November + December Link Roundup
Happy 2024! November and December were busy with final projects and holiday travel, so I figured I’d wrap the two roundups into one.
This year, I traveled to New Brunswick to celebrate Christmas and while I was there, we drove out to Boiestown to find the grave of Peter Emberley, a young man from Prince Edward Island who died while working in the New Brunswick lumber woods in 1880. He was well-liked despite having only recently arrived in the province, and his friend John Calhoun wrote a song about his untimely death, which passed into the oral tradition and became one of New Brunswick’s best-known folk songs. The song effectively captures the dangers of logging and the humanity of the shanty boys; I think that’s part of the reason it’s remained a popular ballad in the province, as so many families (including my own) have been touched by logging deaths and injuries. We’ve played several recordings of the song on Barking Dog, so it was nice to pay my respects to the man himself.
Below, find some of my favourite videos, albums, and articles from the past two months.
Videos
4 Live Performances
We played this recording on December 21st, and while I was making the archive post for the website, I discovered that it had been filmed. It’s a sweet live performance of “Four Strong Winds” by Neil Young and his former wife, Pegi.
Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee performed together for nearly 40 years. Here they are playing “Red River Blues” and “Crow Jane” in 1970.
On November 23rd, we played Pete Seeger’s version of “I Come and Stand at Every Door,” a poem by Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. Seeger set the poem to a melody written by MIT student James Waters for the Scottish ballad “The Great Selkie,” performed here by Katarina Juvančič and Dejan Lapanja.
I was so glad to learn about the master of ki ho’alu, or slack key, guitar Alice Nāmakelua last month. She led an amazing life, and you can hear her talk about it and play some of her music in this 30-minute interview from 1974.
2 Film Scenes
We played a song from Steven Wright’s 1985 comedy album I Still Have a Pony on November 23rd. Dylan reminded me of Wright’s role opposite Roberto Benigni in the 1986 Jim Jarmusch short film Coffee and Cigarettes, which was later turned into a full-length anthology film that I highly recommend watching.
Aside from being a famous comedian and mime, Harpo Marx also had a successful career as a harpist, and we played his version of “The Ash Grove” in November. Here’s one of my favourite comedic performances by Harpo.
1 Documentary
We Lived Alone is a short documentary from 2014, directed by Andrea Kannes. It tells the story of singer/songwriter Connie Converse, who was by all accounts ahead of her time in terms of musical composition and never found success as a recording artist during her lifetime. She’s a compelling figure and one of my favourite musicians, and I’m glad this documentary exists to provide a little more information about her life.
Albums
2 Albums on Which You Wouldn’t Expect to Find Traditional Music
Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys released What I Really Want For Christmas in 2005, and it combines both traditional and popular Christmas songs. We played his version of “Auld Lang Syne” on December 21st.
The 2021 deluxe rerelease of John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band contains improvised jams from the recording sessions, including a couple of versions of the American folk song “Lost John.” We played “Lost John - Jam 2” on December 14th.
3 Barking Dog Favourites
Talkin’ About My Time is a 1963 Folk Legacy Records release, recorded by the folklorist Bruce Jackson at Indiana State Prison, where the blues musician Eugene Rhodes was serving a sentence at the time. We’ve played many songs from this album over the last few months, and it’s quickly become a favourite. Rhodes tells stories from his time spent playing with musicians like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Boy Fuller in between his song recordings.
Legacies is another Folk Legacy release, from 2015. Lisa Null was a mainstay on the Washington, DC folk scene, and this recording, her first in 30 years and also her last, is a perfect bookend to a career spent collecting and composing in the American folk tradition. I can’t get enough of her voice.
We’ve been playing selections from Drop on Down in Florida since Barking Dog began in 2018. The album of field recordings was first released by the Florida Folklife Program in 1981, and the record company Dust-to-Digital rereleased it in 2012 along with a comprehensive book of essays and images.
Articles
1 Article About the History of Recording Technology in Canada
While researching Emile Berliner for our December 21st show, I was pleased to discover that his Gramophone company had a factory and retail outlet in Montreal in the early 20th century. The former factory now houses a museum that presents the history of sound technologies, with special attention paid to Berliner, who invented the gramophone record. This is a short article about the history of his company in Montreal.
2 Articles About Events Memorialized in Song by David Rovics
David Rovics is possibly the most prolific topical songwriter of our time in terms of sheer quantity of songs he releases about current events. Here’s an article about the Coca-Cola Killings, during which members of a rightwing paramilitary group killed two union members in a Coca-Cola factory in Colombia in 1996. Rovics wrote about the situation in his song “Drink of the Death Squads,” which we played on December 14th.
On November 2nd, we played Rovics’ “Song for the Mavi Marmara,” about the history of refugees in Gaza and international activists’ efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza in 2010, which ended in a massacre perpetrated by the Israeli military. This article provides a first-hand account of the killings.
2 Articles About Folk Music History
This is a nice and succinct article about some of the people, places, and events integral to the Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1950s and 60s.
And here’s a longer article about the singer and banjo player Frank Proffitt of North Carolina, on the occasion of the donation of one of his banjos to the Library of Congress in 2018.
Miscellany
Finally, I recently discovered that the archives of Tony Schwartz’s WNYC recordings are available on their website. The Tony Schwartz Collection is going to provide me with a lot of entertainment and inspiration this year, and I hope Barking Dog listeners enjoy hearing his recordings as much as we enjoy playing them.
Thanks for joining me for another link roundup—we’re looking forward to producing more radio for you in 2024! If you have any music or show theme suggestions, you’re always welcome to drop me a line in the comments, on my website, or at ckuwbarkingdog@gmail.com. See you next month!