blues

This Week's Show •

Greil Marcus: America in Three Songs

Our country turned 240 last week—and yet it seems as if we’ve got so much growing up to do. In the 1960s—maybe the last moment in our history that felt so fraught with tension, inequity, and racism—the people turned, ...

Our country turned 240 last week—and yet it seems as if we’ve got so much growing up to do.

In the 1960s—maybe the last moment in our history that felt so fraught with tension, inequity, and racism—the people turned, poignantly, to folk music. At Newport and in the march on Washington, aesthetics, politics, and national memory converged around Bob Dylan, Mavis Staples, Peter Seeger and Joan Baez’s old songs of fairness, equality, and the American way.

It seems hopelessly old-hat now. But what are the chances there’s still some fresh wisdom left in the real popular music of America?

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Our guide is Greil Marcus, the rock critic of Rolling Stone and (more lately) Pitchfork who’s become by now a musical archaeologist of American life in song.

What Bob Dylan did from the stage beginning in the Sixties’ folk revival, Marcus has done in writing: respectfully preserving and reinterpreting a musical canon that began before the age of recording in roots blues and hill-country banjo. He’s a close listener to what he calls “folk lyric,” the common stock of phrases, images, and rhymes that recur again and again in our national songs.

With his new book, Marcus locates a hidden history of America in just three strange songs, all of them worthy of obsession and homage: “The Ballad of Hollis Brown,” by Bob Dylan (1965), “Last Kind Words Blues,” by Geeshie Wiley and L. V. Thomas (1930), and “I Wish I Was A Mole in The Ground,” recorded in 1928 by Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

The songs make for great listening on their own—Aesop’s fables or visionary poems set to music, repurposed again and again—but they’re also poignant reminders about how much we’ve forgotten about the way we used to live. Scarcity, sickness, and the nearness to death, rural piety, unschooled poetry and deep communities, the Mississippi River and the starlit sky—old music that’s all new.

With our producer Max Larkin, it’s a special, musical episode of Open Source.

August 19, 2013

Albert Murray, 1916 – 2013

Of the incomparably stylish, argumentative and, in the end, authoritative Sage of Harlem, it surely could be argued that his “Stomping the Blues” (1976) is still the most provocative (and without question best illustrated) book ...

Of the incomparably stylish, argumentative and, in the end, authoritative Sage of Harlem, it surely could be argued that his “Stomping the Blues” (1976) is still the most provocative (and without question best illustrated) book ever published on the vast range and richness of African-American music, from the downhome church to the dancehall to Duke Ellington’s sacred extensions and refinements of vernacular forms and feelings. Al Murray taught many of us by his sometimes gruff but patient and always original drawing of distinctions — between Folk Art and Fine Art, for example, and between “The Blues as Such” and “The Blues as Music.” It all began with the insight that blues music was the sound not of mourning or complaint, but of confrontation and transcendence. As he phrased it in “Stomping…” : “The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not. With all its so-called blue notes and overtones of sadness, blues music of its very nature and function is nothing if not a form of diversion… Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance…” Praise God for Albert Murray!! And thank you, dear Al.