Chapter Nine: Nu Folk: The Music Changes but the Beat goes On. pp. 168 - 188
Read, in Dunaway and Beer,
Chapter Seven: Movement Music, pp. 137 - 150
Chapter Eight: Folk Rock. pp. 151 - 167
No new readings.
We're going to watch/listen to a video about the songs of the civil rights era.
Remember that your Reflective Paper is Due today.
Also remember that I cannot open papers typed in the Macintosh .pages format.
Save as .doc, .docx, or .pdf before you send them to me.
...the civil rights movement's musicians did not bring in music from outside activist communities (except to generate publicity for particular protest events). Civil Rights song burst out of the churches that had nourished a community of Sunday singers with a gospel and spiritual tradition rooted in Africa and mad subversive under slavery.
***
Many folk music fans were running short on hope and optimism and were coming to the new protest music not motivated by their zeal for traditional sounds but by their need for community, entertainment, and escape--as Woodstock demonstrated.
...By the 1980s, young people interested in anti-establishment song were drawn to the anyone-can-do-this ethos of new wave and punk music or to hip-hop or rap, born of dire ghetto politics. Public Enemy's song "Fight the Power" (1989) is as incendiary as anything Paul Robeson ever sang; NWA's "Fuck tha Police (1988) earned the performers an investigation by the FBI. Young people in the 1990s were more likely to encounter Lead Belly not through fork musicians, but through the grunge band Nirvana.
Another Site you might find interesting and useful. Click the image.
Refrain:
We who believe in freedom cannot rest
We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes
Verses
Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons
And that which touches we most is that I had a chance to work with people
Passing on to others that which was passed on to me
To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail
And if I can shed some light as they carry us through the gale
The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on
Is when the reins are in the hand of the young who dare to run against the storm
Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me
I need to be just one in the number as we stand against tyranny
Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot I come to realize
That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survive
I’m a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard
At time I can be quite difficult, I’ll bow to no man’s word
I never got to Woodstock: graduate school came first. Click on the picture to the left to read interviews with some of the young folks who did make it. The poster at the top of the page leads to a BBC page on the history of Rock 'n Roll.
1989 the number another summer (get down)
Sound of the funky drummer
Music hittin' your heart cause I know you got soul
And finally an introduction (if you need it) to "grunge" music by the most famous band playing that kind of thing: Nirvana. The lead Singer Kurt Cobain came to a very sad end--at his own hand. Read his biography and watch a short film about him by clicking on his name.
