“Family Affair” was a #1 single for Sly & The Family Stone in 1971. Yet “musical families” take different forms, as illustrated by two recent concerts. In December, there were the Wainwright/McGarrigle family holiday concerts (one at Town Hall NYC, and one I saw at Brooklyn’s Murmrr; there had been others in Canada). A flow …
When most music artists produce boxed sets the collections are typically their own greatest hits, deeper-cut retrospectives, re-mastered reissues, alternate takes, unreleased tracks, and so on. The sets are often elaborately packaged, with book or other items. Christine Lavin’s “The Seasons Project” reflects her career not so much as the wonderful songwriter and performer she …
I always told people I wanted to grow up to be Pete Seeger. That was a lie. I wanted to be Chad Mitchell. Chad had a great tenor that rode over the often acerbic and histrionic harmonies that were the Chad Mitchell Trio’s signature on Woody Guthrie’s “Great Historical Bum” and Michael Brown’s takedown of …
NEWPORT, RI; July 31, 2019—If there is one musician who embodies the spirit of the Newport Folk Festival today it is Brandi Carlile. Within a one hour span on the opening day of this 60th anniversary festival Friday she sat (really sang) in with Amy Ray on the Harbor stage, with Sheryl Crow on the …
Stunning aural and visual interpretation of Come All You Coal Miners and Take Me to Harlan by Bela Fleck, Abigail Washburn and Pilobolus. Wrenching and sweet all at once.
Click here for the Spotify playlist. In 1967, I was a student at Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York. I was participating in anti-Vietnam War marches, with Phil Ochs’s sister, Sonny Ochs, who lived nearby, leading the requisite sing-alongs; spearheading a program to convince the community that permitting a Phoenix House drug rehab …
BROOKLYN, NY; OCTOBER 5, 2016—In the late 1960s/early ’70s I took a course on New York City Street Songs with Oscar Brand and Theodore Bikel at the New School for Social Research (as the full name was known then). Learning to think of jump rope songs as “folk music” changed the way I thought of …
Marie & Rosetta is a stirring and often rousing musical biography of the life of gospel popularizer (and rock and roll predecessor) Sister Rosetta Tharpe. The work focuses on Tharpe’s relationship with her protégé Marie Knight, who Tharpe pulled from Mahalia Jackson’s backup choir and with whom she performed for three years. Kecia Lewis and …
BROOKLYN, NY; August 18, 2016—I was 18 in 1970 when I started writing about music for the Village Voice, often covering what is now referred to as “Americana,” but was then just known as “folk music.” Much of what I wrote about was pretty rarefied: Blind Alfred Reed, Aunt Molly Jackson, Michael Cooney but also …
If anyone wondered just how Patti Smith would close the Saturday concert at the Newport Folk Festival, where the guiding principle is “speaking truth to power,” it was with one lightening jolt after another. And I don’t mean the kind that lit the sky shortly after her sun-drenched set ended. Who else would even dream …
nightmayer 