Rating: 4.5 Our goal is always to offer you an assortment of cost-free ebooks too as aid resolve ... more Rating: 4.5 Our goal is always to offer you an assortment of cost-free ebooks too as aid resolve your troubles. We have got a considerable collection of totally free of expense Book for people from every single stroll of life. We have got tried our finest to gather a sizable library of preferred cost-free as well as paid files.
Selected Readings, Notes, and Discography Illustration Credits musical idol (and, he has said, hi... more Selected Readings, Notes, and Discography Illustration Credits musical idol (and, he has said, his last), and with the folk revival that grew out of the left-wing hootenannies of the 1940s. This approach makes sense, but it has become overly familiar, and it slights the influence of the much larger cultural and political spirit, initially associated with the Communist Party and its so-called Popular Front efforts to broaden its political appeal in the mid-1930s, which pervaded American life during the 1940s-Bob Dylan's formative boyhood years. In order to take a fuller and fresher look at this important part of Dylan's cultural background, I decided to focus on Popular Front music seemingly very different from Guthrie's ballads and talking blues-the orchestral compositions of Aaron Copland. The choice may seem extremely odd. Yet even though the connections are now largely forgotten, Copland belonged to leftist musical circles in New York in the mid-1930s that also included some of the major figures in what was becoming the world of folk-music collecting. Copland's beloved compositions of the late 1930s and the 1940s, including Billy the Kid and Rodeo, may sound today like pleasant, panoramic Americana, but they in fact contained some of the same leftist political impulses that drove the forerunners of the folk-music revival of the 1950s and '60s. Dylan, meanwhile, grew up in a 1940s America where Copland was becoming the living embodiment of serious American music. Copland's music and persona had no obvious or direct effect on the kinds of music Dylan performed and wrote as a young man, but the broader cultural mood that Copland represented certainly did. And insofar as Dylan's career has in part involved translating the materials of American popular song into a new kind of high popular art-challenging yet accessible to ordinary listeners-his artistic aspirations and achievements are not dissimilar to Copland's. The second chapter concerns the Beat generation writers, in particular Allen Ginsberg. Not only did Dylan eagerly read the Beats before he arrived in Greenwich Village; he and Ginsberg befriended each other at what was, fortuitously, a critical moment in both of their careers. Once again, though, much as with the folk revival, understanding the Beats and their influence on Dylan requires moving back before the 1950s, to battles over literature and aesthetics fought out during World War II on and around the campus of Columbia University. The echoes of those battles-and the spirit of the so-called New Vision that the young Ginsberg and his odd friends promulgated-reappeared later in Dylan's music, most emphatically in the songs on his two great albums completed in 1965, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan's influence on Ginsberg, at several levels, in turn helped the poet write his great work of 1966, "Wichita Vortex Sutra." And Ginsberg and Dylan's personal and artistic connections, begun at the end of 1963, would last until Ginsberg's death in 1997. The remainder of Bob Dylan in America takes up Dylan's career at selected and arbitrary but far from random moments: his concert at Philharmonic Hall at the end of October 1964, in which he tried out startling new songs such as "Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright, Ma" (and which I happened to attend); the making of Dylan's landmark album Blonde on Blonde in New York and Nashville in 1965-66; the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975; and the birth of one of Dylan's greatest songs, "Blind Willie McTell," recorded (but not released) in 1983. The book then takes a long jump to 1992-93, when Dylan, his career out of joint for a decade, reached back for inspiration in traditional folk music and the early blues. The book covers this pivotal moment in Dylan's career by examining two very different songs that Dylan recorded in 1993: "Delia," one of the first blues songs ever written; and "Lone Pilgrim," an old Sacred Harp hymn. The final chapters consider Dylan's work from "Love and Theft" in 2001 through his album of Christmas music, Christmas in the Heart, released late in 2009. Although each chapter after Chapter Two takes a particular composition or event as its initial focus, none confines itself strictly to that subject. By roaming through other related material, sometimes leaping back and forth in time, I hope to discuss most of Dylan's greatest work, including albums such as Blood on the Tracks, without losing sight of the other great work, in and out of the recording studio, on which I concentrate. I also hope to present some reevaluations of material I heard very differently when first released. Approaching my subject this way means that people, places, and things sometimes appear and vanish, only to reappear later under somewhat different circumstances. The folklorist John Lomax, for example, turns up in the very first chapter as the head of the Archive of American Folk Song, in connection with the invention of a folksy, Popular Front aesthetic; then he turns up again, five chapters later, in connection with the blues singer Blind Willie McTell. Or to take a smaller but still important example: in Chapter One, the writers in and around the influential periodical Partisan Review turn up as anti-Stalinist leftist critics of Aaron Copland; in Chapter Two, the Partisan Review intellectual, critic, and Columbia English professor Lionel Trilling appears, at roughly the same time, the mid-1940s, as the ambivalent antagonist of Allen Ginsberg and the incipient Beat generation. Where absolutely necessary to keeping the story line clear, I have alluded to earlier appearances by various figures or groups. But to pause and point out all of these recurrences, and the cultural circuits they represent, would interrupt the flow of the narrative and turn the book into an overlong encyclopedia of music and literary history. Readers should thus be prepared to encounter characters or institutions already discussed earlier in the book, but in very different contexts-and, much The stairway down to the Gaslight Cafe, New York. (photo credit II) * In a television interview with Ed Bradley, broadcast by CBS late in 2004, Dylan marveled at the lyrics of old songs such as "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and mused: "I don't do that anymore. I don't know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written." The Popular Front and Aaron Copland's America Early in October 2001, Bob Dylan began a two-month concert tour of the northern United States. In his first performances since the terrorist attacks of September 11, Dylan debuted many of the songs on his new album, "Love and Theft," including the prescient song of disaster, "High Water (for Charley Patton)." Columbia Records, eerily, had released "Love and Theft" on the same day that the terrorists struck. How, if at all, would Dylan now respond to the nation's trauma? Would he, for once, speak to the audience? What would he play? The new tour had no opening act, but as a concert prelude the audience heard (as had become commonplace at Dylan's shows) a prerecorded selection of orchestral music. And on this tour, Dylan began playing what may have seemed a curious choice: a recording of the "Hoe-Down" section of Aaron Copland's Rodeo. Then Dylan and his band took the stage and, with acoustic instruments, further acknowledged the awfulness of the moment, while also marking Dylan's changes and continuities over the years, by playing the country songwriter Fred Rose's "Wait for the Light to Shine": When the road is rocky and you got a heavy load Wait for the light to shine Aaron Copland, circa 1930. (photo credit 1.1) That reviewer, who was one of the founders of the Composers' Collective and wrote under the pseudonym Carl Sands, was the Harvard-trained composer, professor, and eminent musicologist Charles Seeger. At this point, Seeger, a musical modernist, had little use for traditional folk music as a model for revolutionary culture. "Many folksongs are complacent, melancholy, defeatist," he wrote, "intended to make the slaves endure their lot-pretty, but not the stuff for a militant proletariat to feed on." 4 A year later, though, the Communist Party, on instructions from the Comintern, abandoned its hyper-militant politics and avant-garde artistic leanings in favor of the broad political and cultural populism of the so-called Popular Front. The Composers' Collective duly folded in 1936, but Seeger took the shift in stride. In 1935, he moved his family to Washington, D.C., to work as an adviser to the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration, the forerunner of the New Deal's Farm Security Administration; and he and his second wife, the avant-garde composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, were able to collaborate with their friend John Lomax and his son Alan in helping to build the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In addition to collecting and transcribing traditional songs that were in danger of disappearing, the archive and its friends would encourage the development of folk music as a tool for radical politics -efforts that eventually helped inspire Bob Dylan and the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Members of the Seeger family, circa 1937. Left to right: Ruth Crawford Seeger, Mike Seeger, Charles Seeger, Peggy Seeger. Not shown are Charles's children from his first marriage, including son Pete, then eighteen. (photo credit 1.2) Charles's son Peter, then a teenager, had accompanied his father and stepmother to hear Copland discourse at the Degeyter Club, and during the summer of 1935 he traveled with his father to a square dance and music festival in Asheville, North Carolina, run by the legendary folklorist and mountain musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The youngster was already a crack ukulele player, but in Asheville he heard traditional folk music for the first time, played by Lunsford on a cross between a mandolin and a...
During the decades before the Civil War, Princeton, New Jersey, was the intellectual center of th... more During the decades before the Civil War, Princeton, New Jersey, was the intellectual center of the American Presbyterian Church. With their traditional, Old School affiliations, the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and the Princeton Theological Seminary found themselves mainly on the conservative side of the growing disputes over abolitionism, slavery, and race relations. Yet both the town (with its lively and growing free black community) and its centers of learning produced considerable antislavery opinion as well. This article discusses the clashing views on slavery and race in antebellum Prince" ton, and describes their theological as well as social and political origins. It also details how, by the late 1850s, even conservative opinion had shifted toward antislavery.
Ferocious clashes among the Founders over the role of ordinary citizens in a government of "... more Ferocious clashes among the Founders over the role of ordinary citizens in a government of "we, the people" were eventually resolved in the triumph of Andrew Jackson. Thereafter, Sean Wilentz shows, a fateful division arose between two starkly opposed democracies-a division contained until the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked its bloody resolution. The College Edition features a new preface and further reading lists for each volume. It eliminated the endnotes of the one-volume edition but preserves the entire text of the original.
International Labor and Working-class History, 1982
The American Working Class History Project, under the aegis of Herbert Gutman and directed by Ste... more The American Working Class History Project, under the aegis of Herbert Gutman and directed by Stephen Brier is in full swing. The project's trade union education program continued through the summer, culminating in a seminar of unionists and historians held at Pawling. New York. A fresh grant from the Ford Foundation will enable the research director, Bruce Levine. to complete work on the printed materials for the project's proposed curriculum on American labor history, by 1985, the Project hopes to have finished a panoply of films, documentary collec tions, and more. Levine is particularly interested in learning of any source materials or documents on American working-class history that might be of use to students; Josh Brown and Kate Pfordresher would appreciate hearing of any visual sources thus far untapped. The Project also plans to publish a newsletter, to help coordinate its work and announce upcoming events.
... This includes a great many people, but especially my parents, Kenneth and Mary Watts, whose w... more ... This includes a great many people, but especially my parents, Kenneth and Mary Watts, whose warm and steady encouragement has been nourishing, Daniel PC Watts, whose equestrian showmanship has been inspiring, Julie Watts Brown, whose friendship and irreverent ...
... Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy ... 18501896 (New York: Cambridge University Pr... more ... Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy ... 18501896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 19451975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors ...
Rating: 4.5 Our goal is always to offer you an assortment of cost-free ebooks too as aid resolve ... more Rating: 4.5 Our goal is always to offer you an assortment of cost-free ebooks too as aid resolve your troubles. We have got a considerable collection of totally free of expense Book for people from every single stroll of life. We have got tried our finest to gather a sizable library of preferred cost-free as well as paid files.
Selected Readings, Notes, and Discography Illustration Credits musical idol (and, he has said, hi... more Selected Readings, Notes, and Discography Illustration Credits musical idol (and, he has said, his last), and with the folk revival that grew out of the left-wing hootenannies of the 1940s. This approach makes sense, but it has become overly familiar, and it slights the influence of the much larger cultural and political spirit, initially associated with the Communist Party and its so-called Popular Front efforts to broaden its political appeal in the mid-1930s, which pervaded American life during the 1940s-Bob Dylan's formative boyhood years. In order to take a fuller and fresher look at this important part of Dylan's cultural background, I decided to focus on Popular Front music seemingly very different from Guthrie's ballads and talking blues-the orchestral compositions of Aaron Copland. The choice may seem extremely odd. Yet even though the connections are now largely forgotten, Copland belonged to leftist musical circles in New York in the mid-1930s that also included some of the major figures in what was becoming the world of folk-music collecting. Copland's beloved compositions of the late 1930s and the 1940s, including Billy the Kid and Rodeo, may sound today like pleasant, panoramic Americana, but they in fact contained some of the same leftist political impulses that drove the forerunners of the folk-music revival of the 1950s and '60s. Dylan, meanwhile, grew up in a 1940s America where Copland was becoming the living embodiment of serious American music. Copland's music and persona had no obvious or direct effect on the kinds of music Dylan performed and wrote as a young man, but the broader cultural mood that Copland represented certainly did. And insofar as Dylan's career has in part involved translating the materials of American popular song into a new kind of high popular art-challenging yet accessible to ordinary listeners-his artistic aspirations and achievements are not dissimilar to Copland's. The second chapter concerns the Beat generation writers, in particular Allen Ginsberg. Not only did Dylan eagerly read the Beats before he arrived in Greenwich Village; he and Ginsberg befriended each other at what was, fortuitously, a critical moment in both of their careers. Once again, though, much as with the folk revival, understanding the Beats and their influence on Dylan requires moving back before the 1950s, to battles over literature and aesthetics fought out during World War II on and around the campus of Columbia University. The echoes of those battles-and the spirit of the so-called New Vision that the young Ginsberg and his odd friends promulgated-reappeared later in Dylan's music, most emphatically in the songs on his two great albums completed in 1965, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Dylan's influence on Ginsberg, at several levels, in turn helped the poet write his great work of 1966, "Wichita Vortex Sutra." And Ginsberg and Dylan's personal and artistic connections, begun at the end of 1963, would last until Ginsberg's death in 1997. The remainder of Bob Dylan in America takes up Dylan's career at selected and arbitrary but far from random moments: his concert at Philharmonic Hall at the end of October 1964, in which he tried out startling new songs such as "Gates of Eden" and "It's Alright, Ma" (and which I happened to attend); the making of Dylan's landmark album Blonde on Blonde in New York and Nashville in 1965-66; the Rolling Thunder Revue tour of 1975; and the birth of one of Dylan's greatest songs, "Blind Willie McTell," recorded (but not released) in 1983. The book then takes a long jump to 1992-93, when Dylan, his career out of joint for a decade, reached back for inspiration in traditional folk music and the early blues. The book covers this pivotal moment in Dylan's career by examining two very different songs that Dylan recorded in 1993: "Delia," one of the first blues songs ever written; and "Lone Pilgrim," an old Sacred Harp hymn. The final chapters consider Dylan's work from "Love and Theft" in 2001 through his album of Christmas music, Christmas in the Heart, released late in 2009. Although each chapter after Chapter Two takes a particular composition or event as its initial focus, none confines itself strictly to that subject. By roaming through other related material, sometimes leaping back and forth in time, I hope to discuss most of Dylan's greatest work, including albums such as Blood on the Tracks, without losing sight of the other great work, in and out of the recording studio, on which I concentrate. I also hope to present some reevaluations of material I heard very differently when first released. Approaching my subject this way means that people, places, and things sometimes appear and vanish, only to reappear later under somewhat different circumstances. The folklorist John Lomax, for example, turns up in the very first chapter as the head of the Archive of American Folk Song, in connection with the invention of a folksy, Popular Front aesthetic; then he turns up again, five chapters later, in connection with the blues singer Blind Willie McTell. Or to take a smaller but still important example: in Chapter One, the writers in and around the influential periodical Partisan Review turn up as anti-Stalinist leftist critics of Aaron Copland; in Chapter Two, the Partisan Review intellectual, critic, and Columbia English professor Lionel Trilling appears, at roughly the same time, the mid-1940s, as the ambivalent antagonist of Allen Ginsberg and the incipient Beat generation. Where absolutely necessary to keeping the story line clear, I have alluded to earlier appearances by various figures or groups. But to pause and point out all of these recurrences, and the cultural circuits they represent, would interrupt the flow of the narrative and turn the book into an overlong encyclopedia of music and literary history. Readers should thus be prepared to encounter characters or institutions already discussed earlier in the book, but in very different contexts-and, much The stairway down to the Gaslight Cafe, New York. (photo credit II) * In a television interview with Ed Bradley, broadcast by CBS late in 2004, Dylan marveled at the lyrics of old songs such as "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and mused: "I don't do that anymore. I don't know how I got to write those songs. Those early songs were almost magically written." The Popular Front and Aaron Copland's America Early in October 2001, Bob Dylan began a two-month concert tour of the northern United States. In his first performances since the terrorist attacks of September 11, Dylan debuted many of the songs on his new album, "Love and Theft," including the prescient song of disaster, "High Water (for Charley Patton)." Columbia Records, eerily, had released "Love and Theft" on the same day that the terrorists struck. How, if at all, would Dylan now respond to the nation's trauma? Would he, for once, speak to the audience? What would he play? The new tour had no opening act, but as a concert prelude the audience heard (as had become commonplace at Dylan's shows) a prerecorded selection of orchestral music. And on this tour, Dylan began playing what may have seemed a curious choice: a recording of the "Hoe-Down" section of Aaron Copland's Rodeo. Then Dylan and his band took the stage and, with acoustic instruments, further acknowledged the awfulness of the moment, while also marking Dylan's changes and continuities over the years, by playing the country songwriter Fred Rose's "Wait for the Light to Shine": When the road is rocky and you got a heavy load Wait for the light to shine Aaron Copland, circa 1930. (photo credit 1.1) That reviewer, who was one of the founders of the Composers' Collective and wrote under the pseudonym Carl Sands, was the Harvard-trained composer, professor, and eminent musicologist Charles Seeger. At this point, Seeger, a musical modernist, had little use for traditional folk music as a model for revolutionary culture. "Many folksongs are complacent, melancholy, defeatist," he wrote, "intended to make the slaves endure their lot-pretty, but not the stuff for a militant proletariat to feed on." 4 A year later, though, the Communist Party, on instructions from the Comintern, abandoned its hyper-militant politics and avant-garde artistic leanings in favor of the broad political and cultural populism of the so-called Popular Front. The Composers' Collective duly folded in 1936, but Seeger took the shift in stride. In 1935, he moved his family to Washington, D.C., to work as an adviser to the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration, the forerunner of the New Deal's Farm Security Administration; and he and his second wife, the avant-garde composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, were able to collaborate with their friend John Lomax and his son Alan in helping to build the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. In addition to collecting and transcribing traditional songs that were in danger of disappearing, the archive and its friends would encourage the development of folk music as a tool for radical politics -efforts that eventually helped inspire Bob Dylan and the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. Members of the Seeger family, circa 1937. Left to right: Ruth Crawford Seeger, Mike Seeger, Charles Seeger, Peggy Seeger. Not shown are Charles's children from his first marriage, including son Pete, then eighteen. (photo credit 1.2) Charles's son Peter, then a teenager, had accompanied his father and stepmother to hear Copland discourse at the Degeyter Club, and during the summer of 1935 he traveled with his father to a square dance and music festival in Asheville, North Carolina, run by the legendary folklorist and mountain musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford. The youngster was already a crack ukulele player, but in Asheville he heard traditional folk music for the first time, played by Lunsford on a cross between a mandolin and a...
During the decades before the Civil War, Princeton, New Jersey, was the intellectual center of th... more During the decades before the Civil War, Princeton, New Jersey, was the intellectual center of the American Presbyterian Church. With their traditional, Old School affiliations, the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and the Princeton Theological Seminary found themselves mainly on the conservative side of the growing disputes over abolitionism, slavery, and race relations. Yet both the town (with its lively and growing free black community) and its centers of learning produced considerable antislavery opinion as well. This article discusses the clashing views on slavery and race in antebellum Prince" ton, and describes their theological as well as social and political origins. It also details how, by the late 1850s, even conservative opinion had shifted toward antislavery.
Ferocious clashes among the Founders over the role of ordinary citizens in a government of "... more Ferocious clashes among the Founders over the role of ordinary citizens in a government of "we, the people" were eventually resolved in the triumph of Andrew Jackson. Thereafter, Sean Wilentz shows, a fateful division arose between two starkly opposed democracies-a division contained until the election of Abraham Lincoln sparked its bloody resolution. The College Edition features a new preface and further reading lists for each volume. It eliminated the endnotes of the one-volume edition but preserves the entire text of the original.
International Labor and Working-class History, 1982
The American Working Class History Project, under the aegis of Herbert Gutman and directed by Ste... more The American Working Class History Project, under the aegis of Herbert Gutman and directed by Stephen Brier is in full swing. The project's trade union education program continued through the summer, culminating in a seminar of unionists and historians held at Pawling. New York. A fresh grant from the Ford Foundation will enable the research director, Bruce Levine. to complete work on the printed materials for the project's proposed curriculum on American labor history, by 1985, the Project hopes to have finished a panoply of films, documentary collec tions, and more. Levine is particularly interested in learning of any source materials or documents on American working-class history that might be of use to students; Josh Brown and Kate Pfordresher would appreciate hearing of any visual sources thus far untapped. The Project also plans to publish a newsletter, to help coordinate its work and announce upcoming events.
... This includes a great many people, but especially my parents, Kenneth and Mary Watts, whose w... more ... This includes a great many people, but especially my parents, Kenneth and Mary Watts, whose warm and steady encouragement has been nourishing, Daniel PC Watts, whose equestrian showmanship has been inspiring, Julie Watts Brown, whose friendship and irreverent ...
... Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy ... 18501896 (New York: Cambridge University Pr... more ... Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy ... 18501896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Julian E. Zelizer, Taxing America: Wilbur D. Mills, Congress, and the State, 19451975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors ...
Uploads
Papers by Sean Wilentz