May Link Roundup
Well, another month has come and gone, it’s starting to feel like summer, and here I am with your Barking Dog link roundup for May. Shall we?
Videos
3 Archival Videos
I thought I had seen all the footage of Lead Belly that’s available, but this month I came across this video of him playing “Goodnight, Irene” for his wife, Martha Promise Ledbetter, likely just a couple months after their marriage in 1935.
I thought I caught a glimpse of Mississippi John Hurt in the thumbnail of this video and clicked on it to see if it was him (it was), but I was immediately drawn in by Hedy’s performance. It’s fortunate that so much of Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest TV show is preserved and available on YouTube.
Here’s Boyd Rivers performing Muddy Waters’ “You Gonna Take Sick and Die” at the Mississippi Delta Blues Festival in 1979.
2 Contemporary Performances of Black American Cultural Traditions
The McIntosh County Shouters have been performing the ring shout since the 18th century—this is their 2019 performance of “Blow, Gabriel”.
Here’s the Piedmont blues musician John Dee Holeman and contemporary roots musician Dom Flemons with their version of the hambone, also known as the Juba dance.
Albums
3 Folkways Albums with Very Specific Subject Matter
Music of the Carousel from 1961, a collection of popular songs played on the calliope.
The ambiguously titled Songs for Children from New York City; are the songs recorded for children who live in New York City, or are the songs themselves from New York City? Perhaps both. Either way, good album.
Music of New Orleans, Vol. 1: Music of the Streets: Music of Mardi Gras is an eclectic collection of field recordings made on the streets of New Orleans between 1954 and 1958.
Articles
2 Moments in American Prison History
This is a short article (with photos) about the radio program Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, which aired across Texas between 1938 and 1944 and featured performances from inmates in the state prison in Huntsville. We played a recording from Hattie Ellis, a Texan in her twenties who appeared on the show while she was serving 30 years for murder, on the May 4th edition of Barking Dog.
This article discusses the Coal Creek War of the 1890s, when prison labour was used in the mines in eastern Tennessee to force unions to accept company terms.
You can hear a miner’s version of a song that was sung by the Black inmates who worked in the mines on our May 18th edition of the show.
Miscellany
Look, I’m not a fan of the FBI, but they do have some interesting stuff on their website—for instance, the death mask of Oklahoma outlaw Pretty Boy Floyd, who FBI agents shot dead in October of 1934. Floyd was immortalised by Woody Guthrie in 1939 in a ballad about the outlaw.
This month I learned that Pulitzer-prize-winning poet, writer, and editor Carl Sandburg’s very influential 1927 American folk song collection The American Songbag is available in full on the Internet Archive website.
I also found this really neat map of places that were important to the art scene in New York City between 1958 and 1976, including Gerde’s Folk City and Cafe Wha?, which hosted loads of well-known folk musicians, as well as comedians and performance artists. The map includes full write-ups of each place.
Finally, just a heads up that I’m on vacation for the next couple of weeks, so the next few shows will be reruns. They’ll be reruns of really good episodes, though, so you should still tune in. Same time, same place. Catch you next month!