guitar

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.

Podcast • February 11, 2010

Ghana Speaks (IV): … and Koo Nimo plays guitar and sings

Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Koo Nimo (60 minutes, 36 meg mp3) It is 7:30 a.m. on the last Saturday in January, a warm winter morning in Ghana, and we are privileged to ...

Click to listen to Chris’s visit with Koo Nimo (60 minutes, 36 meg mp3)

It is 7:30 a.m. on the last Saturday in January, a warm winter morning in Ghana, and we are privileged to be hanging out for an hour of music and a few well-chosen words with a aristocrat of sound and four accompanists in his studio in Kumasi, the old Ashanti tribal capital.

Ghana’s guitar treasure Koo Nimo has the air, it’s been well said, of an “Ashanti Segovia, proud of his heritage and of the instrument he has adopted.” He also reminds you immediately of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. He smiles warmly with the simplicity of the infinitely accomplished — the disarming modesty of ultimate celebrity. These charismatic string-players both have a way of telling you that, in truth, they are humble heirs of ancient musical cultures and disciplines. Both embody the highest refinement of music at its widest reach — Yo-Yo in his Silk Road Project linking North Africa to East Asia; Koo Nimo in representing the circular Gulf Stream of musical influences from West Africa to Brazil, the Caribbean, Havana, New Orleans and New York — and endlessly back and around.

Koo Nimo is a peculiarly Ghanaian figure, in that he’s a musical child of the royal Ashanti court, who came of age as a public performer at precisely the moment in the late 1950s when newly independent Ghana was searching for a nation-building sound.

He’s the personification, at the same time, of “world music,” in the way he encompasses all. In his conversation and his playing, you can hear that nothing human is foreign to Koo Nimo.

Among the names respectfully dropped in an hour’s rambling talk of friends and inspirations are: Fela Kuti, as in the current Broadway show celebrating the late great Nigerian Afrobeat star; Hugh Masakela of South Africa; Ghana’s late “divine drummer” “Ghanaba;” the American jazz immortals Thelonious Monk, Oscar Peterson, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders; the harmonica blues man Sonny Boy Williamson; Memphis Slim; great soloists of the Ellington band he heard and met in London in the early ’70s, including Johnny Hodges, Cootie Williams, Cat Anderson and Clark Terry; Ellington himself, though Koo Nimo never got to shake Duke’s hand — “we would go to the dressing room and just look at him;” the very different guitar geniuses Charlie Christian of Oklahoma City and the Virginian Charlie Byrd of samba fame; the rock legend Jimi Hendrix, for his guitar chord voicings; and the Brazilian composer Antonio Carlos Jobim — two of whose songs find their way into Koo Nimo’s performances here.

But here’s the beauty of “world music” as the great Koo Nimo embraces it: his sound is never remotely a soup. And he himself is never to be confused with any of the people he admires so generously. “They are all influences,” as he says to me, “but I have a way of keeping the influences light… I listen to Latin calypso a lot,” he adds, and you’ll hear it in his playing, “but I use all these influences, all these techniques, to do justice to our own.”