Sonny and me

Yesterday would have been the 107th birthday of the blind blues harmonica player Sonny Terry (who died aged 74 in 1986).

A couple of years after his death, I watched a BBC Arena documentary presented by Alan Yentob about the left-wing folk singer Woody Guthrie which included footage of him playing with Sonny Terry and the guitarist Brownie McGhee, with whom Sonny formed a long, if not always harmonious offstage, musical partnership, and a few months after that was in an "A" Level General Studies lesson when the teacher played a Guthrie track and asked if anyone knew who it was (needless to say, I was the only one who did; he also read to us the famous bit in W.C. Handy's autobiography, Father of the Blues, where he recalls meeting a "lean loose-joined Negro" at a country station in Mississippi in 1903 who "pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar with a knife" as he played a song about "goin' where the Southern cross the Dog", which Handy called "the weirdest music I ever heard", before playing Charlie Patton to us, thus planting another musical seed in me...).

Where white teenage blues fans in sixties England began by listening to the Stones and Animals' cover versions before working their way back to the Chicago originals by Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, I started with Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee accompanying Woody Guthrie, moved on to Bob Dylan's early Guthriesque albums and then the folk-blues of John Lee Hooker, before finally arriving myself at those post-war South Side classics.

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee also appeared alongside Muddy Waters, gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe, pianists Cousin Joe Pleasant and Otis Spann and bassist Ransom Knowling at the disused Wilbraham Road railway station in south Manchester in 1964 for the Granada TV show Blues & Gospel Train, performing somewhat incongruously between stacked coops of chickens and a tethered goat on the platform.

My Back Pages

Bob Dylan has finally spoken about the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to him a couple of weeks back, saying that the committee's decision had left him speechless.

I discovered Dylan as a teenager through his, and my, one-time musical hero Woody Guthrie, rather than the other way round as I suspect is more common (in much the same way, I listened to Chicago's West Side blues greats Otis Rush, Magic Sam and Freddie King long before I heard the covers of their songs by the Stones, Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin).

I have no problem with the decision to award Dylan the prize. His songs, especially the early, 1960's ones, are clearly written in a poetic form, and often echo Biblical phrases, as in the line "And the first one now will later be last" from The Times They Are A-Changin'.

Maybe the Nobel committee picked Dylan because of the press coverage they knew it would create, but whatever the reason, I'll still be pleased to see him collect his award in Stockholm next month.

The sound of German music

A new film, The Sound of Heimat, examines the revival of folk music in Germany.

German folk songs (Volkslieder) reached the height of their popularity in the Romantic/nationalist movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In the twentieth century though their association with Nazism meant that singing them was officially discouraged in both East and West Germany after 1945. About the only place they were still sung was amongst the German diaspora in South America and southern Africa.

There's an interesting article about German folk music here.

Blues Run the Game

I listened to a radio programme yesterday about the American folk singer Jackson C. Frank.

I must admit I hadn't heard of Frank before, although I had heard the cover of his song Blues Run the Game by Simon and Garfunkel. Along with other Americans in the 50's and 60's, many of them escaping the McCarthyite witch hunt or the draft, Frank headed to London and joined its burgeoning folk scene after being awarded compensation for injuries he received as a child in a fire at school.

His subsequent fate, homeless and beset by mental illness, has echoes of that of the blues guitarist Peter Green, except that it took Frank's untimely death to propel his work back into public consciousness.

Happy birthday George

Today is the eighty-seventh birthday of the jazz promoter George Wein.

Wein, who set up the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954 and the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, is largely responsible for some of the most seminal musical performances of the sixties, including Muddy Waters performing to a white audience in the U.S. for the first time in 1960 and Dylan going electric in 1965. The 1958 Jazz Festival was filmed as Jazz on a Summer's Day with Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles and Miles Davis.

On top of all that, Wein can also cut it as a pianist.

Close the Coalhouse door

I listened to the Radio 4 play Close the Coalhouse Door by Alan Plater on Saturday afternoon.

Based on the writings of ex-miner Sid Chaplin, Close the Coalhouse Door is about the Durham miners' union from the strikes to achieve recognition in the 1830's through the Depression and post-war nationalisation.  It's also well known for the songs in it by Alex Glasgow which as well as Close the Coalhouse Door include As Soon As This Pub Closes and Socialist ABC.

Alan Plater wrote the play in 1968, before the coalfield battles of 1972, 1974 and 1984-5, so director Sam West brings the play up to the present day with an "alternate history" in which Thatcherism never happened. If only...

Here's to you Woody Guthrie

Today is the centenary of the birth of the American folk singer Woody Guthrie.

Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma; he died in 1967 in a New York psychiatric hospital where he had been confined for many years with Huntington's chorea, an inherited degenerative condition.

Guthrie is the epitome of the American rebel, the little guy standing up to the rich and powerful, but in politics, like fellow folk singer Pete Seeger, he stuck closely to the line of the US Communist Party that they both supported. Seeger's song lyrics in World War II changed every time the CP twisted and turned, from C for Conscription ("Well it's C for Conscription/C for Capitol Hill....That passed that goddamn bill....I'd rather be here home/ Even sleeping in a holler log/Than go to the army/And be treated like a dirty dog!") during the Nazi-Soviet Pact to Deliver the Goods ("We're working in the cities, we're working in the woods/We'll all work together to deliver the goods/I got a new job and I'm working overtime/Turning out tanks on the assembly line/Got to crank up the factories like the president said/Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.") after the German invasion of Russia in 1941.

A lot of people know about Guthrie through Billy Bragg's recordings of his unpublished lyrics or Bob Dylan's Song to Woody on his eponymous first album ("Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song/ ’Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along/Seems it's sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn/ It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born") but I first heard him on a BBC2 Arena documentary in the late 80's presented by Alan Yentob. Not long after that, a General Studies teacher at school who was into blues and folk played us some more of his songs, as well as one by the Mississippi blues pioneer Charlie Patton.

Guthrie is probably best known in the US for writing This Land is Your Land, in response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America which he hated.

Radio 4 has a programme about Woody tonight, presented by his biographer Joe Klein.