Skip to main content

The fab four of the folk revolution

By


Positively Fourth Street is an evocative account of four remarkable people at a remarkable point in postwar musical history, by a writer whose first book was the award-winning biography of Billy Strayhorn. Critical yet fair, it is a reminder that idols don't have feet of clay so much as of flesh. Joan and Bob and Richard and Mimi trod on one another's toes and occasionally landed a well-aimed kick. But when all is sung and done, separately and together, they made some wonderful music. -- Liz Thomson
_________________________________________________


Sounds like another fascinating look into the early years of Dylan and co. with a focus on their interrelationships.

Comments

  1. James FergusonOctober 17, 2010 at 7:10 PM

    Not so flattering a review from the NYTimes,

    http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/10/reviews/010610.10kellyt.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dianne JarreauOctober 21, 2010 at 6:43 PM

    I was looking for something else when I found this, thought you might like looking at it.
    http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/lomax/

    Positively Fourth Street was something I read, after all it was just around the corner. I believe I mentioned that title just by way of patter but it may have been in the first post that I wrote and then skipped over re: what Copland's music "Looks like...in motion", as a response to robertwhalen. I got side-tracked from Agnes de Mille of the film-family as a dancer and the Martha Graham commission to Copland, in view of Rodeo and Appalachian Spring as I saw it, saw them, as a child.

    I feel Wilentz threw these in simply as example of Early Americana in Music, although pre-Dylan,as an influence on what was coming, as surely as were/had been Guthrie and Seeger, etc.

    Looking back, however, all I can say is Thank,God, we moved on to a more complex music once the folk revival lessened in popularity. Notice: I say 'music', not the poetic form or rhapsodic charisma manifest in Dylan who did wonders in an upsurge for Poetry as performance art introducing a more international poetry scene.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more