Happy Birthday Eric Andersen -Out In The 1960s Folk Revival Minute- The Music Of Eric Andersen- A CD Review
A link to a YouTube film clip of Eric Andersen performing one of his songs
Eric Andersen’s Greatest Hits, Eric Andersen, 1971
In the great swirl that was the folk music revival movement of the early 1960’s a number of new voices were heard that created their own folk expression and were not as dependent on the traditional works of collective political struggle or social commentary associated with the likes of The Weavers, Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie. Although Eric Andersen was a product of the intense Cambridge folk scene and knew and played with many of the stars of that scene he had a distinctive niche in that he performed mainly his own his music and his subject matter tended toward the very personal. It was only political in the most general sense that he, like the others, was breaking away from Tin Pan Alley to express his sentiments.
That said, this greatest hits compilation is almost exclusively made up of songs that he wrote in the 1960’s- the most productive period of his career. I have seen some of his more recent performances and listened to his later work and nothing compares with the work of this period. Such tunes of personal sorrow and anger as Florentine and Sheila and well as the classic Violets of Dawn and Leaving You come from this period. In short, one has to listen to (and read) the lyrics of this singer/ song writer from this time to get a real feel for his work. But if you want to take a trip back to a time when a serious argument could, and was made, that the personal was political and that folk music was, above all, about expressing the seemingly eternal notions of the complexities of love and loss then this is a part of the archives.
A link to a YouTube film clip of Eric Andersen performing one of his songs
Eric Andersen’s Greatest Hits, Eric Andersen, 1971
In the great swirl that was the folk music revival movement of the early 1960’s a number of new voices were heard that created their own folk expression and were not as dependent on the traditional works of collective political struggle or social commentary associated with the likes of The Weavers, Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie. Although Eric Andersen was a product of the intense Cambridge folk scene and knew and played with many of the stars of that scene he had a distinctive niche in that he performed mainly his own his music and his subject matter tended toward the very personal. It was only political in the most general sense that he, like the others, was breaking away from Tin Pan Alley to express his sentiments.
That said, this greatest hits compilation is almost exclusively made up of songs that he wrote in the 1960’s- the most productive period of his career. I have seen some of his more recent performances and listened to his later work and nothing compares with the work of this period. Such tunes of personal sorrow and anger as Florentine and Sheila and well as the classic Violets of Dawn and Leaving You come from this period. In short, one has to listen to (and read) the lyrics of this singer/ song writer from this time to get a real feel for his work. But if you want to take a trip back to a time when a serious argument could, and was made, that the personal was political and that folk music was, above all, about expressing the seemingly eternal notions of the complexities of love and loss then this is a part of the archives.
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