Podcast appearances and mentions of Peggy Seeger

  • 102PODCASTS
  • 158EPISODES
  • 59mAVG DURATION
  • 1MONTHLY NEW EPISODE
  • May 1, 2025LATEST
Peggy Seeger

POPULARITY

20172018201920202021202220232024


Best podcasts about Peggy Seeger

Latest podcast episodes about Peggy Seeger

Radio Crystal Blue
Radio Crystal Blue 4/30/25 part 2

Radio Crystal Blue

Play Episode Listen Later May 1, 2025 113:50


Michael Sarian "Straight Trash" - Esquina www.michaelsarian.comEilane Amherd "Pinot Ou Fendant" - La Degustation www.elianeperforms.com Lil' Red And the Rooster "Same Old Blues" (featuring Bobby Floyd) www.lilredrooster.com Deb Seymour "Tesla Trip" - Sometimes You Gotta Wear Boots www.debseymourmusic.com Megan Bee "Used To Be" - Cottonwood www.meganbeemusic.com The Pinkerton Raid "Holocene" - Jagged Vacance: Winter Songs By Other People www.pinkertonraid.com **********************Some of the official showcase artist at this year's Southeast Regional Folk Alliance event in May, www.serfa.org :HuDost "Sol Searcher (Light Upon The Water)" - The Monkey In The Crown www.hudost.com Arielle Silver "Riverdock at Sunset" - Watershed www.ariellesilver.com Mean Mary "Bring Down The Rain" - Woman Creature (Portrait Of A Woman, Part 2) www.meanmary.comTim Easton "Sliver Of Light" www.timeaston.com **************************Dan Whitaker "Oh Cayenne" - I Won't Play By Your Rules www.danwhitaker.com Seth Mulder & Midnight Run "Gilgarry's Glen" - www.midnightrunbluegrass.com Golden Shoals "Everybody's Singing" - s/t www.goldenshoals.comGordie Tentrees & Jaxon Haldane "Nowhere Fast" - Double Takes https://www.tentrees.caTeri Rane "Small Steps" - Goldenrod www.tenirane.com Will Branch "One False Move" - Face The Day www.willbranch.com Peggy Seeger "The Puzzle" - First Farewell www.peggyseeger.comHeather Pierson "Up Here In The Mountains" - Back To The Light www.heatherpierson.com Closing music: Geoffrey Armes "Vrikshashana (The Tree)" - Spirit Dwelling

Narrated
302: The River Has Roots

Narrated

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 1, 2025 13:18


This time we discussed The River Has Roots, written by Amal El-Mohtar and narrated by Gem Carmella. We also discussed the included novelette “John Hollowback and the Witch”. The River Has Roots [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby]   ”Kilkelly” by Peter Jones  ”Ballad of Spring Hill” by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl  ”Diner” by Martin Sexton  The Greenhollow Duology (Series): Silver in the Wood  [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby]   The Kingston Cycle (Series): Witchmark [Libro.fm] / [Overdrive/Libby] Babel [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby] The Book of Witches: An Anthology [Libro.fm] / [OverDrive/Libby]

Composer of the Week
Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953)

Composer of the Week

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 14, 2025 101:19


Between new sounds and old songs, Kate Molleson shares the story of Ruth Crawford-SeegerRuth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) had multiple lives. As Ruth, she was an aspiring poet and teacher, who longed to become a mother. Crawford the composer wrote some of the most daring pages of 20th-century American music, granting her a place among the group of the 'Ultra-Modernists'. And, as the matriarch of the Seeger dynasty, she collected and arranged countless pieces from treasures of the folk tradition. With Kate Molleson, discover the extraordinary life and work of a major American composer, in a story of creative experimentations, of family bonds, and most of all, of joy in music-making, accompanied by the memories of Crawford's daughter and folk legend, Peggy Seeger.Music Featured: Little Waltz Five Songs to Poems by Carl Sandburg (1, Home Thoughts; 2, White Moon) Theme and Variations Selection from American Folk Songs for Children Diaphonic Suite No 2 for bassoon and cello Kaleidoscopic Changes on an Original Theme, Ending with a Fugue Diaphonic Suite No 3 for Flute Whirligig Preludes for Piano Caprice Sonata for Violin and Piano Trad: Prisoner Blues Music for Small Orchestra Marion Bauer: Four Piano Pieces Selection from 19 American Folk Songs for piano Three Songs to poems by Carl Sandburg Diaphonic Suite No 4 for oboe and violoncello Three Chants for Female Chorus String Quartet Diaphonic Suite No 1 for oboe Selection from Animal Folk Songs for Children Preludes for Piano Two Ricercare to poems by Hsi Tseng Tsiang Peggy Seeger: How I Long For Peace Selection from American Folk Songs for Christmas Andante for strings Trad: "New River Train” Trad: "Midnight Special" Trad: "Irene (Goodnight, Irene)" Charles Seeger: John Hardy Piano Study in Mixed Accents Suite No 1, for five wind instruments and piano Elizabeth Cotten: "Freight Train" Rissolty, Rossolty Piano Sonata Diaphonic Suite for two clarinets Piano Study in Mixed Accents (Version 3) Suite for Wind Quintet Five Canons, for piano Peggy Seeger: "Everything Changes"Presented by Kate Molleson Produced by Julien Rosa for BBC Audio Wales and WestFor full track listings, including artist and recording details, and to listen to the pieces featured in full (for 30 days after broadcast) head to the series page for Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0028k1vAnd you can delve into the A-Z of all the composers we've featured on Composer of the Week here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/3cjHdZlXwL7W41XGB77X3S0/composers-a-to-z

Radio Crystal Blue
Radio Crystal Blue 1/16/25 part 2

Radio Crystal Blue

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 16, 2025 155:57


*************************** ALBUM FOCUS: Cultural Crossroads, from Putumayo World Music www.putumayo.com Experience the magic of international artistic collaborations with Cultural Crossroads. The album weaves a rich tapestry of global sounds, proving music's ability to travel and unite people of different backgrounds and traditions. Sousou & Maher Cissoko (Senegal/Sweden) - "Wula" (Putumayo Version) SSLH Collective[Safeguard Sudan's Living Heritage (Sudan)]" "Rajeen Tany (We'll Return Again)" Ryan Tennis with El Caribefunk & Bakithi Kumalo (USA/Colombia/South Africa) "Morena" ************************* These artists are appearing in the upcoming Light Of Day series of concerts in NJ www.lightofday.org Jo Wymer "The Shoebox" - SLG www.jowymer.com Pete Mancini "She Don't Care" - Silent Troubadour: The Songs Of Gene Clark www.petemancini.com SONiA disappear fear "Broken Film" - Broken Film www.soniadisappearfear.com Deni Bonet "Primal Dream" - Bright Shiny Objects www.denibonet.com *********************** Sugar Bones "Leave The Light On" - s/t www.sugarbonesband.com Denise La Grassa "The Door" - Sundown Rising www.deniselagrassa.com Professor Louie & The Crowmatix "Fall Back On Me" - Strike Up The Band www.professorlouie.com Ed Alstrom "Slow Blues" - Flee Though None Pursue www.edalstrom.com The Pinkerton Raid "Holocene" - Jagged Vacance: Winter Songs By Other People, Volume 1 www.pinkertonraid.com Goldpine "About Tomorrow" - Two www.goldpinemusic.com Gasoline Lollipops "Freedom Don't Come Easy" www.gasolinelollipops.com March To August "Perfect Son" - Songs Inspired By Witness www.marchtoaugust.com Karan Casey "Nine Apples Of Gold" - Nine Apples Of Gold www.karancasey.com Peggy Seeger "How I Long For Peace" - First Farewell www.peggyseeger.com *************************** The Necks "Imprinting" - The Necks www.thenecks.com Tragedy Ann "Velveteen" - Heirlooms www.tragedyannmusic.com Julian Taylor "100 Proof" - Live At TD Music Hall www.juliantaylormusic.ca Doug Alan Wilcox "Walkin In The Dark" www.dawilcox.com John McCutcheon "At The End Of The Day" = Field Of Stars www.folkmusic.com Johnsmith "Where's The World Goin' To" - Backroads www.johnsmithmusic.com Closing: Geoffrey armes "Vrikshashana (The Tree)" - Spirit Dwelling www.geoffreyarmes.com Running time: 5 hours 13 minutes I hold deed to this audio's usage, which is free to share with specific attribution, non-commercial and non-derivation rules. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Sing Out! Radio Magazine
Episode 2359: 25-02 Haul Away Boys

Sing Out! Radio Magazine

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 8, 2025 58:30


There has been a resurgence of interest in maritime songs and shanties since a TikTok video took the world by storm a while back. This week on the Magazine we begin a two-part feature focusing on maritime songs and shanties. We'll hear music from The Fisherman's Friends, Hauler, Jimmy Rankin, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and of course, Stan Rogers. We'll haul away boys … this week on The Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysDonogh Hennessey / “Hornpipe:Home By the Fire” / Masters of the Irish Guitar / ShanachieThe Fisherman's Friends / “Keep Hauling” /Music from the Movie Fisherman's Friends / IslandHauler / “Whalebone” / Hauler / Self-producedThe Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem / “Haul Away Joe” / In Person at Carnegie Hall / ColumbiaGreat Big Sea / “Ferryland Sealer” / Turn / SireBett Padgett / “Carrol M. Deering” / Hatteras: if a Lighthouse Could Speak.../ Ceilidh's MusicMcKasson & McDonald / “Bay of Biscay” / Harbour / Self-producedEwan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, A.L. Lloyd & Chorus / “Blood-Red Roses” / Classic Maritime Music / Smithsonian FolkwaysJohn Doyle / “Reels:The Gooseberry Bush-The Sailor's Return” / Masters of the Irish Guitar / ShanachieJimmy Rankin / “Haul Away the Whale” / Moving East / True NorthLou Killen / “The Flying Cloud” / Blow the Man Down / TopicVarious / “Sitting in the Stern of a Boat” / Lewis & Clark Original Soundtrack / RCAStan Rogers / “Northwest Passage” / Northwest Passage / Fogarty's CoveMorrigan / “Bully in the Alley” / Classic Maritime Music / Smithsonian FolkwaysPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Basic Folk
The Sound of Women's Voices: A Shorty Bonus on a Weird Ass Day

Basic Folk

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 6, 2024 16:34


I woke up today and my wife told me the news. I went for a walk in the woods and found myself thinking about We Shall Overcome and singing it by myself surrounded by fallen leaves and pine trees. I put on Dawn Landes' new album: The Liberated Woman's Songbook, I thought about women of the past and how they found their strength. I started posting clips of women who appeared on Basic Folk this year. As I was listening, I wanted to put these voices together all in one spot because I found strength and comfort here. I hope it helps you, wherever you are, whoever you voted for.Take care today. We'll be here for you. Featuring voices of: lizzie no, Sarah Jarosz, Aoife O'Donovan, Dawn Landes, Amy Helm, Missy Raines, Peggy Seeger, Michaela Anne, Ana Egge, Denitia, Liv Greene, Kaïa Kater, Humbird, Leyla McCalla.Feedback? Email us: basicfolkpod@gmail.com

Coming From Left Field (Video)
“Marx's Ethical Vision” with Vanessa Wills

Coming From Left Field (Video)

Play Episode Listen Later Oct 1, 2024 58:00


Dr. Vanessa Wills is a political philosopher, ethicist, educator, and activist based in Washington, DC. She is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at George Washington University. Her areas of specialization are moral, social, and political philosophy, nineteenth-century German philosophy (especially Karl Marx), and the philosophy of race.  She is a founding editor of Spectre Journal, a biannual journal of Marxist theory, strategy, and analysis. In her book Marx's Ethical Vision, she presents novel Marxist positions in various philosophical debates and covers a wide range of Karl Marx's writings while giving a holistic account of his views throughout his life. Order the book: Marx's Ethical Vision by Vanessa Christina Wills https://www.kingsbookstore.com/book/9780197688144 Spectre Journal https://spectrejournal.com/ Vanessa, the Jazz Singer! From Indiana With Love-Feme (feat. Vanessa Wills) https://youtu.be/4Ssr_K3EbIA Mentioned by Greg: Rhiannon Giddens new version of Peggy Seeger's classic: https://youtu.be/lmwwqHmwZq8   Greg's Blog: http://zzs-blg.blogspot.com/ Pat's Substack: https://patcummings.substack.com/about   #VanessaWills#VanessaChristinaWills#AnalyticalMarxism#MarxsEthcialVision#CommunistManifesto#MoralObjectivism#Philosophy#Alienation#HistoricalMaterialst#Captalism#Spectre#SpectreJournal#CapitalismCritcism#MoralPhilosphy#GeorgeWashingtonUniveity#EthicsAngelaDavis#PatCummings#GregGodels#ZZBlog#ComingFromLeftField#ComingFromLeftFieldPodcast#zzblog#mltoday

Radio Crystal Blue
Radio Crystal Blue 9/20/24 part 2

Radio Crystal Blue

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 25, 2024 136:32


Mary Ocher "Museum Of Childhood Terror" - Your Guide To Revolution www.maryocher.com Sundown47 "Murray Avenue" - Along For The Ride www.sundown47.com Seaside Tryst "Wait By The Payphone" - Different Places www.seasidetryst.com Sugar Bones "I Feel Feelings" www.sugarbonesband.com Shannon Curtis "Take It If You Want It" - Good To Me www.shannoncurtis.net Fiona Moonchild "Cataclysm" - Sweets Of Reason https://cruisinrecords.com/fiona-moonchild/ Sun Blood Stories "Brand New Ghost Town" www.sunbloodstories.com Quinn The Brain "Burn Out" - Bleed Me www.quinnthebrain.com Zookraught ""Not 4 U" - https://www.facebook.com/zookraught/ ********************* ALBUM FOCUS: Si Kahn & George Mann: Labor Day: A Tribute To Hard-Working People Everywhere www.sikahn.com Kathy Mattea "Lawrence Jones" Peggy Seeger "Aragon Mill" Si Kahn 'Standing At The End Of The Line" **************************** Vaneese Thomas "Miles From Home" - Stories in Blue www.vaneesethomas.com Trevor B Power "Are We Ever Free" - Mystery www.trevorbpower.com Suzanne's Band "Hielo y Fuego" www.suzannesband.com Ben Arsenault "Flowers At Your Feet" - https://www.facebook.com/BenArsenaultMusic/ Chris Gostling "Michigan Nights" - Forest City Town Country https://www.chrisgostlingmusic.com/ Cuff The Duke "Stranded Here" - Breaking Dawn www.cufftheduke.ca ************** Elaine Romanelli "Red Tail" - The Hour Before www.elaineromanelli.com Rachael Sage "Breathe" - Reimagined (acoustic) www.rachaelsage.com Joselyn & Don “Choose Love" (featuring Chris Pierce) www.joselynwilkinson.com The Magnolia Janes 'Speed Of Life" - The Light Years www.themagnoliajanes.com Tret Fure "No Place Like Home" - Lavender Moonshine www.tretfure.com Cosy Sheridan & Charlie Koch "Demeter In The Underworld" - My Fence & My Neighbor www.cosysheridan.com Rebecca Frazier "Seasons" - Boarding Windows in Paradises www.rebeccafrazier.com Julian Loida "Gymnopedia No. 1" - Giverny www.julianloida.com Closing: Chicha Libre "Gnossienne No. 1" - Sonido Amazonico --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

Sing for Science
LABS: Peggy Seeger and Prof. Tim Coulson on Eco-Feminism

Sing for Science

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 28, 2024 68:18


Recorded Live at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford, England on August 8th, 2024. Folk icon Peggy Seeger talks with Oxford University Biology Professor Tim Coulson about her experience as feminist, ecologist, activist, mother, musician, Seeger and more. Eco Feminism can be defined as a branch of feminism and political ecology that explores the connections between women and nature. The theory argues that the oppression of women and the degradation of our natural environment are linked and caused by patriarchal, capitalist systems. Further, ecofeminist theory calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Professor Coulson provides compelling context from scholarship to further amplify these ideas including description of pre-patriarchal societies, the importance of educating women in developing countries and more.

Basic Folk
Peggy Seeger spills Folk Feminist Tea with Dawn Landes, ep. 270

Basic Folk

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2024 70:30


Editor's note: For this episode, we invited our friend Dawn Landes to interview Peggy Seeger. Dawn was the perfect choice to interview the feminist folk icon. She recently joined us on a special episode with Aoife O'Donovan to discuss their feminist-themed new albums. We're thrilled to welcome Dawn back as guest host!I can't believe it took me 40 years to come across Peggy Seeger's music. I'm a little mad about this honestly, and have been trying to make up for lost time by diving deep into her songs and her story. I've been a fan of her older brother, Pete Seeger since I was a kid but didn't realize the depth of talent and reach in the Seeger family …they are truly Folk Royalty! Peggy Seeger is the daughter of a celebrated modernist composer and a musicologist who grew up with people like Alan Lomax and Elizabeth Cotten hanging out in her family home. At 89 years old she's released 24 solo recordings and been a part of over a hundred more. She's built her career on wit, incredible musicianship and unflappable activism.On this episode of Basic Folk, I am honored to talk with Peggy Seeger about her beginnings in feminism, her decades-long partnership with Scottish singer Ewan MacColl, the creation of the BBC Radio Ballads, the importance of hope and her dream tattoos! She even sang us a song from memory that I doubt she had sung in many years. Peggy is a repository of traditional songs and continues to tour and play music with her family as she's done throughout her whole life. Although she claims that she doesn't write anthems, Seeger's songs have become synonymous with women's rights and environmental activism. Coming from a woman who once sang her defense in a courtroom, we should all take Peggy's advice…“Something wrong? Make a song!”--- Dawn LandesFollow Basic Folk on social media: https://basicfolk.bio.link/Sign up for Basic Folk's newsletter: https://bit.ly/basicfolknewsHelp produce Basic Folk by contributing: https://basicfolk.com/donate/Interested in sponsoring us? Contact BGS: https://bit.ly/sponsorBGSpodsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

This is Love
You Can't Promise to Love Forever

This is Love

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 5, 2024 43:28


Folk singer Peggy Seeger and her partner, Irene Pyper-Scott, live on different continents. Peggy has written dozens of poems and songs for Irene, and one for the man she spent 33 years with before that – Ewan MacColl. “He loved me the way I loved Irene.” Ewan MacColl wrote the famous love song – “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” – about Peggy in 1957. Peggy Seeger's book is First Time Ever: A Memoir. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2BmMZr5 Want to listen to This is Love ad-free? Sign up for Criminal Plus – you'll get This is Love, Criminal, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery ad-free. Plus, behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal and other exclusive benefits. Learn more and sign up here. We also make Criminal and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Paroxis Histérica
T6. E10. Peggy Seeger: la inmortal mujer invisible

Paroxis Histérica

Play Episode Listen Later May 9, 2024 46:37


Décimo episodio de la sexta temporada dedicado a la grandiosa Peggy Seeger, una artista referencia para el country que gracias a una carrera prolífica nos ha dejado un legado musical invaluable y muy importante para la lucha de los movimientos sociales de mujeres.

P2 Dokumentär
Libba – gitarrvirtuosen som återuppstod

P2 Dokumentär

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 13, 2024 57:00


I början av 1900-talet skrev en liten flicka från North Carolina en låt som 50 år senare stals och gjorde stor succé. Det här är berättelsen om vad som faktiskt hände och vem Elizabeth Libba Cotten verkligen var. Lyssna på alla avsnitt i Sveriges Radio Play. Berättelsen om folkgitarristen Elizabeth “Libba” Cottens (1893–1987) liv och öde har gått under den kommersiella radarn i flera decennier, trots hennes stora avtryck på den internationella musikscenen.Libba var vänsterhänt och som barn lärde hon sig därför att spela gitarr upp och ner. Men hon blev tvungen att lägga musicerandet på hyllan tillsammans med en handfull egenkomponerade låtar – däribland den tongivande folkklassikern “Freight Train”. Musik som enligt alla odds torde stanna på Libbas hemort Chapel Hill i sydöstra USA.Men ett halvt sekel senare tappar en flicka bort sin mamma mitt i julrushen på ett varuhus – något som ska komma att få oanade konsekvenser.Hösten 2023 gav sig musikern och dokumentärmakaren Catharina Jaunviksna av till USA för att resa i Libbas fotspår och ta reda på vem hon verkligen var, medan det ännu finns människor kvar i livet som kände henne.Medverkande:Alice Gerrard - musiker, folklorist och vän till Libba. Peggy Seeger - musiker, folklorist och vän till Libba. Brenda Evans - Libbas barnbarnsbarn. Yasmin Williams - musiker och fan. Dom Flemons - musiker, fan och folklorist. Jeff Place - senior archivist, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. Robert Searing - historiker och curator, Onondaga Historical Association Museum. En dokumentär från 2024 skapad, producerad och mixad av Catharina Jaunviksna, produktionsbolaget RITE.Arkivmaterial från: Southern Folklife Collection - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, “Me & Stella” (33mm film by Geri Ashur, 1978), Library of Congress, Seattle Folklore Society, Incl. the Ralph Rinzler & Alan Lomax archives.

jarasaseasongi - muzyczne historie
Piosenki z "Radio Ballad"

jarasaseasongi - muzyczne historie

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 7, 2024 34:27


Podcast Jarasaseasongi powstał niechcący, przy okazji tworzenia audycji dla Radia Danielka. A Radio Danielka skończyło już 3 lata. Na tę okoliczność pasowałoby więc w Jarasaseasongach o radiu. Już kiedyś opowiadałem o prekursorach nowoczesnego radiowego dziennikarstwa, dziś opowiem więcej o ich rewolucyjnej audycji. Nasze radio – Danielkę robi grupa zapaleńców, profesjonalistów i amatorów choćby takich jak ja. Dzięki rewolucji technologicznej możemy to robić bez potężnego zaplecza technicznego. Ha, albo może właśnie z potężnym zapleczem… zaklętym w miniaturowych, prostych w obsłudze urządzeniach. Może właśnie tak. Ale kształt naszych audycji to nie tylko technologia, to suma naszych pasji i doświadczeń pokoleń radiowców, doświadczeń zebranych, podpatrzonych, no i przede wszystkim podsłuchanych. Nie musieliśmy wyważać drzwi i wymyślać koła, zrobili to za nas inni. Mi szczególnie bliskie są dokonania najbardziej folkowej pary wszech czasów Peggy Seeger i Ewana MacColla. Otóż pod koniec lat 50 ubiegłego wieku Ewan i Peggy, nawiązali współpracę z angielskim producentem radiowym Charlsem Parkerem. Postanowili stworzyć dla BBC cykl audycji poświęconych różnym aspektom życia na wyspach brytyjskich. Na przestrzeni 6 lat powstało osiem audycji o różnorodnej tematyce. Cykl nosił nazwę „Radio Ballad” i zapisał się na stałe na kartach historii dziennikarstwa. Nasi folkowcy wpadli na pomysł, żeby połączyć w jednej audycji cztery fundamentalne elementy dotąd nie wykorzystywane w komplecie. Mianowicie: muzykę instrumentalną, efekty dźwiękowe, piosenki i nagrane wypowiedzi zwyczajnych ludzi. Dziś nie brzmi to zaskakująco ale w latach 50 była to rewolucja. Samo połączenie różnych form nie było może szczególnie zaskakujące, nowością był sposób emitowania wypowiedzi bohaterów. W tamtych czasach w audycjach radiowych wypowiedzi zwyczajnych ludzi były transkrybowane a następnie czytane przez zawodowych lektorów. MacColl, Seeger i Parker, do każdej audycji gromadzili setki taśm z nagranymi rozmowami …spośród nich wybierali najciekawsze i, uwaga w ORYGINALE puszczali w eter. W tamtych latach - szok. Powstały programy autentyczne, zabawne, pouczające i poetyckie, w których poszczególne elementy przenikały się nawzajem. Zatem o Radio Ballad opowiadam w dzisiejszym podcaście. Ale, jako że Jarasaseasongi to przecież rzecz o piosenkach, to posłuchamy piosenek z tego cyklu. Wszakże w Radio Ballad śpiewane były utwory napisane specjalnie do każdej audycji przez Ewana MacColla. Posłuchajcie zatem jak piosenki Ewana z rewolucyjnego cyklu audycji śpiewają inni artyści.   Audycja zawiera utwory: “Song of the Iron Road”, wyk. Luke Kelly i The Dubliners, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl “Just a Note”, wyk. Karan Casey, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl “Niech zabrzmi pieśń ”, wyk. Cztery Refy, sł. Ewan MacColl, tłum. Jerzy Rogacki muz. Ewan MacColl “On the North Sea Holes”, “The Big Hewer”, wyk. David Coffin, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl “Morrissey and the Russian Sailor”, wyk. Seán 'ac Dhonnchadha, sł. i muz. trad. “Moving On Song”, wyk. MacColl Brothers, Chris Wood i Karine Polwart, sł. i muz. Ewan MacColl #music #history #folk #szanty #shanties #shanty #żeglarstwo #muzyka #historia #historie #piosenki

Sing Out! Radio Magazine
Episode 2315: 24-10 Haul Away, Pt.1

Sing Out! Radio Magazine

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 6, 2024 58:30


There has been a resurgence of interest in maritime songs and shanties since social media videos have spread out into the world. In a nod to popular taste, this week we begin a two-part feature focusing on maritime songs and shanties. We'll hear music from The Fisherman's Friends, Hauler, Jimmy Rankin, The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem and Stan Rogers. We'll haul away together … this week on the Sing Out! Radio Magazine.Pete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian FolkwaysDonogh Hennessey / “Hornpipe:Home By the Fire” / Masters of the Irish Guitar / ShanachieThe Fisherman's Friends / “Keep Hauling” /Music from the Movie Fisherman's Friends / IslandHauler / “Whalebone” / Hauler / Self-producedThe Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem / “Haul Away Joe” / In Person at Carnegie Hall / ColumbiaGreat Big Sea / “Ferryland Sealer” / Turn / SireBett Padgett / “Carrol M. Deering” / Hatteras: if a Lighthouse Could Speak.../ Ceilidhe's MusicMcKasson & McDonald / “Bay of Biscay” / Harbour / Self-producedEwan MacColl, Peggy Seeger, A.L. Lloyd & Chorus / “Blood-Red Roses” / Classic Maritime Music / Smithsonian FolkwaysJohn Doyle / “Reels:The Gooseberry Bush-The Sailor's Return” / Masters of the Irish Guitar / ShanachieJimmy Rankin / “Haul Away the Whale” / Moving East / True NorthLou Killen / “The Flying Cloud” / Blow the Man Down / TopicVarious / “Sitting in the Stern of a Boat” / Lewis & Clark Original Soundtrack / RCAStan Rogers / “Northwest Passage” / Northwest Passage / Fogarty's CoveMorrigan / “Bully in the Alley” / Classic Maritime Music / Smithsonian FolkwaysPete Seeger / “If I Had A Hammer”(excerpt) / Songs of Hope and Struggle / Smithsonian Folkways

Folk on Foot
Sandra Kerr (and Nancy Kerr) in Warkworth

Folk on Foot

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 19, 2024 59:13


The beloved baggy cloth cat Bagpuss is fifty years old in 2024. We celebrate his birthday by visiting Sandra Kerr at her home in the Northumberland village of Warkworth. Sandra co-wrote and arranged the music for the series and provided some of the voices. In her cosy music room she shows us her Bagpuss souvenirs, reflects on the show's enduring appeal and sings one of the songs. Then, on a walk along the River Coquet, Sandra looks back to the folk revival of the 1960s, recalling working as a nanny for Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in exchange for music lessons. Finally, she's joined by her daughter Nancy Kerr to play traditional Northumbrian dance tunes. A warm, fascinating and entertaining meeting with one of the enduring stars of the folk world. --- We rely entirely on support from our listeners to keep this show on the road. If you like what we do please either... Become a patron and get great rewards: patreon.com/folkonfoot Or just buy us a coffee: ko-fi.com/folkonfoot Sign up for our newsletter at www.folkonfoot.com Follow us on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @folkonfoot --- Find out more about Sandra at https://www.sandrakerr.net/

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast
"My Dear Companion"

The 1937 Flood Watch Podcast

Play Episode Listen Later Dec 8, 2023 3:28


Most of the world heard “My Dear Companion” when it was featured on the 1987 Trio album released by superstars Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, with songwriting credits going to Kentucky balladeer Jean Ritchie.That creation story for the song is accurate, as far as it goes. Ritchie wrote her tune in 1963, and 10 years later it was among the first things The Flood played when the band started coming together. The Kentucky ConnectionOlder members of the band often talked about being at folk festivals — like those at Kentucky's Grayson Lake and Carter Caves state parks — at which Jean Ritchie was the star attraction.In fact, some of us remember sitting with Nancy McClellan at the festivals — or in her living room in Ashland — listening to Jean tell stories of her early days when as a young girl she made her way from Viper, Ky., to New York City in the 1950s when the folk music boom was just beginning.The Song's Pre-Jean HistoryBut the roots of “Dear Companion” go deeper than 1963. Jean never made any secret of the fact that she patterned her piece after a traditional song that English folklorist Cecil Sharp collected in early 20th century America. Sharp later recounted how he collected the song in1916 from Rosie Hensley of Carmen, NC. The following year Sharp moved on to Kentucky to collect more songs, many of them from Jean Ritchie's aunts and cousins.In 1956, Jean herself recorded that original song, which opens with the lines: I once did have a dear companion, Indeed I thought his love my own, Until a dark-eyed girl betrayed me And then he cared no more for me…A quick aside: In the 1970s, Flood co-founder Roger Samples recalled his mother, Velva Kennedy Samples, back home in Clendenin, WV, singing that same song. This was long before Ritchie copyrighted her composition. Quite likely, Velva was singing some version of the original Cecil Sharp find.Meanwhile, that traditional version also was sung by Peggy Seeger, who recalled learning it in 1960 at a Canadian club from fellow folkie Bonnie Dobson, who recorded it in 1963. Dobson's version used a haunting Bob Coltman melody.Today if you YouTube the Dobson recording, you can hear the homage that Jean Ritchie pays to that Coltman tune when she crafts her own melody. (We think Jean's is imminently more hum-able, though, so it's little wonder hers is pretty much the only version anyone knows nowadays.)Our Take on the TuneWhat makes Ritchie's rendition special — besides her lovely melody — is her wonderful re-crafting of the lyrics. Like the original, Jean's song is nominally about abandoned love, but then she goes far beyond that to a larger theme of loss in general.And it's because of those deeper expressions — with lines like, I wish I was a sparrow flying / I'd fly to some high and lonesome place / And join those little birds in their crying, / Remembering you and your dear face — that we in The Flood have often thought of this song in times of our darkest grief.For instance, when our old friend Harvey McClellan died in the fall of 2004, the Bowens traveled with Nancy to Harvey's Henderson, Ky., birthplace, where Charlie sang the song at the burial. Nine years later, at Nancy McClellan's own funeral, Charlie, with bandmates Randy Hamilton and Michelle Hoge, sang the same song at her graveside.So, it was only natural for us recently to think of the song again at the first rehearsal after the death of our own dear companion, Doug Chaffin, last month. He absolutely loved playing that song. So, here's to you, Doug.On the AlbumSpeaking of Doug, you can hear him soloing and playing soulful, tasteful fills behind the solos of Joe, Dave and Sam on “My Dear Companion” on The Flood's 2013 Cleanup & Recovery album.These days the entire album can be heard online on our free Radio Floodango music streaming service. Click here to reach the disc. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit 1937flood.substack.com

bobcast
Episode 130: BOBCAST SEP 2023

bobcast

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 1, 2023 44:29


'The effect rather than the process'David Bowie, Scroobius Pip, Tok Tok Tok, David Attenborough, Glen Baxter, Jaimie Branch, Steven Wright, Amanda Palmer, Augustus Pablo, Paul Chowdhry, Yves Klein Blue, Susan Orlean, Peggy Seeger, Albert Pla, Tom Waits, Vanessa Paradis, Young Marble Giants

The CAT Club (Classic Album Thursdays)
AN EVENING WITH PEGGY SEEGER

The CAT Club (Classic Album Thursdays)

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2023 105:45


“This sparky woman has done so much, lived so much, crammed so much in. Most of all, she has informed our appreciation of British and North American folk music, like very, very few people have. Then factor in her multiple roles in illuminating the folk, political song and feminist scenes and how her songs have enriched the folk idiom, and you have somebody worth getting amazed about.” - Ken Hunt / Folk Roots Magazine. PEGGY SEEGER was born on 17 June, 1935 in New York City. She is one of the most important figures in the history of folk music. An American folk singer who also achieved renown in Britain, where she lived for more than 30 years, as the wife of songwriter and activist Ewan MacColl. Seeger's father was Charles Seeger (1886–1979), an important folklorist and musicologist; her mother was Seeger's second wife, Ruth Porter Crawford. Ruth Crawford Seeger, who died in 1953, was a modernist composer and was one of the first women to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship. One of her brothers is Mike Seeger, and the well-known songwriter Pete Seeger is her half-brother. Among Peggy Seeger's first recordings in 1955 was ‘American Folk Songs for Children', considered one of her most enduring, and probably the best-selling, collection of children's songs ever recorded. Together with MacColl, Seeger joined The Critics Group, performing satirical songs in a mixture of theatre, comedy and song. Seeger and MacColl recorded as a duo and as solo artists; MacColl wrote "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" in Peggy's honour. Her critically acclaimed classic biography, ‘First Time Ever – A Memoir' was published in 2018. We were delighted to welcome Peggy to The CAT Club for a memorable evening. A splendid time was had by all. CAT Club stalwart IAN CLAYTON was in the interviewer's chair. This event took place on 16 July 2023 in the Pigeon Loft at The Robin Hood, Pontefract, West Yorkshire. To find out more about the CAT Club please visit: www.thecatclub.co.uk Music used in this podcast by kind permission of Peggy Seeger. Happy Trails.

Saturday Live
Peggy Seeger, Tanni Grey-Thompson, Ruth Birch, Dave Mustaine

Saturday Live

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 29, 2023 60:59


Peggy Seeger is often described as the godmother of folk. She was married to Ewan McColl who led the British Folk Revival in the late 50s and 60's and wrote The First Time Ever I Saw your Face, for her. Peggy's been singing since the age of two; has played guitar, banjo, piano, electroharp, the concertina and Appalachian dulcimer. All of this is not surprising given she's a member of the North American musical Seeger family. Many songwriters have penned the lyrics – Love Changes Everything and in Ruth Birch's case – it certainly did. Ruth was forced to leave the job she loved after the "horrific" experience of being interrogated by military police over her sexuality. She was an analyst in the Intelligence Corps having joined the Army in 1987 – where it was illegal to be gay until the year 2000 - and was investigated over her same sex relationship with Ju - who was an officer as they served together in Northern Ireland in the 1990s. Dame Tanni Grey Thompson is one of the country's greatest sports stars. A Baroness, gold medals aplenty, sits on the board of many organizations, TV and radio presenter and Mastermind veteran. Need we say more. All that – plus the Inheritance Tracks of metal music icon Dave Mustaine. Presenters: Nikki Bedi and Jason Mohammad Producer: Ben Mitchell

Wetootwaag's Podcast of Bagpipe Power
Season 7 Episode 11 Lark in the Morning Part II Galloway Tom

Wetootwaag's Podcast of Bagpipe Power

Play Episode Listen Later May 20, 2023 68:29


Tunes: Straloch: Gallua Tom Walsh: Gallaway Tom Vickers (Same as walsh): The Gold Ring Oswald: Gallaway Tom Scots Musical Museum: Galloway Tam Niel Gow: Kelso Races Sutherland: Kelso Races O'Farrell: Galloway Tom, Tuhy's Frolic Goodman: Humours of Limerick Ennis: The Lark's March O'Neill: The Little Yellow Boy, The House in the Glen, The Lark in the Morning Hugh McDermot: A Western Lilt James Morrison: The Lark In the Morning Dave Rickard: The Lark in the Morning Angus McKay: The Hills of Glenorchy James Aird: The Humours of Limerick David Young: Tom Come Tickle me Ryan: Lark in the Morning +X+X+X+ 1627: Gullua Tom From Straloch Lute MS (Courtesy of Traditional Tune Archive) https://tunearch.org/wiki/Annotation:Gallua_Tom 1745: Gallaway Tom in Walsh's Caledonian Country Dances: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/94558476 1770s: Gallaway Tom From Vickers: http://www.farnearchive.com/farneimages/jpgs/R0312100.jpg 1754: Gallaway Tom in Oswald's Caledonian Pocket Companion: https://archive.org/details/caledonianpocket01rugg/page/24/mode/2up 1792: O Galloway Tam From Scots Musical Museum https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87798448 Performed by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YHWFF0sDw0 +X+X+ 1784: Kelso Races from First Book of Niel Gow's Reels, 2d edition: https://hms.scot/prints/copy/8/ 1816: Kelso Races from Sutherland's Edinburgh Repository of Music: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/91461944 +X+X+ 1806: Galloway Tom, From O'Farrel Pocket Companion Vol 1: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87779678 1806: Tuhy's Frolic From O'Farrell's Pocket Companion: https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87780878 +X+X+ 1860s: Humours of Limerick (Jackson) From Goodman http://goodman.itma.ie/volume-two#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=99&z=-957.4682%2C950.6699%2C11615.1632%2C4196.3988 1963: The Lark's March and Story from Seamus Ennis, Masters of Irish Music: Seamus Ennis. https://youtu.be/ryB-N3RIdm8 1903: The Little Yellow Boy (From O'Neill's Music of Ireland) http://www.oldmusicproject.com/AA3Sheet/0701-1200/Sheet-0701-0800/0706-LittleYellowBoy.gif 1907: The House in the Glen From O'Neill's Dance Music of Ireland https://imslp.org/wiki/TheDanceMusicofIreland(O%27Neill%2CFrancis) 1926: The Lark in the Morning performed by James Morrison: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/James_Morrison/ +X+X+ Hills of Glenorchy from Angus Mackay https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/105007069 1780s: The Humours of Limerick from Aird's Selection of Scotch, Irish, English and Foreign Airs https://digital.nls.uk/special-collections-of-printed-music/archive/87704991 1740s: Tom Come Tickle Me: From David Young: https://rmacd.com/music/macfarlane-manuscript/collection/ 1903: Lark in the Morning: From O'Neill's Music of Ireland: http://www.oldmusicproject.com/AA3Sheet/0701-1200/Sheet-1001-1100/1019-LarkMorning.gif 1883: Lark in the Morning: From Ryan's Mammoth Collection: (Page 114) https://violinsheetmusic.org/collections/ 1770s: The Gold Ring, From William Vicker's Manuscript http://www.farnearchive.com/farneimages/jpgs/R0312400.jpg +X+X+X+ FIN Here are some ways you can support the show: You can support the Podcast by joining the Patreon page at https://www.patreon.com/wetootwaag You can also take a minute to leave a review of the podcast if you listen on Itunes! Tell your piping and history friends about the podcast! Checkout my Merch Store on Bagpipeswag: https://www.bagpipeswag.com/wetootwaag You can also support me by Buying my First Album on Bandcamp: https://jeremykingsbury.bandcamp.com/album/oyster-wives-rant-a-year-of-historic-tunes or my second album on Bandcamp! https://jeremykingsbury.bandcamp.com/album/pay-the-pipemaker or my third album on Bandcamp! https://jeremykingsbury.bandcamp.com/album/bannocks-of-barley-meal You can now buy physical CDs of my albums using this Kunaki link: https://kunaki.com/msales.asp?PublisherId=166528&pp=1 You can just send me an email at wetootwaag@gmail.com letting me know what you thought of the episode! Listener mail keeps me going! Finally I have some other support options here: https://www.wetootwaag.com/support Thanks! Listen on Itunes/Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wetootwaags-bagpipe-and-history-podcast/id129776677 Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5QxzqrSm0pu6v8y8pLsv5j?si=QLiG0L1pT1eu7B5_FDmgGA

The Strange Brew - artist stories behind the greatest music ever recorded

In this episode, we have the privilege of interviewing Peggy Seeger. Peggy has been an influential figure in The post Peggy Seeger appeared first on The Strange Brew .

Folk Roots Radio... with Jan Hall
Episode 659 - We're All About The Music! (Mak'em & Tak'em Edition)

Folk Roots Radio... with Jan Hall

Play Episode Listen Later May 8, 2023 58:00


Join us on Episode 659 of Folk Roots Radio for another hour of the latest new folk and roots releases. There is loads of great new music out there, and, as always, it's an absolute pleasure to be able to share more of it with you. This time around we check out new music from Unthank Smith, Cinder Well, John McCusker, Annie Capps, Waymzy (Kyle Waymouth), A'Court with Spiegel & Vinnick, Aaron Nathans & Michael G. Ronstadt, Nadjiwan, Logan Staats, The Rough & Tumble, Peggy Seeger, Maggie Fraser, Tim Grimm and Del Barber. Enjoy! If you like the artists you hear on this show and want to support them, don't just stream their music – BUY their music, and then you'll really make a difference to their income at a time when it is becoming much more difficult to make a living as a musician. Folk Roots Radio is a labour of love - a full time hobby. If you enjoy this episode, please consider giving us a 'LIKE' and leaving a review/comment on your podcast provider and sharing the episode on social media. We'll love you for it! Check out the full playlist on the website: https://folkrootsradio.com/folk-roots-radio-episode-659-were-all-about-the-music-makem-takem-edition/

music rough spiegel tumble peggy seeger del barber tim grimm john mccusker michael g ronstadt folk roots radio
Radio Crystal Blue
Radio Crystal Blue 4/20/23 part 2

Radio Crystal Blue

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 21, 2023 114:08


ALBUM FOCUS: A reoccurring series focusing on new and outstanding concept, compilation and tribute albums. Putumayo Presents African Yoga: A Peaceful Soundtrack For Yoga and Relaxation http://www.putumayo.com In tandem with the beginning of Putumayo's 30th anniversary year, the world music label presents this collection, which draws from the rich musical tapestry of the vast and diverse African continent. Ablaye Cissoko & Volker Goetze "Miliamba" Ami Faku "Ndikhethe Wena" Geoffrey Oryema "Land Of Anaka" ***************** Hymn For Her "Human Condition" - Pop-N-Downers www.hymnforher.com Jesse Stratton Band "A Hot Dog And A Beer" - Family & Friends www.jessestrattonmusic.com Secret Emchy Society "Another Time And Place" - Gold Country/Country Gold www.emchy.com Professor Louie & The Crowmatix "Tick Tock" - Strike Up The Band www.professorlouie.com Blue Dogs "That's How I Knew" - Big Dreamers www.bluedogs.com The Runaway Grooms "Heartwork" - This Road www.therunawaygrooms.com Jon Shain & FJ Ventre "Sinking Ship" - Never Found A Way To Tame The Blues www.jonshain.com Nathans & Ronstadt "Man and a Whale" - Hello World www.nathansandronstadt.com Greg Klyma "Circular World" - Another Man's Treasure www.klyma.com ******************** Daniel Rotem "Wave Nature" - Wave Nature www.danielrotem.com Katherine Kyu Hyeon Lim "Paloma E" - www.katherineviolin.com Paula Standing "The More I Give" - The More I Give www.paulastanding.com Jesse Terry "Strangers In Our Town" - When We Wander www.jesseterrymusic.com Rebecca Folsom "In My Little Town" - Sanctuary www.rebeccafolsom.com Chris Smither "Old Man Down" - More From The Levee www.smither.com Peggy Seeger "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" www.peggyseeger.com Karan Casey "The Rocks Of Bawn" - Nine Apples Of Gold www.karancasey.com ******************* Closing music: MFSB "My Mood" - Universal Love Running time: 4 hours, 29 minutes --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/message Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/radiocblue/support

The Toby Gribben Show
Peggy Seeger

The Toby Gribben Show

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 14, 2023 11:31


The song was written for her by her lover Ewan MacColl in early 1957. He sang it down a crackling transatlantic phone line to Peggy who had returned to the USA, unwilling to continue an affair with a married man. That was the only time he ever sang the song which went on to become one of the greatest love songs of all time. “It was a hell of a way to woo me back!” says Peggy. With a simple and moving piano accompaniment, Peggy's new interpretation reflects on the memory of overwhelming love, now tempered with a deep mature knowledge of its fragility and fleetingness. The final verse is telling; often recorded by others as “I knew our joy would fill the earth”, Peggy sings the original and far more poignant “I thought our joy would fill the earth and last til the end of time”. Peggy says, “I've had two life partners, one male and one female, and I have three children and 9 grandchildren. I've come to realise that the lyrics can be interpreted in so many ways. Ewan wrote the tune to mimic the heartbeat of someone wildly in love and I used to feel like a soaring bird when I sang this song. Now I'm grounded within it and that makes me happy.” The 2023 recording is a family affair with Peggy & Ewan's sons Neill & Calum MacColl, and the official video by their daughter Kitty MacColl. It's released for the 67th anniversary of verse 2 (The first time ever I kissed your mouth…..) There are over 1000 cover versions on Spotify alongside Roberta Flack's iconic recording. Artists including Elvis, Johnny Cash, Shirley Bassey, Johnny Mathis, Celine Dion, George Michael, Janet Kay, Miley Cyrus, Paul Potts & James Blake have all stamped their personal marks. In 2022 The Killers performed it live on a world tour. Peggy says, “I love hearing all the different ways that singers make the song their own. It's testament to the universal story and the brilliant storytelling - it's deceptively simple yet so powerful.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Before The Light Goes Out
Neill MacColl

Before The Light Goes Out

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 12, 2023 30:00


Neill MacColl is the eldest son of folk pioneers Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and the half brother of Kirsty MacColl. He is also a musician, songwriter and producer in his own right. He has produced albums for many artists including Bombay Bicycle Club, where Neill eldest son Jamie is the guitarist, and toured as a seasoned session guitarist with artists such as David Gary, David Gilmour, Jesse Buckley and Nadine Shah. He has composed for film and TV, films such as Fever Pitch, 24/7, Far From The Madding Crowd and My Cousin Rachel. He also wrote and recorded an amazing album with me called Two, as well as writing songs such as Heart Shaped Stone for the Crown Electric album and the song Me For You on my latest record Night Drives. In this episode he gets quite vehement about cushions, and talks of being in the wilderness as his most at home place. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Radio 3 Documentary
Government Song Woman

The Radio 3 Documentary

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 5, 2023 43:27


American musician Rhiannon Giddens investigates the fascinating life and recordings of the folk song collector Sidney Robertson Cowell. Travelling thousands of miles all over the US in the depression era, Cowell was willing to track down songs in unlikely places, once writing "I don't scare easily." She spent a night riding in a hearse in Wisconsin just to question the driver and hear his songs, walked up mountains to record lumberjacks and traditional Appalachian singers and poled three miles downriver after dark on a makeshift raft to find a famed fiddler in his goldmine in California. Listening to her recordings is like travelling back in time; they capture the voices of so many different nationalities that emigrated to the US, but she also made recordings on the Aran Islands in Ireland. During her lifetime Cowell was marginalised like so many women collectors of that period, but in this celebration of her recordings and observations, Giddens finally gives her work the attention it deserves. With indebted thanks to the American Folklife Center archive in the Library of Congress who hold the collection of Sidney Robertson Cowell's recordings and to the following contributors who have done so much to bring her work to light: Cathy Hiebert Kerst, folklorist and archivist who catalogued Sidney's recordings of the WPA California Folk Project. Sheryl Kaskowitz, scholar of American music and author of forthcoming book: The Music Unit: FDR's Hidden New Deal Program that Tried to Save America from the Great Depression—One Song at a Time. Jim P Leary, a folklorist and scholar of Scandinavian studies, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, author of Folksongs of Another America. Dr. Deirdre Ní Chonghaile writer, researcher and musician (she plays fiddle with Rhiannon at the end of the programme) who has written about the collecting work of Sidney Robertson Cowell on the Aran Islands in the 1950s. Robert Cochrane, Professor of English and folklore specialist at the University of Arkansas. Peggy Seeger, folksinger. California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell: https://www.loc.gov/collections/sidney-robertson-cowell-northern-california-folk-music/about-this-collection/ Producer: Clare Walker

Folk on Foot
Folk on Foot Trailer

Folk on Foot

Play Episode Listen Later Sep 19, 2022 29:29


What is the multi-award-winning Folk on Foot all about? The Telegraph calls it “a restorative breathing space in sound”.  In this sampler, host Matthew Bannister shares beautiful extracts from episodes featuring Karine Polwart on Fala Moor, Eliza Carthy and family at Robin Hood's Bay, Jenny Sturgeon in Shetland, Richard Thompson in Muswell Hill, Duncan Chisholm at Sandwood Bay, The Unthanks on the Northumberland Coast, Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn at Wandlebury, Peggy Seeger in Iffley and The Young'uns in Hartlepool. Dip your toe in the water here before diving into all our glorious episodes.  --- Delve deeper into the Folk on Foot world and keep us on the road by becoming a Patron—sign up at patreon.com/folkonfoot. You can choose your level and get great rewards, ranging from a stylish Folk on Foot badge to access to our amazing and ever expanding Folk on Foot on Film video archive of more than 150 unique performances filmed on our travels. Sign up for our newsletter at www.folkonfoot.com Follow us on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @folkonfoot  


Episode 4 of Season 5. Helen's oldest friend, from her college days in New York, calls up for a chat from Sydney, Australia. They talk a lot of nonsense about Quantum Science, and the nature of time. Well, somebody has to!Support the show

Creative Confidential with Jude Kampfner
Episode 23: Chris Brookes - Finding the silence in the middle of the sound

Creative Confidential with Jude Kampfner

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 25, 2022 23:50


Canadian audio artist, journalist and actor, Chris Brookes lives in St John's, Newfoundland near Battery Hill, where Marconi set up his receiving tower in the first transatlantic wireless experiment.  Brookes began his career running a theatre company creating documentary style productions that influenced government legislation. He then worked as a current affairs producer for the weekly 3 hour show ‘CBC Sunday Morning'. He says he always considered himself an artist rather than an employee of a broadcasting company. As an independent audio producer, he's attended the European Features Conference regularly and found inspiring peers and mentors in sound auteurs from France, Germany and Scandinavia. https://www.batteryradio.com/ Literary influences: John Berger: Into Their Labours trilogy Michael Ondaatje: Coming Through Slaughter James Agee & Walker Evans: Now Let Us Praise Famous Men   Audio features: Kaye Mortley: Springtime it Brings on the Shearing Peter Leonhard Braun: Bells in Europe ARTE & Radio Grenouille: (Anouk Batard, Mehdi Ahoudig): Who Killed Lolita? Charles Parker, Peggy Seeger, Ewan MacColl: The Radio Ballads Each week in Creative Confidential Jude Kampfner chats to an independent professional performance or visual artist about how they survive and thrive. They share details of moving between projects, becoming more entrepreneurial, finding the best opportunities and developing a signature image and style. Her guests range from lyricists to novelists, videographers to sound designers. A broadcaster, writer and coach, Jude gently probes and challenges her so that whatever your line of creativity you learn from her advice and the experiences of her lively guests. REACH OUT TO JUDE: -  Jude's WebsiteJude on TwitterJude on LinkedInJude on Instagram Theme music composed by Gene Pritsker. https://www.genepritsker.com/ Show Producer and Editor, Mark McDonald. Launch YOUR podcast here.  

All About Sound
Shami Chakrabarti on Protest

All About Sound

Play Episode Listen Later Jul 18, 2022 41:50


When did you last take part in a protest? Perhaps you signed a petition; joined a debate on social media; wrote to your MP or read an impassioned poem. In this episode Lemn is joined by Shami Chakrabarti to examine how campaigners have used language to further their aims throughout the centuries. Together, they listen to inspiring voices from the British Library Sound Archive, from leaders such as Nelson Mandela to campaigners fighting for LGBTQ rights, punk musicians and suffragettes such as Christabel Pankhurst.  Described in The Times as "probably the most effective public affairs lobbyist of the past 20 years," Shami Chakrabarti is a barrister and human rights activist, as well as Member of the House of Lords and former Director of advocacy organisation Liberty. Recordings in the episode in order of appearance:  Christabel Pankhurst speaking after her release from Holloway Prison on 18th December 1908.  British Library shelfmark: 1CL0025836    An extract from Nelson Mandela's speech made in April 1964 at The Rivonia Trial. Restored and transferred by the British Library from the dictabelt originals loaned by The National Archives of South Africa and © The National Archives of South Africa.  British Library shelfmark: C985   An oral history interview recorded with Mr Kemp from Nottingham, in November 1982. Part of the Nottinghamshire Oral History Collection: Making Ends Meet Project. British Library shelfmark: UUOL066/14    Member of the Gay Liberation Front, Luchia Fitzgerald, speaks to Dr. Sarah Feinstein in 2016 as part of Manchester Pride's OUT! oral history project. Thanks to Archives+ in Manchester for this extract. © Luchia Fitzgerald and Archives+. British Library shelfmark: UAP007  The Hooters perform ‘We shall Overcome' at the Hooters' club in Birkenhead in 1965. The recording was found at Archives+, Manchester, it's part of the Stan Mason folk music archive and was digitised as part of the Unlocking our Sound Heritage (UOSH) project.  British Library shelfmark: UAP004/5 S2 C1  Barack Obama speaking to his supporters in January 2008, after losing New Hampshire's Democratic primary to Hilary Clinton. Popularly known as the ‘Yes we can' speech. © Barack Obama. British Library shelfmark: 1SS0009809  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2018 PEN Pinter Prize acceptance speech. The recording was made at the British Library. With thanks to The Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.  British Library shelfmark: C927/1981  Labour MP Jess Phillips's address to the House of Commons in January 2019. Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.  Alice Walker reads her poem ‘First they said'. The recording was made at the Africa Centre in May 1985 and it is part of the African Centre Collection, digitised by the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project.  British Library shelfmark: C48/56  Adrienne Rich reads her poem ‘Power' at Conway Hall in June 1984 as part of the 1st International Feminist Book Fair collection. The recording was digitised by the Unlocking Our Sound Heritage project.  British Library shelfmark: C154/2  Benjamin Zephaniah performing his poem ‘This policeman keeps on kicking me' at the Poetry Olympics festival, 1982. Recorded by the British Library at the Young Vic Theatre.  British Library shelfmark: C92/2 C43  ‘Black and White for Apartheid' performed by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger in December 1964. It is part of the African Writers Club collection of radio programmes recorded in the 1960s in London.  British Library shelfmark: C134/375  Extracts from the British Library event called ‘Banned Books Week: Poetry in Protest' in September 2021. Myanmarese-British poet Ko Ko Thett and Dr Choman Hardi, poet and scholar, speak to columnist Kate Maltby.  An extract from ‘Oh Bondage Up Yours', the 1977 debut single by X-Ray Spex. © BMG, X-Ray Spex/Poly Styrene, Westminster Music Ltd/TRO Essex Group.  British Library shelfmark: 1CD0198888 

Music Therapy Conversations
Ep 63 Karan Casey

Music Therapy Conversations

Play Episode Listen Later Jun 22, 2022 72:18


Karan Casey  Does Singing Songs Make a Difference? This episode is a recording of Karan Casey's keynote presentation at the close of the conference of the European Music Therapy Confederation in Edinburgh, 8-12 June 2022. Karan talked about songs and social justice, arts practice research, and about her own life and experiences as a performer and campaigner on social issues. She performed a number of songs as part of the presentation, and then had a conversation with Luke Annesley to explore these issues further. It was an inspiring ending to a varied and exciting conference. About Karan: Singing songs charged with a sense of social responsibility in a career spanning over 25 years Karan Casey has released eleven albums as well as contributing to numerous other artists' projects – appearing on more than 50 albums in total. She has toured extensively throughout North America, Europe and Japan, performing with her own band as well as collaborating with such diverse musicians as Maura O'Connell, James Taylor, Bela Fleck, Boston Pops Orchestra, Kate Ellis, Niall Vallely, Pauline Scanlon, The Chieftains, The Dubliners, Peggy Seeger, Karen Matheson, Mick Flannery, Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Tim O'Brien, Solas and Lúnasa.  In 2018 Karan helped found FairPlé which is an organization aimed at achieving fairness and gender balance for female performers in Irish traditional and folk musics. Karan tours with her band Niamh Dunne, Sean Óg Graham and Niall Vallely. Karan's most recent album Hieroglyphs That Tell the Tale was released on the Vertical Records Label. Her song “Down in the Glen” was nominated for Best Original Folk Song at the RTE Folk Awards 2019 and she completed a PhD in music in 2019. Karan has recently performed her new show with Director Sophie Motley called I Walked into My Head which was premiered at the Kilkenny Arts Festival 2021. Karan is currently working on a new stage show to be produced at the Everyman Theatre in Cork in early 2023 as well as an album of new songs about women in the Irish revolutionary period. Please note: As we are awaiting permission to include the performance of 'The King's Shilling' in this episode, here is a YouTube link to Karan's studio version of the song. Reviews of Karan's music: "Karan Casey's latest album is revelatory. She's always been a singer of songs that tell a story and show their muscle…This is a strikingly three-dimensional work that stands the test of intensive and repeated listening with ease. A vivid and dazzling snapshot of Casey invincible, at the height of her powers.” Siobhán Long, Irish Times   “Casey's voice is among the loveliest in folk music and she's a wonderful interpreter of both contemporary and traditional material.” BOSTON GLOBE   “Karan Casey's latest solo venture is a thing of rare beauty.” SING OUT   "The most soulful singer to emerge in Irish traditional music in the past decade." THE GLASGOW HERALD   “If ever any doubt existed about who's the best Irish traditional woman singer today, "Exiles Return" sweeps aside all pretenders…Karan Casey has no vocal peer.” IRISH ECHO   Songs Siúil a Rúin (trad.) The King's Shilling (Ian Sinclair) Rocks of Bawn (trad.) Ballad of Accounting (Ewen MacColl) I'm Still Standing Here (Janis Ian) Hear How the Music it Heals (trad.) Bog Braon (trad.)   Other links and references: Casey, K. (2017, September). Singing my way to Social Justice. In Voices: A World Forum for Music Therapy (Vol. 17, No. 3).  Davis, A. Y. (2011). Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. Vintage. www.karancasey.com info@karancasey.com   Lyrics   Siúil a Rúin   I wish I was on yonder hill 'Tis there I would sit and cry my fill Until every tear it would turn a mill Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán I would sell my rock, I would sell my reel I would sell my only spinning wheel For to buy my love a sword of steel Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin Siúil go sochair agus siúil go ciúin Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán And now my love he has gone to France To try his fortune to advance And if he returns, 'tis but a chance Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán Siúil, siúil, siúil a rúin Siúil go sochair agus siúil go ciúin Siúil go doras agus éalaigh liom Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán   I wish, I wish, I wish in vain I wish I had my heart again And it's vainly I think that I would not complain Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán   The King's Shilling   Oh my love has left me with bairnes twa And that's the last of him I ever saw He's joined the army and marched to war He took the shilling He took the shilling and he's off to war   Come laddies come, hear the cannons roar Take the King's shilling and you're off to war   Well did he look as he marched along With his kilt and sporran and his musket gun And the ladies tipped him as he marched along He sailed out by He sailed out by the Broomielaw   The pipes did play as he marched along And the soldiers sang out a battle song March on, march on, cried the Captain gay And for King and country For King and country we will fight today   Come laddies come, hear the cannons roar Take the King's shilling and we're off to war   The battle rattled to the sound of guns And the bayonets flashed in the morning sun The drums did beat and the cannons roared And the shilling didn't seem Oh the shilling didn't seem much worth the war   Come laddies come, hear the cannons roar Take the King's shilling and we're off to war   Well the men they fought and the men did fall Cut down by bayonets and musket ball And many of these brave young men Would never fight for Would never fight for the King again   Come laddies come, hear the cannons roar Take the King's shilling and we're off to war Come laddies come, hear the cannons roar Take the King's shilling and you'll die in war     Rocks of Bawn   Come all ye loyal heroes wherever you may be. Don't hire with any master till you know what your work will be You will rise up early from the clear day light till the dawn and you never will be able for to plough the Rocks of Bawn.   Rise up, gallant Sweeney, and give your horse some hay And give them a good feed of oats before they stray away Don't feed them on soft turnip put them out on your green lawn Or they never will be able for to plough the Rocks of Bawn.   My curse upon you, Sweeney boy, you have me nearly robbed You're sitting by the fireside with your dúidín in your gob You're sitting by the fireside now from clear daylight till the dawn And you never will be able for to plough the Rocks of Bawn   My shoes they are worn and my stockings they are thin My heart is always trembling for fear they might give in My heart is always trembling from the clear daylight till the dawn And I never will be able for to plough the Rocks of Bawn.   I wish the Queen of England she would call for me in time And place me in some regiment all in my youth and prime I'd fight for Ireland's glory from the clear daylight till dawn And I never would return again to plough the Rocks of Bawn.     Ballad of Accounting   In the morning we built the city In the afternoon walked through its streets Evening saw us leaving We wandered through our days as if they would never e All of us imagined we had endless time to spend We hardly saw the crossroads And small attention gave To landmarks on the journey from the cradle to the grave, cradle to the grave, cradle to the grave   Did you learn to dream in the morning? Abandon dreams in the afternoon? Wait without hope in the evening? Did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies? Did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes? Did you kiss the foot that kicked you? Did you thank them for their scorn? Did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born, act of being born, act of being born?   Did you alter the face of the city? Did you make any change in the world you found? Or did you observe all the warnings? Did you read the trespass notices did you keep off the grass? Did you shuffle off the pavement just to let your betters pass? Did you learn to keep your mouth shut, Were you seen and never heard? Did you learn to be obedient and jump to at a word, jump to at a word, jump to at a word?   Did you ever demand any answers? The who, the what or the reason why? Did you ever question the setup? Did you stand aside and let them choose while you took second best? Did you let them skim the cream off and then give to you the rest? Did you settle for the shoddy? Did you think it right To let them rob you right and left and never make a fight, never make a fight, never make a fight?   What did you learn in the morning? How much did you know in the afternoon? Were you content in the evening? Did they teach you how to question when you were at the school? Did the factory help you grow, were you the maker or the tool? Did the place where you were living Enrich your life and then Did you reach some understanding of all your fellow men, all your fellow men, all your fellow men?     I'm Still Standing Here   See these lines upon my face They're a map of where I've been In the deep they are traced a deeper life has settled in How do we survive living out our lives   I wouldn't trade a line make it smooth or fine Or pretend that time stands still I want to rest my soul here where it can grow without fear Another line another year I'm still standing here   See these marks upon my skin They're the lyric of my life Every story that begins Means another ends in sight Only lover's understand Skin just covers who I am   I wouldn't trade a line make it smooth or fine Or pretend that time stands still I want to rest my soul here where it can grow without fear Another line another year I'm still standing here   See these bruises see these scars Hieroglyphs that tell the tale You can read them in the dark Through your fingertips like braille   I wouldn't trade a line make it smooth or fine Or pretend that time stands still I want to rest my soul here where it can grow without fear Another line another year I'm still standing here                

Collective Whisper podcast
Gets to know....George Murphy

Collective Whisper podcast

Play Episode Listen Later May 28, 2022 64:27


On this episode Simon K speaks to Irish singer/songwriter George MurphyGeorge Murphy is an Irish singer songwriter who hails from the Dublin suburb of Beaumount.He exploded onto the Irish music scene after his memorable appearances on the Irish television show “You're a Star”. Just out of secondary school at the age of 17 he very quickly took over the Irish music scene, signing to Sony Ireland for his debut album ‘Dreamed A Dream' which went straight to No.1 in the Irish charts.The album eventually went on to gain triple Platinum status. George had made a big impact with insiders on the Irish Music scene, Phil Coulter was quoted as saying that George “Is the most exciting vocal find in Ireland”, The late Ronnie Drew was quoted saying “A voice beyond his years”, Peggy Seeger was quoted saying “A very honest approach to the songs, kept them true to their Origin” and Hotpress magazine described him at the time as “A serious contender”.George enjoyed a lot of success in the early part of his career playing a lot of top festivals and venues in Ireland. In 2006 George went on to release his 2nd album “So The story goes” and the title track got to No.7 in the Irish Singles Chart. That same year he played O2 in the Park and shared the stage with Brian McFadden who was making his debut as a solo artist after leaving Westlife.He decided to embark on a small tour in America where he released his 3rd album “The Ballad of Archie Thompson”, featuring folk legends John Sheahan and Barney McKenna of the Dubliners.For personal reasons George came back to Ireland in 2013, he had grown a little tired of the road and felt that he had lost some motivation. A dark time was to follow and as he said himself “It's a tough life being on the road as an artist, it's full of ups and downs, the highs are very high but the lows are very low”.Fortunately, it didn't take George too long to get back on his feet, he started taking writing his own material more seriously and began playing small pubs, clubs and small music venues trying out some of his new material.In 2015 George signed a new management deal with 10 music Management and then went on to sign a new record deal with Trad Nua. When Finbar's lad, Martin Furey, left the High Kings, they immediately turned to George Murphy to fill the void.Now after 18 months of audience and critical acclaim, and still only 29, George has decided to return to his roots, and with his own band, The Rising Sons, and will tour extensively in 2019/2020.Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/georgemurphymusic/?hl=enSpotify:https://open.spotify.com/artist/4QqYJChcAFcHbimTWMnf7gSoundcloud:https://soundcloud.com/georgemurphyofficialFacebook:https://www.facebook.com/GeorgeMurphyMusicThe Rising sons: https://www.facebook.com/therisingsonsirl

Woman's Hour
Weekend Woman's Hour: Peggy Seeger, Exam Stress, Candice Carty-Williams

Woman's Hour

Play Episode Listen Later May 7, 2022 57:00


Emma talks to Peggy Seeger who has enjoyed six decades of success with her music. Peggy was married to the singer Ewen McColl. Together they revitalised the British Folk Scene during the 50s and 60s. Now 86 years old, Peggy's own songs have become anthems for feminists, anti-nuclear campaigners and those fighting for social justice. Exam season is upon us - Highers have begun in Scotland and A-levels and GCSEs start on the 16th May, but maybe your kids have end of year exams coming up too. As a parent what is the best way to support your child? Anita is joined by Dr Jane Gilmour, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Candice Carty-Williams described her very successful first novel Queenie as 'the black Bridget Jones'. She has described her new novel People Person as her ‘daddy issues' book and in it she celebrates families of all sorts. Her aim, she says, is to make visible the people she knows and the experiences she has had. As Anne Robinson announces she's stepping down as the host of the Channel 4 quiz show Countdown, Emma Barnett catches up with her. Robinson was the first female to ever host the show, with 265 episodes under her belt since she joined just a year ago. It's been just over a year since the former husband of ITV presenter Ruth Dodsworth was jailed for coercive controlling behaviour and stalking. In a new ITV Tonight programme ‘Controlled By My Ex Partner: The Hidden Abuse' Ruth explores the crime of coercive control and what needs to be done to stop it. Milli Proust, writer and floral designer in West Sussex, and Georgie Newbery, a flower farmer, discuss the growing trend of cut flower gardening. Sex Parties have gone from being fringe underground raves to large, well-established sell-out club nights, in the last few years. We hear from Dr Kate Lister, Sex Historian and Author of A Curious History of Sex and Miss Gold - who runs One Night Parties, a sex party in London.

Woman's Hour
Women and Folk Music

Woman's Hour

Play Episode Listen Later May 2, 2022 52:42


This May bank holiday Emma looks at women and the tradition of folk music. You may have a stereotypical image of a woman in a floaty dress walking through a flower meadow - but we want to challenge that. From protest songs and feminist anthems - it's not all whimsy in the world of folk. Emma talks to Peggy Seeger who has enjoyed six decades of success with her music. Peggy was married to the singer Ewen McColl. He wrote the song "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" for her. Together they revitalised the British Folk Scene during the 50s and 60s, working on the BBC Radio Ballads; ground-breaking documentaries - which wove a story from the words of real people working in the mining and fishing industry or building the M1 motorway with sound effects, and songs. Now 86 years old, Peggy's own songs have become anthems for feminists, anti-nuclear campaigners and those fighting for social justice. Emma examines the uncomfortable elements of folk music, and how artists are finding ways of reinterpreting old songs, or writing new ones to represent missing narratives and stories. Who were the female tradition-bearers, writers and performers and the often forgotten collectors - those who would record and notate traditional songs handed down orally from generation to generation? And what is being done to improve the gender equality and diversity in folk music? Emma is joined by: Peggy Seeger http://www.peggyseeger.com/about Fay Hield https://fayhield.com/about.html Anne Martin https://www.annemartin.scot/ Amy Hollinrake https://www.amyhollinrake.com/about Rachel Newton http://www.rachelnewtonmusic.com/about.html Grace Petrie https://gracepetrie.com/ Angeline Morrison https://linktr.ee/angelcakepie Peggy Seeger and Grace Petrie will be playing at Norfolk & Norwich Festival's 250th anniversary later this month.

ChinaTalk
Global Standards: What's the Deal?

ChinaTalk

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2022 69:49


Standards. Who has them? From shipping containers to screws to tech gadgets, how is it that something made in China can have certain attributes identical to another product made by another company half a world away? And why does it matter? MIT professor and business history JoAnne Yates and Wellesley professor of political science Craig Murphy are the authors of Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880. Together with co-host Jacob Feldgoise, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, we talk about how international standards were established at the impact this had on China's development. We also discuss How standardized shipping containers made China's rise possible Why Tim Berners Lee is a benevolent overlord Who has the most influence in setting international standards Why Europe might be more annoying than China from a US standards perspective Outro music: Gonna Be An Engineer by Peggy Seeger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IGVxBb5uYk CHECK OUT THE CHINATALK SUBSTACK! https://chinatalk.substack.com Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ChinaTalk

ChinaEconTalk
Global Standards: What's the Deal?

ChinaEconTalk

Play Episode Listen Later Apr 25, 2022 69:49


Standards. Who has them? From shipping containers to screws to tech gadgets, how is it that something made in China can have certain attributes identical to another product made by another company half a world away? And why does it matter? MIT professor and business history JoAnne Yates and Wellesley professor of political science Craig Murphy are the authors of Engineering Rules: Global Standard Setting since 1880. Together with co-host Jacob Feldgoise, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, we talk about how international standards were established at the impact this had on China's development. We also discuss How standardized shipping containers made China's rise possible Why Tim Berners Lee is a benevolent overlord Who has the most influence in setting international standards Why Europe might be more annoying than China from a US standards perspective Outro music: Gonna Be An Engineer by Peggy Seeger https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IGVxBb5uYk CHECK OUT THE CHINATALK SUBSTACK! https://chinatalk.substack.com Support us on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/ChinaTalk

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs
Episode 146: “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys

A History Of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2022


Episode one hundred and forty-six of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys, and the history of the theremin. 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 "You're Gonna Miss Me" by the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. 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/ Resources There is no Mixcloud this week, because there were too many Beach Boys songs in the episode. I used many resources for this episode, most of which will be used in future Beach Boys episodes too. It's difficult to enumerate everything here, because I have been an active member of the Beach Boys fan community for twenty-four years, and have at times just used my accumulated knowledge for this. But the resources I list here are ones I've checked for specific things. Stephen McParland has published many, many books on the California surf and hot-rod music scenes, including several on both the Beach Boys and Gary Usher.  His books can be found at https://payhip.com/CMusicBooks Andrew Doe's Bellagio 10452 site is an invaluable resource. Jon Stebbins' The Beach Boys FAQ is a good balance between accuracy and readability. And Philip Lambert's Inside the Music of Brian Wilson is an excellent, though sadly out of print, musicological analysis of Wilson's music from 1962 through 67. I have also referred to Brian Wilson's autobiography, I Am Brian Wilson, and to Mike Love's, Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy. As a good starting point for the Beach Boys' music in general, I would recommend this budget-priced three-CD set, which has a surprisingly good selection of their material on it, including the single version of "Good Vibrations". Oddly, the single version of "Good Vibrations" is not on the The Smile Sessions box set. But an entire CD of outtakes of the track is, and that was the source for the session excerpts here. Information on Lev Termen comes from Theremin: Ether Music and Espionage by Albert Glinsky Transcript In ancient Greece, the god Hermes was a god of many things, as all the Greek gods were. Among those things, he was the god of diplomacy, he was a trickster god, a god of thieves, and he was a messenger god, who conveyed messages between realms. He was also a god of secret knowledge. In short, he was the kind of god who would have made a perfect spy. But he was also an inventor. In particular he was credited in Greek myth as having invented the lyre, an instrument somewhat similar to a guitar, harp, or zither, and as having used it to create beautiful sounds. But while Hermes the trickster god invented the lyre, in Greek myth it was a mortal man, Orpheus, who raised the instrument to perfection. Orpheus was a legendary figure, the greatest poet and musician of pre-Homeric Greece, and all sorts of things were attributed to him, some of which might even have been things that a real man of that name once did. He is credited with the "Orphic tripod" -- the classification of the elements into earth, water, and fire -- and with a collection of poems called the Rhapsodiae. The word Rhapsodiae comes from the Greek words rhaptein, meaning to stitch or sew, and ōidē, meaning song -- the word from which we get our word "ode", and  originally a rhapsōdos was someone who "stitched songs together" -- a reciter of long epic poems composed of several shorter pieces that the rhapsōdos would weave into one continuous piece. It's from that that we get the English word "rhapsody", which in the sixteenth century, when it was introduced into the language, meant a literary work that was a disjointed collection of patchwork bits, stitched together without much thought as to structure, but which now means a piece of music in one movement, but which has several distinct sections. Those sections may seem unrelated, and the piece may have an improvisatory feel, but a closer look will usually reveal relationships between the sections, and the piece as a whole will have a sense of unity. When Orpheus' love, Eurydice, died, he went down into Hades, the underworld where the souls of the dead lived, and played music so beautiful, so profound and moving, that the gods agreed that Orpheus could bring the soul of his love back to the land of the living. But there was one condition -- all he had to do was keep looking forward until they were both back on Earth. If he turned around before both of them were back in the mortal realm, she would disappear forever, never to be recovered. But of course, as you all surely know, and would almost certainly have guessed even if you didn't know because you know how stories work, once Orpheus made it back to our world he turned around and looked, because he lost his nerve and didn't believe he had really achieved his goal. And Eurydice, just a few steps away from her freedom, vanished back into the underworld, this time forever. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop: "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Lev Sergeyevich Termen was born in St. Petersburg, in what was then the Russian Empire, on the fifteenth of August 1896, by the calendar in use in Russia at that time -- the Russian Empire was still using the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar used in most of the rest of the world, and in the Western world the same day was the twenty-seventh of August. Young Lev was fascinated both by science and the arts. He was trained as a cellist from an early age, but while he loved music, he found the process of playing the music cumbersome -- or so he would say later. He was always irritated by the fact that the instrument is a barrier between the idea in the musician's head and the sound -- that it requires training to play. As he would say later "I realised there was a gap between music itself and its mechanical production, and I wanted to unite both of them." Music was one of his big loves, but he was also very interested in physics, and was inspired by a lecture he saw from the physicist Abram Ioffe, who for the first time showed him that physics was about real, practical, things, about the movements of atoms and fields that really existed, not just about abstractions and ideals. When Termen went to university, he studied physics -- but he specifically wanted to be an experimental physicist, not a theoretician. He wanted to do stuff involving the real world. Of course, as someone who had the misfortune to be born in the late 1890s, Termen was the right age to be drafted when World War I started, but luckily for him the Russian Army desperately needed people with experience in the new invention that was radio, which was vital for wartime communications, and he spent the war in the Army radio engineering department, erecting radio transmitters and teaching other people how to erect them, rather than on the front lines, and he managed not only to get his degree in physics but also a diploma in music. But he was also becoming more and more of a Marxist sympathiser, even though he came from a relatively affluent background, and after the Russian Revolution he stayed in what was now the Red Army, at least for a time. Once Termen's Army service was over, he started working under Ioffe, working with him on practical applications of the audion, the first amplifying vacuum tube. The first one he found was that the natural capacitance of a human body when standing near a circuit can change the capacity of the circuit. He used that to create an invisible burglar alarm -- there was an antenna sending out radio waves, and if someone came within the transmitting field of the antenna, that would cause a switch to flip and a noise to be sounded. He was then asked to create a device for measuring the density of gases, outputting a different frequency for different densities. Because gas density can have lots of minor fluctuations because of air currents and so forth, he built a circuit that would cut out all the many harmonics from the audions he was using and give just the main frequency as a single pure tone, which he could listen to with headphones. That way,  slight changes in density would show up as a slight change in the tone he heard. But he noticed that again when he moved near the circuit, that changed the capacitance of the circuit and changed the tone he was hearing. He started moving his hand around near the circuit and getting different tones. The closer his hand got to the capacitor, the higher the note sounded. And if he shook his hand a little, he could get a vibrato, just like when he shook his hand while playing the cello. He got Ioffe to come and listen to him, and Ioffe said "That's an electronic Orpheus' lament!" [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Mr. Theremin's Miserlou"] Termen figured out how to play Massenet's "Elegy" and Saint-Saens' "The Swan" using this system. Soon the students were all fascinated, telling each other "Termen plays Gluck on a voltmeter!" He soon figured out various refinements -- by combining two circuits, using the heterodyne principle, he could allow for far finer control. He added a second antenna, for volume control, to be used by the left hand -- the right hand would choose the notes, while the left hand would change the volume, meaning the instrument could be played without touching it at all. He called the instrument the "etherphone",  but other people started calling it the termenvox -- "Termen's voice". Termen's instrument was an immediate sensation, as was his automatic burglar alarm, and he was invited to demonstrate both of them to Lenin. Lenin was very impressed by Termen -- he wrote to Trotsky later talking about Termen's inventions, and how the automatic burglar alarm might reduce the number of guards needed to guard a perimeter. But he was also impressed by Termen's musical invention. Termen held his hands to play through the first half of a melody, before leaving the Russian leader to play the second half by himself -- apparently he made quite a good job of it. Because of Lenin's advocacy for his work, Termen was sent around the Soviet Union on a propaganda tour -- what was known as an "agitprop tour", in the familiar Soviet way of creating portmanteau words. In 1923 the first piece of music written specially for the instrument was performed by Termen himself with the Leningrad Philharmonic, Andrey Paschenko's Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra. The score for that was later lost, but has been reconstructed, and the piece was given a "second premiere" in 2020 [Excerpt: Andrey Paschenko, "Symphonic Mystery for Termenvox and Orchestra" ] But the musical instrument wasn't the only scientific innovation that Termen was working on. He thought he could reverse death itself, and bring the dead back to life.  He was inspired in this by the way that dead organisms could be perfectly preserved in the Siberian permafrost. He thought that if he could only freeze a dead person in the permafrost, he could then revive them later -- basically the same idea as the later idea of cryogenics, although Termen seems to have thought from the accounts I've read that all it would take would be to freeze and then thaw them, and not to have considered the other things that would be necessary to bring them back to life. Termen made two attempts to actually do this, or at least made preliminary moves in that direction. The first came when his assistant, a twenty-year-old woman, died of pneumonia. Termen was heartbroken at the death of someone so young, who he'd liked a great deal, and was convinced that if he could just freeze her body for a while he could soon revive her. He talked with Ioffe about this -- Ioffe was friends with the girl's family -- and Ioffe told him that he thought that he was probably right and probably could revive her. But he also thought that it would be cruel to distress the girl's parents further by discussing it with them, and so Termen didn't get his chance to experiment. He was even keener on trying his technique shortly afterwards, when Lenin died. Termen was a fervent supporter of the Revolution, and thought Lenin was a great man whose leadership was still needed -- and he had contacts within the top echelons of the Kremlin. He got in touch with them as soon as he heard of Lenin's death, in an attempt to get the opportunity to cryopreserve his corpse and revive him. Sadly, by this time it was too late. Lenin's brain had been pickled, and so the opportunity to resurrect him as a zombie Lenin was denied forever. Termen was desperately interested in the idea of bringing people back from the dead, and he wanted to pursue it further with his lab, but he was also being pushed to give demonstrations of his music, as well as doing security work -- Ioffe, it turned out, was also working as a secret agent, making various research trips to Germany that were also intended to foment Communist revolution. For now, Termen was doing more normal security work -- his burglar alarms were being used to guard bank vaults and the like, but this was at the order of the security state. But while Termen was working on his burglar alarms and musical instruments and attempts to revive dead dictators, his main project was his doctoral work, which was on the TV. We've said before in this podcast that there's no first anything, and that goes just as much for inventions as it does for music. Most inventions build on work done by others, which builds on work done by others, and so there were a lot of people building prototype TVs at this point. In Britain we tend to say "the inventor of the TV" was John Logie Baird, but Baird was working at the same time as people like the American Charles Francis Jenkins and the Japanese inventor Kenjiro Takayanagi, all of them building on earlier work by people like Archibald Low. Termen's prototype TV, the first one in Russia, came slightly later than any of those people, but was created more or less independently, and was more advanced in several ways, with a bigger screen and better resolution. Shortly after Lenin's death, Termen was invited to demonstrate his invention to Stalin, who professed himself amazed at the "magic mirror". [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] Termen was sent off to tour Europe giving demonstrations of his inventions, particularly his musical instrument. It was on this trip that he started using the Romanisation "Leon Theremin", and this is how Western media invariably referred to him. Rather than transliterate the Cyrillic spelling of his birth name, he used the French spelling his Huguenot ancestors had used before they emigrated to Russia, and called himself Leo or Leon rather than Lev. He was known throughout his life by both names, but said to a journalist in 1928 "First of all, I am not Tair-uh-MEEN. I wrote my name with French letters for French pronunciation. I am Lev Sergeyevich Tair-MEN.". We will continue to call him Termen, partly because he expressed that mild preference (though again, he definitely went by both names through choice) but also to distinguish him from the instrument, because while his invention remained known in Russia as the termenvox, in the rest of the world it became known as the theremin. He performed at the Paris Opera, and the New York Times printed a review saying "Some musicians were extremely pessimistic about the possibilities of the device, because at times M. Theremin played lamentably out of tune. But the finest Stradivarius, in the hands of a tyro, can give forth frightful sounds. The fact that the inventor was able to perform certain pieces with absolute precision proves that there remains to be solved only questions of practice and technique." Termen also came to the UK, where he performed in front of an audience including George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett, Henry Wood and others. Arnold Bennett was astonished, but Bernard Shaw, who had very strong opinions about music, as anyone who has read his criticism will be aware, compared the sound unfavourably to that of a comb and paper. After performing in Europe, Termen made his way to the US, to continue his work of performance, propagandising for the Soviet Revolution, and trying to license the patents for his inventions, to bring money both to him and to the Soviet state. He entered the US on a six-month visitor's visa, but stayed there for eleven years, renewing the visa every six months. His initial tour was a success, though at least one open-air concert had to be cancelled because, as the Communist newspaper the Daily Worker put it, "the weather on Saturday took such a counter-revolutionary turn". Nicolas Slonimsky, the musicologist we've encountered several times before, and who would become part of Termen's circle in the US, reviewed one of the performances, and described the peculiar audiences that Termen was getting -- "a considerable crop of ladies and gentlemen engaged in earnest exploration of the Great Beyond...the mental processes peculiar to believers in cosmic vibrations imparted a beatific look to some of the listeners. Boston is a seat of scientific religion; before he knows it Professor Theremin may be proclaimed Krishnamurti and sanctified as a new deity". Termen licensed his patents on the invention to RCA, who in 1929 started mass-producing the first ever theremins for general use. Termen also started working with the conductor Leopold Stokowski, including developing a new kind of theremin for Stokowski's orchestra to use, one with a fingerboard played like a cello. Stokowski said "I believe we shall have orchestras of these electric instruments. Thus will begin a new era in music history, just as modern materials and methods of construction have produced a new era of architecture." Possibly of more interest to the wider public, Lennington Sherwell, the son of an RCA salesman, took up the theremin professionally, and joined the band of Rudy Vallee, one of the most popular singers of the period. Vallee was someone who constantly experimented with new sounds, and has for example been named as the first band leader to use an electric banjo, and Vallee liked the sound of the theremin so much he ordered a custom-built left-handed one for himself. Sherwell stayed in Vallee's band for quite a while, and performed with him on the radio and in recording sessions, but it's very difficult to hear him in any of the recordings -- the recording equipment in use in 1930 was very primitive, and Vallee had a very big band with a lot of string and horn players, and his arrangements tended to have lots of instruments playing in unison rather than playing individual lines that are easy to differentiate. On top of that, the fashion at the time when playing the instrument was to try and have it sound as much like other instruments as possible -- to duplicate the sound of a cello or violin or clarinet, rather than to lean in to the instrument's own idiosyncracies. I *think* though that I can hear Sherwell's playing in the instrumental break of Vallee's big hit "You're Driving Me Crazy" -- certainly it was recorded at the time that Sherwell was in the band, and there's an instrument in there with a very pure tone, but quite a lot of vibrato, in the mid range, that seems only to be playing in the break and not the rest of the song. I'm not saying this is *definitely* a theremin solo on one of the biggest hits of 1930, but I'm not saying it's not, either: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "You're Driving Me Crazy" ] Termen also invented a light show to go along with his instrument -- the illumovox, which had a light shining through a strip of gelatin of different colours, which would be rotated depending on the pitch of the theremin, so that lower notes would cause the light to shine a deep red, while the highest notes would make it shine a light blue, with different shades in between. By 1930, though, Termen's fortunes had started to turn slightly. Stokowski kept using theremins in the orchestra for a while, especially the fingerboard models to reinforce the bass, but they caused problems. As Slonimsky said "The infrasonic vibrations were so powerful...that they hit the stomach physically, causing near-nausea in the double-bass section of the orchestra". Fairly soon, the Theremin was overtaken by other instruments, like the ondes martenot, an instrument very similar to the theremin but with more precise control, and with a wider range of available timbres. And in 1931, RCA was sued by another company for patent infringement with regard to the Theremin -- the De Forest Radio Company had patents around the use of vacuum tubes in music, and they claimed damages of six thousand dollars, plus RCA had to stop making theremins. Since at the time, RCA had only made an initial batch of five hundred instruments total, and had sold 485 of them, many of them as promotional loss-leaders for future batches, they had actually made a loss of three hundred dollars even before the six thousand dollar damages, and decided not to renew their option on Termen's patents. But Termen was still working on his musical ideas. Slonimsky also introduced Termen to the avant-garde composer and theosophist Henry Cowell, who was interested in experimental sounds, and used to do things like play the strings inside the piano to get a different tone: [Excerpt: Henry Cowell, "Aeolian Harp and Sinister Resonance"] Cowell was part of a circle of composers and musicologists that included Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, and Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford, who Cowell would introduce to each other. Crawford would later marry Seeger, and they would have several children together, including the folk singer Peggy Seeger, and Crawford would also adopt Seeger's son Pete. Cowell and Termen would together invent the rhythmicon, the first ever drum machine, though the rhythmicon could play notes as well as rhythms. Only two rhythmicons were made while Termen was in the US. The first was owned by Cowell. The second, improved, model was bought by Charles Ives, but bought as a gift for Cowell and Slonimsky to use in their compositions. Sadly, both rhythmicons eventually broke down, and no recording of either is known to exist. Termen started to get further and further into debt, especially as the Great Depression started to hit, and he also had a personal loss -- he'd been training a student and had fallen in love with her, although he was married. But when she married herself, he cut off all ties with her, though Clara Rockmore would become one of the few people to use the instrument seriously and become a real virtuoso on it. He moved into other fields, all loosely based around the same basic ideas of detecting someone's distance from an object. He built electronic gun detectors for Alcatraz and Sing-Sing prisons, and he came up with an altimeter for aeroplanes. There was also a "magic mirror" -- glass that appeared like a mirror until it was backlit, at which point it became transparent. This was put into shop windows along with a proximity detector -- every time someone stepped close to look at their reflection, the reflection would disappear and be replaced with the objects behind the mirror. He was also by this point having to spy for the USSR on a more regular basis. Every week he would meet up in a cafe with two diplomats from the Russian embassy, who would order him to drink several shots of vodka -- the idea was that they would loosen his inhibitions enough that he would not be able to hide things from them -- before he related various bits of industrial espionage he'd done for them. Having inventions of his own meant he was able to talk with engineers in the aerospace industry and get all sorts of bits of information that would otherwise not have been available, and he fed this back to Moscow. He eventually divorced his first wife, and remarried -- a Black American dancer many years his junior named Lavinia Williams, who would be the great love of his life. This caused some scandal in his social circle, more because of her race than the age gap. But by 1938 he had to leave the US. He'd been there on a six-month visa, which had been renewed every six months for more than a decade, and he'd also not been paying income tax and was massively in debt. He smuggled himself back to the USSR, but his wife was, at the last minute, not allowed on to the ship with him. He'd had to make the arrangements in secret, and hadn't even told her of the plans, so the first she knew was when he disappeared. He would later claim that the Soviets had told him she would be sent for two weeks later, but she had no knowledge of any of this. For decades, Lavinia would not even know if her husband was dead or alive. [Excerpt: Blake Jones and the Trike Shop, "Astronauts in Trouble"] When Termen got back to the USSR, he found it had changed beyond recognition. Stalin's reign of terror was now well underway, and not only could he not find a job, most of the people who he'd been in contact with at the top of the Kremlin had been purged. Termen was himself arrested and tortured into signing a false confession to counter-revolutionary activities and membership of fascist organisations. He was sentenced to eight years in a forced labour camp, which in reality was a death sentence -- it was expected that workers there would work themselves to death on starvation rations long before their sentences were up -- but relatively quickly he was transferred to a special prison where people with experience of aeronautical design were working. He was still a prisoner, but in conditions not too far removed from normal civilian life, and allowed to do scientific and technical work with some of the greatest experts in the field -- almost all of whom had also been arrested in one purge or another. One of the pieces of work Termen did was at the direct order of Laventy Beria, Stalin's right-hand man and the architect of most of the terrors of the Stalinist regime. In Spring 1945, while the USA and USSR were still supposed to be allies in World War II, Beria wanted to bug the residence of the US ambassador, and got Termen to design a bug that would get past all the normal screenings. The bug that Termen designed was entirely passive and unpowered -- it did nothing unless a microwave beam of a precise frequency was beamed at it, and only then did it start transmitting. It was placed in a wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States, presented to the ambassador by a troupe of scouts as a gesture of friendship between the two countries. The wood in the eagle's beak was thin enough to let the sound through. It remained there for seven years, through the tenures of four ambassadors, only being unmasked when a British radio operator accidentally tuned to the frequency it was transmitting on and was horrified to hear secret diplomatic conversations. Upon its discovery, the US couldn't figure out how it worked, and eventually shared the information with MI5, who took eighteen months to reverse-engineer Termen's bug and come up with their own, which remained the standard bug in use for about a decade. The CIA's own attempts to reverse-engineer it failed altogether. It was also Termen who came up with that well-known bit of spycraft -- focussing an infra-red beam on a window pane, to use it to pick up the sound of conversations happening in the room behind it. Beria was so pleased with Termen's inventions that he got Termen to start bugging Stalin himself, so Beria would be able to keep track of Stalin's whims. Termen performed such great services for Beria that Beria actually allowed him to go free not long after his sentence was served. Not only that, but Beria nominated Termen for the Stalin Award, Class II, for his espionage work -- and Stalin, not realising that Termen had been bugging *him* as well as foreign powers, actually upgraded that to a Class I, the highest honour the Soviet state gave. While Termen was free, he found himself at a loose end, and ended up volunteering to work for the organisation he had been working for -- which went by many names but became known as the KGB from the 1950s onwards. He tried to persuade the government to let Lavinia, who he hadn't seen in eight years, come over and join him, but they wouldn't even allow him to contact her, and he eventually remarried. Meanwhile, after Stalin's death, Beria was arrested for his crimes, and charged under the same law that he had had Termen convicted under. Beria wasn't as lucky as Termen, though, and was executed. By 1964, Termen had had enough of the KGB, because they wanted him to investigate obvious pseudoscience -- they wanted him to look into aliens, UFOs, ESP... and telepathy. [Excerpt, The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (early version)" "She's already working on my brain"] He quit and went back to civilian life.  He started working in the acoustics lab in Moscow Conservatory, although he had to start at the bottom because everything he'd been doing for more than a quarter of a century was classified. He also wrote a short book on electronic music. In the late sixties an article on him was published in the US -- the first sign any of his old friends had that he'd not  died nearly thirty years earlier. They started corresponding with him, and he became a minor celebrity again, but this was disapproved of by the Soviet government -- electronic music was still considered bourgeois decadence and not suitable for the Soviet Union, and all his instruments were smashed and he was sacked from the conservatory. He continued working in various technical jobs until the 1980s, and still continued inventing refinements of the theremin, although he never had any official support for his work. In the eighties, a writer tried to get him some sort of official recognition -- the Stalin Prize was secret -- and the university at which he was working sent a reply saying, in part, "L.S. Termen took part in research conducted by the department as an ordinary worker and he did not show enough creative activity, nor does he have any achievements on the basis of which he could be recommended for a Government decoration." By this time he was living in shared accommodation with a bunch of other people, one room to himself and using a shared bathroom, kitchen, and so on. After Glasnost he did some interviews and was asked about this, and said "I never wanted to make demands and don't want to now. I phoned the housing department about three months ago and inquired about my turn to have a new flat. The woman told me that my turn would come in five or six years. Not a very reassuring answer if one is ninety-two years old." In 1989 he was finally allowed out of the USSR again, for the first time in fifty-one years, to attend a UNESCO sponsored symposium on electronic music. Among other things, he was given, forty-eight years late, a letter that his old colleague Edgard Varese had sent about his composition Ecuatorial, which had originally been written for theremin. Varese had wanted to revise the work, and had wanted to get modified theremins that could do what he wanted, and had asked the inventor for help, but the letter had been suppressed by the Soviet government. When he got no reply, Varese had switched to using ondes martenot instead. [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ecuatorial"] In the 1970s, after the death of his third wife, Termen had started an occasional correspondence with his second wife, Lavinia, the one who had not been able to come with him to the USSR and hadn't known if he was alive for so many decades. She was now a prominent activist in Haiti, having established dance schools in many Caribbean countries, and Termen still held out hope that they could be reunited, even writing her a letter in 1988 proposing remarriage. But sadly, less than a month after Termen's first trip outside the USSR, she died -- officially of a heart attack or food poisoning, but there's a strong suspicion that she was murdered by the military dictatorship for her closeness to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the pro-democracy activist who later became President of Haiti. Termen was finally allowed to join the Communist Party in the spring of 1991, just before the USSR finally dissolved -- he'd been forbidden up to that point because of his conviction for counter-revolutionary crimes. He was asked by a Western friend why he'd done that when everyone else was trying to *leave* the Communist Party, and he explained that he'd made a promise to Lenin. In his final years he was researching immortality, going back to the work he had done in his youth, working with biologists, trying to find a way to restore elderly bodies to youthful vigour. But sadly he died in 1993, aged ninety-seven, before he achieved his goal. On one of his last trips outside the USSR, in 1991, he visited the US, and in California he finally got to hear the song that most people associate with his invention, even though it didn't actually feature a theremin: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Back in the 1930s, when he was working with Slonimsky and Varese and Ives and the rest, Termen had set up the Theremin Studio, a sort of experimental arts lab, and in 1931 he had invited the musicologist, composer, and theoretician Joseph Schillinger to become a lecturer there. Schillinger had been one of the first composers to be really interested in the theremin, and had composed a very early piece written specifically for the instrument, the First Airphonic Suite: [Excerpt: Joseph Schillinger, "First Airphonic Suite"] But he was most influential as a theoretician. Schillinger believed that all of the arts were susceptible to rigorous mathematical analysis, and that you could use that analysis to generate new art according to mathematical principles, art that would be perfect. Schillinger planned to work with Termen to try to invent a machine that could compose, perform, and transmit music. The idea was that someone would be able to tune in a radio and listen to a piece of music in real time as it was being algorithmically composed and transmitted. The two men never achieved this, but Schillinger became very, very, respected as someone with a rigorous theory of musical structure -- though reading his magnum opus, the Schillinger System of Musical Composition, is frankly like wading through treacle. I'll read a short excerpt just to give an idea of his thinking: "On the receiving end, phasic stimuli produced by instruments encounter a metamorphic auditory integrator. This integrator represents the auditory apparatus as a whole and is a complex interdependent system. It consists of two receivers (ears), transmitters, auditory nerves, and a transformer, the auditory braincenter.  The response to a stimulus is integrated both quantitatively and selectively. The neuronic energy of response becomes the psychonic energy of auditory image. The response to stimuli and the process of integration are functional operations and, as such, can be described in mathematical terms , i.e., as  synchronization, addition, subtraction, multiplication, etc. But these integrative processes alone do not constitute the material of orchestration either.  The auditory image, whether resulting from phasic stimuli of an excitor or from selfstimulation of the auditory brain-center, can be described only in Psychological terms, of loudness, pitch, quality, etc. This leads us to the conclusion that the material of orchestration can be defined only as a group of conditions under which an integrated image results from a sonic stimulus subjected to an auditory response.  This constitutes an interdependent tripartite system, in which the existence of one component necessitates the existence of two others. The composer can imagine an integrated sonic form, yet he cannot transmit it to the auditor (unless telepathicaliy) without sonic stimulus and hearing apparatus." That's Schillinger's way of saying that if a composer wants someone to hear the music they've written, the composer needs a musical instrument and the listener needs ears and a brain. This kind of revolutionary insight made Schillinger immensely sought after in the early 1930s, and among his pupils were the swing bandleaders Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey, and the songwriter George Gershwin, who turned to Schillinger for advice when he was writing his opera Porgy and Bess: [Excerpt: Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong, "Here Come De Honey Man"] Another of his pupils was the trombonist and arranger Glenn Miller, who at that time was a session player working in pickup studio bands for people like Red Nichols. Miller spent some time studying with him in the early thirties, and applied those lessons when given the job of putting together arrangements for Ray Noble, his first prominent job. In 1938 Glenn Miller walked into a strip joint to see a nineteen-year-old he'd been told to take a look at. This was another trombonist, Paul Tanner, who was at the time working as a backing musician for the strippers. Miller had recently broken up his first big band, after a complete lack of success, and was looking to put together a new big band, to play arrangements in the style he had worked out while working for Noble. As Tanner later put it "he said, `Well, how soon can you come with me?' I said, `I can come right now.' I told him I was all packed, I had my toothbrush in my pocket and everything. And so I went with him that night, and I stayed with him until he broke the band up in September 1942." The new band spent a few months playing the kind of gigs that an unknown band can get, but they soon had a massive success with a song Miller had originally written as an arranging exercise set for him by Schillinger, a song that started out under the title "Miller's Tune", but soon became known worldwide as "Moonlight Serenade": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Moonlight Serenade"] The Miller band had a lot of lineup changes in the four and a bit years it was together, but other than Miller himself there were only four members who were with that group throughout its career, from the early dates opening for  Freddie Fisher and His Schnickelfritzers right through to its end as the most popular band in America. They were piano player Chummy MacGregor, clarinet player Wilbur Schwartz, tenor sax player Tex Beneke, and Tanner. They played on all of Miller's big hits, like "In the Mood" and "Chattanooga Choo-Choo": [Excerpt: Glenn Miller, "Chattanooga Choo-Choo"] But in September 1942, the band broke up as the members entered the armed forces, and Tanner found himself in the Army while Miller was in the Air Force, so while both played in military bands, they weren't playing together, and Miller disappeared over the Channel, presumed dead, in 1944. Tanner became a session trombonist, based in LA, and in 1958 he found himself on a session for a film soundtrack with Dr. Samuel Hoffman. I haven't been able to discover for sure which film this was for, but the only film on which Hoffman has an IMDB credit for that year is that American International Pictures classic, Earth Vs The Spider: [Excerpt: Earth Vs The Spider trailer] Hoffman was a chiropodist, and that was how he made most of his living, but as a teenager in the 1930s he had been a professional violin player under the name Hal Hope. One of the bands he played in was led by a man named Jolly Coburn, who had seen Rudy Vallee's band with their theremin and decided to take it up himself. Hoffman had then also got a theremin, and started his own all-electronic trio, with a Hammond organ player, and with a cello-style fingerboard theremin played by William Schuman, the future Pulitzer Prize winning composer. By the 1940s, Hoffman was a full-time doctor, but he'd retained his Musicians' Union card just in case the odd gig came along, and then in 1945 he received a call from Miklos Rozsa, who was working on the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's new film, Spellbound. Rozsa had tried to get Clara Rockmore, the one true virtuoso on the theremin playing at the time, to play on the soundtrack, but she'd refused -- she didn't do film soundtrack work, because in her experience they only wanted her to play on films about ghosts or aliens, and she thought it damaged the dignity of the instrument. Rozsa turned to the American Federation of Musicians, who as it turned out had precisely one theremin player who could read music and wasn't called Clara Rockmore on their books. So Dr. Samuel Hoffman, chiropodist, suddenly found himself playing on one of the most highly regarded soundtracks of one of the most successful films of the forties: [Excerpt: Miklos Rozsa, "Spellbound"] Rozsa soon asked Hoffman to play on another soundtrack, for the Billy Wilder film The Lost Weekend, another of the great classics of late forties cinema. Both films' soundtracks were nominated for the Oscar, and Spellbound's won, and Hoffman soon found himself in demand as a session player. Hoffman didn't have any of Rockmore's qualms about playing on science fiction and horror films, and anyone with any love of the genre will have heard his playing on genre classics like The Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T, The Thing From Another World, It Came From Outer Space, and of course Bernard Hermann's score for The Day The Earth Stood Still: [Excerpt: The Day The Earth Stood Still score] As well as on such less-than-classics as The Devil's Weed, Voodoo Island, The Mad Magician, and of course Billy The Kid Vs Dracula. Hoffman became something of a celebrity, and also recorded several albums of lounge music with a band led by Les Baxter, like the massive hit Music Out Of The Moon, featuring tracks like “Lunar Rhapsody”: [Excerpt: Samuel Hoffman, "Lunar Rhapsody”] [Excerpt: Neil Armstrong] That voice you heard there was Neil Armstrong, on Apollo 11 on its way back from the moon. He took a tape of Hoffman's album with him. But while Hoffman was something of a celebrity in the fifties, the work dried up almost overnight in 1958 when he worked at that session with Paul Tanner. The theremin is a very difficult instrument to play, and while Hoffman was a good player, he wasn't a great one -- he was getting the work because he was the best in a very small pool of players, not because he was objectively the best there could be. Tanner noticed that Hoffman was having quite some difficulty getting the pitching right in the session, and realised that the theremin must be a very difficult instrument to play because it had no markings at all. So he decided to build an instrument that had the same sound, but that was more sensibly controlled than just waving your hands near it. He built his own invention, the electrotheremin, in less than a week, despite never before having had any experience in electrical engineering. He built it using an oscillator, a length of piano wire and a contact switch that could be slid up and down the wire, changing the pitch. Two days after he finished building it, he was in the studio, cutting his own equivalent of Hoffman's forties albums, Music For Heavenly Bodies, including a new exotica version of "Moonlight Serenade", the song that Glenn Miller had written decades earlier as an exercise for Schillinger: [Excerpt: Paul Tanner, "Moonlight Serenade"] Not only could the electrotheremin let the player control the pitch more accurately, but it could also do staccato notes easily -- something that's almost impossible with an actual theremin. And, on top of that, Tanner was cheaper than Hoffman. An instrumentalist hired to play two instruments is paid extra, but not as much extra as paying for another musician to come to the session, and since Tanner was a first-call trombone player who was likely to be at the session *anyway*, you might as well hire him if you want a theremin sound, rather than paying for Hoffman. Tanner was an excellent musician -- he was a professor of music at UCLA as well as being a session player, and he authored one of the standard textbooks on jazz -- and soon he had cornered the market, leaving Hoffman with only the occasional gig. We will actually be seeing Hoffman again, playing on a session for an artist we're going to look at in a couple of months, but in LA in the early sixties, if you wanted a theremin sound, you didn't hire a theremin player, you hired Paul Tanner to play his electrotheremin -- though the instrument was so obscure that many people didn't realise he wasn't actually playing a theremin. Certainly Brian Wilson seems to have thought he was when he hired him for "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "I Just Wasn't Made For These Times"] We talked briefly about that track back in the episode on "God Only Knows",   but three days after recording that, Tanner was called back into the studio for another session on which Brian Wilson wanted a theremin sound. This was a song titled "Good, Good, Good Vibrations", and it was inspired by a conversation he'd had with his mother as a child. He'd asked her why dogs bark at some people and not at others, and she'd said that dogs could sense vibrations that people sent out, and some people had bad vibrations and some had good ones. It's possible that this came back to mind as he was planning the Pet Sounds album, which of course ends with the sound of his own dogs barking. It's also possible that he was thinking more generally about ideas like telepathy -- he had been starting to experiment with acid by this point, and was hanging around with a crowd of people who were proto-hippies, and reading up on a lot of the mystical ideas that were shared by those people. As we saw in the last episode, there was a huge crossover between people who were being influenced by drugs, people who were interested in Eastern religion, and people who were interested in what we now might think of as pseudo-science but at the time seemed to have a reasonable amount of validity, things like telepathy and remote viewing. Wilson had also had exposure from an early age to people claiming psychic powers. Jo Ann Marks, the Wilson family's neighbour and the mother of former Beach Boy David Marks, later had something of a minor career as a psychic to the stars (at least according to obituaries posted by her son) and she would often talk about being able to sense "vibrations". The record Wilson started out making in February 1966 with the Wrecking Crew was intended as an R&B single, and was also intended to sound *strange*: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] At this stage, the song he was working on was a very straightforward verse-chorus structure, and it was going to be an altogether conventional pop song. The verses -- which actually ended up used in the final single, are dominated by organ and Ray Pohlman's bass: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] These bear a strong resemblance to the verses of "Here Today", on the Pet Sounds album which the Beach Boys were still in the middle of making: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Here Today (instrumental)"] But the chorus had far more of an R&B feel than anything the Beach Boys had done before: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-02-18"] It did, though, have precedent. The origins of the chorus feel come from "Can I Get a Witness?", a Holland-Dozier-Holland song that had been a hit for Marvin Gaye in 1963: [Excerpt: Marvin Gaye, "Can I Get a Witness?"] The Beach Boys had picked up on that, and also on its similarity to the feel of Lonnie Mack's instrumental cover version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis, Tennessee", which, retitled "Memphis", had also been a hit in 1963, and in 1964 they recorded an instrumental which they called "Memphis Beach" while they were recording it but later retitled "Carl's Big Chance", which was credited to Brian and Carl Wilson, but was basically just playing the "Can I Get a Witness" riff over twelve-bar blues changes, with Carl doing some surf guitar over the top: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Carl's Big Chance"] The "Can I Get a Witness" feel had quickly become a standard piece of the musical toolkit – you might notice the resemblance between that riff and the “talking 'bout my generation” backing vocals on “My Generation” by the Who, for example. It was also used on "The Boy From New York City", a hit on Red Bird Records by the Ad-Libs: [Excerpt: The Ad-Libs, "The Boy From New York City"] The Beach Boys had definitely been aware of that record -- on their 1965 album Summer Days... And Summer Nights! they recorded an answer song to it, "The Girl From New York City": [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "The Girl From New York City"] And you can see how influenced Brian was by the Ad-Libs record by laying the early instrumental takes of the "Good Vibrations" chorus from this February session under the vocal intro of "The Boy From New York City". It's not a perfect match, but you can definitely hear that there's an influence there: [Excerpt: "The Boy From New York City"/"Good Vibrations"] A few days later, Brian had Carl Wilson overdub some extra bass, got a musician in to do a jaw harp overdub, and they also did a guide vocal, which I've sometimes seen credited to Brian and sometimes Carl, and can hear as both of them depending on what I'm listening for. This guide vocal used a set of placeholder lyrics written by Brian's collaborator Tony Asher, which weren't intended to be a final lyric: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (first version)"] Brian then put the track away for a month, while he continued work on the Pet Sounds album. At this point, as best we can gather, he was thinking of it as something of a failed experiment. In the first of the two autobiographies credited to Brian (one whose authenticity is dubious, as it was largely put together by a ghostwriter and Brian later said he'd never even read it) he talks about how he was actually planning to give the song to Wilson Pickett rather than keep it for the Beach Boys, and one can definitely imagine a Wilson Pickett version of the song as it was at this point. But Brian's friend Danny Hutton, at that time still a minor session singer who had not yet gone on to form the group that would become Three Dog Night, asked Brian if *he* could have the song if Brian wasn't going to use it. And this seems to have spurred Brian into rethinking the whole song. And in doing so he was inspired by his very first ever musical memory. Brian has talked a lot about how the first record he remembers hearing was when he was two years old, at his maternal grandmother's house, where he heard the Glenn Miller version of "Rhapsody in Blue", a three-minute cut-down version of Gershwin's masterpiece, on which Paul Tanner had of course coincidentally played: [Excerpt: The Glenn Miller Orchestra, "Rhapsody in Blue"] Hearing that music, which Brian's mother also played for him a lot as a child, was one of the most profoundly moving experiences of Brian's young life, and "Rhapsody in Blue" has become one of those touchstone pieces that he returns to again and again. He has recorded studio versions of it twice, in the mid-nineties with Van Dyke Parks: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks, "Rhapsody in Blue"] and in 2010 with his solo band, as the intro and outro of an album of Gershwin covers: [Excerpt: Brian Wilson, "Rhapsody in Blue"] You'll also often see clips of him playing "Rhapsody in Blue" when sat at the piano -- it's one of his go-to songs. So he decided he was going to come up with a song that was structured like "Rhapsody in Blue" -- what publicist Derek Taylor would later describe as a "pocket symphony", but "pocket rhapsody" would possibly be a better term for it. It was going to be one continuous song, but in different sections that would have different instrumentation and different feelings to them -- he'd even record them in different studios to get different sounds for them, though he would still often have the musicians run through the whole song in each studio. He would mix and match the sections in the edit. His second attempt to record the whole track, at the start of April, gave a sign of what he was attempting, though he would not end up using any of the material from this session: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: Gold Star 1966-04-09" around 02:34] Nearly a month later, on the fourth of May, he was back in the studio -- this time in Western Studios rather than Gold Star where the previous sessions had been held, with yet another selection of musicians from the Wrecking Crew, plus Tanner, to record another version. This time, part of the session was used for the bridge for the eventual single: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-04 Second Chorus and Fade"] On the twenty-fourth of May the Wrecking Crew, with Carl Wilson on Fender bass (while Lyle Ritz continued to play string bass, and Carol Kaye, who didn't end up on the finished record at all, but who was on many of the unused sessions, played Danelectro), had another attempt at the track, this time in Sunset Studios: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 1966-05-24 (Parts 2&3)"] Three days later, another group of musicians, with Carl now switched to rhythm guitar, were back in Western Studios recording this: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations: Western 1966-05-27 Part C" from 2:52] The fade from that session was used in the final track. A few days later they were in the studio again, a smaller group of people with Carl on guitar and Brian on piano, along with Don Randi on electric harpsichord, Bill Pitman on electric bass, Lyle Ritz on string bass and Hal Blaine on drums. This time there seems to have been another inspiration, though I've never heard it mentioned as an influence. In March, a band called The Association, who were friends with the Beach Boys, had released their single "Along Comes Mary", and by June it had become a big hit: [Excerpt: The Association, "Along Comes Mary"] Now the fuzz bass part they were using on the session on the second of June sounds to my ears very, very, like that intro: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (Inspiration) Western 1966-06-02" from 01:47] That session produced the basic track that was used for the choruses on the final single, onto which the electrotheremin was later overdubbed as Tanner wasn't at that session. Some time around this point, someone suggested to Brian that they should use a cello along with the electrotheremin in the choruses, playing triplets on the low notes. Brian has usually said that this was Carl's idea, while Brian's friend Van Dyke Parks has always said that he gave Brian the idea. Both seem quite certain of this, and neither has any reason to lie, so I suspect what might have happened is that Parks gave Brian the initial idea to have a cello on the track, while Carl in the studio suggested having it specifically play triplets. Either way, a cello part by Jesse Erlich was added to those choruses. There were more sessions in June, but everything from those sessions was scrapped. At some point around this time, Mike Love came up with a bass vocal lyric, which he sang along with the bass in the choruses in a group vocal session. On August the twenty-fourth, two months after what one would think at this point was the final instrumental session, a rough edit of the track was pulled together. By this point the chorus had altered quite a bit. It had originally just been eight bars of G-flat, four bars of B-flat, then four more bars of G-flat. But now Brian had decided to rework an idea he had used in "California Girls". In that song, each repetition of the line "I wish they all could be California" starts a tone lower than the one before. Here, after the bass hook line is repeated, everything moves up a step, repeats the line, and then moves up another step: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] But Brian was dissatisfied with this version of the track. The lyrics obviously still needed rewriting, but more than that, there was a section he thought needed totally rerecording -- this bit: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations: [Alternate Edit] 1966-08-24"] So on the first of September, six and a half months after the first instrumental session for the song, the final one took place. This had Dennis Wilson on organ, Tommy Morgan on harmonicas, Lyle Ritz on string bass, and Hal Blaine and Carl Wilson on percussion, and replaced that with a new, gentler, version: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys: "Good Vibrations (Western 1966-09-01) [New Bridge]"] Well, that was almost the final instrumental session -- they called Paul Tanner in to a vocal overdub session to redo some of the electrotheremin parts, but that was basically it. Now all they had to do was do the final vocals. Oh, and they needed some proper lyrics. By this point Brian was no longer working with Tony Asher. He'd started working with Van Dyke Parks on some songs, but Parks wasn't interested in stepping into a track that had already been worked on so long, so Brian eventually turned to Mike Love, who'd already come up with the bass vocal hook, to write the lyrics. Love wrote them in the car, on the way to the studio, dictating them to his wife as he drove, and they're actually some of his best work. The first verse grounds everything in the sensory, in the earthy. He makes a song originally about *extra* -sensory perception into one about sensory perception -- the first verse covers sight, sound, and smell: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] Carl Wilson was chosen to sing the lead vocal, but you'll notice a slight change in timbre on the line "I hear the sound of a" -- that's Brian stepping into double him on the high notes. Listen again: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations"] For the second verse, Love's lyric moves from the sensory grounding of the first verse to the extrasensory perception that the song has always been about, with the protagonist knowing things about the woman who's the object of the song without directly perceiving them. The record is one of those where I wish I was able to play the whole thing for you, because it's a masterpiece of structure, and of editing, and of dynamics. It's also a record that even now is impossible to replicate properly on stage, though both its writers in their live performances come very close. But while someone in the audience for either the current touring Beach Boys led by Mike Love or for Brian Wilson's solo shows might come away thinking "that sounded just like the record", both have radically different interpretations of it even while sticking close to the original arrangement. The touring Beach Boys' version is all throbbing strangeness, almost garage-rock, emphasising the psychedelia of the track: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live 2014)"] While Brian Wilson's live version is more meditative, emphasising the gentle aspects: [Excerpt Brian Wilson, "Good Vibrations (live at the Roxy)"] But back in 1966, there was definitely no way to reproduce it live with a five-person band. According to Tanner, they actually asked him if he would tour with them, but he refused -- his touring days were over, and also he felt he would look ridiculous, a middle-aged man on stage with a bunch of young rock and roll stars, though apparently they offered to buy him a wig so he wouldn't look so out of place. When he wouldn't tour with them, they asked him where they could get a theremin, and he pointed them in the direction of Robert Moog. Moog -- whose name is spelled M-o-o-g and often mispronounced "moog", had been a teenager in 1949, when he'd seen a schematic for a theremin in an electronic hobbyist magazine, after Samuel Hoffman had brought the instrument back into the limelight. He'd built his own, and started building others to sell to other hobbyists, and had also started branching out into other electronic instruments by the mid-sixties. His small company was the only one still manufacturing actual theremins, but when the Beach Boys came to him and asked him for one, they found it very difficult to control, and asked him if he could do anything simpler. He came up with a ribbon-controlled oscillator, on the same principle as Tanner's electro-theremin, but even simpler to operate, and the Beach Boys bought it and gave it to Mike Love to play on stage. All he had to do was run his finger up and down a metallic ribbon, with the positions of the notes marked on it, and it would come up with a good approximation of the electro-theremin sound. Love played this "woo-woo machine" as he referred to it, on stage for several years: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Good Vibrations (live in Hawaii 8/26/67)"] Moog was at the time starting to build his first synthesisers, and having developed that ribbon-control mechanism he decided to include it in the early models as one of several different methods of controlling the Moog synthesiser, the instrument that became synonymous with the synthesiser in the late sixties and early seventies: [Excerpt: Gershon Kingsley and Leonid Hambro, "Rhapsody in Blue" from Switched-On Gershwin] "Good Vibrations" became the Beach Boys' biggest ever hit -- their third US number one, and their first to make number one in the UK. Brian Wilson had managed, with the help of his collaborators, to make something that combined avant-garde psychedelic music and catchy pop hooks, a truly experimental record that was also a genuine pop classic. To this day, it's often cited as the greatest single of all time. But Brian knew he could do better. He could be even more progressive. He could make an entire album using the same techniques as "Good Vibrations", one where themes could recur, where sections could be edited together and songs could be constructed in the edit. Instead of a pocket symphony, he could make a full-blown teenage symphony to God. All he had to do was to keep looking forward, believe he could achieve his goal, and whatever happened, not lose his nerve and turn back. [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Smile Promo" ]

united states america god tv love music california history president europe english earth uk british french germany new york times spring russia government japanese russian devil western army tennessee revolution hawaii greek world war ii union witness ufos britain caribbean greece cd cia ucla air force haiti rock and roll apollo parks weed mood moscow noble esp psychological soviet union pulitzer prize soviet musicians imdb astronauts crawford orchestras hades communists black americans great depression joseph stalin unesco hoffman swan tvs alfred hitchcock beach boys petersburg hammond marxist kremlin excerpt ussr marvin gaye hermes lev kgb alcatraz espionage tilt lenin neil armstrong mixcloud louis armstrong baird chuck berry communist party rhapsody soviets rock music fairly gold star rca brian wilson siberian orpheus billy wilder fender american federation gregorian good vibrations ives russian revolution gershwin elegy moog spellbound george bernard shaw mi5 sing sing george gershwin gluck wrecking crew summer days red army eurydice pet sounds stradivarius porgy glenn miller trotsky benny goodman russian empire cowell lost weekend mike love krishnamurti three dog night theremin wilson pickett stalinist varese god only knows great beyond seeger huguenots russian army driving me crazy dennis wilson my generation vallee california girls tommy dorsey bernard shaw charles ives schillinger massenet derek taylor can i get van dyke parks beria hal blaine paris opera carl wilson cyrillic class ii saint saens great seal carol kaye meen peggy seeger orphic bernard hermann leopold stokowski termen arnold bennett rudy vallee les baxter holland dozier holland tair stokowski ray noble gonna miss me american international pictures moonlight serenade rockmore robert moog leon theremin lonnie mack it came from outer space henry cowell john logie baird miklos rozsa clara rockmore danelectro henry wood moscow conservatory rozsa along comes mary red nichols tex beneke paul tanner don randi voodoo island ecuatorial edgard varese william schuman freddie fisher lyle ritz stalin prize tilt araiza
ShoutOut Radio
ShoutOut: Peggy Seeger

ShoutOut Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2022 46:42


ShoutOut Radio
ShoutOut: Peggy Seeger

ShoutOut Radio

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 24, 2022 46:42


Folk on Foot
Official Folk Albums Chart Show—1st March 2022

Folk on Foot

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 1, 2022 43:29


This month's Official Folk Albums Chart Show from Folk on Foot features an interview with the singer and harpist Rachel Newton about Heal and Harrow - her collaboration with the fiddle player Lauren MacColl. It was inspired by one of the darkest episodes in Scotland's history - the witch trials of the 16th and 17th centuries. There's also music from the Longest Johns, Talisk, Peggy Seeger, Saint Sister, Josienne Clarke and Manran. --- Access over 150 performances from dozens of artists, by signing up to Folk On Foot On Film: https://www.folkonfoot.com/watch We rely entirely on support from our listeners to make Folk on Foot. So please consider becoming a patron. You'll make a small monthly contribution and get great rewards. Find out more at www.patreon.com/folkonfoot. Sign up for our newsletter at www.folkonfoot.com Follow us on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @folkonfoot

Arts & Ideas
Artists' models and fame

Arts & Ideas

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 23, 2022 44:34


The red-haired Joanna Hiffernan was James McNeill Whistler's Woman in White. An exhibition curated by Margaret MacDonald for the Royal Academy of Arts, London and the National Gallery of Art, Washington uncovers the role she played in his career. An instagram account about the women painted by Viennese artist Egon Schiele has amassed over 100,000 followers. Now Sophie Haydock is publishing a novel called The Flames, which imagines the story of Schiele's wife and three other women who modelled for him. Ilona Sagar has been working for over 2 years in social care services and community settings in the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham to make art reflecting the consequences of asbestos exposure involving social workers, carers, organisers and residents. Shahidha Bari hosts a conversation about famous artists and their sometimes less famous models. Whistler's Woman in White: Joanna Hiffernan runs at the Royal Academy in London from 26 February — 22 May 2022 https://www.ilonasagar.com/ https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/radio-ballads/ On view at Serpentine (31 March – 29 May) and Barking Town Hall and Learning Centre (2-17 April), Radio Ballads presents new film commissions alongside paintings, drawings and contextual materials that share each project's collaborative research process. The original documentary series Radio Ballads produced by musicians Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, working with radio producer Charlie Parker, were broadcast by the BBC from 1957–64. Sophie Haydock's novel The Flames is published in March 2022. Producer: Torquil MacLeod You can find a playlist on the Free Thinking website exploring Art, Architecture, Photography and Museums with discussions on colour, trompe l'oeil, world's fairs, and guests including Veronica Ryan, Jennifer Higgie, Eric Parry and Alison Brooks, the directors of museums in London, Paris, Singapore, Los Angeles, Washington https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p026wnjl

Psycho Killer: Shocking True Crime Stories
Thomas Parker: Hanged In Public For Shooting his Parents

Psycho Killer: Shocking True Crime Stories

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 30, 2021 36:21


Visit our website https://psycho-killer.co for exclusive videos, photos, articles, and transcripts.See our exclusive picture gallery https://bit.ly/parker-murder-imagesThomas Parker's mother doted on her little boy. This spoilt brat grew up to be a workshy, wife-beating drunk. And he repaid his parents by turning a shotgun on them. Parker's father survived with slight injuries. But his mother lingered for weeks with a festering head wound. The year was 1864. Elizabeth Parker fell into a coma and died in April. Four months later, her son also met his maker — at the end of a rope in front of 10,000 citizens. Thomas Parker was the last person to be hanged in public at Nottingham. This is his story. The Six O'clock Knock© is a Psycho Killer production.See our news article https://psycho-killer.co/psycho-killer-true-crime-podcast/news for photographs of the crime scene as it is today, contemporary court documents and the post mortem sketch prepared for the coroner.With contributions from Emmaline Severn, a distant relative of Elizabeth Parker, and Paul Mann QC.The traditional folk songs in this episode are performed by Catherine Earnshaw and Keith Clouston. 'The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood' is a traditional tune with lyrics by Richard and Mimi Fariña. 'Blue Bleezin' Blind Drunk' is also traditional, with the last verse written by Linda Thompson. 'False, False' is a traditional Scottish song collected in 1962 by Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger.Transcript[Music] This podcast contains descriptions of death and violence that some listeners may find upsetting we begin at the end [Music] a cool dry morning in august a Wednesday a 29 year old man in the prime of his life stands on a scaffold the roar from the crowd arrayed below engulfs him like flood water buffeting and deafening him with abuse [Music] for the first but not the last time today tom parker tilts his head back and gasps for air he is surrounded by a sea of faces so many it's impossible to count them all some are contorted in rage and scorn some are giddy with excitement others turn away afraid to look upon the condemned man's face out of respect or superstition but then there are those men just like him or like he used to be full of drink leering and braying as if revelling in a day at the races pressed in a doorway a youth and a maid steal an unlikely embrace her bare breast hidden only by her lover's needing hand their passion inflamed by the bloodlust of those thronged before them some have been here all night keen to take a prime spot from which to enjoy the day's grisly spectacle i am the resurrection and the life saith the lord he that believeth in me though he were dead yet shall he live the chaplains words are drowned out by another wave of impatient jeers a hush descends now though as the white hood is placed over the prisoner's head in the distance the barking of dogs and the striking of a clock it is eight o'clock parker's eyes are swimming his heart beating as though to break free from his rib cage a hot dark bloom spreads in his trousers betraying his terror [Music] those closest can see and smell his shame some hurl obscenities at him fanning the air melodramatically the dirty bastard shat himself i know that my redeemer liveth and that he shall stand on the latter day upon the earth parker mouths the verse almost in unison desperate to display his newly restored faith in the almighty the summer breeze fills the chaplain's surplus like a sail and snatches at the brittle leaves of the prayer book he had fretted that the expected rain would make the scaffold slick any slip up here would be greeted with a very public type of ridicule that he wished to avoid and though after my skin worms destroy this body parker shuts his eyes as the noose is slipped over his hooded head and tries to mouth the verse [Music] but a vision swims into view a familiar kindly face every detail is there from the carefully parted gray hair under the modest bonnet to the cameo brooch at her throat to his horror the vision distorts then revealing a bloated sightless eye and a skein of dried blood staining the pallid cheek man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery in tones the reverend howard he cometh up and he is cut down like a flower he flees as it were a shadow and never continueth in one stay parker screws up his eyes but still the apparition of his mother dances before him her lolling head now reveals a shaved pallid scalp peppered with birdshot he tries to scream but his tongue has swollen and his mouth fills once more with the brandy he'd sucked at breakfast in the midst of life we are in death the bolt is drawn with a terrible sound richard thomas parker dangles in agony on the scaffold his struggles lasting much longer than expected for a moment he imagines he is airborne gliding above the throng impervious to the sting of their insults their jeers finally silenced in ore but then the roar of the crowd crashes back in waves febrile animalistic they're chanting like peels of thunder an urgent response to the denial of the reverend's fervent prayers he died hard they will say thomas askin the executioner has a reputation for botched hangings parker convulses but the drop is too short to break his neck the noose draws tight the brass ring behind his ear trapping his last breath compressing the vagus nerve and in that instant as his consciousness evaporates he is briefly aware of an overpowering odor it is blood and pig shit and lilac blossom...Read more https://bit.ly/psycho-killer-fiskerton-murder

The Lyric Feature - RTÉ
Vocal Chords: Peggy Seeger | The Lyric Feature

The Lyric Feature - RTÉ

Play Episode Listen Later Feb 21, 2021 56:59


Singers Iarla Ó Lionaird and Peggy Seeger discuss the global journey of the human voice and ask, why do we sing and what happens when we do? An Athena Media production Producer: Helen Shaw Audio Editor: Pearse O Caoimh. Producer for lyric fm: Eoin O Kelly (First broadcast 24th March 2017)

Song Of The Soul
Pete Seeger's Generations of Music

Song Of The Soul

Play Episode Listen Later May 11, 2019 55:00


Part 3 of musicians who performed with & whose music was grown by Pete Seeger. We'll end with his sister, Peggy Seeger, after visits with & music from Ruth Pelham of Music Mobile Online, DC Cultural Warrior & Singer Luci Murphy, and Jane Sapp, founder of the Black Belt Folk Roots Festival, and much, much, more. Pete's influence on music is alive and thriving in so many places!

Vocal Chords
E 11 - In Conversation with Peggy Seeger

Vocal Chords

Play Episode Listen Later Aug 23, 2018 57:53


Iarla O Lionaird meets folk singer Peggy Seeger at her home in Oxford to explore her life's journey in song and song composition. Peggy talks of her childhood growing up under the influence of her older half brother Peter Seeger and in a home where legendary singers like Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie would visit to meet her parents, song collectors and composers Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Vocal Chords is the intellectual property of Athena Media Ltd and no production use can be made of the podcasts without the direct consent of the producers. www.vocalchords.ie

New Books in Women's History
Jean R. Freedman, “Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics” (U Illinois Press, 2017)

New Books in Women's History

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 8, 2018 66:23


When folklorist Jean Freedman first met Peggy Seeger in 1979, Freedman was an undergraduate on her junior year abroad in London, while her American compatriot had been living in the UK for two decades. Their encounter took place in the Singers' Club, a folk music venue that Seeger and her husband Ewan MacColl founded in the early 1960s and to which Freedman returned many times during her London sojourn. After Freedman returned to the States, the pair kept in touch for a while but their contact became increasingly sporadic. However, it began again in earnest when the folklorist emailed Seeger to check some facts for a writing assignment. During their subsequent exchange, Seeger asked if Freedman might know of anyone who would be interested in writing her biography. Immediately, Freedman volunteered herself. Eight years, many interviews, and much text-based research later, Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics (University of Illinois Press, 2017) is the result. As the book's subtitle suggests, Freedman covers multiple aspects of her subject's rich story, including Seeger's upbringing within a privileged musical family; her relationship with the aforementioned leftwing folksinger and songwriter, actor and playwright Ewan MacColl; her involvement in the production of the groundbreaking BBC Radio Ballads; her musical endeavors, many of which were collaborative; her involvement in the establishment of various initiatives such as the Critics Group, a key aim of which was to help young singers perform folk material in an appropriate manner; and her political activism. Freedman also writes about Seeger's return to America in the early 1990s following MacColl's death, then her subsequent relocation to Britain in 2010 where she continues to live and be astonishingly active. Seeger's most recent album, Everything Changes, was released in 2014, and when this New Books in Folklore interview with Freedman was recorded in March 2018, she already had another one in the works. Freedman's Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love, and Politics is the first full length study of an important cultural figure and has been very well received since its publication last year. A recent review in the Journal of Folklore Research described the book as offering a comprehensive overview of Peggy Seeger's life along with an absorbing history of the folk music revival. It also praises Freedman's prose for being as approachable and entertaining as Seeger's lyrics and informal, intimate performance style. Rachel Hopkin is a UK born, US based folklorist and radio producer and is currently a PhD candidate at the Ohio State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Song Of The Soul
Tunes in the Belly of the Year

Song Of The Soul

Play Episode Listen Later Jan 20, 2018 55:00


A Song of the Soul collage from mid-2017 full of folkies, young & old, with tributes to Pete Seeger by Charlie King and Pete's sister, Peggy Seeger, a Quaker ballad by Paul Tinkerhess, a sing-along song with Peter & Annie, Anishinabe-rooted music with Bill Miller, and an heartful journey across America in song with Robinson & Rohe.

Arts & Ideas
Free Thinking - Peggy Seeger

Arts & Ideas

Play Episode Listen Later Nov 5, 2015 44:21


Philip Dodd talks to one of the icons of what used to be called the counter-culture, Peggy Seeger. Another chance to hear a conversation recorded earlier this year before Peggy Seeger joins the line up of guests performing at Sage Gateshead over Radio 3's Free Thinking Festival this weekend. Peggy Seeger's voice and career are emblematic of a life lived against the establishment grain. Born in New York in 1935 she first made her name as one of the leaders of the British Folk Revival, and with her partner Ewan MacColl, she helped to create one of the most innovative radio series of the last fifty years, the Radio Ballads, which blended original music, sound effects, and first-person interviews. In the 1950s she had her US passport withdrawn following a visit to China and chose to stay in Europe. It wasn't wholly unexpected. She had long aligned herself with the radical left and was an outspoken champion of feminism - one of her most famous songs being "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer". When official US attitudes softened after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1994 she returned to live in the States, but recently moved back to the United Kingdom and is still recording and releasing albums, including her latest CD Everything Changes.

Arts & Ideas
Free Thinking - Peggy Seeger

Arts & Ideas

Play Episode Listen Later Mar 25, 2015 44:16


Philip Dodd talks to one of the icons of what used to be called the counter-culture, Peggy Seeger. Her voice and career are emblematic of a life lived against the establishment grain.