Podcast appearances and mentions of Tom Dooley

In this episode, Steve welcomes Michael La Chiana from Journey Through The Past TV to talk about his upcoming Amazon Prime Video release about the Legend of Tom Dooley. Find Michael online: https://www.youtube.com/@JourneyThruThePasttv2025 Music courtesy of Laura Reed/Lore: https://www.youtube.com/@Whatisloremusic and https://www.whatislore.com/ and from Lee G at 1st Floor Audio: https://www.youtube.com/@1stFloorAudioBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/missing-persons-mysteries--5624803/support.

Iedereen die een beetje bekend is met Amerikaanse folk- en moordballades kent de regels: Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, hang down your head and cry... Hang down your head, Tom Dooley, poor boy, you're bound to die...Tom Dooley is een van de beroemdste moordliederen uit de Amerikaanse geschiedenis. Achter het lied schuilt een verhaal van passie, verraad en een brute moord die een heel land in zijn greep hield. Een negentiende eeuwse moordzaak, vol schandalen en mysteries. Patrick Bernauw vertelt het hele verhaal en schreef er een variante op: "In een kuil".Abonneer je nu op WARE MISDAAD zodat je zeker geen aflevering hoeft te missen. Misschien vind je ook de tijd om onze podcast een mooi boeketje sterren toe te kennen op je favoriete platform, of er een review over te schrijven? Wil je ons een onmisbaar financieel steuntje in de rug geven? Dan kun je lid worden van onze SUPPORTERS CLUB... Voor een kleine maandelijkse bijdrage krijg je toegang tot allerlei lekkers. Volg de link: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/ware-misdaad--5433901/supportTot en met 15 april 2025 krijgen leden van de Supporters Club er 3 gratis ebooks van Patrick Bernauw bovenop (historische "faction" thrillers):De Paus van Satan: De negentiende eeuwse auteur Joris-Karl Huysmans - Frans moeder, Nederlandse vader - infiltreert in het satanistische milieu van Parijs en komt er op het spoor van... jawel!De Zaak Louis XVII: Zijn ouders eindigden op het schavot. Maar wat is er gebeurd met hun zoon, de kroonprins van Frankrijk, die tijdens de Revolutie spoorloos verdween?Het geslacht van de engel: Hoe een kort verhaal van de schrijver Arthur Machen in de vorm van een krantenartikel verantwoordelijk werd voor een van de grootste mythes van de Grote Oorlog... de Engelen van Mons.

Join us this week as we discuss the ballad of Tom Dooley.  Its a great tune but a tragic tale. Support the show

Two threads that wove through all of last year for us: coming together in creative community in the face of looming climate disaster and reclaiming Appalachian murder ballads.Those might seem like radically different subjects, but the overlap – for us, at least – was using art to grow resilience in the face of grief. Especially with the climate disaster that was Helene hitting so many of our neighbors. This episode features interviews with musician Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses), artist and climate organizer Denali Nalamalapu, Jason Duncan from the Wilkes County Historical Museum, and discussions with MidMountain Fellows Heather Adams, Sarah Gill, Katherine Fahey, Dan Van Allen, Becky Poole, Miriam Juliana, Elsa Howell, and Marie Anderson.This episode also featured a clip of the Kingston Trio's version of "Tom Dooley" and instrumentals from Betsy Podsiadlo's performance in Fatal Femme Agency during MidMountain Fest in October of 2024.This episode was produced with support from Mid Atlantic Arts' Central Appalachian Living Traditions Program.

One of the most influential bands in American music history performs Dec. 7 at Key West Theater.  The Kingston Trio, a legacy band that carries the torch for one of the most influential musical movements in modern history, blending calypso, folk, bluegrass and rock themes into the Americana mainstream, performs Saturday, Dec. 7 at the Key West Theater.Keys Weekly's Britt Myers and Mandy Miles catch up with the trio for the latest episode of the Florida Keys Weekly podcast. They discuss the band's historic feats of record-breaking hits and album sales; the Beatles opening for the trio and their influence on Bob Dylan and the folk revival of the early '60s. Many argue the Kingston Trio transformed modern American music alongside pioneers such as Elvis Presley, BB King and The Beach Boys — blending sounds and genres that forever changed how music was performed and marketed. Mike Marvin, Tim Gorelangton and Buddy Woodward represent the group today, performing hits like “Tom Dooley” and "MTA" while reminiscing with nostalgic stories of growing up around the original trio. Don't miss the podcast, which drops some breaking news (spoiler alert) on a potential upcoming Netflix miniseries on the Kingston Trio. Some tickets remain at thekeywesttheater.com.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amici, amanti, gelosie e sifilide: un omicidio efferato, quello di Laura Foster, porta scompiglio nella contea di Wilkes, in Carolina del Nord. L'anno è il 1866 e l'unico sospettato, Tom Dula (detto Dooley) è sparito dalla circolazione... Buon ascolto!

Today's podcast features Nick Reynolds, one of the founding members of the Kingston Trio. They became known for their tight harmonies and lively stage presence. One of the trio's biggest hits was “Tom Dooley,” which was number one on the Billboard charts and earned them a Grammy Award. The Trio had many more hits, including “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “Scotch and Soda,” and “Greenback Dollar.” Their music resonated with audiences of all ages, cementing their status as folk music legends. 

In this episode, the Lovelights join me again to discuss opening for The Doors as well as the interactions they had with them.

Our rhearts go out to those affected forever by Hurrican helene in Western North Carolina and right here in the Palmetto State. In this episode, we go north of the border for the first timne ever to cover a North Carolina Crime as a tribute to those still struggling. We hope this can bring them some escape from their current reality and maybe a small bit of entertainment.As for the story, we cover a 19th century libertine with an eye for the ladies. Things go awry when one of his paramours ends up missing.

Vem var egentligen Tom Dooley, mannen som det sjungs om i den kända folksången? Varför hängdes han? Är historien verkligen sann? Och vet man vad som egentligen hände?Wikipedia säger sitt om Tom Dooley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Senator Tom Dooley chats to PJ about his plan to regulate dynamic pricing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

How does Urkel show up in this one? Who's the only decent member of the Full House cast? And why is Tom Dooley hanging his head and crying? We get a closer look at the answers to these questions and more as we watch Season 4, Episode 16 of Full House.  Alex Diamond, David Kenny, and John McDaniel heard that the long-running network sitcom Family Matters ends with side character Steve Urkel going to space. And the best way to figure out how that happened - obviously - is to watch the last episode first and make our way backwards through nearly ten years of television.Join our countdown to number one (and our slow descent into madness) in all the places you expect internet people to be:Website: jumpingtheshuttle.spaceEmail: jumpingtheshuttle@gmail.comInstagram: @JumpingTheShuttle / @ThatAlexD / @dak577Twitter: @JumpingShuttle / @ThatAlexD / @dak577TikTok: @JumpingTheShuttle / @ThatAlexD / @dak577Brought to you by Smooth My Balls

Using my modified Recording King RKO-3S (with fiberskyn head and nylon strings) tuned relative to G-standard, probably about 3 half-steps down.

Using my modified Recording King RKO-3S (with fiberskyn head and nylon strings) tuned relative to G-standard, probably about 3 half-steps down.

====================================================SUSCRIBETEhttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNpffyr-7_zP1x1lS89ByaQ?sub_confirmation=1=======================================================================DECIDETE HOYDevoción Matutina para Jóvenes 2024Narrado por: Daniel RamosDesde: Connecticut, Estados Unidos===================|| www.drministries.org ||===================04 DE JULIOUN HOMBRE DILIGENTE«Mientras es de día, tenemos que hacer el trabajo del que me envió; pues viene la noche, cuando nadie puede trabajar» (Juan 9: 4). «El bosque es encantador, oscuro y profundo, pero yo tengo promesas que cumplir, y kilómetros que recorrer antes de dormir». Estas líneas, escritas por el poeta norteamericano Roberto Frost, se leyeron en el funeral del doctor Tom Dooley, un médico que dedicó su vida a ayudar a la gente necesitada en Laos. El trabajo que realizó fue muy importante y novedoso, y logró inspirar la creación de un centro médico internacional. Cuando al doctor Dooley le diagnosticaron cáncer, supo que su vida sería más corta, por lo que trabajó incansablemente día y noche. Según un colaborador, se quejaba de que el día solo tuviera veinticuatro horas. En 1959, en una gira por los Estados Unidos, visitó treinta y siete ciudades, dio cuarenta y nueve charlas en sesenta días y recaudó casi un millón de dólares para su centro médico internacional de ayuda. Cuando regresó a Laos, atendía a unos cien pacientes por día, revisaba la correspondencia durante gran parte de la noche y estaba disponible para atender situaciones de emergencia médica en cualquier momento. Menos de un año después, regresó a Estados Unidos, donde presentó cincuenta y cinco charlas en cuarenta y un lugares en tan solo seis semanas. Le dijo a un amigo: «¡Todavía tengo mucho que hacer!». Desafortunadamente, el doctor Dooley falleció en Nueva York el 18 de enero de 1960, antes de completar su obra. Incluso más que la vida de Tom Dooley, la vida de Jesús se caracterizó por la comprensión de que el tiempo es corto. Trabajaba sin descanso, hasta el punto de la extenuación. Mientras otros dormían, él oraba. Mantenía un ritmo agotador, enseñando a sus discípulos, curando a los enfermos, plantando las semillas de la verdad, consolando a los desanimados y llevando a cabo el plan de la salvación. Por lo tanto, cuando se acercaba la crucifixión, pudo decir a su Padre: «He terminado la obra que tú me confiaste» (Juan 17: 14). ¿Estás viviendo tu vida al máximo? ¿Qué puedes hacer hoy para aprovechar al máximo tu tiempo y dejar un impacto positivo en el mundo? Recuerda, el tiempo es corto, ¡vive con propósito y pasión! 

Al discusses his relationship with the Trio reading a letter that Nick Reynolds wrote him and an intro Bob Shane read for Dr. Tom Dooley

Tab and tutorial now available in the Breakthrough Banjo course http://clawhammerbanjo.net/coursetour  

Wed (pt 1 of 2): On today's Late Riser's Podcast, Rev. Billy Ray Collins reiterates the evils of Prom Season.. - We cover the backstory of Tom Dooley.. - Tater has the latest Tatertainment News.. - Mr. Rhubarb snaps on the crew and still manages to bring a history story into the light.. - Terry Hanson tells us about the time he was close enough to Fidel Castro to.. well, you know.. - and we'll wrap things up with a letter from one of our captive audience members ..! ℗®© 2024 John Boy & Billy, Inc.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Wed (pt 2 of 2): On today's Late Riser's Podcast, Rev. Billy Ray Collins reiterates the evils of Prom Season.. - We cover the backstory of Tom Dooley.. - Tater has the latest Tatertainment News.. - Mr. Rhubarb snaps on the crew and still manages to bring a history story into the light.. - Terry Hanson tells us about the time he was close enough to Fidel Castro to.. well, you know.. - and we'll wrap things up with a letter from one of our captive audience members ..! ℗®© 2024 John Boy & Billy, Inc.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 1170, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: At The Bookstore 1: Kathryn Glasgow's first novel, "Another Song About the King", features a mom obsessed with this singer. Elvis Presley. 2: 2 men travel America with this man's brain in a Tupperware bowl in the true story "Driving Mr. Albert". Albert Einstein. 3: This prolific novelist proved her "metal" once again with her 2000 bestseller "The House on Hope Street". Danielle Steel. 4: "Dark Eagle" by historian John Ensor Harr is called "A Novel Of" this traitor "And the American Revolution". Benedict Arnold. 5: The front cover of "Hooking Up" by this "Bonfire of the Vanities" author shows his name but not the book's title. Tom Wolfe. Round 2. Category: Ends In Ola. With Ola in quotation marks 1: It's what you ride along the canals of Venice. a gondola. 2: It often includes rolled oats, wheat germ, honey, fruit and nuts. granola. 3: This early phonograph began cranking out music in 1906. a Victrola. 4: Italy's Lombardy region is famous for producing this soft (and smelly) blue cheese. Gorgonzola. 5: Haiti occupies a third of this island; the Dominican Republic covers the rest. Hispaniola. Round 3. Category: Classic Country 1: 1 of 3 original members of the Country Music Hall of Fame. (1 of) Hank Williams, Sr., Jimmie Rodgers and Fred Rose. 2: To make it as "A big star in the movies", Buck Owens said he had to "act" this way. naturally. 3: Lefty Frizzell told his honey, "If you've got the money, I've got" this. the time. 4: Migrants leaving this state's "Dust Bowl" helped bring country music to the West. Oklahoma. 5: In 1958, the first country music Grammy Award went to this Kingston Trio song. "Tom Dooley". Round 4. Category: The Last Word Said In Classic Films 1: "The Wizard of Oz". home. 2: "Gone with the Wind". day. 3: "Casablanca". friendship. 4: "King Kong", from 1933. beast. 5: "Apocalypse Now". Horror. Round 5. Category: Ute Tell Me. With Ute in quotation marks 1: To water down. dilute. 2: Drive in from the burbs. commute. 3: Hairy. hirsute. 4: In a proper one of these, the forefinger touches the hat just to the right of the right eye. salute. 5: Jekyll calls Hyde this type of rough fellow "that slept within me". brute. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia!Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/ AI Voices used

As a committed christian, Dr. Tom Dooley has dedicated his life to the pursuit of science. In our first segment he joins host Don Hawkins to talk about cancer and hope There's been significant progress in cancer treatments causing the death rate to drop. However, cancer still takes far to many lives.  Dr. Robert Crummie lost his wife to cancer and he and Cliff McArdle join host Don Hawkins to discuss dealing with grief and loss. Discover more Christian podcasts at lifeaudio.com and inquire about advertising opportunities at lifeaudio.com/contact-us.

Join me for a great conversation with the group that opened for The Doors in Louisville on October 31, 1968, Tom Dooley and the Lovelights.

Doc Watson has been gone for more than a decade, and yet his music and legacy remain more alive and relevant than ever. And thanks to the ongoing MerleFest, which brings a wide-ranging cast from the Americana world to Doc's North Carolina stomping grounds every April, that's not going to change anytime soon. We consider the enduring impact of Doc through conversations with some of those who bear his stamp, including Gillian Welch and Jerry Douglas, in this special episode of Carolina Calling.Music featured in this episode:Doc Watson - "Sittin' on Top of the World"Doc & Merle Watson - "Jimmy's Texas Blues"Gillian Welch - "Everything Is Free"Andrew Marlin - "Erie Fidler"Doc Watson - "Tom Dooley"Doc & Merle Watson - "Sheeps In The Meadow / Stoney Fork"Doc & Merle Watson - "Poor Boy Blues"Doc Watson - "And Am I Born to Die"Doc Watson - "My Home's Across the Blue Ridge Mountains"Jerry Douglas - "A New Day Medley"Doc Watson - "The Last Thing On My Mind"Carolina Calling is produced by The Bluegrass Situation and Come Hear NCAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Fjórar vikur verða liðnar á morgun frá mannskæðum árásum Hamas á Ísrael. Ísraelsmenn lýstu yfir stríði og hafa gert enn mannskæðari árásir á Gasa. Nú berast fréttir af því að þeir hafi umkringt Gasaborg. Erlingur Erlingsson hernaðarsagnfræðingur ræddi við okkur um stöðuna. Eiríkur Valdimarsson þjóðfræðingur og verkefnastjóri hjá Rannsóknarsetri Háskóla Íslands á Ströndum - Þjóðfræðistofu sagði okkur frá rannsóknum sínum um tengdamömmur sem menningarfyrirbæri, en hann hefur rýnt í orðræðu um tengdamömmur og rýnt í það af hverju ímynd þeirra hefur oft á sér neikvæðan blæ. Á sunnudaginn verður haldið upp á 90 ára afmæli Hvolsvallar, sem er tiltölulega ungt þéttbýli og sérstakt að því leyti að þar var hvorki byggt upp við sjó né árfarveg. Ísólfur Gylfi Pálmason er fyrrverandi sveitarstjóri og kemur að hátíðahöldum helgarinnar ? hann fór yfir söguna með okkur. Umsjón: Eyrún Magnúsdóttir og Þórunn Elísabet Bogadóttir. Tónlist: Kingston Trio, The - Tom Dooley. Egill Ólafsson, Hernández, Lizzy - ¿Estoy aquí? (am I here?). Lester Young - Teddy Wilson Quartet - All of me. Hljómar - Fyrsti kossinn.

Fjórar vikur verða liðnar á morgun frá mannskæðum árásum Hamas á Ísrael. Ísraelsmenn lýstu yfir stríði og hafa gert enn mannskæðari árásir á Gasa. Nú berast fréttir af því að þeir hafi umkringt Gasaborg. Erlingur Erlingsson hernaðarsagnfræðingur ræddi við okkur um stöðuna. Eiríkur Valdimarsson þjóðfræðingur og verkefnastjóri hjá Rannsóknarsetri Háskóla Íslands á Ströndum - Þjóðfræðistofu sagði okkur frá rannsóknum sínum um tengdamömmur sem menningarfyrirbæri, en hann hefur rýnt í orðræðu um tengdamömmur og rýnt í það af hverju ímynd þeirra hefur oft á sér neikvæðan blæ. Á sunnudaginn verður haldið upp á 90 ára afmæli Hvolsvallar, sem er tiltölulega ungt þéttbýli og sérstakt að því leyti að þar var hvorki byggt upp við sjó né árfarveg. Ísólfur Gylfi Pálmason er fyrrverandi sveitarstjóri og kemur að hátíðahöldum helgarinnar ? hann fór yfir söguna með okkur. Umsjón: Eyrún Magnúsdóttir og Þórunn Elísabet Bogadóttir. Tónlist: Kingston Trio, The - Tom Dooley. Egill Ólafsson, Hernández, Lizzy - ¿Estoy aquí? (am I here?). Lester Young - Teddy Wilson Quartet - All of me. Hljómar - Fyrsti kossinn.

Each Halloween season, All Things Judicial releases a special "Fright Court" episode, where the focus turns to ghostly legends associated with North Carolina's courthouses and legal community. IThis year, we focus on courthouse ghosts in New Hanover and Mitchell counties, and dive into the folklore of the 1866 murder of Laura Foster and subsequent trial and execution of her accused killer, Tom Dula (Dooley). This story became a worldwide pop culture phenomenon beginning in 1958 when the Kingston Trio released a murder ballad which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart."I've always believed that the hanging of Tom Dooley here in our little town of Statesville, North Carolina is the most widely recognized execution in U.S. history," said Steve Hill, curator of the Statesville Historical Collection. "Everybody wanted to make a dollar off of Tom Dooley while they could, and a lot of people did." The first segment of this episode is an interview with John Hirchak, who, along with his wife Kim, operate the Ghost Walk of Old Wilmington and The Black Cat Shoppe. Hirchak shares stories about three spirits who occupy the historic New Hanover County Courthouse, and we discuss possible explanations for hauntings.The second segment is a dramatic reading of an article published by the Mitchell County Historical Society which details firsthand accounts of seeing and hearing a ghost which haunts the historic Mitchell County Courthouse.In the third segment, we meet Margaret Ferguson Carter Martine from the Whippoorwill Academy and Village in Wilkes County. She recounts the Dooley story and shares her personal connection to a key figure in that historic event.Then we travel to Iredell County where we meet Keith Ryan, Director of the Historic Sharpe House. He shares details about May 1, 1868, the fateful day Tom Dooley was hanged in Statesville.In the final interview of this episode, we meet Steve Hill, curator of the Statesville Historical Collection. He provides insight into the worldwide impact of the Dooley story.You can find out more about All Things Judicial or hear previous episodes in the Fright Court series by visiting NCcourts.gov.

"Hang down your head, Tom DooleyHang down your head and cryHang down your head, Tom DooleyPoor boy, you're bound to die."The murder ballad, 'Tom Dooley', made famous by the Kingston Trio in 1958, is the tale of a twisted love triangle that culminated in two sensational trials that both captivated and disgusted the people of North Carolina in the years following the American civil war.Dianne and Jennie also delve into the song 'Swannanoa Tunnel', a work song that was sung by African American prison laborers who were tasked with the arduous job of building the railroad tracks and tunnels through North Carolina. An estimated 125 – 300 convicts died during the construction of these tunnels.Join Jennie and Dianne on this Ordinary Extraordinary musical journey through the hidden histories and the real-life dramas that inspired these songs.To purchase tickets to Beyond the Grave: An Evening with Bram Stoker in Colorado Springs, Colorado, click here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-the-grave-an-evening-with-bram-stoker-tickets-696195337997?aff=oddtdtcreatorResources used to research this episode include:Baker, Bruce E., et al. "Folk Music." https://www.ncpedia.org. 20 Sep. 2006. www.ncpedia.org/folk-music. Accessed 17 Sep. 2023.Kemp, Mark. "An Our State Playlist: North Carolina Folk Music ." https://www.ourstate.com. 31 Aug. 2023. www.ourstate.com/an-our-state-playlist-north-carolina-folk-music/. Accessed 17 Sep. 2023., North Carolina Arts Council . "The Legend Behind North Carolina's Most Famous Murder Ballad ." https://www.ncarts.org. 29 Oct. 2019. www.ncarts.org/blog/2019/10/29/legend-behind-north-carolinas-most-famous-murder-ballad#:~:text=In%201868%20a%20man%20named,the%20crime%20and%20its%20fallout. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023.Martin, Christy. "The Story Behind the Ballad and Legend of Tom Dooley ." https://thesouthernvoice.com. 7 Oct. 2022. thesouthernvoice.com/the-story-behind-the-ballad-and-legend-tom-dooley/. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023., North Carolina Ghosts . "The Scary Truth: The Legend of Tom Dooley ." https://northcarolinaghosts.com. northcarolinaghosts.com/mountains/tom-dooley/scary-truth/. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023.McKown, Harry. "May 1868: The Death of Tom Dooley ." https://blogs.lib.unc.edu. 1 May 2008. blogs.lib.unc.edu/ncm/2008/05/01/this_month_may_1868-2/. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023. "Tom Dooley Gravesite ." https://www.findagrave.com. 22 July 2001. www.findagrave.com/cemetery/641036/tom-dooley-gravesite. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023.Sabatella, Matthew. "Swannanoa Tunnel: About the Song ." https://balladofamerica.org. balladofamerica.org/swannanoa-tunnel/. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023., WLOS Staff. "New memorial & exhibit recognize incarcerated laborers' contribution to WNC railroads ." https://wlos.com. 24 Oct. 2021. wlos.com/news/local/new-memorial-exhibit-recognize-incarcerated-laborers-contribution-to-wnc-railroads. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023. "The Rail Project." https://therailproject.org. therailproject.org/. Accessed 24 Sep. 2023.

The group formed in the early 1950s, with original member Dave Guard, Bob Shane, and Nick Reynolds, and they were a major force in the folk music revival of the 50s and 60s. They had hits song like "Tom Dooley", "Sloop John B", and "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" The original members are gone. But the current lineup of the Kingston Trio,Mike Marvin, Tim Gorelangton, and Buddy Woodward, joined The Morning Show in studio to chat about continuing the legacy of the band.

This week we are joined by Ford Motor Company Enthusiast Tom Dooley to barely scratch the surface on the titan of industry that was Henry Ford. We focus heavily on the man's philosophy of business and penchant for engineering and how that translated into how he ran his company and how he tried to bring up everyone around him to be the best man that he could be. Don't forget to join our Telegram channel at T.me/historyhomos and to join our group chat at T.me/historyhomoschat The video version of the show is available on Youtube, bitchute, odysee. For weekly premium episodes or to contribute to the show subscribe to our channel at www.rokfin.com/historyhomos Any questions comments concerns or T-shirt/sticker requests can be leveled at historyhomos@gmail.com Later homos --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/historyhomos/support

Hitchockian heavy and Third Man hero Joseph Cotten returns for more "tales well calculated to keep you in Suspense!" We'll hear him first as a corrupt prosecutor who plans a murder to keep his dirty dealings a secret in "A Watery Grave" (originally aired on CBS on March 10, 1952). Then, he stars as the titular murderer as the ballad of "Tom Dooley" comes to life on radio (originally aired on CBS on March 30, 1953).

In radio news, Townsquare Media turns off two more A M radio stations. There is lots of news on the street, and finally we conclude our look at December People Meter Ratings. Next up, Jennifer will present those Call Letter and Format changes. This will be followed by radio station WCCO AM coverage of Martin Luther King a sassination coverage from CBS Radio, and WCCO AM Minneapolis Mn. This weeks classic aircheck takes us to Cincinnati Ohio and radio station WSAI AM and Tom Dooley from 1967. Finally our featured station takes us to Carpondale Il, and radio station Wuez fm and their variety hits format.

This week the Cemetery Row ladies cover true crime stories that inspired songs and murder ballads. Sheena covers the Lawson family murders and Lori discusses the murder of Laura Foster that inspired the song “Tom Dooley.” Hannah dives into the histories behind two songs, the Drive-By Truckers' “Ramon Casiano” and Nirvana's “Polly.”

Why do one Festival in a weekend when you can do two? That's just what we did in Wilkesboro, NC recently. (Actually, it was three festivals but we couldn't fit them all into one episode. - See the "Whippoorwill Academy and Village" episdoe for our day at the Tom Dooley & Appalachian Culture Festival in nearby Ferguson, NC. That was on the same weekend trip!)For infomation about the Carolina In The Fall Festival:https://carolinainthefall.org/For  infomation about the Prohibition Hot Rod and Moonshine Festival:https://www.prohibitionfestival.net/homeFor visiting Wilkesboro, NC:https://www.wilkescountytourism.com/Title Sponsors of MMO:Angler Magazine: https://coastalanglermag.com/great-smoky-mountains/ Prestie Subaru: https://www.prestigesubaru.com/Sunrift Adventures: https://sunrift.com/ Show Sponsor: Explore Wilkesboro, NCVisit https://www.wilkescountytourism.com/ for more information.

Whippoorwill Academy and Village is a collection of old North Carolina buildings that have been saved, moved, and restored. The Whippoorwill Academy building was the actual old school house in the Ferguson community. North Carolina Poet Laurete James Larkin Pearson attended Whippoorwill while growing up in Ferguson. We recently spent the day at this wonderful property and organization for the 2022 Tom Dooley & Appalachian Culture Day. We loved it!For more information, visit http://www.whippoorwillacademy.com/Title Sponsors of MMO:Angler Magazine: https://coastalanglermag.com/great-smoky-mountains/ Prestie Subaru: https://www.prestigesubaru.com/Sunrift Adventures: https://sunrift.com/ Show Sponsor: Explore Wilkesboro, NCVisit https://www.wilkescountytourism.com/ for more information.

Episode 152 of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “For What It's Worth”, and the short but eventful career of Buffalo Springfield. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a twenty-five-minute bonus episode available, on "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" by Glen Campbell. 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 As usual, there's a Mixcloud mix containing all the songs excerpted in the episode. This four-CD box set is the definitive collection of Buffalo Springfield's work, while if you want the mono version of the second album, the stereo version of the first, and the final album as released, but no demos or outtakes, you want this more recent box set. For What It's Worth: The Story of Buffalo Springfield by Richey Furay and John Einarson is obviously Furay's version of the story, but all the more interesting for that. For information on Steve Stills' early life I used Stephen Stills: Change Partners by David Roberts.  Information on both Stills and Young comes from Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young by David Browne.  Jimmy McDonough's Shakey is the definitive biography of Neil Young, while Young's Waging Heavy Peace is his autobiography. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before we begin -- this episode deals with various disabilities. In particular, there are descriptions of epileptic seizures that come from non-medically-trained witnesses, many of whom took ableist attitudes towards the seizures. I don't know enough about epilepsy to know how accurate their descriptions and perceptions are, and I apologise if that means that by repeating some of their statements, I am inadvertently passing on myths about the condition. When I talk about this, I am talking about the after-the-fact recollections of musicians, none of them medically trained and many of them in altered states of consciousness, about events that had happened decades earlier. Please do not take anything said in a podcast about music history as being the last word on the causes or effects of epileptic seizures, rather than how those musicians remember them. Anyway, on with the show. One of the things you notice if you write about protest songs is that a lot of the time, the songs that people talk about as being important or impactful have aged very poorly. Even great songwriters like Bob Dylan or John Lennon, when writing material about the political events of the time, would write material they would later acknowledge was far from their best. Too often a song will be about a truly important event, and be powered by a real sense of outrage at injustice, but it will be overly specific, and then as soon as the immediate issue is no longer topical, the song is at best a curio. For example, the sentencing of the poet and rock band manager John Sinclair to ten years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer was hugely controversial in the early seventies, but by the time John Lennon's song about it was released, Sinclair had been freed by the Supreme Court, and very, very few people would use the song as an example of why Lennon's songwriting still has lasting value: [Excerpt: John Lennon, "John Sinclair"] But there are exceptions, and those tend to be songs where rather than talking about specific headlines, the song is about the emotion that current events have caused. Ninety years on from its first success, for example, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" still has resonance, because there are still people who are put out of work through no fault of their own, and even those of us who are lucky enough to be financially comfortable have the fear that all too soon it may end, and we may end up like Al begging on the streets: [Excerpt: Rudy Vallee, "Brother Can You Spare a Dime?"] And because of that emotional connection, sometimes the very best protest songs can take on new lives and new meanings, and connect with the way people feel about totally unrelated subjects. Take Buffalo Springfield's one hit. The actual subject of the song couldn't be any more trivial in the grand scheme of things -- a change in zoning regulations around the Sunset Strip that meant people under twenty-one couldn't go to the clubs after 10PM, and the subsequent reaction to that -- but because rather than talking about the specific incident, Steve Stills instead talked about the emotions that it called up, and just noted the fleeting images that he was left with, the song became adopted as an anthem by soldiers in Vietnam. Sometimes what a song says is nowhere near as important as how it says it. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"] Steve Stills seems almost to have been destined to be a musician, although the instrument he started on, the drums, was not the one for which he would become best known. According to Stills, though, he always had an aptitude for rhythm, to the extent that he learned to tapdance almost as soon as he had learned to walk. He started on drums aged eight or nine, after somebody gave him a set of drumsticks. After his parents got sick of him damaging the furniture by playing on every available surface, an actual drum kit followed, and that became his principal instrument, even after he learned to play the guitar at military school, as his roommate owned one. As a teenager, Stills developed an idiosyncratic taste in music, helped by the record collection of his friend Michael Garcia. He didn't particularly like most of the pop music of the time, but he was a big fan of pre-war country music, Motown, girl-group music -- he especially liked the Shirelles -- and Chess blues. He was also especially enamoured of the music of Jimmy Reed, a passion he would later share with his future bandmate Neil Young: [Excerpt: Jimmy Reed, "Baby, What You Want Me To Do?"] In his early teens, he became the drummer for a band called the Radars, and while he was drumming he studied their lead guitarist, Chuck Schwin.  He said later "There was a whole little bunch of us who were into kind of a combination of all the blues guys and others including Chet Atkins, Dick Dale, and Hank Marvin: a very weird cross-section of far-out guitar players." Stills taught himself to play like those guitarists, and in particular he taught himself how to emulate Atkins' Travis-picking style, and became remarkably proficient at it. There exists a recording of him, aged sixteen, singing one of his own songs and playing finger-picked guitar, and while the song is not exactly the strongest thing I've ever heard lyrically, it's clearly the work of someone who is already a confident performer: [Excerpt: Stephen Stills, "Travellin'"] But the main reason he switched to becoming a guitarist wasn't because of his admiration for Chet Atkins or Hank Marvin, but because he started driving and discovered that if you have to load a drum kit into your car and then drive it to rehearsals and gigs you either end up bashing up your car or bashing up the drum kit. As this is not a problem with guitars, Stills decided that he'd move on from the Radars, and join a band named the Continentals as their rhythm guitarist, playing with lead guitarist Don Felder. Stills was only in the Continentals for a few months though, before being replaced by another guitarist, Bernie Leadon, and in general Stills' whole early life is one of being uprooted and moved around. His father had jobs in several different countries, and while for the majority of his time Stills was in the southern US, he also ended up spending time in Costa Rica -- and staying there as a teenager even as the rest of his family moved to El Salvador. Eventually, aged eighteen, he moved to New Orleans, where he formed a folk duo with a friend, Chris Sarns. The two had very different tastes in folk music -- Stills preferred Dylan-style singer-songwriters, while Sarns liked the clean sound of the Kingston Trio -- but they played together for several months before moving to Greenwich Village, where they performed together and separately. They were latecomers to the scene, which had already mostly ended, and many of the folk stars had already gone on to do bigger things. But Stills still saw plenty of great performers there -- Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk in the jazz clubs, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, and Richard Pryor in the comedy ones, and Simon and Garfunkel, Richie Havens, Fred Neil and Tim Hardin in the folk ones -- Stills said that other than Chet Atkins, Havens, Neil, and Hardin were the people most responsible for his guitar style. Stills was also, at this time, obsessed with Judy Collins' third album -- the album which had featured Roger McGuinn on banjo and arrangements, and which would soon provide several songs for the Byrds to cover: [Excerpt: Judy Collins, "Turn, Turn, Turn"] Judy Collins would soon become a very important figure in Stills' life, but for now she was just the singer on his favourite record. While the Greenwich Village folk scene was no longer quite what it had been a year or two earlier, it was still a great place for a young talented musician to perform. As well as working with Chris Sarns, Stills also formed a trio with his friend John Hopkins and a banjo player called Peter Tork who everyone said looked just like Stills. Tork soon headed out west to seek his fortune, and then Stills got headhunted to join the Au Go Go Singers. This was a group that was being set up in the same style as the New Christy Minstrels -- a nine-piece vocal and instrumental group that would do clean-sounding versions of currently-popular folk songs. The group were signed to Roulette Records, and recorded one album, They Call Us Au-Go-Go Singers, produced by Hugo and Luigi, the production duo we've previously seen working with everyone from the Tokens to the Isley Brothers. Much of the album is exactly the same kind of thing that a million New Christy Minstrels soundalikes were putting out -- and Stills, with his raspy voice, was clearly intended to be the Barry McGuire of this group -- but there was one exception -- a song called "High Flyin' Bird", on which Stills was able to show off the sound that would later make him famous, and which became so associated with him that even though it was written by Billy Edd Wheeler, the writer of "Jackson", even the biography of Stills I used in researching this episode credits "High Flyin' Bird" as being a Stills original: [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "High Flyin' Bird"] One of the other members of the Au-Go-Go Singers, Richie Furay, also got to sing a lead vocal on the album, on the Tom Paxton song "Where I'm Bound": [Excerpt: The Au-Go-Go Singers, "Where I'm Bound"] The Au-Go-Go Singers got a handful of dates around the folk scene, and Stills and Furay became friendly with another singer playing the same circuit, Gram Parsons. Parsons was one of the few people they knew who could see the value in current country music, and convinced both Stills and Furay to start paying more attention to what was coming out of Nashville and Bakersfield. But soon the Au-Go-Go Singers split up. Several venues where they might otherwise have been booked were apparently scared to book an act that was associated with Morris Levy, and also the market for big folk ensembles dried up more or less overnight when the Beatles hit the music scene. But several of the group -- including Stills but not Furay -- decided they were going to continue anyway, and formed a group called The Company, and they went on a tour of Canada. And one of the venues they played was the Fourth Dimension coffee house in Fort William, Ontario, and there their support act was a rock band called The Squires: [Excerpt: The Squires, "(I'm a Man And) I Can't Cry"] The lead guitarist of the Squires, Neil Young, had a lot in common with Stills, and they bonded instantly. Both men had parents who had split up when they were in their teens, and had a successful but rather absent father and an overbearing mother. And both had shown an interest in music even as babies. According to Young's mother, when he was still in nappies, he would pull himself up by the bars  of his playpen and try to dance every time he heard "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie": [Excerpt: Pinetop Smith, "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie"] Young, though, had had one crucial experience which Stills had not had. At the age of six, he'd come down with polio, and become partially paralysed. He'd spent months in hospital before he regained his ability to walk, and the experience had also affected him in other ways. While he was recovering, he would draw pictures of trains -- other than music, his big interest, almost an obsession, was with electric train sets, and that obsession would remain with him throughout his life -- but for the first time he was drawing with his right hand rather than his left. He later said "The left-hand side got a little screwed. Feels different from the right. If I close my eyes, my left side, I really don't know where it is—but over the years I've discovered that almost one hundred percent for sure it's gonna be very close to my right side … probably to the left. That's why I started appearing to be ambidextrous, I think. Because polio affected my left side, and I think I was left-handed when I was born. What I have done is use the weak side as the dominant one because the strong side was injured." Both Young's father Scott Young -- a very famous Canadian writer and sports broadcaster, who was by all accounts as well known in Canada during his lifetime as his son -- and Scott's brother played ukulele, and they taught Neil how to play, and his first attempt at forming a group had been to get his friend Comrie Smith to get a pair of bongos and play along with him to Preston Epps' "Bongo Rock": [Excerpt: Preston Epps, "Bongo Rock"] Neil Young had liked all the usual rock and roll stars of the fifties  -- though in his personal rankings, Elvis came a distant third behind Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis -- but his tastes ran more to the more darkly emotional. He loved "Maybe" by the Chantels, saying "Raw soul—you cannot miss it. That's the real thing. She was believin' every word she was singin'." [Excerpt: The Chantels, "Maybe"] What he liked more than anything was music that had a mainstream surface but seemed slightly off-kilter. He was a major fan of Roy Orbison, saying, "it's almost impossible to comprehend the depth of that soul. It's so deep and dark it just keeps on goin' down—but it's not black. It's blue, deep blue. He's just got it. The drama. There's something sad but proud about Roy's music", and he would say similar things about Del Shannon, saying "He struck me as the ultimate dark figure—behind some Bobby Rydell exterior, y'know? “Hats Off to Larry,” “Runaway,” “Swiss Maid”—very, very inventive. The stuff was weird. Totally unaffected." More surprisingly, perhaps, he was a particular fan of Bobby Darin, who he admired so much because Darin could change styles at the drop of a hat, going from novelty rock and roll like "Splish Splash" to crooning "Mack The Knife" to singing Tim Hardin songs like "If I Were a Carpenter", without any of them seeming any less authentic. As he put it later "He just changed. He's completely different. And he's really into it. Doesn't sound like he's not there. “Dream Lover,” “Mack the Knife,” “If I Were a Carpenter,” “Queen of the Hop,” “Splish Splash”—tell me about those records, Mr. Darin. Did you write those all the same day, or what happened? He just changed so much. Just kinda went from one place to another. So it's hard to tell who Bobby Darin really was." And one record which Young was hugely influenced by was Floyd Cramer's country instrumental, "Last Date": [Excerpt: Floyd Cramer, "Last Date"] Now, that was a very important record in country music, and if you want to know more about it I strongly recommend listening to the episode of Cocaine and Rhinestones on the Nashville A-Team, which has a long section on the track, but the crucial thing to know about that track is that it's one of the earliest examples of what is known as slip-note playing, where the piano player, before hitting the correct note, briefly hits the note a tone below it, creating a brief discord. Young absolutely loved that sound, and wanted to make a sound like that on the guitar. And then, when he and his mother moved to Winnipeg after his parents' divorce, he found someone who was doing just that. It was the guitarist in a group variously known as Chad Allan and the Reflections and Chad Allan and the Expressions. That group had relatives in the UK who would send them records, and so where most Canadian bands would do covers of American hits, Chad Allan and the Reflections would do covers of British hits, like their version of Geoff Goddard's "Tribute to Buddy Holly", a song that had originally been produced by Joe Meek: [Excerpt: Chad Allan and the Reflections, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"] That would later pay off for them in a big way, when they recorded a version of Johnny Kidd and the Pirates' "Shakin' All Over", for which their record label tried to create an air of mystery by releasing it with no artist name, just "Guess Who?" on the label. It became a hit, the name stuck, and they became The Guess Who: [Excerpt: The Guess Who, "Shakin' All Over"] But at this point they, and their guitarist Randy Bachman, were just another group playing around Winnipeg. Bachman, though, was hugely impressive to Neil Young for a few reasons. The first was that he really did have a playing style that was a lot like the piano style of Floyd Cramer -- Young would later say "it was Randy Bachman who did it first. Randy was the first one I ever heard do things on the guitar that reminded me of Floyd. He'd do these pulls—“darrr darrrr,” this two-note thing goin' together—harmony, with one note pulling and the other note stayin' the same." Bachman also had built the first echo unit that Young heard a guitarist play in person. He'd discovered that by playing with the recording heads on a tape recorder owned by his mother, he could replicate the tape echo that Sam Phillips had used at Sun Studios -- and once he'd attached that to his amplifier, he realised how much the resulting sound sounded like his favourite guitarist, Hank Marvin of the Shadows, another favourite of Neil Young's: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Man of Mystery"] Young soon started looking to Bachman as something of a mentor figure, and he would learn a lot of guitar techniques second hand from Bachman -- every time a famous musician came to the area, Bachman would go along and stand right at the front and watch the guitarist, and make note of the positions their fingers were in. Then Bachman would replicate those guitar parts with the Reflections, and Neil Young would stand in front of him and make notes of where *his* fingers were. Young joined a band on the local circuit called the Esquires, but soon either quit or was fired, depending on which version of the story you choose to believe. He then formed his own rival band, the Squires, with no "e", much to the disgust of his ex-bandmates. In July 1963, five months after they formed, the  Squires released their first record, "Aurora" backed with "The Sultan", on a tiny local label. Both tracks were very obviously influenced by the Shadows: [Excerpt: The Squires, "Aurora"] The Squires were a mostly-instrumental band for the first year or so they were together, and then the Beatles hit North America, and suddenly people didn't want to hear surf instrumentals and Shadows covers any more, they only wanted to hear songs that sounded a bit like the Beatles. The Squires started to work up the appropriate repertoire -- two songs that have been mentioned as in their set at this point are the Beatles album track "It Won't Be Long", and "Money" which the Beatles had also covered -- but they didn't have a singer, being an instrumental group. They could get in a singer, of course, but that would mean splitting the money with another person. So instead, the guitarist, who had never had any intention of becoming a singer, was more or less volunteered for the role. Over the next eighteen months or so the group's repertoire moved from being largely instrumental to largely vocal, and the group also seem to have shuttled around a bit between two different cities -- Winnipeg and Fort William, staying in one for a while and then moving back to the other. They travelled between the two in Young's car, a Buick Roadmaster hearse. In Winnipeg, Young first met up with a singer named Joni Anderson, who was soon to get married to Chuck Mitchell and would become better known by her married name. The two struck up a friendship, though by all accounts never a particularly close one -- they were too similar in too many ways; as Mitchell later said “Neil and I have a lot in common: Canadian; Scorpios; polio in the same epidemic, struck the same parts of our body; and we both have a black sense of humor". They were both also idiosyncratic artists who never fit very well into boxes. In Fort William the Squires made a few more records, this time vocal tracks like "I'll Love You Forever": [Excerpt: The Squires, "I'll Love You Forever"] It was also in Fort William that Young first encountered two acts that would make a huge impression on him. One was a group called The Thorns, consisting of Tim Rose, Jake Holmes, and Rich Husson. The Thorns showed Young that there was interesting stuff being done on the fringes of the folk music scene. He later said "One of my favourites was “Oh Susannah”—they did this arrangement that was bizarre. It was in a minor key, which completely changed everything—and it was rock and roll. So that idea spawned arrangements of all these other songs for me. I did minor versions of them all. We got into it. That was a certain Squires stage that never got recorded. Wish there were tapes of those shows. We used to do all this stuff, a whole kinda music—folk-rock. We took famous old folk songs like “Clementine,” “She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain,” “Tom Dooley,” and we did them all in minor keys based on the Tim Rose arrangement of “Oh Susannah.” There are no recordings of the Thorns in existence that I know of, but presumably that arrangement that Young is talking about is the version that Rose also later did with the Big 3, which we've heard in a few other episodes: [Excerpt: The Big 3, "The Banjo Song"] The other big influence was, of course, Steve Stills, and the two men quickly found themselves influencing each other deeply. Stills realised that he could bring more rock and roll to his folk-music sound, saying that what amazed him was the way the Squires could go from "Cottonfields" (the Lead Belly song) to "Farmer John", the R&B song by Don and Dewey that was becoming a garage-rock staple. Young in turn was inspired to start thinking about maybe going more in the direction of folk music. The Squires even renamed themselves the High-Flying Birds, after the song that Stills had recorded with the Au Go Go Singers. After The Company's tour of Canada, Stills moved back to New York for a while. He now wanted to move in a folk-rock direction, and for a while he tried to persuade his friend John Sebastian to let him play bass in his new band, but when the Lovin' Spoonful decided against having him in the band, he decided to move West to San Francisco, where he'd heard there was a new music scene forming. He enjoyed a lot of the bands he saw there, and in particular he was impressed by the singer of a band called the Great Society: [Excerpt: The Great Society, "Somebody to Love"] He was much less impressed with the rest of her band, and seriously considered going up to her and asking if she wanted to work with some *real* musicians instead of the unimpressive ones she was working with, but didn't get his nerve up. We will, though, be hearing more about Grace Slick in future episodes. Instead, Stills decided to move south to LA, where many of the people he'd known in Greenwich Village were now based. Soon after he got there, he hooked up with two other musicians, a guitarist named Steve Young and a singer, guitarist, and pianist named Van Dyke Parks. Parks had a record contract at MGM -- he'd been signed by Tom Wilson, the same man who had turned Dylan electric, signed Simon and Garfunkel, and produced the first albums by the Mothers of Invention. With Wilson, Parks put out a couple of singles in 1966, "Come to the Sunshine": [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Come to the Sunshine"] And "Number Nine", a reworking of the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: [Excerpt: The Van Dyke Parks, "Number Nine"]Parks, Stills, and Steve Young became The Van Dyke Parks Band, though they didn't play together for very long, with their most successful performance being as the support act for the Lovin' Spoonful for a show in Arizona. But they did have a lasting resonance -- when Van Dyke Parks finally got the chance to record his first solo album, he opened it with Steve Young singing the old folk song "Black Jack Davy", filtered to sound like an old tape: [Excerpt: Steve Young, "Black Jack Davy"] And then it goes into a song written for Parks by Randy Newman, but consisting of Newman's ideas about Parks' life and what he knew about him, including that he had been third guitar in the Van Dyke Parks Band: [Excerpt: Van Dyke Parks, "Vine Street"] Parks and Stills also wrote a few songs together, with one of their collaborations, "Hello, I've Returned", later being demoed by Stills for Buffalo Springfield: [Excerpt: Steve Stills, "Hello, I've Returned"] After the Van Dyke Parks Band fell apart, Parks went on to many things, including a brief stint on keyboards in the Mothers of Invention, and we'll be talking more about him next episode. Stills formed a duo called the Buffalo Fish, with his friend Ron Long. That soon became an occasional trio when Stills met up again with his old Greenwich Village friend Peter Tork, who joined the group on the piano. But then Stills auditioned for the Monkees and was turned down because he had bad teeth -- or at least that's how most people told the story. Stills has later claimed that while he turned up for the Monkees auditions, it wasn't to audition, it was to try to pitch them songs, which seems implausible on the face of it. According to Stills, he was offered the job and turned it down because he'd never wanted it. But whatever happened, Stills suggested they might want his friend Peter, who looked just like him apart from having better teeth, and Peter Tork got the job. But what Stills really wanted to do was to form a proper band. He'd had the itch to do it ever since seeing the Squires, and he decided he should ask Neil Young to join. There was only one problem -- when he phoned Young, the phone was answered by Young's mother, who told Stills that Neil had moved out to become a folk singer, and she didn't know where he was. But then Stills heard from his old friend Richie Furay. Furay was still in Greenwich Village, and had decided to write to Stills. He didn't know where Stills was, other than that he was in California somewhere, so he'd written to Stills' father in El Salvador. The letter had been returned, because the postage had been short by one cent, so Furay had resent it with the correct postage. Stills' father had then forwarded the letter to the place Stills had been staying in San Francisco, which had in turn forwarded it on to Stills in LA. Furay's letter mentioned this new folk singer who had been on the scene for a while and then disappeared again, Neil Young, who had said he knew Stills, and had been writing some great songs, one of which Furay had added to his own set. Stills got in touch with Furay and told him about this great band he was forming in LA, which he wanted Furay to join. Furay was in, and travelled from New York to LA, only to be told that at this point there were no other members of this great band, but they'd definitely find some soon. They got a publishing deal with Columbia/Screen Gems, which gave them enough money to not starve, but what they really needed was to find some other musicians. They did, when driving down Hollywood Boulevard on April the sixth, 1966. There, stuck in traffic going the other way, they saw a hearse... After Steve Stills had left Fort William, so had Neil Young. He hadn't initially intended to -- the High-Flying Birds still had a regular gig, but Young and some of his friends had gone away for a few days on a road trip in his hearse. But unfortunately the transmission on the hearse had died, and Young and his friends had been stranded. Many years later, he would write a eulogy to the hearse, which he and Stills would record together: [Excerpt: The Stills-Young Band, "Long May You Run"] Young and his friends had all hitch-hiked in different directions -- Young had ended up in Toronto, where his dad lived, and had stayed with his dad for a while. The rest of his band had eventually followed him there, but Young found the Toronto music scene not to his taste -- the folk and rock scenes there were very insular and didn't mingle with each other, and the group eventually split up. Young even took on a day job for a while, for the only time in his life, though he soon quit. Young started basically commuting between Toronto and New York, a distance of several hundred miles, going to Greenwich Village for a while before ending up back in Toronto, and ping-ponging between the two. In New York, he met up with Richie Furay, and also had a disastrous audition for Elektra Records as a solo artist. One of the songs he sang in the audition was "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", the song which Furay liked so much he started performing it himself. Young doesn't normally explain his songs, but as this was one of the first he ever wrote, he talked about it in interviews in the early years, before he decided to be less voluble about his art. The song was apparently about the sense of youthful hope being crushed. The instigation for it was Young seeing his girlfriend with another man, but the central image, of Clancy not singing, came from Young's schooldays. The Clancy in question was someone Young liked as one of the other weird kids at school. He was disabled, like Young, though with MS rather than polio, and he would sing to himself in the hallways at school. Sadly, of course, the other kids would mock and bully him for that, and eventually he ended up stopping. Young said about it "After awhile, he got so self-conscious he couldn't do his thing any more. When someone who is as beautiful as that and as different as that is actually killed by his fellow man—you know what I mean—like taken and sorta chopped down—all the other things are nothing compared to this." [Excerpt: Neil Young, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing (Elektra demo)"] One thing I should say for anyone who listens to the Mixcloud for this episode, that song, which will be appearing in a couple of different versions, has one use of a term for Romani people that some (though not all) consider a slur. It's not in the excerpts I'll be using in this episode, but will be in the full versions on the Mixcloud. Sadly that word turns up time and again in songs of this era... When he wasn't in New York, Young was living in Toronto in a communal apartment owned by a folk singer named Vicki Taylor, where many of the Toronto folk scene would stay. Young started listening a lot to Taylor's Bert Jansch albums, which were his first real exposure to the British folk-baroque style of guitar fingerpicking, as opposed to the American Travis-picking style, and Young would soon start to incorporate that style into his own playing: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, "Angie"] Another guitar influence on Young at this point was another of the temporary tenants of Taylor's flat, John Kay, who would later go on to be one of the founding members of Steppenwolf. Young credited Kay with having a funky rhythm guitar style that Young incorporated into his own. While he was in Toronto, he started getting occasional gigs in Detroit, which is "only" a couple of hundred miles away, set up by Joni and Chuck Mitchell, both of whom also sometimes stayed at Taylor's. And it was in Detroit that Neil Young became, albeit very briefly, a Motown artist. The Mynah Birds were a band in Toronto that had at one point included various future members of Steppenwolf, and they were unusual for the time in that they were a white band with a Black lead singer, Ricky Matthews. They also had a rich manager, John Craig Eaton, the heir to the Eaton's department store fortune, who basically gave them whatever money they wanted -- they used to go to his office and tell him they needed seven hundred dollars for lunch, and he'd hand it to them. They were looking for a new guitarist when Bruce Palmer, their bass player, bumped into Neil Young carrying an amp and asked if he was interested in joining. He was. The Mynah Birds quickly became one of the best bands in Toronto, and Young and Matthews became close, both as friends and as a performance team. People who saw them live would talk about things like a song called “Hideaway”, written by Young and Matthews, which had a spot in the middle where Young would start playing a harmonica solo, throw the harmonica up in the air mid-solo, Matthews would catch it, and he would then finish the solo. They got signed to Motown, who were at this point looking to branch out into the white guitar-group market, and they were put through the Motown star-making machine. They recorded an entire album, which remains unreleased, but they did release a single, "It's My Time": [Excerpt: The Mynah Birds, "It's My Time"] Or at least, they released a handful of promo copies. The single was pulled from release after Ricky Matthews got arrested. It turned out his birth name wasn't Ricky Matthews, but James Johnson, and that he wasn't from Toronto as he'd told everyone, but from Buffalo, New York. He'd fled to Canada after going AWOL from the Navy, not wanting to be sent to Vietnam, and he was arrested and jailed for desertion. After getting out of jail, he would start performing under yet another name, and as Rick James would have a string of hits in the seventies and eighties: [Excerpt: Rick James, "Super Freak"] Most of the rest of the group continued gigging as The Mynah Birds, but Young and Palmer had other plans. They sold the expensive equipment Eaton had bought the group, and Young bought a new hearse, which he named Mort 2 – Mort had been his first hearse. And according to one of the band's friends in Toronto, the crucial change in their lives came when Neil Young heard a song on a jukebox: [Excerpt: The Mamas and the Papas, "California Dreamin'"] Young apparently heard "California Dreamin'" and immediately said "Let's go to California and become rock stars". Now, Young later said of this anecdote that "That sounds like a Canadian story to me. That sounds too real to be true", and he may well be right. Certainly the actual wording of the story is likely incorrect -- people weren't talking about "rock stars" in 1966. Google's Ngram viewer has the first use of the phrase in print being in 1969, and the phrase didn't come into widespread usage until surprisingly late -- even granting that phrases enter slang before they make it to print, it still seems implausible. But even though the precise wording might not be correct, something along those lines definitely seems to have happened, albeit possibly less dramatically. Young's friend Comrie Smith independently said that Young told him “Well, Comrie, I can hear the Mamas and the Papas singing ‘All the leaves are brown, and the skies are gray …' I'm gonna go down to the States and really make it. I'm on my way. Today North Toronto, tomorrow the world!” Young and Palmer loaded up Mort 2 with a bunch of their friends and headed towards California. On the way, they fell out with most of the friends, who parted from them, and Young had an episode which in retrospect may have been his first epileptic seizure. They decided when they got to California that they were going to look for Steve Stills, as they'd heard he was in LA and neither of them knew anyone else in the state. But after several days of going round the Sunset Strip clubs asking if anyone knew Steve Stills, and sleeping in the hearse as they couldn't afford anywhere else, they were getting fed up and about to head off to San Francisco, as they'd heard there was a good music scene there, too. They were going to leave that day, and they were stuck in traffic on Sunset Boulevard, about to head off, when Stills and Furay came driving in the other direction. Furay happened to turn his head, to brush away a fly, and saw a hearse with Ontario license plates. He and Stills both remembered that Young drove a hearse, and so they assumed it must be him. They started honking at the hearse, then did a U-turn. They got Young's attention, and they all pulled into the parking lot at Ben Frank's, the Sunset Strip restaurant that attracted such a hip crowd the Monkees' producers had asked for "Ben Frank's types" in their audition advert. Young introduced Stills and Furay to Palmer, and now there *was* a group -- three singing, songwriting, guitarists and a bass player. Now all they needed was a drummer. There were two drummers seriously considered for the role. One of them, Billy Mundi, was technically the better player, but Young didn't like playing with him as much -- and Mundi also had a better offer, to join the Mothers of Invention as their second drummer -- before they'd recorded their first album, they'd had two drummers for a few months, but Denny Bruce, their second drummer, had become ill with glandular fever and they'd reverted to having Jimmy Carl Black play solo. Now they were looking for someone else, and Mundi took that role. The other drummer, who Young preferred anyway, was another Canadian, Dewey Martin. Martin was a couple of years older than the rest of the group, and by far the most experienced. He'd moved from Canada to Nashville in his teens, and according to Martin he had been taken under the wing of Hank Garland, the great session guitarist most famous for "Sugarfoot Rag": [Excerpt: Hank Garland, "Sugarfoot Rag"] We heard Garland playing with Elvis and others in some of the episodes around 1960, and by many reckonings he was the best session guitarist in Nashville, but in 1961 he had a car accident that left him comatose, and even though he recovered from the coma and lived another thirty-three years, he never returned to recording. According to Martin, though, Garland would still sometimes play jazz clubs around Nashville after the accident, and one day Martin walked into a club and saw him playing. The drummer he was playing with got up and took a break, taking his sticks with him, so Martin got up on stage and started playing, using two combs instead of sticks. Garland was impressed, and told Martin that Faron Young needed a drummer, and he could get him the gig. At the time Young was one of the biggest stars in country music. That year, 1961, he had three country top ten hits, including a number one with his version of Willie Nelson's "Hello Walls", produced by Ken Nelson: [Excerpt: Faron Young, "Hello Walls"] Martin joined Faron Young's band for a while, and also ended up playing short stints in the touring bands of various other Nashville-based country and rock stars, including Patsy Cline, Roy Orbison, and the Everly Brothers, before heading to LA for a while. Then Mel Taylor of the Ventures hooked him up with some musicians in the Pacific Northwest scene, and Martin started playing there under the name Sir Raleigh and the Coupons with various musicians. After a while he travelled back to LA where he got some members of the LA group Sons of Adam to become a permanent lineup of Coupons, and they recorded several singles with Martin singing lead, including the Tommy Boyce and Steve Venet song "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day", later recorded by the Monkees: [Excerpt: Sir Raleigh and the Coupons, "Tomorrow's Gonna Be Another Day"] He then played with the Standells, before joining the Modern Folk Quartet for a short while, as they were transitioning from their folk sound to a folk-rock style. He was only with them for a short while, and it's difficult to get precise details -- almost everyone involved with Buffalo Springfield has conflicting stories about their own careers with timelines that don't make sense, which is understandable given that people were talking about events decades later and memory plays tricks. "Fast" Eddie Hoh had joined the Modern Folk Quartet on drums in late 1965, at which point they became the Modern Folk Quintet, and nothing I've read about that group talks about Hoh ever actually leaving, but apparently Martin joined them in February 1966, which might mean he's on their single "Night-Time Girl", co-written by Al Kooper and produced and arranged by Jack Nitzsche: [Excerpt: The Modern Folk Quintet, "Night-Time Girl"] After that, Martin was taken on by the Dillards, a bluegrass band who are now possibly most famous for having popularised the Arthur "Guitar Boogie" Smith song "Duellin' Banjos", which they recorded on their first album and played on the Andy Griffith Show a few years before it was used in Deliverance: [Excerpt: The Dillards, "Duellin' Banjos"] The Dillards had decided to go in a country-rock direction -- and Doug Dillard would later join the Byrds and make records with Gene Clark -- but they were hesitant about it, and after a brief period with Martin in the band they decided to go back to their drummerless lineup. To soften the blow, they told him about another band that was looking for a drummer -- their manager, Jim Dickson, who was also the Byrds' manager, knew Stills and his bandmates. Dewey Martin was in the group. The group still needed a name though. They eventually took their name from a brand of steam roller, after seeing one on the streets when some roadwork was being done. Everyone involved disagrees as to who came up with the name. Steve Stills at one point said it was a group decision after Neil Young and the group's manager Frazier Mohawk stole the nameplate off the steamroller, and later Stills said that Richey Furay had suggested the name while they were walking down the street, Dewey Martin said it was his idea, Neil Young said that he, Steve Sills, and Van Dyke Parks had been walking down the street and either Young or Stills had seen the nameplate and suggested the name, and Van Dyke Parks says that *he* saw the nameplate and suggested it to Dewey Martin: [Excerpt: Steve Stills and Van Dyke Parks on the name] For what it's worth, I tend to believe Van Dyke Parks in most instances -- he's an honest man, and he seems to have a better memory of the sixties than many of his friends who led more chemically interesting lives. Whoever came up with it, the name worked -- as Stills later put it "We thought it was pretty apt, because Neil Young is from Manitoba which is buffalo country, and  Richie Furay was from Springfield, Ohio -- and I'm the field!" It almost certainly also helped that the word "buffalo" had been in the name of Stills' previous group, Buffalo Fish. On the eleventh of April, 1966, Buffalo Springfield played their first gig, at the Troubadour, using equipment borrowed from the Dillards. Chris Hillman of the Byrds was in the audience and was impressed. He got the group a support slot on a show the Byrds and the Dillards were doing a few days later in San Bernardino. That show was compered by a Merseyside-born British DJ, John Ravenscroft, who had managed to become moderately successful in US radio by playing up his regional accent so he sounded more like the Beatles. He would soon return to the UK, and start broadcasting under the name John Peel. Hillman also got them a week-long slot at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and a bidding war started between record labels to sign the band. Dunhill offered five thousand dollars, Warners counted with ten thousand, and then Atlantic offered twelve thousand. Atlantic were *just* starting to get interested in signing white guitar groups -- Jerry Wexler never liked that kind of music, always preferring to stick with soul and R&B, but Ahmet Ertegun could see which way things were going. Atlantic had only ever signed two other white acts before -- Neil Young's old favourite Bobby Darin, who had since left the label, and Sonny and Cher. And Sonny and Cher's management and production team, Brian Stone and Charlie Greene, were also very interested in the group, who even before they had made a record had quickly become the hottest band on the circuit, even playing the Hollywood Bowl as the Rolling Stones' support act. Buffalo Springfield already had managers -- Frazier Mohawk and Richard Davis, the lighting man at the Troubadour (who was sometimes also referred to as Dickie Davis, but I'll use his full name so as not to cause unnecessary confusion in British people who remember the sports TV presenter of the same name), who Mohawk had enlisted to help him. But Stone and Greene weren't going to let a thing like that stop them. According to anonymous reports quoted without attribution in David Roberts' biography of Stills -- so take this with as many grains of salt as you want -- Stone and Greene took Mohawk for a ride around LA in a limo, just the three of them, a gun, and a used hotdog napkin. At the end of the ride, the hotdog napkin had Mohawk's scrawled signature, signing the group over to Stone and Greene. Davis stayed on, but was demoted to just doing their lights. The way things ended up, the group signed to Stone and Greene's production company, who then leased their masters to Atlantic's Atco subsidiary. A publishing company was also set up for the group's songs -- owned thirty-seven point five percent by Atlantic, thirty-seven point five percent by Stone and Greene, and the other twenty-five percent split six ways between the group and Davis, who they considered their sixth member. Almost immediately, Charlie Greene started playing Stills and Young off against each other, trying a divide-and-conquer strategy on the group. This was quite easy, as both men saw themselves as natural leaders, though Stills was regarded by everyone as the senior partner -- the back cover of their first album would contain the line "Steve is the leader but we all are". Stills and Young were the two stars of the group as far as the audience were concerned -- though most musicians who heard them play live say that the band's real strength was in its rhythm section, with people comparing Palmer's playing to that of James Jamerson. But Stills and Young would get into guitar battles on stage, one-upping each other, in ways that turned the tension between them in creative directions. Other clashes, though were more petty -- both men had very domineering mothers, who would actually call the group's management to complain about press coverage if their son was given less space than the other one. The group were also not sure about Young's voice -- to the extent that Stills was known to jokingly apologise to the audience before Young took a lead vocal -- and so while the song chosen as the group's first A-side was Young's "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing", Furay was chosen to sing it, rather than Young: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing"] On the group's first session, though, both Stills and Young realised that their producers didn't really have a clue -- the group had built up arrangements that had a complex interplay of instruments and vocals, but the producers insisted on cutting things very straightforwardly, with a basic backing track and then the vocals. They also thought that the song was too long so the group should play faster. Stills and Young quickly decided that they were going to have to start producing their own material, though Stone and Greene would remain the producers for the first album. There was another bone of contention though, because in the session the initial plan had been for Stills' song "Go and Say Goodbye" to be the A-side with Young's song as the B-side. It was flipped, and nobody seems quite sure why -- it's certainly the case that, whatever the merits of the two tracks as songs, Stills' song was the one that would have been more likely to become a hit. "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" was a flop, but it did get some local airplay. The next single, "Burned", was a Young song as well, and this time did have Young taking the lead, though in a song dominated by harmonies: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Burned"] Over the summer, though, something had happened that would affect everything for the group -- Neil Young had started to have epileptic seizures. At first these were undiagnosed episodes, but soon they became almost routine events, and they would often happen on stage, particularly at moments of great stress or excitement. Several other members of the group became convinced -- entirely wrongly -- that Young was faking these seizures in order to get women to pay attention to him. They thought that what he wanted was for women to comfort him and mop his brow, and that collapsing would get him that. The seizures became so common that Richard Davis, the group's lighting tech, learned to recognise the signs of a seizure before it happened. As soon as it looked like Young was about to collapse the lights would turn on, someone would get ready to carry him off stage, and Richie Furay would know to grab Young's guitar before he fell so that the guitar wouldn't get damaged. Because they weren't properly grounded and Furay had an electric guitar of his own, he'd get a shock every time. Young would later claim that during some of the seizures, he would hallucinate that he was another person, in another world, living another life that seemed to have its own continuity -- people in the other world would recognise him and talk to him as if he'd been away for a while -- and then when he recovered he would have to quickly rebuild his identity, as if temporarily amnesiac, and during those times he would find things like the concept of lying painful. The group's first album came out in December, and they were very, very, unhappy with it. They thought the material was great, but they also thought that the production was terrible. Stone and Greene's insistence that they record the backing tracks first and then overdub vocals, rather than singing live with the instruments, meant that the recordings, according to Stills and Young in particular, didn't capture the sound of the group's live performance, and sounded sterile. Stills and Young thought they'd fixed some of that in the mono mix, which they spent ten days on, but then Stone and Greene did the stereo mix without consulting the band, in less than two days, and the album was released at precisely the time that stereo was starting to overtake mono in the album market. I'm using the mono mixes in this podcast, but for decades the only versions available were the stereo ones, which Stills and Young both loathed. Ahmet Ertegun also apparently thought that the demo versions of the songs -- some of which were eventually released on a box set in 2001 -- were much better than the finished studio recordings. The album was not a success on release, but it did contain the first song any of the group had written to chart. Soon after its release, Van Dyke Parks' friend Lenny Waronker was producing a single by a group who had originally been led by Sly Stone and had been called Sly and the Mojo Men. By this time Stone was no longer involved in the group, and they were making music in a very different style from the music their former leader would later become known for. Parks was brought in to arrange a baroque-pop version of Stills' album track "Sit Down I Think I Love You" for the group, and it became their only top forty hit, reaching number thirty-six: [Excerpt: The Mojo Men, "Sit Down I Think I Love You"] It was shortly after the first Buffalo Springfield album was released, though, that Steve Stills wrote what would turn out to be *his* group's only top forty single. The song had its roots in both LA and San Francisco. The LA roots were more obvious -- the song was written about a specific experience Stills had had. He had been driving to Sunset Strip from Laurel Canyon on November the twelfth 1966, and he had seen a mass of young people and police in riot gear, and he had immediately turned round, partly because he didn't want to get involved in what looked to be a riot, and partly because he'd been inspired -- he had the idea for a lyric, which he pretty much finished in the car even before he got home: [Excerpt: The Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The riots he saw were what became known later as the Riot on Sunset Strip. This was a minor skirmish between the police and young people of LA -- there had been complaints that young people had been spilling out of the nightclubs on Sunset Strip into the street, causing traffic problems, and as a result the city council had introduced various heavy-handed restrictions, including a ten PM curfew for all young people in the area, removing the permits that many clubs had which allowed people under twenty-one to be present, forcing the Whisky A-Go-Go to change its name just to "the Whisk", and forcing a club named Pandora's Box, which was considered the epicentre of the problem, to close altogether. Flyers had been passed around calling for a "funeral" for Pandora's Box -- a peaceful gathering at which people could say goodbye to a favourite nightspot, and a thousand people had turned up. The police also turned up, and in the heavy-handed way common among law enforcement, they managed to provoke a peaceful party and turn it into a riot. This would not normally be an event that would be remembered even a year later, let alone nearly sixty years later, but Sunset Strip was the centre of the American rock music world in the period, and of the broader youth entertainment field. Among those arrested at the riot, for example, were Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda, neither of whom were huge stars at the time, but who were making cheap B-movies with Roger Corman for American International Pictures. Among the cheap exploitation films that American International Pictures made around this time was one based on the riots, though neither Nicholson, Fonda, or Corman were involved. Riot on Sunset Strip was released in cinemas only four months after the riots, and it had a theme song by Dewey Martin's old colleagues The Standells, which is now regarded as a classic of garage rock: [Excerpt: The Standells, "Riot on Sunset Strip"] The riots got referenced in a lot of other songs, as well. The Mothers of Invention's second album, Absolutely Free, contains the song "Plastic People" which includes this section: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Plastic People"] And the Monkees track "Daily Nightly", written by Michael Nesmith, was always claimed by Nesmith to be an impressionistic portrait of the riots, though the psychedelic lyrics sound to me more like they're talking about drug use and street-walking sex workers than anything to do with the riots: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Daily Nightly"] But the song about the riots that would have the most lasting effect on popular culture was the one that Steve Stills wrote that night. Although how much he actually wrote, at least of the music, is somewhat open to question. Earlier that month, Buffalo Springfield had spent some time in San Francisco. They hadn't enjoyed the experience -- as an LA band, they were thought of as a bunch of Hollywood posers by most of the San Francisco scene, with the exception of one band, Moby Grape -- a band who, like them had three guitarist/singer/songwriters, and with whom they got on very well. Indeed, they got on rather better with Moby Grape than they were getting on with each other at this point, because Young and Stills would regularly get into arguments, and every time their argument seemed to be settling down, Dewey Martin would manage to say the wrong thing and get Stills riled up again -- Martin was doing a lot of speed at this point and unable to stop talking, even when it would have been politic to do so. There was even some talk while they were in San Francisco of the bands doing a trade -- Young and Pete Lewis of Moby Grape swapping places -- though that came to nothing. But Stills, according to both Richard Davis and Pete Lewis, had been truly impressed by two Moby Grape songs. One of them was a song called "On the Other Side", which Moby Grape never recorded, but which apparently had a chorus that went "Stop, can't you hear the music ringing in your ear, right before you go, telling you the way is clear," with the group all pausing after the word "Stop". The other was a song called "Murder in my Heart for the Judge": [Excerpt: Moby Grape, "Murder in my Heart for the Judge"] The song Stills wrote had a huge amount of melodic influence from that song, and quite a bit from “On the Other Side”, though he apparently didn't notice until after the record came out, at which point he apologised to Moby Grape. Stills wasn't massively impressed with the song he'd written, and went to Stone and Greene's office to play it for them, saying "I'll play it, for what it's worth". They liked the song and booked a studio to get the song recorded and rush-released, though according to Neil Young neither Stone nor Greene were actually present at the session, and the song was recorded on December the fifth, while some outbursts of rioting were still happening, and released on December the twenty-third. [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "For What it's Worth"] The song didn't have a title when they recorded it, or so Stills thought, but when he mentioned this to Greene and Stone afterwards, they said "Of course it does. You said, 'I'm going to play the song, 'For What It's Worth'" So that became the title, although Ahmet Ertegun didn't like the idea of releasing a single with a title that wasn't in the lyric, so the early pressings of the single had "Stop, Hey, What's That Sound?" in brackets after the title. The song became a big hit, and there's a story told by David Crosby that doesn't line up correctly, but which might shed some light on why. According to Crosby, "Nowadays Clancy Can't Even Sing" got its first airplay because Crosby had played members of Buffalo Springfield a tape he'd been given of the unreleased Beatles track "A Day in the Life", and they'd told their gangster manager-producers about it. Those manager-producers had then hired a sex worker to have sex with Crosby and steal the tape, which they'd then traded to a radio station in return for airplay. That timeline doesn't work, unless the sex worker involved was also a time traveller,  because "A Day in the Life" wasn't even recorded until January 1967 while "Clancy" came out in August 1966, and there'd been two other singles released between then and January 1967. But it *might* be the case that that's what happened with "For What It's Worth", which was released in the last week of December 1966, and didn't really start to do well on the charts for a couple of months. Right after recording the song, the group went to play a residency in New York, of which Ahmet Ertegun said “When they performed there, man, there was no band I ever heard that had the electricity of that group. That was the most exciting group I've ever seen, bar none. It was just mind-boggling.” During that residency they were joined on stage at various points by Mitch Ryder, Odetta, and Otis Redding. While in New York, the group also recorded "Mr. Soul", a song that Young had originally written as a folk song about his experiences with epilepsy, the nature of the soul, and dealing with fame. However, he'd noticed a similarity to "Satisfaction" and decided to lean into it. The track as finally released was heavily overdubbed by Young a few months later, but after it was released he decided he preferred the original take, which by then only existed as a scratchy acetate, which got released on a box set in 2001: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Mr. Soul (original version)"] Everyone has a different story of how the session for that track went -- at least one version of the story has Otis Redding turning up for the session and saying he wanted to record the song himself, as his follow-up to his version of "Satisfaction", but Young being angry at the idea. According to other versions of the story, Greene and Stills got into a physical fight, with Greene having to be given some of the valium Young was taking for his epilepsy to calm him down. "For What it's Worth" was doing well enough on the charts that the album was recalled, and reissued with "For What It's Worth" replacing Stills' song "Baby Don't Scold", but soon disaster struck the band. Bruce Palmer was arrested on drugs charges, and was deported back to Canada just as the song started to rise through the charts. The group needed a new bass player, fast. For a lipsynch appearance on local TV they got Richard Davis to mime the part, and then they got in Ken Forssi, the bass player from Love, for a couple of gigs. They next brought in Ken Koblun, the bass player from the Squires, but he didn't fit in with the rest of the group. The next replacement was Jim Fielder. Fielder was a friend of the group, and knew the material -- he'd subbed for Palmer a few times in 1966 when Palmer had been locked up after less serious busts. And to give some idea of how small a scene the LA scene was, when Buffalo Springfield asked him to become their bass player, he was playing rhythm guitar for the Mothers of Invention, while Billy Mundi was on drums, and had played on their second, as yet unreleased, album, Absolutely Free: [Excerpt: The Mothers of Invention, "Call any Vegetable"] And before joining the Mothers, Fielder and Mundi had also played together with Van Dyke Parks, who had served his own short stint as a Mother of Invention already, backing Tim Buckley on Buckley's first album: [Excerpt: Tim Buckley, "Aren't You the Girl?"] And the arrangements on that album were by Jack Nitzsche, who would soon become a very close collaborator with Young. "For What it's Worth" kept rising up the charts. Even though it had been inspired by a very local issue, the lyrics were vague enough that people in other situations could apply it to themselves, and it soon became regarded as an anti-war protest anthem -- something Stills did nothing to discourage, as the band were all opposed to the war. The band were also starting to collaborate with other people. When Stills bought a new house, he couldn't move in to it for a while, and so Peter Tork invited him to stay at his house. The two got on so well that Tork invited Stills to produce the next Monkees album -- only to find that Michael Nesmith had already asked Chip Douglas to do it. The group started work on a new album, provisionally titled "Stampede", but sessions didn't get much further than Stills' song "Bluebird" before trouble arose between Young and Stills. The root of the argument seems to have been around the number of songs each got on the album. With Richie Furay also writing, Young was worried that given the others' attitudes to his songwriting, he might get as few as two songs on the album. And Young and Stills were arguing over which song should be the next single, with Young wanting "Mr. Soul" to be the A-side, while Stills wanted "Bluebird" -- Stills making the reasonable case that they'd released two Neil Young songs as singles and gone nowhere, and then they'd released one of Stills', and it had become a massive hit. "Bluebird" was eventually chosen as the A-side, with "Mr. Soul" as the B-side: [Excerpt: Buffalo Springfield, "Bluebird"] The "Bluebird" session was another fraught one. Fielder had not yet joined the band, and session player Bobby West subbed on bass. Neil Young had recently started hanging out with Jack Nitzsche, and the two were getting very close and working on music together. Young had impressed Nitzsche not just with his songwriting but with his arrogance -- he'd played Nitzsche his latest song, "Expecting to Fly", and Nitzsche had said halfway through "That's a great song", and Young had shushed him and told him to listen, not interrupt. Nitzsche, who had a monstrous ego himself and was also used to working with people like Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones and Sonny Bono, none of them known for a lack of faith in their own abilities, was impressed. Shortly after that, Stills had asked Nitzsch

Better Lawns and Gardens Hour 1 – Coming to you from Summit Responsible Solutions Studios,  Garden expert Teresa Watkins provides details of her vacation to Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Rhode Island. Her “Rhod trip” to visit Rhodwood, the inspirational home of North Carolina's most outstanding landscape designer, Jay Sifford. Teresa describes her new plants for her landscape and her discovery that leads to new insights of the Kingston Trio's song, “Tom Dooley” and finding the burial place of her 7th and 8th great grandparents. Gardening questions and texts include the niece of the lyricist of “Tom Dooley,” propagating dwarf papaya seeds,the real name of a butterfly bush, solution to “take-all-root rot, and more.  https://bit.ly/3c1f5x7 Photo credit of Rhodwood: Teresa Watkins Listen to Better Lawns and Gardens every Saturday 7 am - 9 am EST.  Call in with your garden questions 1.888.455.2867, or text 23680.     #WFLF #WFLA #FNN #BetterLawns #gardening #Florida #gardeninglife #talkradio #southflorida #northflorida #centralflorida #tropical #floridalife #SHE #landscaping #Orlando #Sarasota #Miami #FortLauderdale #BLGradio #WRLN #WiOD #gardening  #SummitResponsibleSolutions #QualityGreenSpecialists #BlackKow 3Rhodwood #NorthCarolina #nursery #PlantDelights #JaySifford 

Trong giới nghệ sĩ Việt Nam ở hải ngoại, có thể là không có người nào mà sự nghiệp nghệ thuật đầy những thăng trầm và kéo dài như nữ tài tử Kiều Chinh. Cuộc đời của ngôi sao điện ảnh sinh vào năm 1937 tại Hà Nội đã trải qua cùng với nhiều biến động của đất nước, kể từ khi bà bước vào nghệ thuật thứ bảy vào thập niên 1950 cho đến năm 1975, khi Sài Gòn thất thủ, phải sang Hoa Kỳ tị nạn và sống lưu vong cho tới nay. Nhưng ở xứ người, Kiều Chinh không chỉ tiếp tục con đường của một nghệ sĩ, mà bà còn là một nhà hoạt động xã hội hết mình không chỉ với đồng hương, mà với mọi thân phận bất hạnh. Cuộc đời với biết bao diễn biến đầy kịch tính như trong một cuốn tiểu thuyết đã được Kiều Chinh tái hiện trong cuốn hồi ký “ Kiều Chinh - Nghệ sĩ lưu vong”. Cuốn sách đã được phát hành tại Hoa Kỳ từ tháng 9 năm 2021 bằng hai ấn bản tiếng Việt và tiếng Anh. Theo dự kiến ấn bản tiếng Pháp sẽ ra mắt độc giả vào khoảng tháng 9 hoặc tháng 10 năm nay.  Hôm nay, chúng tôi rất hân hạnh được tiếp chuyện qua điện thoại với nữ tài tử Kiều Chinh, một nữ diễn viên mà tên tuổi đã gắn liền với nền điện ảnh Việt Nam từ bao thập niên và có lẽ là nữ tài tử người Việt được làng điện ảnh Hollywood biết đến nhiều nhất.  RFI: Xin chào chị Kiều Chinh. Thưa chị trước khi nói về cuốn hồi ký mà bản tiếng Pháp sẽ ra mắt độc giả trong nay mai, xin được hỏi là hiện giờ chị có tiếp tục có những sinh hoạt trong giới văn hóa nghệ thuật, cũng như các hoạt động xã hội?  Kiều Chinh: Thưa Thanh Phương, mình cứ tưởng về già sẽ có nhiều thời gian ở nhà làm vườn, trồng cây cảnh. Nhưng không biết tại sao số phận Kiều Chinh càng già càng quá bận rộn! Thứ nhất, sau khi cuốn hồi ký ra đời, Kiều Chinh được đón nhận ở khắp mọi nơi, cho nên phải đi ra mắt sách ở khắp các tiểu bang trên đất Mỹ, ở các thành phố bên Canada. Hiện giờ Kiều Chinh vẫn còn đang đóng phim, vừa đi thành phố Kentucky, Louisville đóng phim hai tuần lễ, mới về cách đây hai ngày và còn hai dự án làm phim, tháng 10 sẽ qua Úc để đóng phim một tháng, thành ra rất là bận rộn.  Ngoài việc đóng phim và ra mắt sách, lại còn những hoạt động xã hội, cộng đồng nữa. RFI: Hiện nay chị vẫn tiếp tục đi các nơi để giới thiệu cuốn hồi Ký " Kiều Chinh - Nghệ sĩ lưu vong", cho thấy độc giả, ít ra là tại Hoa Kỳ, đã đón nhận nồng nhiệt cuốn sách này? Kiều Chinh: Vâng, xin lỗi lại nói về “le moi” ( cái tôi ), mà “le moi est haissable” ( cái tôi thì đáng ghét ). Nhưng theo lời nhà Đinh Quang Anh Thái, nhà sách Tự Lực, đây là một cuốn sách “make history”, tức là cuốn sách thành công nhất trong lịch sử làm sách ở Hoa Kỳ, bởi vì mới ra mắt có mấy tháng mà đã có mấy ngàn ấn bản phát hành khắp mọi nơi. Những buổi ra mắt sách rất thành công. Thật sự thì cuộc đời của Kiều Chinh cũng giống cuộc đời của hàng triệu người Việt Nam lưu vong trên thế giới, ai cũng có một câu chuyện để kể lại. Kiều Chinh chỉ là một trong hàng triệu câu chuyện đó, nhưng có được may mắn là cuốn sách " Kiều Chinh - Nghệ sĩ lưu vong" được đón nhận rất là nồng nhiệt. RFI: Thưa chị Kiều Chinh, chị đã đặt tên cho cuốn hồi ký là “Kiều Chinh - Nghệ sĩ lưu vong”. Như vậy đối với chị, quảng đời mà chị sống nơi đất khách quê người là thời gian mà có nhiều sự kiện, nhiều biến cố ghi dấu sự nghiệp, cũng như cuộc sống của chị? Kiều Chinh: Vâng. Thật sự thì cũng có những người không đồng ý với chữ “lưu vong”, nhưng đối với Kiều Chinh, khi mình không sống ở quê hương mình, thì đó là một sự lưu vong. Cuốn hồi ký, nhất là ấn bản tiếng Anh, được đón nhận rất là nồng nhiệt, vì Kiều Chinh nghĩ là sau cuộc chiến Việt Nam, sau 1975, đã có rất nhiều sách, phim ảnh nói về chiến tranh Việt Nam, về Việt Nam. Nhưng những sách và phim đó là từ point de vue ( quan điểm ) của người ngoại cuộc, qua con mắt của những người không phải là người Việt Nam, không phải là của những người đã sống ở Việt Nam. Còn Kiều Chinh là người sinh ra ở đất Bắc, lớn lên ở miền Nam và sống quá nửa đời người ở quê hương và đã trải qua ba cuộc chiến, từ thời Đệ nhị Thế chiến tới thời kỳ chiến tranh Đông Dương kết thúc, chứng kiến quân đội Pháp rời bỏ Việt Nam và quân đội Mỹ bắt đầu đi vào Việt Nam. Trong những năm tháng đó, mình giống như là những nhân chứng sống, mình là người trong cuộc, kể lại câu chuyện về lịch sử của quê hương. Mình cũng là một nghệ sĩ nữa, cho nên đã trải qua rất nhiều rất nhiều biến động của đất nước, cũng như đã được đi đây đi đó rất nhiều trong suốt thời gian làm diễn viên điện ảnh, đã đại diện cho điện ảnh miền Nam đi khắp các vùng Đông Nam Á và cũng được đóng phim ở khắp vùng Đông Nam Á, từ Philippines cho tới Singapore, Malaysia, Hồng Kông, Đài Loan và cả Ấn Độ nữa.  RFI: Thưa chị Kiều Chinh. Đúng là cuộc đời nghệ thuật điện ảnh của chị gắn liền với những thăng trầm của lịch sử đất nước, nhất là ở miền nam trong thời gian chiến tranh, cho nên chị đã có một vai diễn nhớ đời trong bộ phim nổi tiếng “ Người tình không chân dung”. Kiều Chinh: Phim “ Người tình không chân dung” hãng phim Giao Chỉ sản xuất. Hãng phim Giao Chỉ là của Kiều Chinh. Kiều Chinh là executive producer và diễn viên chính, phim do đạo diễn Hoàng Vĩnh Lộc viết cốt chuyện và dàn dựng. Đó cũng là cuốn phim đầu tiên dự đại hội điện ảnh ở Đài Loan và cuốn phim đầu tiên được hai giải thưởng tại sự kiện đó: giải cho phim chiến tranh và giải cho nữ diễn viên chính là Kiều Chinh.  Nếu có cuốn phim nào để lại cho Kiều Chinh nhiều kỷ niệm nhất thì có lẽ đó là phim “ Người Tình Không Chân Dung”, bởi vì phim không quay trong một phim trường, mà được quay “live” ở khắp các vùng có mặt trận. Thành ra Kiều Chinh đã có dịp gặp rất nhiều anh em. Phim đã để lại nhiều dấu ấn, đặc biệt là với hai nam diễn viên chính là anh Vũ Xuân Thông và anh Minh Trường Sơn. Với Kiều Chinh, đó là hai người bạn thân nhất trong đời thường. Mới đây là kỷ niệm 50 năm bộ phim đó, đài Jimmy TV ở Mỹ đã có một cuộc phỏng vấn dài với ba diễn viên chính và chúng tôi lại gặp nhau. Cuốn phim đã để lại nhiều kỷ niệm và cũng nhân đây cám ơn tất cả quý vị đã có cảm tình với phim “ Người Tình Không Chân Dung” trong 50 năm qua và cũng xin chắp tay tưởng nhớ biết bao nhiêu người trong phim đó đã ra đi.   RFI: Ngay từ thời gian còn đóng phim ở Việt Nam, chị cũng đã có dịp sang Mỹ và tiếp xúc với giới điện ảnh Hoa Kỳ. Từ khi phải rời Việt Nam để sang Mỹ sống chị đã có những vai diễn gì ưng ý nhất trong làng điện ảnh Hollywood, một môi trường mà thật ra không xa lạ lắm đối với chị, những vai diễn đánh dấu cuộc đời nghệ thuật của chị ở hải ngoại? Kiều Chinh: Lần đầu tiên Kiều Chinh qua Mỹ là vào năm 1968, khi có một hãng phim dự tính quay cuốn phim "Doctor Tom Dooley", họ mời Kiều Chinh sang Hollywood để sửa soạn, nhưng chẳng may là dự án đó không thành. Nhưng thời gian đó, qua đây Kiều Chinh cũng được mời tham dự bộ phim mà Kiều Chinh yêu thích vô cùng, đó là "Doctor Jivago" và cũng làm quen một vài nhân vật ở đây.  Còn phim nào để lại nhiều ấn tượng nhất cho Kiều Chinh? Nếu nói về TV thì phải nói đến chương trình MASH, show truyền hình đầu tiên Kiều Chinh được làm việc ở Hollywood. MASH là show nổi tiếng nhất thời đấy ở nước Mỹ và trên toàn thế giới, với đạo diễn là tài tử Alan Adam. Nếu nói về phim ảnh thì sau cuốn phim "The letter" với nữ tài tử Lee Remick thì phải nói đến phim của nhà văn Amy Tan "The Joy Luck Club" ( 1993 ). Bộ phim đã đưa Kiều Chinh đi khắp nơi trên nước Mỹ, cũng như là ở châu Âu để ra mắt phim. Đi đâu họ cũng nhận ra mình đóng trong phim "The Joy Luck Club"! RFI:  Đó là nói về lĩnh vực điện ảnh. Nhưng trong cuộc đời ghệ sĩ lưu vong, dường như là số phận cũng đã đưa đẩy chị đến các hoạt động xã hội, từ thiện, mà trên hết là những hoạt động trợ giúp cho đồng bào tị nạn Việt Nam tại Hoa Kỳ, nhất là trong những năm đầu tiên? Có lẽ chính những hoạt động đó đã làm cho cuộc sống nghệ thuật của chị thêm phong phú, thêm ý nghĩa? Kiều Chinh: Thưa Thanh Phương, đa số các thính giả biết Kiều Chinh là một nghệ sĩ đóng phim, thật sự công việc bận rộn thứ hai, ngoài đóng phim, Kiều Chinh còn là một diễn giả, đi gần như là khắp các trường đại học trên nước Mỹ để nói chuyện. Ngoài trường đại học, Kiều Chinh còn được đi rất nhiều ở rất nhiều tổ chức về văn hóa, phụ nữ và xã hội. Ở những nơi dừng chân để nói chuyện, Kiều Chinh cũng đã được gặp rất nhiều người.  Nhất là thời gian vào khoảng năm 1980, khi có sự hiện diện của thuyền nhân Việt Nam, Kiều Chinh đã bay sang Philippines cùng đệ nhất phu nhân Philippines Imelda Marcos để chào đón đồng bào thuyền nhân tại trại Palawan. Đồng thời Kiều Chinh cũng đi khắp các trại tị nạn ở Đông Nam Á, Hồng Kông, để thăm đồng bào tị nạn. Đó cũng chính là nhờ những lần đi nói chuyện các nơi. Có một lần được mời đến bức tường đá đen mà ở Hoa Thịnh Đốn ( Washington ), nơi ghi tên 58.000 binh sĩ Mỹ tử trận ở Việt Nam, Kiều Chinh có đọc một bài diễn văn. Trên nửa triệu người có mặt hôm đó nhân kỷ niệm 10 năm bức tường đá đen. Họ tổ chức 3 ngày 3 đêm liền để đọc tên từng người một trên bức tường đó. Khi đến lượt Kiều Chinh là người thứ tư lên đọc tên, Kiều Chinh nói: “ Hôm nay, tôi là một công dân Mỹ, nhưng là gốc Việt. Khi đọc những tên như là Smith, Johnson, thì trong lòng tôi không khỏi nghĩ đến những người họ Trần, họ Lê đã gục ngã trong cuộc chiến đó. Đã có đến hơn 2 triệu người gục ngã. Tôi ước mong một ngày sẽ làm được gì để vinh danh những người đó, nhất là trẻ em.” Khi nói điều đó, Kiều Chinh đã được những Vietnam Vet ( Cựu chiến binh Mỹ ở Việt Nam ) hưởng ứng. Sau đó, Kiều Chinh được tiếp tay với nhà báo nổi tiếng Terry Anderson, người đã bị giữ làm con tin ở Trung Đông và ông Lewis Puller, một cựu chiến binh nổi tiếng của Mỹ, cùng sáng lập một hội từ thiện lấy tên là "The Vietnam Children Fund" vào năm 1993. Hội chỉ làm một công việc là xây những ngôi trường tiểu học tại các làng mạc đã bị chiến tranh tàn phá, giúp các em có chỗ học và hy vọng các em sẽ có một tương lai tốt đẹp hơn.  Hội có may mắn là được rất nhiều sự ủng hộ, đặc biệt từ phía các cựu quân nhân Mỹ. Một trong những người đầu tiên đứng lên ủng hộ cũng là một Vietnam Vet, Jim Kimsey . Sau khi giải ngũ, ông đã sang Việt Nam hai lần trong thời gian chiến tranh. Khi về, ông thành lập công ty America Online. Chính ông là người tài trợ cho ngôi trường đầu tiên của hội, mà Kiều Chinh đã đề nghị xây tại Đông Hà, tức vĩ tuyến 17, nơi chia đôi đất nước trong thời chiến. Năm 1995, ngôi trường được xây xong. Ông Terry Anderson, tức là đồng chủ tịch với Kiều Chinh cùng với ông Jim Kimsey, người tài trợ, đã về cắt băng khánh thành trường.  Từ đó cho đến nay, hội đã xây được 52 ngôi trường tại khắp các vùng trên quê hương, từ Bắc, Trung tới Nam. Người tài trợ nhiều nhất và lâu dài nhất cũng là một người cựu chiến binh Mỹ ở Việt Nam, đó là ông Fred Smith, chủ tịch của công ty FedEx, đã tài trợ cho hội 5 ngôi trường. Ngôi trường cuối cùng Kiều Chinh về cắt băng khánh thành, hình như vào năm 2016 là ở Quảng Nam. Cho tới nay, 52 ngôi trường đó đã đủ chỗ cho các em đi học, giúp cho khoảng 40 chục ngàn em mỗi năm có nơi đi học.   RFI: Thưa chị Kiều Chinh, cuộc đời của chị quả là có nhiều thăng trầm, nhiều biến cố đau thương. Nhìn lại những năm tháng đã qua, điều gì đã giúp cho chị vượt qua được những thử thách, những tai nạn để vẫn đứng vững cho đến ngày hôm nay, để tiếp tục đi đóng phim, tiếp tục hoạt động xã hội? Kiều Chinh: Đúng như anh nói. Cuộc đời của Kiều Chinh có những may mắn, nhưng cũng có những cái kém may mắn, cũng gặp rất nhiều thăng trầm. Mỗi lần một sự việc không máy mắn xảy ra thì mình cứ tưởng như là trời sụp, là mình chịu đựng không nổi. Nhiều lúc cũng muốn nổi điên! Nhưng cũng nhờ là tại những nơi mà mình đã đi, chẳng hạn như các trại tị nạn, mình đã gặp biết bao nhiêu người, đã nhìn thấy, đã chứng kiến và đã được nghe những thảm kịch. Mình nhìn lại thì mình thấy: “ Chao ôi, chuyện của mình thấm thía gì so với chuyện mà những người khác đã trải qua. Hãy nhìn lại mà xem, đồng bào mình cũng như là khắp mọi nơi, biết bao nhiêu người khổ đau, biết bao chuyện ghê gớm. Vậy thì chuyện của mình có gì đâu, đừng té ngã như vậy, hãy đứng thẳng lên và đi tới, để tiếp tục công việc của mình và hãy mạnh mẽ để còn làm được nhiều việc cho người khác". Đó là sức mạnh giúp cho Kiều Chinh RFI : Thưa chị Kiều Chinh, nếu không có gì trục trặc thì ấn bản tiếng Pháp cuốn hồi ký “ Kiều Chinh Nghệ sĩ lưu vong” sẽ được xuất bản trong tháng 9, tháng 10.  Trước khi kết thúc cuộc nói chuyện, chị có những lời tâm sự, nhắn gởi gì đến đồng bào người Việt ở Pháp nói riêng, và đồng bào người Việt nói chung? Kiều Chinh: Cám ơn Thanh Phương. Cuốn sách của Kiều Chinh bản tiếng Việt cũng như bản tiếng Anh đã được đón nhận rất nồng nhiệt ở Hoa Kỳ. Rất nhiều người bên Đức, bên Úc, cả ở Việt Nam và đặc biệt bên Pháp cũng đòi Kiều Chinh gởi sách đi rồi ra mắt sách. Đó là lý do mà Kiều Chinh đã quyết định cho cuốn sách được sang Pháp ngữ. Hiện giờ, cuốn sách dự kiến là tháng 9, tháng 10 sẽ xong và rất mong có một buổi ra mắt sách để gặp gỡ đồng bào ở bên Pháp sau khi cuốn sách bằng tiếng Pháp được phát hành. Cho tới giờ cũng chưa biết ai sẽ giúp mình đứng ra tổ chức một buổi ra mắt sách như vậy. Ước mong sẽ có một người nào đó bên Pháp đứng ra tổ chức cho Kiều Chinh. RFI : Xin cám hơn chị Kiều Chinh.

This week we are discussing the murder ballad of Tom Dooley.  Did Tom really do what they say he did?  Was his death the result of his actions, or those of another?  Grab a beverage and join us as we enjoy beers from TwoBoros Brewery, and try to unravel the mysteries of this case!Follow Us On All The ThingsFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/bloodandbarrelsInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/bloodandbarrelsTwitter - https://twitter.com/bloodbarrelspodSee More About Us & Find Blood & Barrels MerchWebsite - https://bloodandbarrels.comMerch - https://bloodandbarrels.com/merch/#!/allAdditional Episodes Available For Blood & Barrels Patreon Family Members!Join the family for as little as $1 a month!Support the show

On this episode of the Life in the Carolinas podcast, Carl sits down with Jan Kronsell, a Danish university business professor and the author of Land of friendliness and beauty: A Danes Guide to Western North Carolina, The Doctor's Secret: Another version of the Tom Dooley legend, and his latest release, Who killed Laura Foster?: My view on a 150-year old murder. While admitting that “the truth will never be found, unless someone invests a time machine,” Jan wrote Who killed Laura Foster as a sort of culmination piece to satisfy, to the best of his ability, his immense curiosity towards the North Carolina legend since first learning about it in the late 1990s. Jan shares his 20+-year journey to painting the clearest picture he could of the murder of Laura Foster, including the possible reasons behind the suspicious behaviors of Laura's father and her cousin Anne's younger brother Thomas directly before and after her death, and the series of events that allowed Jan to pinpoint the most likely location of her grave. He also offers his thoughts on why this particular story is so enduring over a century later. “Everybody has their own version of the story,” says Jan. “And I think that's great because [...] it's not about telling the truth⁠—it's about keeping the legends alive.”

This week's episode is all about ballad singers and storytellers. We'll hear an interview with West Virginia native Becca Spence Dobias who wrote a novel called ‘On Home.' And co-host Mason Adams sits down with ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle, who grew up in Rural Retreat, Virginia. We'll also hear about a song called “Tom Dooley,” which was first released shortly after the Civil War, and much more.

This week's episode is all about ballad singers and storytellers. We'll hear an interview with West Virginia native Becca Spence Dobias who wrote a novel called ‘On Home.' And co-host Mason Adams sits down with ballad singer Elizabeth LaPrelle, who grew up in Rural Retreat, Virginia. As longtime performers and new parents, she and her husband took to Facebook Live, posting weekly livestreams of lullabies and stories. We'll also hear about a song called “Tom Dooley,” which was first released shortly after the Civil War. It resurfaced 60 years ago, when it topped the Billboard charts. It had everything: A love triangle, a grisly murder, a manhunt, and a hanging. Folkways reporter Heather Duncan set out to explore why ballads like Tom Dooley, based on real tragedies and real people, have such staying power.

This week's episode is all about ballad singers and storytellers. If you've listened to Inside Appalachia over the past year, there's a good chance you've heard music by Anna & Elizabeth. This week on Inside Appalachia, co-host Mason Adams sits down with Elizabeth LaPrelle, who grew up in Rural Retreat, Virginia. She and her husband Brian Dolphin moved from Brooklyn back to southwestern Virginia just before the pandemic hit. As longtime performers and new parents they took to Facebook Live, posting weekly livestreams of lullabies and stories. We'll also hear about a song called “Tom Dooley,” which was first released shortly after the Civil War. It resurfaced 60 years ago, when it topped the Billboard charts. It had everything: A love triangle, a grisly murder, a manhunt, and a hanging. Folkways reporter Heather Duncan is a native of Wilkes County, North Carolina, where the song unfolds. Recently she set out to explore why ballads like Tom Dooley, based on real tragedies and real people, have such staying power. And we'll hear from a contemporary ballad singer Saro Lynch-Thomason, who uses the tradition of ballad singing in protests and marches.

This episode of Things I Text My Brother starts with a dramatic reading of a text exchange between the brothers Drouillard regarding an ominous, well-worn murder ballad from deep In the Pines and goes on to discuss long trains, Harry Nilsson, Lead Belly, decapitation by both boyfriends and driving wheels, Tom Dooley, lyrical gaslighting, Kurt Cobain, and Ira Louvin's mandolin. Father Art blesses us with another visit as well. Follow us @ThingsITextMyBrotherPodcast on Instagram where you can leave us notes for us to tackle in future segments of Ablutions and Edification. Like, subscribe, and do all the other things which podcasts tell you to do. Then, tell a friend, an enemy, and a total stranger to give us a listen as well. ————————----------- Theme Music: Still Pickin by Kevin MacLeod (Royalty free music) (filmmusic.io) "Still Pickin" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Lovely Piano Music Under Dramatic Reading: Relaxing Piano Music by Kevin MacLeod Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4273-re…-piano-music License: filmmusic.io/standard-license Church bells and various sounds effects: mixkit.co/free-sound-effects/ Mixkit Sound Effects Free License mixkit.co/license/

Part Two and the conclusion of the Tom Dooley saga.

NOTE: This episode went up before the allegations about Dylan, in a lawsuit filed on Friday, were made public on Monday night. Had I been aware of them, I would at least have commented at the beginning of the episode. Episode one hundred and thirty of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan, and the controversy over Dylan going electric, 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 "Hold What You've Got" by Joe Tex. 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/ Erratum A couple of times I refer to “CBS”. Dylan's label in the US was Columbia Records, a subsidiary of CBS Inc, but in the rest of the world the label traded as “CBS Records”. I should probably have used “Columbia” throughout... Resources No Mixcloud this week, as there are too many songs by Dylan. Much of the information in this episode comes from Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties by Elijah Wald, which is recommended, as all Wald's books are. I've used these books for all the episodes involving Dylan: Bob Dylan: All The Songs by Phillipe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon is a song-by-song look at every song Dylan ever wrote, as is Revolution in the Air, by Clinton Heylin. Heylin also wrote the most comprehensive and accurate biography of Dylan, Behind the Shades. I've also used Robert Shelton's No Direction Home, which is less accurate, but which is written by someone who knew Dylan. The New Yorker article by Nat Hentoff I talk about is here. And for the information about the writing of "Like a Rolling Stone", I relied on yet another book by Heylin, All the Madmen. Dylan's albums up to 1967 can all be found in their original mono mixes on this box set. And Dylan's performances at Newport from 1963 through 1965 are on this DVD. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript There's a story that everyone tells about Bob Dylan in 1965, the story that has entered into legend. It's the story that you'll see in most of the biographies of him, and in all those coffee-table histories of rock music put out by glossy music magazines. Bob Dylan, in this story, was part of the square, boring, folk scene until he plugged in an electric guitar and just blew the minds of all those squares, who immediately ostracised him forever for being a Judas and betraying their traditionalist acoustic music, but he was just too cool and too much of a rebel to be bound by their rules, man. Pete Seeger even got an axe and tried to cut his way through the cables of the amplifiers, he was so offended by the desecration of the Newport Folk Festival. And like all these stories, it's an oversimplification but there's an element of truth to it too. So today, we're going to look at what actually happened when Dylan went electric. We're going to look at what led to him going electric, and at the truth behind the legend of Seeger's axe. And we're going to look at the masterpiece at the centre of it all, a record that changed rock songwriting forever. We're going to look at Bob Dylan and "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] While we've seen Dylan turn up in all sorts of episodes -- most recently the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man", the last time we looked at him in detail was in the episode on "Blowin' in the Wind", and when we left him there he had just recorded his second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, but it had not yet been released. As we'll see, Dylan was always an artist who moved on very quickly from what he'd been doing before, and that had started as early as that album. While his first album, produced by John Hammond, had been made up almost entirely of traditional songs and songs he'd learned from Dave van Ronk or Eric von Schmidt, with only two originals, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan had started out being produced by Hammond, but as Hammond and Dylan's manager Albert Grossman had come to find it difficult to work together, the last few tracks had been produced by Tom Wilson. We've mentioned Wilson briefly a couple of times already, but to reiterate, Wilson was a Black Harvard graduate and political conservative whose background was in jazz and who had no knowledge of or love for folk music. But Wilson saw two things in Dylan -- the undeniable power of his lyrics, and his vocals, which Wilson compared to Ray Charles. Wilson wanted to move Dylan towards working with a backing band, and this was something that Dylan was interested in doing, but his first experiment with that, with John Hammond, hadn't been a particular success. Dylan had recorded a single backed with a band -- "Mixed-Up Confusion", backed with "Corrina, Corrina", a version of an old song that had been recorded by both Bob Wills and Big Joe Turner, but had recently been brought back to the public mind by a version Phil Spector had produced for Ray Peterson. Dylan's version of that song had a country lope and occasional breaks into Jimmie Rodgers style keening that foreshadow his work of the late sixties: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Corrina, Corrina (single version)"] A different take of that track was included on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, an album that was made up almost entirely of originals. Those originals fell into roughly two types -- there were songs like "Masters of War", "Blowin' in the Wind", and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" which dealt in some way with the political events of the time -- the fear of nuclear war, the ongoing conflict in Vietnam, the Civil Rights movement and more -- but did so in an elliptical, poetic way; and there were songs about distance in a relationship -- songs like "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright", which do a wonderful job at portraying a young man's conflicted feelings -- the girl has left him, and he wants her back, but he wants to pretend that he doesn't.  While it's always a bad idea to look for a direct autobiographical interpretation of Dylan's lyrics, it seems fairly safe to say that these songs were inspired by Dylan's feelings for his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, who had gone travelling in Europe and not seen him for eight months, and who he was worried he would never see again, and he does seem to have actually had several conflicting feelings about this, ranging from desperation for her to come back through to anger and resentment. The surprising thing about The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan is that it's a relatively coherent piece of work, despite being recorded with two different producers over a period of more than a year, and that recording being interrupted by Dylan's own travels to the UK, his separation from and reconciliation with Rotolo, and a change of producers. If you listened to it, you would get an impression of exactly who Dylan was -- you'd come away from it thinking that he was an angry, talented, young man who was trying to merge elements of both traditional English folk music and Robert Johnson style Delta blues with poetic lyrics related to what was going on in the young man's life. By the next album, that opinion of Dylan would have to be reworked, and it would have to be reworked with every single album that came out.  But The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out at the perfect time for Dylan to step into the role of "spokesman for a generation" -- a role which he didn't want, and to which he wasn't particularly suited. Because it came out in May 1963, right at the point at which folk music was both becoming hugely more mainstream, and becoming more politicised. And nothing showed both those things as well as the Hootenanny boycott: [Excerpt: The Brothers Four, “Hootenanny Saturday Night”] We've talked before about Hootenanny, the folk TV show, but what we haven't mentioned is that there was a quite substantial boycott of that show by some of the top musicians in folk music at the time. The reason for this is that Pete Seeger, the elder statesman of the folk movement, and his old band the Weavers, were both blacklisted from the show because of Seeger's Communist leanings. The Weavers were --- according to some sources -- told that they could go on if they would sign a loyalty oath, but they refused. It's hard for those of us who weren't around at the time to really comprehend both just how subversive folk music was considered, and how seriously subversion was taken in the USA of the early 1960s. To give a relevant example -- Suze Rotolo was pictured on the cover of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Because of this, her cousin's husband, who was in the military, lost his security clearance and didn't get a promotion he was in line for. Again,  someone lost his security clearance because his wife's cousin was pictured on the cover of a Bob Dylan album. So the blacklisting of Seeger and the Weavers was considered a serious matter by the folk music community, and people reacted very strongly. Joan Baez announced that she wouldn't be going on Hootenanny until they asked Seeger on, and Dylan, the Kingston Trio, Dave van Ronk, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and Peter, Paul, and Mary, among many others, all refused to go on the show as a result. But the odd thing was, whenever anyone *actually asked* Pete Seeger what he thought they should do, he told them they should go on the TV show and use it as an opportunity to promote the music. So while the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, and Mary, two of the biggest examples of the commercialisation of folk music that the serious purists sneered at, were refusing to go on the TV in solidarity with a Communist, that Communist's brother, Mike Seeger, happily went on Hootenanny with his band the New Lost City Ramblers, and when the Tarriers were invited on to the show but it clashed with one of their regular bookings, Pete Seeger covered their booking for them so they could appear. Dylan was on the side of the boycotters, though he was not too clear on exactly why. When he spoke about  the boycott on stage, this is what he had to say: [Excerpt: Dylan talks about the boycott. Transcript: "Now a friend of mine, a friend of all yours I'm sure, Pete Seeger's been blacklisted [applause]. He and another group called the Weavers who are around New York [applause] I turned down that television show, but I got no right [applause] but . . . I feel bad turning it down, because the Weavers and Pete Seeger can't be on it. They oughta turn it down. They aren't even asked to be on it because they are blacklisted. Uh—which is, which is a bad thing. I don't know why it's bad, but it's just bad, it's bad all around."] Hootenanny started broadcasting in April 1963, just over a month before The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan came out, and so it would have been a good opportunity for publicity for him -- but turning the show down was also good publicity. Hootenanny wouldn't be the only opportunity to appear on TV that he was offered. It would also not be the only one he turned down. In May, Dylan was given the opportunity to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show, but he agreed on one condition -- that he be allowed to sing "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues". For those who don't know, the John Birch Society is a far-right conspiratorial organisation which had a huge influence on the development of the American right-wing in the middle of the twentieth century, and is responsible for perpetuating almost every conspiracy theory that has exerted a malign influence on the country and the world since that time. They were a popular punching bag for the left and centre, and for good reason -- we heard the Chad Mitchell Trio mocking them, for example, in the episode on "Mr. Tambourine Man" a couple of weeks ago.  So Dylan insisted that if he was going to go on the Ed Sullivan Show, it would only be to perform his song about them: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues"] Now, the Ed Sullivan Show was not interested in having Dylan sing a song that would upset a substantial proportion of its audience, on what was after all meant to be an entertainment show, and so Dylan didn't appear on the show -- and he got a big publicity boost from his principled refusal to make a TV appearance that would have given him a big publicity boost. It's interesting to note in this context that Dylan himself clearly didn't actually think very much of the song -- he never included it on any of his albums, and it remained unreleased for decades. By this point, Dylan had started dating Joan Baez, with whom he would have an on-again off-again relationship for the next couple of years, even though at this point he was also still seeing Suze Rotolo. Baez was one of the big stars of the folk movement, and like Rotolo she was extremely politically motivated. She was also a fan of Dylan's writing, and had started recording versions of his songs on her albums: [Excerpt: Joan Baez, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] The relationship between the two of them became much more public when they appeared together at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963. The Newport Folk Festival had started in 1959, as a spinoff from the successful Newport Jazz Festival, which had been going for a number of years previously. As there was a large overlap between the jazz and folk music fanbases -- both musics appealed at this point to educated, middle-class, liberals who liked to think of themselves as a little bit Bohemian -- the Jazz Festival had first started putting on an afternoon of folk music during its normal jazz programme, and then spun that off into a whole separate festival, initially with the help of Albert Grossman, who advised on which acts should be booked (and of course included several of the acts he managed on the bill). Both Newport festivals had been shut down after rioting at the 1960 Jazz Festival, as three thousand more people had turned up for the show than there was capacity for, and the Marines had had to be called in to clear the streets of angry jazz fans, but the jazz  festival had returned in 1962, and in 1963 the folk festival came back as well. By this time, Albert Grossman was too busy to work for the festival, and so its organisation was taken over by a committee headed by Pete Seeger.  At that 1963 festival, even though Dylan was at this point still a relative unknown compared to some of the acts on the bill, he was made the headliner of the first night, which finished with his set, and then with him bringing Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger and the Freedom Singers out to sing with him on "Blowin' in the Wind" and "We Shall Overcome".  To many people, Dylan's appearance in 1963 was what launched him from being "one of the rising stars of the folk movement" to being the most important musician in the movement -- still just one of many, but the first among equals. He was now being talked of in the same terms as Joan Baez or Pete Seeger, and was also starting to behave like someone as important as them -- like he was a star. And that was partly because Baez was promoting Dylan, having him duet with her on stage on his songs -- though few would now argue that the combination of their voices did either artist any favours, Baez's pure, trained, voice, rubbing up against Dylan's more idiosyncratic phrasing in ways that made both sound less impressive: [Excerpt: Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, "With God On Our Side (live at Newport 1963)"] At the end of 1963, Dylan recorded his third album, which came out in early 1964. The Times They Are A-Changin' seems to be Dylan's least personal album to this point, and seems to have been written as a conscious attempt to write the kind of songs that people wanted and expected from him -- there were songs about particular recent news events, like "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll",  the true story of the murder of a Black woman by a white man, and  "Only a Pawn in Their Game", about the murder of the Civil Rights activist Medgar Evers. There were fictional dramatisations of the kind of effects that real-world social problems were having on people, like "North Country Blues", in which the callous way mining towns were treated by capital leads to a woman losing her parents, brother, husband, and children, or "The Ballad of Hollis Brown", about a farmer driven to despair by poverty who ends up killing his whole family and himself. As you can imagine, it's not a very cheery album, but it's one that impressed a lot of people, especially its title track, which was very deliberately written as an anthem for the new social movements that were coming up: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "The Times They Are A-Changin'"] But it was a bleak album, with none of the humour that had characterised Dylan's first two albums. Soon after recording the album, Dylan had a final split with Rotolo, went travelling for a while, and took LSD for the first time. He also started to distance himself from Baez at this point, though the two would remain together until mid 1965. He seems to have regarded the political material he was doing as a mistake, as something he was doing for other people, rather than because that was what he wanted to do.  He toured the UK in early 1964, and then returned to the US in time to record his fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. It can be argued that this is the point where Dylan really becomes himself, and starts making music that's the music he wants to make, rather than music that he thinks other people want him to make.  The entire album was recorded in one session, along with a few tracks that didn't make the cut -- like the early version of "Mr. Tambourine Man" with Ramblin' Jack Elliott that we heard in the episode on that song. Elliott was in attendance, as were a number of Dylan's other friends, though the album features only Dylan performing. Also there was the journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote a full account of the recording session for the New Yorker, which I'll link in the show notes.  Dylan told Hentoff "“There aren't any finger-pointing songs in here, either. Those records I've already made, I'll stand behind them, but some of that was jumping into the scene to be heard and a lot of it was because I didn't see anybody else doing that kind of thing. Now a lot of people are doing finger-pointing songs. You know—pointing to all the things that are wrong. Me, I don't want to write for people anymore. You know—be a spokesman. Like I once wrote about Emmett Till in the first person, pretending I was him. From now on, I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten—having everything come out naturally." Dylan was right to say that there were no finger-pointing songs. The songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan were entirely personal -- "Ballad in Plain D", in particular, is Dylan's take on the night he split up with Suze Rotolo, laying the blame -- unfairly, as he would later admit -- on her older sister. The songs mostly dealt with love and relationships, and as a result were ripe for cover versions. The opening track, in particular, "All I Really Want to Do", which in Dylan's version was a Jimmie Rodgers style hillbilly tune, became the subject of duelling cover versions. The Byrds' version came out as the follow-up to their version of "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "All I Really Want to Do"] But Cher also released a version -- which the Byrds claimed came about when Cher's husband Sonny Bono secretly taped a Byrds live show where they performed the song before they'd released it, and he then stole their arrangement: [Excerpt: Cher, "All I Really Want to Do"] In America, the Byrds' version only made number forty on the charts, while Cher made number fifteen. In the UK, where both artists were touring at the time to promote the single, Cher made number nine but the Byrds charted higher at number four.  Both those releases came out after the album came out in late 1964, but even before it was released, Dylan was looking for other artists to cover his new songs. He found one at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, where he met Johnny Cash for the first time. Cash had been a fan of Dylan for some time -- and indeed, he's often credited as being the main reason why CBS persisted with Dylan after his first album was unsuccessful, as Cash had lobbied for him within the company -- and he'd recently started to let that influence show. His most recent hit, "Understand Your Man", owed more than a little to Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right", and Cash had also started recording protest songs. At Newport, Cash performed his own version of "Don't Think Twice": [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right"] Cash and Dylan met up, with June Carter and Joan Baez, in Baez's hotel room, and according to later descriptions they were both so excited to meet each other they were bouncing with excitement, jumping up and down on the beds. They played music together all night, and Dylan played some of his new songs for Cash. One of them was "It Ain't Me Babe", a song that seems at least slightly inspired by "She Loves You" -- you can sing the "yeah, yeah, yeah" and "no, no, no" together -- and which was the closing track of Another Side of Bob Dylan. Cash soon released his own version of the song, which became a top five country hit: [Excerpt: Johnny Cash, "It Ain't Me Babe"] But it wasn't long after meeting Cash that Dylan met the group who may have inspired that song -- and his meeting with the Beatles seems to have confirmed in him his decision that he needed to move away from the folk scene and towards making pop records. This was something that Tom Wilson had been pushing for for a while -- Wilson had told Dylan's manager Albert Grossman that if they could get Dylan backed by a good band, they'd have a white Ray Charles on their hands. As an experiment, Wilson took some session musicians into the studio and had them overdub an electric backing on Dylan's acoustic version of "House of the Rising Sun", basing the new backing on the Animals' hit version. The result wasn't good enough to release, but it did show that there was a potential for combining Dylan's music with the sound of electric guitars and drums: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, “House of the Rising Sun (electric version)”] Dylan was also being influenced by his friend John Hammond Jr, the blues musician son of Dylan's first producer, and a veteran of the Greenwich Village folk scene. Hammond had decided that he wanted to show the British R&B bands what proper American blues sounded like, and so he'd recruited a group of mostly-Canadian musicians to back him on an electric album. His "So Many Roads" album featured three members of a group called Levon and the Hawks -- Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, and Robbie Robertson -- who had recently quit working for the Canadian rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins -- plus harmonica player Charlie Musselwhite and Mike Bloomfield, who was normally a guitarist but who is credited on piano for the album: [Excerpt: John Hammond, Jr. "Who Do You Love?"] Dylan was inspired by Hammond's sound, and wanted to get the same sound on his next record, though he didn't consider hiring the same musicians. Instead, for his next album he brought in Bruce Langhorne, the tambourine man himself, on guitar, Bobby Gregg -- a drummer who had been the house drummer for Cameo-Parkway and played on hits by Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell and others; the session guitarists Al Gorgoni and Kenny Rankin, piano players Frank Owens and Paul Griffin, and two bass players, Joseph Macho and William Lee, the father of the film director Spike Lee. Not all of these played on all the finished tracks -- and there were other tracks recorded during the sessions, where Dylan was accompanied by Hammond and another guitarist, John Sebastian, that weren't used at all -- but that's the lineup that played on Dylan's first electric album, Bringing it All Back Home. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues" actually takes more inspiration than one might imagine from the old-school folk singers Dylan was still associating with. Its opening lines seem to be a riff on "Taking it Easy", a song that had originally been written in the forties by Woody Guthrie for the Almanac Singers, where it had been a song about air-raid sirens: [Excerpt: The Almanac Singers, "Taking it Easy"] But had then been rewritten by Pete Seeger for the Weavers, whose version had included this verse that wasn't in the original: [Excerpt: The Weavers, "Taking it Easy"] Dylan took that verse, and the basic Guthrie-esque talking blues rhythm, and connected it to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" with its rapid-fire joking blues lyrics: [Excerpt: Chuck Berry, "Too Much Monkey Business"] But Dylan's lyrics were a radical departure, a freeform, stream-of-consciousness proto-psychedelic lyric inspired as much by the Beat poets as by any musician -- it's no coincidence that in the promotional film Dylan made for the song, one of the earliest examples of what would become known as the rock video, the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg makes an appearance: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Subterranean Homesick Blues"] "Subterranean Homesick Blues" made the top forty in the US -- it only made number thirty-nine, but it was Dylan's first single to chart at all in the US. And it made the top ten in the UK -- but it's notable that even over here, there was still some trepidation about Dylan's new direction. To promote his UK tour, CBS put out a single of "The Times They Are A-Changin'", and that too made the top ten, and spent longer on the charts than "Subterranean Homesick Blues". Indeed, it seems like everyone was hedging their bets. The opening side of Bringing it All Back Home is all electric, but the B-side is made up entirely of acoustic performances, though sometimes with a little added electric guitar countermelody -- it's very much in the same style as Dylan's earlier albums, and seems to be a way of pulling back after testing the waters, of reassuring people who might have been upset by the change in style on the first side that this was still the same Dylan they knew.  And the old Dylan certainly still had plenty of commercial life in him. Indeed, when Dylan went to the UK for a tour in spring of 1965, he found that British musicians were trying to copy his style -- a young man called Donovan seemed to be doing his best to *be* Dylan, with even the title of his debut hit single seeming to owe something to "Blowing in the Wind": [Excerpt: Donovan, "Catch the Wind (original single version)"] On that UK tour, Dylan performed solo as he always had -- though by this point he had taken to bringing along an entourage. Watching the classic documentary of that tour, Dont Look Back, it's quite painful to see Dylan's cruelty to Joan Baez, who had come along on the expectation that she would be duetting with him occasionally, as he had dueted with her, but who is sidelined, tormented, and ignored. It's even worse to see Bob Neuwirth,  a hanger-on who is very obviously desperate to impress Dylan by copying all his mannerisms and affectations, doing the same. It's unsurprising that this was the end of Dylan and Baez's relationship. Dylan's solo performances on that tour went down well, but some of his fans questioned him about his choice to make an electric record. But he wasn't going to stop recording with electric musicians. Indeed, Tom Wilson also came along on the tour, and while he was in England he made an attempt to record a track with the members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers -- Mayall, Hughie Flint, Eric Clapton, and John McVie, though it was unsuccessful and only a low-fidelity fragment of it circulates: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan and the Bluesbreakers, "If You Gotta Go, Go Now"] Also attending that session was a young wannabe singer from Germany who Dylan had taken up with, though their dalliance was very brief. During the session Dylan cut a demo of a song he planned to give her, but Nico didn't end up recording "I'll Keep it With Mine" until a couple of years later. But one other thing happened in England. After the UK tour, Dylan travelled over to Europe for a short tour, then returned to the UK to do a show for the BBC -- his first full televised concert. Unfortunately, that show never went ahead -- there was a party the night before, and Dylan was hospitalised after it with what was said to be food poisoning. It might even actually have been food poisoning, but take a listen to the episode I did on Vince Taylor, who was also at that party, and draw your own conclusions. Anyway, Dylan was laid up in bed for a while, and took the opportunity to write what he's variously described as being ten or twenty pages of stream of consciousness vomit, out of which he eventually took four pages of lyrics, a vicious attack on a woman who was originally the protagonist's social superior, but has since fallen. He's never spoken in any detail about what or who the subject of the song was, but given that it was written just days after his breakup with Baez, it's not hard to guess. The first attempt at recording the song was a false start. On June the fifteenth, Dylan and most of the same musicians who'd played on his previous album went into the studio to record it, along with Mike Bloomfield, who had played on that John Hammond album that had inspired Dylan and was now playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Bloomfield had been surprised when Dylan had told him that he didn't want the kind of string-bending electric blues that Bloomfield usually played, but he managed to come up with something Dylan approved of -- but the song was at this point in waltz time: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (early version)"] The session ended, but Joe Macho, Al Gorgoni and Bobby Gregg stayed around after the session, when Tom Wilson called in another session guitarist to join them in doing the same trick he'd done on "House of the Rising Sun", overdubbing new instruments on a flop acoustic record he'd produced for a Greenwich Village folk duo who'd already split up. But we'll hear more about "The Sound of Silence" in a few weeks' time. The next day, the same musicians came back, along with one new one. Al Kooper had been invited by Wilson to come along and watch the session, but he was determined that he was going to play on whatever was recorded. He got to the session early, brought his guitar and amp in and got tuned up before Wilson arrived. But then Kooper heard Bloomfield play, realised that he simply couldn't play at anything remotely like the same standard, and decided he'd be best off staying in the control room after all.  But then, before they started recording "Like a Rolling Stone", which by now was in 4/4 time, Frank Owens, who had been playing organ, switched to piano and left his organ on. Kooper saw his chance -- he played a bit of keyboards, too, and the song was in C, which is the easiest key to play in. Kooper asked Wilson if he could go and play, and Wilson didn't exactly say no, so Kooper went into the studio and sat at the organ.  Kooper improvised the organ line that became the song's most notable instrumental part, but you will notice that it's mixed quite low in the track. This is because Wilson was unimpressed with Kooper's playing, which is technically pretty poor -- indeed, for much of the song, Kooper is a beat behind the rest of the band, waiting for them to change chords and then following the change on the next measure. Luckily, Kooper is also a good enough natural musician that he made this work, and it gave the song a distinctive sound: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] The finished record came in at around six minutes -- and here I should just mention that most books on the subject say that the single was six minutes and thirteen seconds long. That's the length of the stereo mix of the song on the stereo version of the album. The mono mix on the mono album, which we just heard, is five minutes fifty-eight, as it has a shorter fade. I haven't been able to track down a copy of the single as released in 1965, but usually the single mix would be the same as the mono album mix. Whatever the exact length, it was much, much, longer than the norm for a single -- the Animals' "House of the Rising Sun" had been regarded as ridiculously long at four and a half minutes -- and Columbia originally wanted to split the song over two sides of a single. But eventually it was released as one side, in full: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"] That's Bruce Langhorne there playing that rather sloppy tambourine part, high in the mix. The record made the top five in the UK, and reached number two in the US, only being held off from the top spot by "Help!" by the Beatles.  It would, however, be the last track that Tom Wilson produced for Dylan. Nobody knows what caused their split after three and a half albums working together -- and everything suggests that on the UK tour in the Spring, the two were very friendly. But they had some sort of disagreement, about which neither of them would ever speak, other than a comment by Wilson in an interview shortly before his death in which he said that Dylan had told him he was going to get Phil Spector to produce his records. In the event, the rest of the album Dylan was working on would be produced by Bob Johnston, who would be Dylan's regular producer until the mid-seventies. So "Like a Rolling Stone" was a major break in Dylan's career, and there was another one shortly after its release, when Dylan played the Newport Folk Festival for the third time, in what has become possibly the single most discussed and analysed performance in folk or rock music. The most important thing to note here is that there was not a backlash among the folk crowd against electric instruments. The Newport Folk Festival had *always* had electric performers -- John Lee Hooker and Johnny Cash and The Staple Singers had all performed with electric guitars and nobody had cared. What there was, was a backlash against pop music. You see, up until the Beatles hit America, the commercial side of folk music had been huge. Acts like the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, The Chad Mitchell Trio, and so on had been massive. Most of the fans at the Newport Folk Festival actually despised many of these acts as sell-outs, doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved. But at the same time, those acts *were* doing watered-down versions of the traditional music they loved, and by doing so they were exposing more people to that traditional music. They were making programmes like Hootenanny possible -- and the folkies didn't like Hootenanny, but Hootenanny existing meant that the New Lost City Ramblers got an audience they would otherwise not have got. There was a recognition, then, that the commercialised folk music that many of them despised was nonetheless important in the development of a thriving scene. And it was those acts, the Kingston Trios and Peter, Paul, and Marys, who were fast losing their commercial relevance because of the renewed popularity of rock music. If Hootenanny gets cancelled and Shindig put on in its place, that's great for fans of the Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke, but it's not so great if you want to hear "Tom Dooley" or "If I Had a Hammer". And so many of the old guard in the folk movement weren't wary of electric guitars *as instruments*, but they were wary of anything that looked like someone taking sides with the new pop music rather than the old folk music. For Dylan's first performance at the festival in 1965, he played exactly the set that people would expect of him, and there was no problem. The faultlines opened up, not with Dylan's first performance, but with the performance by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, as part of a history of the blues, presented by Alan Lomax. Lomax had no objection to rock and roll -- indeed, earlier in the festival the Chambers Brothers, a Black electric group from Mississippi, had performed a set of rock and R&B songs, and Lomax had come on stage afterwards and said “I'm very proud tonight that we finally got onto the Newport Folk Festival our modern American folk music: rock 'n' roll!” But Lomax didn't think that the Butterfield band met his criteria of "authenticity". And he had a point. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band were an integrated group -- their rhythm section were Black musicians who had played with Howlin' Wolf -- and they'd gained experience through playing Chicago blues on the South Side of Chicago, but their leader, Butterfield, was a white man, as was Mike Bloomfield, their guitarist, and so they'd quickly moved to playing clubs on the North side, where Black musicians had generally not been able to play. Butterfield and Bloomfield were both excellent musicians, but they were closer to the British blues lovers who were making up groups like the Rolling Stones, Animals, and Manfred Mann. There was a difference -- they were from Chicago, not from the Home Counties -- but they were still scholars coming at the music from the outside, rather than people who'd grown up with the music and had it as part of their culture. The Butterfield Band were being promoted as a sort of American answer to the Stones, and they had been put on Lomax's bill rather against his will -- he wanted to have some Chicago blues to illustrate that part of the music, but why not Muddy Waters or Howlin' Wolf, rather than this new group who had never really done anything? One he'd never even heard -- but who he knew that Albert Grossman was thinking about managing. So his introduction to the Butterfield Blues Band's performance was polite but hardly rapturous. He said "Us white cats always moved in, a little bit late, but tried to catch up...I understand that this present combination has not only caught up but passed the rest. That's what I hear—I'm anxious to find out whether it's true or not." He then introduced the musicians, and they started to play an old Little Walter song: [Excerpt: The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, "Juke"] But after the set, Grossman was furious at Lomax, asking him what kind of introduction that was meant to be. Lomax responded by asking if Grossman wanted a punch in the mouth, Grossman hurled a homophobic slur at Lomax, and the two men started hitting each other and rolling round in the dirt, to the amusement of pretty much everyone around. But Lomax and Grossman were both far from amused. Lomax tried to get the Festival board to kick Grossman out, and almost succeeded, until someone explained that if they did, then that would mean that all Grossman's acts, including huge names like Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, would also be out.  Nobody's entirely sure whose idea it was, but it seems to have been Grossman who thought that since Bloomfield had played on Dylan's recent single, it might be an idea to get the Butterfield Blues Band to back Dylan on stage, as a snub to Lomax. But the idea seems to have cohered properly when Grossman bumped into Al Kooper, who was attending the festival just as an audience member. Grossman gave Kooper a pair of backstage passes, and told him to meet up with Dylan. And so, for Dylan's performance on the Sunday -- scheduled in the middle of the day, rather than as the headliner as most people expected, he appeared with an electric guitar, backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and Al Kooper. He opened with his recent single "Maggie's Farm", and followed it with the new one, "Like a Rolling Stone": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone (live at Newport)"] After those two songs, the group did one more, a song called "Phantom Engineer", which they hadn't rehearsed properly and which was an utter train wreck. And then they left the stage. And there was booing. How much booing, and what the cause was, is hard to say, but everyone agrees there was some. Some people claim that the booing was just because the set had been so short, others say that the audience was mostly happy but there were just a few people booing. And others say that the booing mostly came from the front -- that there were sound problems that meant that while the performance sounded great to people further back, there was a tremendous level of distortion near the front. That's certainly what Pete Seeger said. Seeger was visibly distraught and angry at the sounds coming from the stage. He later said, and I believe him, that it wasn't annoyance at Dylan playing with an electric band, but at the distorted sound. He said he couldn't hear the words, that the guitar was too loud compared to the vocals, and in particular that his father, who was an old man using a hearing aid, was in actual physical pain at the sound. According to Joe Boyd, later a famous record producer but at this time just helping out at the festival, Seeger, the actor Theodore Bikel, and Alan Lomax, all of whom were on the festival board, told Boyd to take a message to Paul Rothchild, who was working the sound, telling him that the festival board ordered him to lower the volume. When Boyd got there, he found Rothchild there with Albert Grossman and Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul, and Mary, who was also on the board. When Boyd gave his message, Yarrow responded that the board was "adequately represented at the sound controls", that the sound was where the musicians wanted it, and gave Boyd a message to take back to the other board members, consisting of a single raised middle finger. Whatever the cause of the anger, which was far from universal, Dylan was genuinely baffled and upset at the reaction -- while it's been portrayed since, including by Dylan himself at times, as a deliberate act of provocation on Dylan's part, it seems that at the time he was just going on stage with his new friends, to play his new songs in front of some of his old friends and a crowd that had always been supportive of him. Eventually Peter Yarrow, who was MCing, managed to persuade Dylan to go back on stage and do a couple more numbers, alone this time as the band hadn't rehearsed any more songs. He scrounged up an acoustic guitar, went back on, spent a couple of minutes fiddling around with the guitar, got a different guitar because something was wrong with that one, played "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", spent another couple of minutes tuning up, and then finally played "Mr. Tambourine Man": [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Mr. Tambourine Man (live at Newport)"] But that pause while Dylan was off stage scrounging an acoustic guitar from somewhere led to a rumour that has still got currency fifty-six years later. Because Peter Yarrow, trying to keep the crowd calm, said "He's gone to get his axe" -- using musicians' slang for a guitar. But many of the crowd didn't know that slang. But they had seen Pete Seeger furious, and they'd also seen, earlier in the festival, a demonstration of work-songs, sung by people who kept time by chopping wood, and according to some people Seeger had joined in with that demonstration, swinging an axe as he sang. So the audience put two and two together, and soon the rumour was going round the festival -- Pete Seeger had been so annoyed by Dylan going electric he'd tried to chop the cables with an axe, and had had to be held back from doing so. Paul Rothchild even later claimed to have seen Seeger brandishing it. The rumour became so pervasive that in later years, even as he denied doing it, Seeger tried to explain it away by saying that he might have said something like "I wish I had an axe so I could cut those cables". In fact, Seeger wasn't angry at Dylan, as much as he was concerned -- shortly afterwards he wrote a private note to himself trying to sort out his own feelings, which said in part "I like some rock and roll a great deal. Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters. I confess that, like blues and like flamenco music, I can't listen to it for a long time at a stretch. I just don't feel that aggressive, personally. But I have a question. Was the sound at Newport from Bob's aggregation good rock and roll?  I once had a vision of a beast with hollow fangs. I first saw it when my mother-in-law, who I loved very much, died of cancer... Who knows, but I am one of the fangs that has sucked Bob dry. It is in the hope that I can learn that I write these words, asking questions I need help to answer, using language I never intended. Hoping that perhaps I'm wrong—but if I am right, hoping that it won't happen again." Seeger would later make his own electric albums, and he would always continue to be complimentary towards Dylan in public. He even repeatedly said that while he still wished he'd been able to hear the words and that the guitar had been mixed quieter, he knew he'd been on the wrong side, and that if he had the time over he'd have gone on stage and asked the audience to stop booing Dylan. But the end result was the same -- Dylan was now no longer part of the Newport Folk Festival crowd. He'd moved on and was now a pop star, and nothing was going to change that. He'd split with Suze, he'd split with Joan Baez, he'd split with Tom Wilson, and now he'd split with his peer group. From now on Dylan wasn't a spokesman for his generation, or the leader of a movement. He was a young man with a leather jacket and a Stratocaster, and he was going to make rock music. And we'll see the results of that in future episodes.

Told through a comedic lens, from a fellow musician and songwriter The Ballad of Tom Dooley is well know but it's back story, not so much. Thomas Dula is a confederate soldier living in North Carolina in the late 1800's, where he find himself in a bit of a pickle. Ok, a love triangle really. When one of the girls ends up dead, the whole town points to Tom. But did he really commit this crime? Click to hear Part One of Two of this true crime saga.

This week's episode is all about ballad singers and storytellers. If you've listened to Inside Appalachia over the past year, there's a good chance you've heard music by Anna & Elizabeth. This week on Inside Appalachia, co-host Mason Adams sits down with Elizabeth LaPrelle, who grew up in Rural Retreat, Virginia. She and her husband Brian Dolphin moved from Brooklyn back to southwestern Virginia just before the pandemic hit. As longtime performers and new parents they took to Facebook Live, posting weekly livestreams of lullabies and stories. We'll also hear about a song called “Tom Dooley,” which was first released shortly after the Civil War. It resurfaced 60 years ago, when it topped the Billboard charts. It had everything: A love triangle, a grisly murder, a manhunt, and a hanging. Folkways reporter Heather Duncan is a native of Wilkes County, North Carolina, where the song unfolds. Recently she set out to explore why ballads like Tom Dooley, based on real tragedies and real people, have such staying power. And we'll hear from a contemporary ballad singer Saro Lynch Thomason, who uses the tradition of ballad singing in protests and marches.

Faiz Shakir, manager of the 2020 Bernie Sanders' campaign, has worked from the inside (Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid) and the outside (Bernie, the ACLU) to advance the causes in which he believes. Faiz has one of the most versatile and unique resumes in politics. But beyond his professional experience, he has a uniquely American story as a Muslim-American child of Pakistani immigrants who spent his childhood bouncing across Florida before baseball served as his path to Harvard University. Podcast WebsiteTwitter: @ProPoliticsPodTwitter: @ZacMcCraryFacebook: The Pro Politics PodcastIN THIS EPISODEThe formative role of baseball in Faiz's early life…lessons that endure today…The Harvard Institute of Politics gives Faiz some professional direction…9/11 is an inflection point in Faiz's worldview…The early lessons that Faiz learns working for Senator Bob Graham…Faiz embeds at the Center for American Progress during CAP's early days…Which prominent figured married Faiz and his wife?Faiz works for Nancy Pelosi and heads up the social media operation for House Democrats…Faiz's leap of faith to work for Harry Reid in the Senate for 4+ years…The first question Harry Reid would ask in every meeting…Faiz's role as Political Director of the ACLU at a transformative time…How Faiz takes the helm of the Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign…Faiz breaks out his best Bernie impression…Why Faiz says being a campaign manager has to be “lonely at the top”…What Faiz learned about running a $200M, 1100-person campaign…The elements of the Sanders' campaign of which Faiz is most proud of…Faiz gives inside scoop on the Bernie-is-Back / AOC rally...Faiz's take on the “ideological lanes” theory of the Democratic primary race…Three Sanders' strategic decisions Faiz would want to handle differently…The one question Faiz believes the primary revolved around…Faiz's advice to the next generation of operatives and activists…AND Lamar Alexander, John Boehner, Tom Brokaw, Pete Buttigieg, Fidel Castro, Anderson Cooper, Ted Cruz, Tom Dooley, Dianne Feinstein, Adele Graham, Bob Graham, Peter Jennings, Amy Klobuchar, Mitch McConnell, More Perfect Union, Brad Parscale, John Podesta, Ari Rabin-Havt, Dan Rather, Bill Richardson, Jane Sanders, ThinkProgress, the Wal-Mart shareholders meeting, Elizabeth Warren, Jeff Weaver, wikileaks … and more!Podcast WebsiteTwitter: @ProPoliticsPodTwitter: @ZacMcCraryFacebook: The Pro Politics Podcast