#mike seeger

[slowtraincumming]

DIVAS 💜

[folk-enjoyer]

Mike Seeger

[banjofilia]

[mmagpye]

sheets of ice on the river this morning

[paintingsandrecords]

a silvery marmoset; ink and watercolor

last eighteen day’s listening:

tsunami - be like that/newspaper

new lost city ramblers - the new lost city ramblers

pete seeger/almanac singers - the original talking union and other union songs

various - dr. demento’s mementos

steve martin and the steep canyon rangers - the long awaited album

slickee boys - mersey, mersey me

frank turner - undefeated

general patton vs. the x-ecutioners - general patton vs. the x-ecutioners

blake babies - earwig

lovage - music to make love to your old lady by

juliana hatfield - bed

descendents - 9th & walnut

priests - bodies and control and money and power

inquisition - revolution live

[muirneach]

folk enjoyer

[antabramo]

the complete transcript of the interview is in this link: https://www.angelfire.com/.../doc.../interview_excerpts.html Mike Seeger interviews Dock Boggs, a Virginia coal miner, banjo player and singer of old-time Appalachian mountain music and blues. Boggs once garnered a record deal with Brunswick to record 24 tracks, but he only completed eight before quitting and returning to Virginia during the 1920s. He was all but forgotten as an artist until Seeger rediscovered him in the 1960s.

[beatleshistoryblog]

LECTURE 17: APOTHEOSIS: Early Bob Dylan in film footage of a televised performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” from March 1963. Still heavily influenced by Oklahoma folk singer Woody Gurthrie at this point, young Dylan wrote a number of memorable folk songs that overshadowed anything that his predecessors had created. His elders, including Pete Seeger, had high hopes for Dylan. But Dylan was not one to remain caged by anybody or any cause. He burst out of his cocoon in 1965 a folk rock musician, backed by his friend, Blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield, and he cast aside the traditional folk scene to reach a level of greatness he could only achieve by breaking free of their influence. 

[1264doghouse]

Cousin Emmy. Circa 1920s. From the Mike Seeger Southern Folklife Collection.

[slowtraincumming]

One of my favorite pictures of Mike and Pete 🫶

[kvetchlandia]

I Spent...

some time today looking at a few preview clips from James Mangold's "A Complete Unknown," his film about the young Bob Dylan. I have mixed feelings about Mangold as a director, but the few released clips look decent, so maybe the film, which is due out in December, will be OK (or even better than that, I hope). Anyway, Timothée Chalamet plays Dylan. Chalamet is a fine actor and the costume designers certainly got the look and style of the young Dylan down...although, imho, Chalamet isn't anywhere near as stunning looking as the young Dylan was. Dakota Fanning, who's also a fine actor, plays a fictitious character named Sylvie Russo. I guess the estate of Suze Rotolo wouldn't allow her name to be used in the film, but the Russo character seems to be a thinly disguised version of Rotolo. It'll be interesting to see how Mangold, not a very political director, handles the persona of a character based on Suze, a very political red-diaper baby, and a young woman whose politics were extremely influential on the young Dylan. Edward Norton as Pete Seeger seems like a stretch to me, but again, Norton's a good actor, so maybe he can pull it off? I don't know the actor who plays Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro). It's kinda weird that the film seems to have Al Kooper in it, but not Mike Bloomfield. Since Bloomfield was central to Dylan's going electric, that seems an odd decision, but I guess we shall see. I was happy to see that Mangold and Jay Cocks (his co-screenwriter) included Dave Van Ronk in the film. I mean, what's the Village folk scene of the early 60s without Dave? Just for fun, Mangold and Cocks also bring us Maria Muldaur, Bobby Neuwirth, Mavis Staples and (this oughtta be good) another fictitious character, Gena Rotolo, I'm assuming based upon Suze Rotolo's older sister, Carla, who Dylan hated and wrote quite scathingly about in his song "Ballad in Plain D." I guess all this is my way of saying that I now have something to keep on living for until December. I hope it's good.

[banjofilia]

Bernunzio Music: From the first run of 100 banjos built by Chuck Ogsbury in 1960, this is an Ode Style 21 longneck, serial number "I" or "1” (it is plausible that this could be the first built, though we can’t really know this for sure). At this time Chuck had yet to build his first "real" shop, and was still "learning the ropes" with Tony Jacobs, "a seventy-year-old wood worker" who had a shop in the North end of Denver (https://www.omebanjos.com/about/history-part-2/). Not only is this banjo truly a "historic" Ode, the back of its head has been signed by undoubtedly the most significant members in the Old Time, Folk, and Banjo universe; Mike Seeger, John Cohen, "Honest" Tom Paley, Pete Seeger, Eric Weissberg, Bill Monroe, Pete Wernick, Tony Trischka, and more. The rim assembly is the earliest all aluminum variety, with original tailpiece and metal hardware; some tarnish to plating overall. The three piece neck was made with beautiful highly flamed maple, with a walnut center strip; no Grade stamp is present on the peghead; guitarish shaped peghead, with rosewood fingerboard (32.5" scale), with abalone fretboard dots; equipped with original geared tuners. Extra holes present from a past Keith tuner situation, and a chip present on the side of the nut; ding on top of peghead, of course. A pre-truss rod instrument, there is significant forward bow, though it could certainly be capo'd and played in a longneck style.

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

In three songs the folk music world changed.

The Punks vs. Soy Nation.

While jerkoffs like Pete Seeger whined, guitarist Mike Bloomfield kept increasing his volume as added fuck you to the dreary sandal wearing folk atavists.

In addition to Bob, the players were Jerome Arnold (bass, keyboards), Mike Bloomfield, Barry Goldberg (keyboard), Al Kooper (keyboards, bass this song only),and Sam Lay (drums),

[justforbooks]

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne, Burt Lancaster, Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey, because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.

Born in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, Louis was the son of Helen (nee Wray), a nurse, and Louis Sr, a porter. As a child he suffered from polio, but became a high school athlete before a basketball injury led to his joining the drama club. His teacher encouraged him to audition professionally, and at 17 he was on Broadway��playing a troubled child in Take a Giant Step, which won him a Donaldson award for best newcomer.

He won a drama scholarship to New York University, but continued working, in The Desk Set (1955), and made his television debut in two episodes of the NBC anthology show The Big Story. In 1959 he was cast with Poitier and Ruby Dee in Raisin in the Sun, and made his film debut reprising his role in 1961. On Broadway that year he played in Jean Genet’s The Blacks, in an all-star cast with James Earl Jones, Cicely Tyson, Roscoe Lee Brown, Godfrey Cambridge and a young Maya Angelou; it was the decade’s longest-running show.

Gossett was also active in the Greenwich Village folk music scene. He released his first single Hooka Dooka, Green Green in 1964, followed by See See Rider, and co-wrote the anti-war hit Handsome Johnny with Richie Havens. In 1967 he released another single, a drums and horns version of Pete Seeger’s anti-war hymn Where Have All the Flowers Gone. He was in the gospel musical Tambourines to Glory (1963) and in producer Mike Todd’s America, Be Seated at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

His plays became more limited: The Zulu and the Zayda and My Sweet Charlie; the very short run of Carry Me Back to Morningside Heights, in which he played a black man owning a white slave; and a revival of Golden Boy (1964), with Sammy Davis Jr. His final Broadway part was as the murdered Congolese leader Patrice Lamumba, in Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Murderous Angels (1971). Gossett had played roles in New York-set TV series such as The Naked City, but he began to make a mark in Hollywood, despite LAPD officers having handcuffed him to a tree, on “suspicion”, in 1966.

On TV he starred in The Young Rebels (1970-71) set in the American revolution. In film, he was good as a desperate tenant in Hal Ashby’s Landlord (1970) and brilliant with James Garner in Skin Game (1971), taking part in a con trick in which Garner sells him repeatedly into slavery then helps him to escape.

In 1977, alongside Roots, he attracted attention as a memorable villain in Peter Yates’s hit The Deep, and got artistic revenge on the LAPD in Robert Aldrich’s The Choirboys. The TV movie of The Lazarus Syndrome (1979) became a series in which Gossett played a realistic hospital chief of staff set against an idealistic younger doctor. He played the black baseball star Satchel Paige in the TV movie Don’t Look Back (1981); years later he had a small part as another Negro League star, Cool Papa Bell, in The Perfect Game (2009).

After his Oscar, he played another assassinated African leader, in the TV mini-series Sadat, reportedly approved for the role by Anwar Sadat’s widow Jihan. Though he remained a busy working actor, good starring roles in major productions eluded him, as producers fell back on his drill sergeant image. He was Colonel “Chappy” Sinclair in Iron Eagle (1986) and its three dismal sequels.

But in 1989 he starred in Dick Wolf’s TV series Gideon Oliver, as an anthropology professor solving crimes in New York. And he won a best supporting actor Golden Globe for his role in the TV movie The Josephine Baker Story (1991). He revisited the stage in the film adaptation of Sam Shepard’s Curse of the Starving Class (1994).

Gossett twice received the NAACP’s Image Award, and another Emmy for producing a children’s special, In His Father’s Shoes (1997). In 2006 he founded the Eracism Foundation, providing programmes to foster “cultural diversity, historical enrichment and anti-violence initiatives”. Despite an illness eventually linked to toxic mould in his Santa Monica home, he kept working with a recurring part in Stargate SG-1 (2005-06). A diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2010 hardly slowed him down.

Most recently, he played Will “Hooded Justice” Reeves in the TV series Watchmen (2019), in the series Kingdom Business, about the gospel music industry, and in the 2023 musical remake of The Color Purple.

His first marriage, to Hattie Glascoe, in 1967, was annulled after five months; his second, to Christina Mangosing, lasted for two years from 1973; and his third, to Cyndi (Cynthia) James, from 1987 to 1992. He is survived by two sons, Satie, from his second marriage, and Sharron, from his third.

🔔 Louis Cameron Gossett Jr, actor, born 27 May 1936; died 28 March 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[folk-enjoyer]

Song of The Day

"Shake Sugaree" Elizabeth Cotten and Brenda Evans, 1960s Shake Sugaree was written sometime in the 1960s by Elizabeth Cotten's Great-Grandchildren. She explains, "Each child got a verse." The song is sung here by Brenda Evans, who was 12 years old then, and was recorded by Mike Seeger. This song could have been the inspiration for the song "Sugaree" by the Grateful Dead, but the band has denied this. Jerry Garcia was a big fan of her work and performed and the band performed some of her songs. I'm not really familiar with these people though, so I'm not sure. Brenda Evans would continue to be a musician, and I think, was a member of the band "The Undisputed Truth" for a time. And would continue to make and perform music in the 1970s.

[ometochtli2rabbit]

13.0.12.5.7

junlajun[11] MANIK'/KIEJ [deer] - lajun[10] PAX

galactic tone: resolution/ dissonant structure

sun sign: deer/black/west

be of service to others - MAYA

mahtlactli-once[11] - MAZATL [deer]

Chalmecatecuhtli | Tlaloc

alo[scarlet macaw]

lord of the night: Mictlantecuhtli

trecena [11]: Tlazolteotl

x: nahui[4] - etzcualiztli - NAHUA

"Four Indian Riders" by Fritz Scholder, 1967

Day Mazatl (Deer, known as Manik in Maya) is governed by Tlaloc, God of Rain and Thunderstorms, as its provider of tonalli (Shadow Soul) life energy. Mazatl is the day of the hunt. It is a good day to stalk your quarry, a bad day to be stalked. Mazatl is a day for breaking old routines and to pay close attention to the routines of others. This is a day for doubling-back on your tracks. - www.azteccalendar.com

as today is the day for the HUNT, some songs that feature that word:

Sleater-Kinney: Hunt You Down

Mike + the Mechanics: Hunt You Down

The Jam: Billy Hunt

Howard Jones: Hunt the Self

Misfits: Witch Hunt

Rush: Witchhunt

Kittie: Witch Hunt

The Pogues: The Rocky Road to Dublin

Vangelis: Wait for Me

Demi Lovato: FEED

Testament: City of Angels

Aceyalone: The Hunt

Sepultura: The Hunt

Ke$ha: Hunt You Down

Dan Fogelberg: Lessons Learned

Florence + The Machine: Howl

Procul Harum: The Unquiet Zone

Yes: Don't Kill the Whale

R.E.M.: Strange Currencies

Slayer: Americon

Blur: Oily Water

Lynyrd Skynyrd: On the Hunt

Pete Seeger: Billy Barlow

Foals: Lonely Hunter

Janelle Monae: Violet Stars, Happy Hunting!!!

The Hollies: After the Fox

Dido: Hunter

Motley Crue: Let Us Prey

Mastodon: The Hunter

Soundgarden: Hunted Down

A-Ha: Hunting High and Low

Dolly Parton: Fisherman's Song

Red Hot Chili Peppers: The Hunter

Duran Duran: Hungry Like the Wolf

Wolf Alice: Planet Hunter

Jethro Tull: Hunt By Numbers

The Cure: The Dragon Hunter's Song

Pink Floyd: Free Four

Metallica: All Nightmare Long

Björk: Hunter

Waylon Jennings: That Dog Won't Hunt