Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
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From Richard Farina's 1965 Notes to "Singer Songwriter Project" Album
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In his Summer 1965 liner notes to the Singer Songwriter Project vinyl album, Richard Farina wrote the following:
"While you're looking around for the wherefores and antecedents of the new folk-songwriting revival, you might ought to remember that there was still another Dylan and his last name was Thomas. He went down in 1953, part of his wordy nightmare inflection torn loose from an alcoholically liberated brain. And despite the polite picnic of typographically correct little academics at his collossal bedside, he hit the metaphoric ground with a thunder of trumpets...
"...Some of us saw him wolfing ale in mugs with the truckers at The White Horse and belching back a phrase as lilting as the tide he so invoked in Wales. Some saw him in the English Professor's living room...And the rest heard the ranting echo of his wild words, words which no matter how gentle or structured the shape of the poem that contained them, bellowed out at us with the overwhelming implication that art was life, enthusiasm, rage, and freedom. At a time when verse seemed channelled into the sour evening game of the universities, that implication was a breath of potent hope in the faint mouths of those babes who were about ready to capitulate, to offer an apology to parents and institutions before ever daring to use the forbidden word Writer in application to themselves. You could do no better, came his hoarse and beautiful whisper, than speak your own true name.
"...We'd been born into the arbitrary confines of a United States...And each year, came the silent chorus of bored asides, millions of tons of Grade-A bullshit pours forth from our country's collectively twisted head...
"Around the same time a good many of us were getting into folk music. And folk music, through no active fault of its own, fooled us into certain sympathies and nostalgic alliances with the so-called traditional past...But the paradox was implicit...How long would people with contemporary poetic sensibilities be content to sing archaic material for an immediate purpose?...
"The underground reaction, the reaction in the cellars of what you might call Everybody's Own MacDougal Street, was topical and quick. A number of people began adding their own songs to otherwise derivative repertoires and finding astonishing response from their listeners. That the songs were intensely personal in their grievance or celebration was inevitable, but in nearly every case the audience was not only ready for the new compositions but anxious to have its own sensibilities strengthened through such an unaffected medium. The love songs, if they were good, were love songs of the times, implying a recognition of station wagons, thruways, and television sets instead of sketching a cop-out, idealized, pastoral picture. The protest songs lost their earlier occasional subject matter and were ambitious enough to take on concerns like the military-industrial complex which made its money by preparing for a war of blistering absurdity. The satire was quick and to the uneasy point, having gained the best from the psychiatrist's and musician's private vocabularies. And in keeping with the anxiety of societal surroundings, the overall production was prolific, frenetic, uneven, often brilliant, and at times appalling.
"But at least it was being heard, and not buried in literary journals...In the very beginning, of course, there was the usual begging and borrowing, maybe some stealing, and those many times you couldn't tell the Leadbelly from the Guthrie from the Dylan from the Clayton from the Seeger from the Paxton from the Spoelstra from the Ochs from the Andersen from the Murdoch from the Sky from the La Farge from the St. Marie from the Hester from the Wheeler from the Lightfoot from the Cohen from the Camp from the MacColl from the Clancy from the maybe even me and Eric von Schmidt..."
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=5#ixzz0zMHrRoaH
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