ll hear, they were unique in many ways. We’ll play music from around the world, music for and from children at play, at school and even some in the workplace. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

In this program we explore the various musical sides of Pete Seeger. We will begin with Pete at Carnegie Hall getting everyone to sing together. It reminds me of those Christmas concerts of my youth, singing at the top of my voice, trying to keep sweet and on pitch. That was Pete as he is best known, leading us, helping us to understand that when we stand together we can be a powerful and harmonious collectivity. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

This show will mine the Folkways catalogue for songs about clocks and time, at least Western conceptions of time. We start with a little bluegrass reflection on clocks and then move onto all sorts of songs with references to time or time keeping. A timely program. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

This show is called “talking about and singing the blues.” The idea comes from the Folkways album “This is the Blues.” It features Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. The album was built around a radio show produced by the great Studs Turkel of Chicago’s WFMT and was recorded on May 7th, 1957. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

Nicola Sacco and Bartolmeo Vanzetti, Italian anarchists, were executed unjustly in 1927 for armed robbery and murder of two pay-clerks in Massachusetts. The case caused quite a stir at the time as for many the conviction was not for murder, but for being anarchists and immigrants. They were pardoned in 1977 by Governor Michael Dukakis. In 1947, twenty years after the execution, my father commissioned an album of original songs penned and sung by Woody Guthrie about the trial, an album Woody himself believed was his most important work. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

It was kind of a gloomy day around Michael Asch’s home when his researcher Rob Wiznura sent him an idea for a show that presented the days of the week in song. It was a blue day, so he thought Blue Monday, because it goes through the days of the week and returns to Monday, as did his idea. But Folkways didn’t record Blue Monday. But then it came to me, even better than Blue Monday was Stormy Monday as it captured the weather and also went through the days of the week. And so it was that an idea for a Folkways radio show was born. Listen as Michael presents material from “the days of the Folkways week”. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

This show is built around the song “The Ink is Black” or “Black and White” by David Arkin, Alan Arkin’s father and Earl Robinson, who for a time was the music teacher at Michael’s school in New York City. Written on the occasion of the 1954 de-segregation decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, it epitomizes the sensibility that segregation is inherently evil. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

This show is about the world of sound captured by Tony Schwartz and produced on Folkways Records. While not a household name, Schwartz is a legendary figure in the advertising business. There is another side to Tony Schwartz. It is found in his passion for recording sounds, particularly human made sounds and for New York City. The marriage of these passions is found in sound documents that range from short sound poems to lengthier sound essays. Often produced for his radio show, sometimes these found their way to become tracks on albums he made for Folkways Records. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

The theme of this show is about Smithsonian Folkways material inspired by dogs, so Michael Asch has called the show “Going to the Dogs.” The idea for the show came from Rob Wiznura, researcher on this radio series, and a guy who likes dogs, and puns about them. Michael is less committed, more of a cat man. Hear songs, sounds and documentary segments, all on the canine theme. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

This episode of Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On focuses on topical songs, mostly from a small-distribution, widely influential magazine from the 1960s and 70s and 80s called Broadside Magazine. In 1962, the first issue cost 35 cents and consisted of a meager 300 copies. But it included songs from such masters as Malvina Reynolds, Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs. Broadside brought many topical singer songwriters to the public’s attention, including, in addition to Reynolds, Ochs and Dylan; Tom Paxton, Richard Farina, Janis Ian and Buffy St. Marie, to name just a few. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

In this show we jump into the world of animal sounds and songs about animals. Of course there are many songs about animals. But Michael’s father Moe Asch also released a number of recordings of animal sounds, some straightforward recordings and others, well, you’ll hear throughout the hour. Michael will pair a song about an animal with the sounds of the animal, all from the wide ranging Folkways Records catalogue. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

This hour features bluegrass music on Folkways Records. Bluegrass is a style developed mostly in Appalachia that combines the music of Scots-Irish, African-American, jazz and blues. Michael presents a personal journey, choosing from those performances he considers 'classic.' Performers include Bill Monroe, Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, Roger Sprung, The Country Gentlemen, The Lily Brothers, Eric Weisberg, Ralph Rinzler and Mike Seeger. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series featuring the original recordings of Folkways records. Host Michael Asch is the only child of Moses and Frances Asch. He was a professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton until his retirement. However, as he says in this first program: "The show is not about me. It is about my father, and more specifically about the record company my father founded and ran for 38 years. The company’s name is Folkways Records, and, due to the foresight and perseverance of many people at the Smithsonian Institution, the company still continues as Smithsonian Folkways Records. This program features an overview of great Folkways sounds."

This time, I thought we’d wander about the collection listening to a teeny bit of the Jazz that my father recorded. Given everything he did, it is easy to forget his keen interest in jazz and of his important recordings, such as for Jazz at the Philharmonic series. But rather than get caught up in the history of Jazz or the role that my father played or make an attempt at being exhaustive with the jazz recordings, I thought we would make things simple and just goose around the collection a bit. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.

I am originally from New York City, though Canada has been my home since 1969. But that wasn’t my first time in Canada. In 1963, through a quirk, I got a ride to Toronto and attended the Mariposa folk festival. I fell in love with Canada on that trip. At that time I had no idea that Folkways had the largest collection of Canadian music available in the world. I don’t think it is still true, but there are well over a hundred Folkways records that feature Canada and Canadians. In this show we explore them. Smithsonian Folkways: Sounds to Grow On is a 26-part series hosted by Michael Asch that features the original recordings of Folkways Records.