Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

Carl Orff, Carmina Burana, O Fortuna (With Latin and English).  Better performance without lyrics.

Joan Baez, There But For Fortune.  The best rendition of a song written by Phil Ochs. Watch the short video.  Ochs' version.

I agree with this analysis of Ochs:

The short, triumphant, tragic career of Phil Ochs illustrates one of the harder lessons of American popular culture: that audiences are moved far more by mystery than by commitment. Of all the artists of the 1960s folk-music boom, only Bob Dylan understood that in his bones, and only Dylan became a superstar. Ochs, by contrast, was the bright class president of the Greenwich Village scene, reeling off powerful, didactic protest songs in an earnest tenor. He was direct and defiantly uncool, and it doomed him.

Joan Baez, A Simple Twist of Fate

Joan Baez, Diamonds and Rust. Dylan wouldn't have made it without her.


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4 responses to “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi

  1. Jeff Allen Avatar
    Jeff Allen

    Bill, that link to the Boston.com article about Ochs doesn’t work. Do you have another source for this?
    TIA

  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Jeff,
    So much for PERMAlinks! It’s an old article. I have no time right now, but you might see if you can locate it with the Way Back Machine.

  3. Jeff Allen Avatar
    Jeff Allen

    Bill, I checked there (today) & it looks like Boston.com paywalled the article.
    Too bad, so sad. Nice that you had an “archived” excerpt… even an author would be helpful (maybe. like academic preprints?).

  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    Jeff,
    If you are really interested in Ochs, go to Amazon and order one of the bios. I believe it was the Schumacher biography that I read in the ’90s.

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