POPULARITY
2 episodes with oakie
2 episodes with oakie
3 episodes with oakie
2 episodes with oakie
3 episodes with oakie
Send us a textWelcome to our FFF Christmas mash-up where we are going to look at the two important titles released on the 25th of December in the year of Our Lord 2024: Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers and starring Lily Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Bill Skarsgard, and Willem Dafoe up against A Complete Unknown directed by James “Walk the Line/Ford Vs. Ferrari” Mangold and starring Timothee Chalamet, Edward Norton, Elle Fanning, Maria Barbaro, Dan Fogler, and the one two punch of craggy, Oakie-faced Narcos Alums: Boyd Holbrook and Scoot McNairy.I'm your host Gino Caputi and I am joined by the lean and mean crew of Roseanne Caputi and Gordon Alex Robertson. Before we throw down with the garlic, wooden stakes, crucifixes and Gibson J-50's, the synopses:In Nosferatu the Dracula story is reimagined as a German tale where newlywed, social climbing Thomas Hutter is sent to Transylvania to sell a house to the mysterious Count Orlok. Orlok in turn knows Hutter's Wife Ellen as years before she allowed him to enter her soul. After Hutter escapes Orloks castle of horrors, Orlock relocates to Wisborg and brings evil and plague with him. With the town gone mad, it is up to Ellen to stop Orlok. In A Complete Unknown, it is 1961 and a young Bob Dylan arrives in New York City to meet his idol Woody Guthrie. Introduced to Guthrie by Pete Seeger in the hospital where Guthrie is dying, Dylan becomes immersed in the New York Folk scene, developing a relationship with folkl sensation Joan Baez. Years go by and Dylan decides to go against Seeger and the Folk community by playing an electric guitar at the famous Newport Folk Festival. Chaos ensues. So which film best exemplifies the spirit of Christmas? Find out! Watch the podcast on Youtube:https://youtu.be/M4qRzeybvd4Follow the FFF Facebook page!https://www.facebook.com/groups/fabulousfilmandfriends
Trav's got a bit of Oakie Doke about him.The brand spanking new Horizontal Season shirt is on sale now via: https://hellosport.shop/4 Pines, a brewery born in Manly and enjoyed everywhere. Vote for 4 Pines Japanese Lager in Gabs Hottest 100 Beers here: https://gabshottest100.com/au-vote/Good Day Multivitamin, it's the least you can do. Use code 'dribblers' for 20% off your order here: https://www.begoodhealth.com.au/Big Day Rosé Magnums are on sale now. Save yourself from dying of thirst via: https://hellosport.shop/Grumpy Coffee, everything to turn your frown upside down. Use code "TOM" for 10% off your order this week here: https://grumpycoffee.com.au/Neds. Whatever you bet on, Take it to the Neds Level. Visit: https://www.neds.com.au/Test CricketTravis HeadSmudgePresentsNew Jersey DronesNew PNG Rugby League TeamEzra MamDCETobler's HolidayScratchies Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
This week, the lads are joined by Emirates Lions head coach, Ivan van Rooyen, to chat about his side's blistering start to the season and the ultimate challenge that awaits them this weekend, Leinster at the Aviva. Barclay won't back down on his Sharks take in spite of their Glasgow victory and we hear from Nathan Doak, Round 5's Premier Sports Player In Focus. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Support us on Patreonhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=Awr92rDP5bllDAQAM_ZXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891407/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.patreon.com%2fuser%3fu%3d4279967/RK=2/RS=9LbiSxziFkcdPQCvqIxPtxIgZ7A-Jack Benny TV Videocasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6BDar4CsgVEyUloEQ8sWpw?si=89123269fe144a10Jack Benny Show OTR Podcast!https://open.spotify.com/show/3UZ6NSEL7RPxOXUoQ4NiDP?si=987ab6e776a7468cJudy Garland and Friends OTR Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/5ZKJYkgHOIjQzZWCt1a1NN?si=538b47b50852483dStrange New Worlds Of Dimension X-1 Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6hFMGUvEdaYqPBoxy00sOk?si=a37cc300a8e247a1Buck Benny YouTube Channelhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrOoc1Q5bllBgQA469XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891281/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.youtube.com%2f%40BuckBenny/RK=2/RS=nVp4LDJhOmL70bh7eeCi6DPNdW4-Support us on Patreonhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=Awr92rDP5bllDAQAM_ZXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891407/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.patreon.com%2fuser%3fu%3d4279967/RK=2/RS=9LbiSxziFkcdPQCvqIxPtxIgZ7A-
Support us on Patreonhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=Awr92rDP5bllDAQAM_ZXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891407/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.patreon.com%2fuser%3fu%3d4279967/RK=2/RS=9LbiSxziFkcdPQCvqIxPtxIgZ7A-Jack Benny TV Videocasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6BDar4CsgVEyUloEQ8sWpw?si=89123269fe144a10Jack Benny Show OTR Podcast!https://open.spotify.com/show/3UZ6NSEL7RPxOXUoQ4NiDP?si=987ab6e776a7468cJudy Garland and Friends OTR Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/5ZKJYkgHOIjQzZWCt1a1NN?si=538b47b50852483dStrange New Worlds Of Dimension X-1 Podcasthttps://open.spotify.com/show/6hFMGUvEdaYqPBoxy00sOk?si=a37cc300a8e247a1Buck Benny YouTube Channelhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=AwrOoc1Q5bllBgQA469XNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891281/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.youtube.com%2f%40BuckBenny/RK=2/RS=nVp4LDJhOmL70bh7eeCi6DPNdW4-Support us on Patreonhttps://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=Awr92rDP5bllDAQAM_ZXNyoA;_ylu=Y29sbwNncTEEcG9zAzEEdnRpZAMEc2VjA3Ny/RV=2/RE=1707891407/RO=10/RU=https%3a%2f%2fwww.patreon.com%2fuser%3fu%3d4279967/RK=2/RS=9LbiSxziFkcdPQCvqIxPtxIgZ7A-
A Happy Tuesday from YOUR KC Morning Show!Tuesdays on The KCMS, Hartzell and Professor Harvey Kaye Take Back America in their weekly conversation reclaiming our Radical American history.On the show today, even MORE breaking news. Hartzell and Professor Kaye break down the phony platform of the "No Labels Party"*** It is once again that time, Kansas City! Nominations are open for The Pitch Magazine's "Best Of" for 2023, and we want to be 4x champs!Make sure you nominate The KC Morning Show!VOTE HERE: https://vote.thepitchkc.com/arts-and-entertainment/best-local-podcastA Good Day To Be A Kansas Citian. Always.xoxo - @hartzell965, @holeyhearts, @harveyjkaye, & @kcmorningshow
Direct Download Fancy a frolic? Bing performs “Faery Faithe in Fluidity” on his Folkcraft Instruments custom mountain dulcimer, “Oakie.” Bing Futch is endorsed by Folkcraft Instruments, V-Picks and Zither Stands. Enjoy "Dulcimerica"? Consider supporting the program by becoming a patron!
The wonderful Michael B. stops by to talk about his upbringing in Oklahoma, his occupation, love for Broadway and his challenges getting on The Voice. Host: Nathanael Reyes Guest: Michael B. https://linktr.ee/imnathanaelreyes
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, chapter 20 - 1, Narrated by Isaac BirchallThe family goes to the coroners office to bury Grandma properly, so she is forced to settle for a pauper's grave. The family then decides to go toward the Hooverville where they are accosted by an old man for asking if they could stay there. They then start to unpack, and Tom goes on a walk to find out what's going on here and to see if he can find a job anywhere. Ma starts cooking the the Hooverville, as Pa comes back after trying to find some meat, he finds a hoard of Children that have gathered around their stew pot, all with hungry eyes. Tom and Casey have another talk about life and what's going to happen now they're in California.Rose of Sharon and Connie talk about their new lives in California, and he laments that he maybe should have stayed in Sallisaw and studied tractors. Ma talks more with the children around the pot of food. Al meets Floyd and Al helps him finish the work on his car. As a thanks Floyd lets him know about the work situation and tells him about a potential job that may be coming up.a Chevy then enters the camp, a man steps out with handbills in his hand. He walks around the camp, and everyone in intimidated. He asks if they need work, and the men ask him what kind of of pay they're offering. The man cannot answer the questions and he gets angry at them for their questions. The man calls to his car and deputy steps out. He grabs Floyd and tries to take him in for no reason at all. Then suddenly Tom steps in...After the scuffle Tom has to go and find Uncle John who has gone off to drink. He walks all along the road and eventually finds him singing drunkenly along the side of the road. He takes him back to the truck and the family has to go away. They drive along he road, and eventually find a huge group of men that are seemingly ready to lynch any "Oakie" that they come across/ The family is forced to find another route, and they come across the scene of the Hooverville camp, up in Flames.Get SurfShark and protect yourself online todayVPN: https://get.surfshark.net/aff_c?offer_id=926&aff_id=20389Antivirus: https://get.surfshark.net/aff_c?offer_id=934&aff_id=20389Get data brokers to stop selling your information with:Incogni: https://get.incogni.io/aff_c?offer_id=1219&aff_id=20389Thank you so much for listening, if you want to support the me go to any of these links :)*Social*SHOPIFY: https://the-essential-reads.myshopify.com/INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/theessentialreadsTWITTER: http://twitter.com/isaacbirchall98Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/theessentialreadsSupport the showThank you so much for listening, if you want to support the me go to any of these links :)*Social*SHOPIFY: https://the-essential-reads.myshopify.com/INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/theessentialreadsTWITTER: http://twitter.com/isaacbirchall98Ko-Fi: https://ko-fi.com/theessentialreads
John's Steinbeck's 1939 tale of an "Oakie" family who crosses Route 66 seeking to escape the Dust Bowl only to discover California isn't the paradise it's been advertised as is one of the most iconic Great American Novels in our literary history. Its impact was profound and immediate: rarely has a novel been so viciously denounced simply for promoting the belief that all Americans deserve to make a living. But the novel has also been celebrated as a testament to democratic protest, inspiring folks songs by Woody Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen that have in turn been covered by later generations of musicians such as Rage Against the Machine. This episode explores what makes the novel such a fan favorite, as well as the pros and cons of tackling politics in literature. We examine the curious role of Steinbeck's intercalary chapters, which, alternating with the story of the displaced Joad family, raise their plight to mythic levels. We also dig deep into the journalistic inspiration for the novel as well as its Hollywood legacy with John Ford's classic 1940 adaptation.
There's a little man made out of acorns living in a tree with a load of squirrels. Presumably that means the squirrels are more scared of him than he is of them. Makes you think. TWITTER: @spreadthewhimsy FACEBOOK: facebook.com/whenwagonwheelswerebigger WEBSITE: whenwagonwheelswerebigger.com W4B theme composed by John Croudy W4B theme acoustic arrangement by Joe Beckhelling
In this episode, I chat with Confident Equestrian Program (CEP) graduate Cassie. She has a background in psychology and is a dog trainer who predominately uses positive reinforcement, but before she joined CEP, she struggled to find a method of reinforcement that felt right to her to use with her horse. Together we discuss: - How she was able to find and accept a method of reinforcement that works well for her quiet but very foody Clydie x, Oakie - Her concerns about using negative reinforcement and desensitising and what her views are on that now - The struggles she was facing as someone who wants to use both positive and light negative reinforcement with her horse and the perceived judgement that can come from that - How she has been able to set Oakie up for success and prioritise their relationship whilst progressing with their training goals - Her journey towards trusting herself and realising that she is the expert of her horse - Her thoughts about CEP and so much more. To find out more about The Confident Equestrian Program please click here - https://www.confidentequestrianprogram.com/CEP To find out more about my membership, Connected please click here - https://www.confidentequestrianprogram.com/connected To connect with Cassie just click here - https://www.instagram.com/oakie_the_wonderpony/ To connect with me click here - https://www.facebook.com/felicitydavieshorsemanship https://www.instagram.com/felicitydavies_/
Dean of Students Meghan Hadley Oakcrest Class of 2006 shares how Grade Level Experiences form students throughout their journey from Middle School to graduation. Oakie dad Philip O'Beirne shares examples from his own experience of how to utilize elements of Oakcrest's educational vision to promote curiosity, virtue, and wonder in the development of your daughters.
In 1982, Patricia Shannon was smart, kind, loved animals - especially her horse, Oakie - and had big dreams and a very bright future. It all came to a violent end the night she crossed paths with Jack Limle.
Happy Tuesday from YOUR KC Morning Show!Tuesdays on The KCMS, Hartzell and Professor Harvey Kaye Take Back America in their weekly conversation reclaiming our Radical American history.On the show today, we take a look at Carol Roth's "The War on Small Business: How the Government Used the Pandemic to Crush the Backbone of America," any why we, as Progressives, MUST to be prepared to counter phony populism.Send in your questions for next week with Professor Harvey Kaye!A Good Day To Be A Kansas Citian. Always.xoxo - @hartzell965, @harveyjkaye, & @holeyhearts
This week we're getting ever so autumnal with leafy bachelor Oakie Doke! Although we're sure this must be a metaphor for something... Follow us! @queersgoneby on IG and Twitter @katebutch1 on IG, Twitter and FB @caitlinrpowell on IG, @caitlinpwll on Twitter Join us at www.patreon.com/queers With thanks to our lovely Patrons: THE JUSTINE TIER: Jess McIvor, Danielle Pollard, Emma, Reuben Robson, Cara Griffiths, Caitlin Hill THE TRACY TIER: Alice Lia Maro, Nothing is certain except Beth and taxes, Laura Kenny, Cole Scahill, Alex's Simp, Ash Find us on our YouTube channel Music: Disco Sting by Kevin MacCleod
In this episode, we step away from our usual theme to explore some worlds that many if not most have never explored! Yes we are bringing on my good friend Jack, who is also known as Oakie Doke, to talk about his new album Death By Correspondence, his favourite video game tunes, microtonal music including instrument creation and turning COVID case numbers into a scale, the emerging location music genre, music therapy, video game covers and more! 1. Trees in the Depths of the Earth - Kirby Super Star (Jun Ishikawa & Dan Miyakawa) 2. The Scale Of The Pandemic (Oakie Doke) 3. Comet Observatory 3 - Super Mario Galaxy (Koji Kondo) 4. Joseph - Death By Correspondence (Oakie Doke) 5. Last Surprise - Persona 5 (Shoji Meguro (ATLUS)) 6. Zoom Zoom - Death By Correspondence (Oakie Doke) 7. Escape From The City - Sonic Adventure Battle 2 (Ted Poley) 8. Idiot Party (Oakie Doke Cover) - Cruelty Squad (Ville Callio) 9. Bloodborne - Cleric Beast (Tsukasa Saitoh) 10. The Times - Death By Correspondence (Oakie Doke) 11. Tim Plays Drums - Crown St Part II (Wollongong) 12. Arcade - ~AJ~ (Wollongong) Bandcamp: https://oakiedoke.bandcamp.com/ Cruelty Squad Cover: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRCFIhhTS-g Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/OakieDoke Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/oakie__doke
“Let one with ears to hear, hear”
On today's show I have the privilege of chatting to Natalie about her two empowering births. Her first son she birthed at home with the support from a private midwife, and although it was an empowering experience, she looks back and can recognise moments of fear and stress throughout her pregnancy and birth. Two weeks into her pregnancy with her second child, she stumbled across a freebirthing video that ignited her innate intuition and forged the path ahead of her to freebirth her second son, Oakie. We chat about clear boundaries she put in place to protect her mental space and how she dealt with any fears that arose before she freebirthed her son at home. Instagram: @nataliealaska__
Alona Decade is an up and coming artist that mixes soul, hip hop, R&B, and jazz into her music. She recently released her debut album titled, “Indecisive,” which is now streaming on all digital platforms. Alona takes pride in her ability to write her own music, and is helping empower her audience through not only her music, but through her own merchandise line called Oakie naturals.Today we discuss the path to answering your "calling" and the consequences of not doing so. Alona talks about letting go of her fear and taking the leap to pursuing her dreams. She also walks us through her creative of process. The interview starts here: 11:13 Find Alona here: https://www.instagram.com/thealonadecade/ Find Dalton here:https://www.instagram.com/dmclaughlin93/http://www.daltonmclaughlin.com/ Find Issac Here:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSVIivmh4isdo7w7zOm7O-ghttps://www.instagram.com/theissachernandez/http://issachernandez.com/
Oral Arguments from the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals
Oral argument argued before the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on or about 11/17/2020
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.
Welcome to the 37th episode of Yesterday's Capers. Every week, Abdullah Moallim will be reviewing and looking back at some of the most memorable and well known tv shows and cartoons.
1,2,3,4,5 did we watch The Tweenies, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 yes we did and never again. Oakie Doke is a friendly foke too to be fair. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Hannah Oakie, recent graduate of Epsilon Theta at the University of Northern Iowa shared her path to a sales career in the chapter's Top Gold presentation at the 2019 PSE National Convention. One judge, Gamma Nu alum, Brian Andersen, could particularly relate to the stigma that some relate to a sales career. Together, with new co-host, Daniel Schultz, we talk about Hannah's experience and how she has changed the stereotype of sales. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In 2018, the barrel racing horse of the decade honor was awarded to none other than Lisa Lockhart's, An Oakie with Cash, or as we all know him..."Louie". We chat with Lisa about this prestigious honor, what's it like to own and ride Louie, her training philosophy, and travel tips. All this and more can be found in Episode 1 of Season 2!
Oakcrest parent Amy Miller—mom to two current Oakies, one alumna and one future Oakie—talks about how she made the decision to send her daughters to Oakcrest and why she's so happy that she did.
Larry O'Connor on reaching out to Andrew Breitbart to join his new website~ "And I reached out to him and said, 'Listen, I'm not in TV or film, I'm in theater but I'm conservative and I have stories to tell,' and he immediately responded and said, 'Let's see what you can write,' and I did some writing for him and he published me right at the beginning . . . and then I started doing this live stream radio show on the internet that was on the Breitbart sites and that got a lot of attention and I ended up getting a lot of high profile guests on my show." Larry O'Connor - Talk Radio Host - 105.9 FM & AM 630 WMAL with Andy Ockershausen in studio interview Andy Ockershausen: This is Andy Ockershausen and this is Our Town, and we have a unique opportunity today to talk to a unique individual because he works at this radio station where we're doing our recording. In fact, he is the radio station. Larry O'Connor, a man- Larry O’Connor: Yeah, everybody was waiting to go, "Oh, my God. They got Chris Plante." Andy Ockershausen: -who knows it all. Larry O’Connor: This is great." Andy Ockershausen: Oakie. I love that name. Oakie and Ockee. We could do a show. Larry O’Connor: You gave me permission to call you Ockee. Will you forgive me for a minute, Andy, because honestly, this is going to be so weird for me because, you know, I usually ask the questions? Andy Ockershausen: I know. Larry O’Connor: Let's face it. You're a much more fascinating person that I am. While we're doing this, I might end up asking you questions. Andy Ockershausen: Well, ask anything you want, I don't have to answer. Larry O’Connor: Well, where'd you get that sweater because that is a really cool sweater vest. Andy Ockershausen: Isn't that nice? I don't know where I got it, it's an old sweater, but I'm an old sweater to because I perspire. But I'm working on it. Larry O'Connor, Oakie. What a career you have had, when I read your resume, I am stunned that you've done so much and you're still a young man. Larry O’Connor: Well, thanks. Andy Ockershausen: And so you must owe a lot of money or people owe you a lot of money because you've had a lot of jobs. Larry O’Connor: Exactly. Andy Ockershausen: But Detroit, Michigan is a long way from southern California. From Detroit, Michigan to Southern California Larry O’Connor: It is, and thank God for the internet, I still have brothers in Michigan and they get to listen all the time and- Andy Ockershausen: It's still snowing there, you know that? Larry O’Connor: It is, yes, I believe the Tigers' game will be snowed out on July fourth. Everybody says, "Oh, of course, you moved out of Detroit because of all the violence and the poverty and the economy," no, it's the weather. It's absolutely the weather, that's the only reason to get out of that place, because Michigan's cool. Andy Ockershausen: Corona del Mar. Larry O’Connor: Yeah, Corona del Mar, this beautiful subdivision in Newport Beach, California, what shift. Imagine being in the Detroit suburbs, Andy, in the eighties and then suddenly I wake up the next morning and I'm going to school at the beach at Corona del Mar high school, it was amazing. Andy Ockershausen: You're walking by the Balboa Bay Club everyday, you've got access to the slot. Larry O’Connor: Yeah. Andy Ockershausen: We have a very dear friend that we lost last year, died, he lived in Newport Beach and he was, John Kluge's partner with MetroMedia. John Kluge - The Shubert Organization and MetroMedia Larry O’Connor: MetroMedia, yeah. He was on the board of the company I ended up working with, The Shubert Organization. Andy Ockershausen: Bob Bennett was? Larry O’Connor: No, Kluge was, on the board of the Shubert Organization which owns all the Broadway theaters. Andy Ockershausen: Kluge somehow, he was a food broker here in Washington. Larry O’Connor: What's that how? Andy Ockershausen: And a friend of his, said there was a station available here so they talked J...
Hello, I am Kevin McCallister from the movie Home Alone. I grew up and am currently an unemployed surveyor. In my spare time I like to listen to podcasts about rats, Oakie Doke, the Tomb Raider's Monzo card and why Gav is a burglar in waiting. That is why I endorse Regular Features.
Oakcrest was featured in an exclusive interview on WMET 1160 AM Guadalupe Radio. We heard from Mary T. Ortiz, Head of School; Cecilia Márquez, Academic Dean representing academic life; and Mrs. Kelly McGiffin, current parent speaking from a parents point of view and finally, Clare Meehan, Class of 2011 speaking on what it mean to be an Oakie and how it prepared her for life in and after college. We are proud to share this "Portrait of Oakcrest".
Oakie Learned About Ibiza From A Famous Transexual // When the books are written about the history of acid house—and there have been several already—one key fact seems to elude authors as they regurgitate the old story of how Paul Oakenfold and friends visited Ibiza, took some ecstasy, and came back to kick off the Summer of Love. "I was working for a record company and they want [John Waters conspirator] Divine," he tells the Rave Curious podcast. "That's how I really discovered Ibiza." The rest, as they say, is history, with Oakenfold returning to London to bring that white island magic to the UK. From there he rocketed to the top of the DJ hierarchy, first working with Madchester stars the Happy Mondays, and eventually opening for U2 and Madonna on stadium tours. You even have Oakie to thank for the Las Vegas DJ craze, which he may have started in 2008 with a weekly gig at The Palms. Throughout it all, he's seen a lot and shares plenty on the Rave Curious Podcast, including his new Generations concept, celebrating 30 years of UK club culture and his new residency in an American city you'd probably never guess. Find out by pressing play.
Finally Friday! We offer a Sweet Deal with The MOST, Amy gets told off in a voice mail, Oakie the Acorn advances in the Mascot Madness, and we visit with the ladies from Bridge Street! Hear it all ON DEMAND, powered by Empower Federal Credit Union! 00:00 - Buckle in... 02:57 - Update 06:25 - Thursday night drama 09:23 - Guess the Year! 12:33 - Update 16:04 - Hollywood Highlights 1 21:25 - Update 25:50 - Malarkey 30:47 - Go Oakie the Acorn! 33:50 - Update 37:57 - Short lived spin-offs 42:59 - Sweet Deal The MOST 51:19 - CNY Indoor Garage & Craft Sale 53:13 - Update 58:20 - Sistina Giordano & TeNesha Murphy from Bridge Street 71:23 - Shopping in the States 74:56 - Hollywood Highlights 2 79:53 - Coming up next week/BYE!!!
Trevor Guthrie came back in a big way in 2014 thanks to his huge collaboration with Armin van Buuren. Ever since, the former soulDecision vocalist has continued his upward trajectory with his solo career, including more cool collabs in various genres. Mike had a chance to speak with Trevor about maintaining that momentum, his new musical identity, his latest single, "Wanted," and more. Plus, the Canadian industry has been abuzz about a cool idea coming from our smallest province. For the past several years, Music PEI has been hosting Showcase PEI, a unique event that brings industry influencers from around the world to the island to drive mutually beneficial business opportunities. Executive Director Rob Oakie gives us insight into this year's edition of the event, and how the model could be applied elsewhere.
This week's episode we were joined by a very distinguished gentleman, who just so happens to be the Director of Music PEI, Mr. Rob Oakie.
© 2020-2025 Ivy Podcast Discovery LLC
