Category: Dylan
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How Joan Baez Got Politicized
David Hajdu, Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina, 2001, p. 147: Dylan nestled his guitar on his lap and began strumming a C chord in three-quarter time. He repeated it until the small room hushed, then he slid into the opening of "With…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Donovan
I had forgotten how good these old songs from Donovan Leitch's initial folk phase sound, before he went 'psychedelic.' Catch the Wind. Colors. Some have noticed a similarity between Catch the Wind and Dylan's Chimes of Freedom (1964) which antedated it. I just now discovered this version of Chimes which is the best I've heard. …
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Three Greenwich Village Folkies
Remember Dave van Ronk? I haven't heard his version of "Cocaine" in maybe 45 years. Enjoy it before it is pulled. Last Saturday I reminded you of Fred Neil. Here is another delightful tune of his, I've Got a Secret. Based loosely on Elizabeth Cotten's Shake Sugaree. And then there was a young cat who named…
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Saturday Night at the Oldies: Mary Travers
Mary Travers of the popular 1960's folk trio "Peter, Paul and Mary" passed away on Wednesday, from leukemia, at age 72. Travers and Co. did perhaps as much as anyone to popularize the songs of the young Bob Dylan. The best known of them is 'Blowin' in the Wind," which became an anthem of the…
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Does the Left Own Dylan?
Not according to Sean Curnyn of RightWingBob.com. (Via Paul J. Cella) Dylan is an artist not an ideologue, arguably America's greatest troubadour. For a taste of Left-Right polarity in Dylan's work already in the 1960s compare Subterranean Homesick Blues with Father of Night. The Weatherman faction of the SDS got its name from the line,…