#sing out!

[1976desire]

bob dylan autographed october-november 1962 sing out magazine, signed december 1962. text reads: there are many roads to choose from. may you pick the one that will lead to answers straight and true!!

x

[folk-enjoyer]

Sing Out! Poster from 1968, signed by various folk singers

[broadsidemagazine]

"I Ain't Marching Any More" - Phil Ochs (sheet music & guitar chords)

Oh, I marched to the battle of New Orleans At the end of the early British wars The young land started growing The young blood started flowing But I ain't marching anymore For I've killed my share of Indians In a thousand different fights I was there at the Little Big Horn I heard many men lying, I saw many more dying But I ain't marching anymore It's always the old to lead us to the wars It's always the young to fall Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun Tell me, is it worth it all? For I stole California from the Mexican land Fought in the bloody Civil War Yes, I even killed my brothers And so many others But I ain't marching anymore For I marched to the battles of the German trench In a war that was bound to end all wars Oh, I must have killed a million men And now they want me back again But I ain't marching anymore It's always the old to lead us to the wars Always the young to fall Now look at all we've won with the saber and the gun Tell me, is it worth it all? For I flew the final mission in the Japanese skies Set off the mighty mushroom roar When I saw the cities burning I knew that I was learning That I ain't marching anymore Now the labor leader's screamin' When they close the missile plants United Fruit screams at the Cuban shore Call it peace or call it treason Call it love or call it reason But I ain't marching anymore No, I ain't marching anymore

[batcavescolony]

Katniss is such an unreliable narrator. She says "Then something unexpected happens. At least, I don't expect it because I don't think of District 12 as a place that cares about me" girl you deliver strawberries to the Mayor, you hunt and trade for the district, when you fell at Prim being chosen someone caught you, when you went to Prim people parted for you, when you volunteered EVERYONE stopped. Idk how to tell you but I think you're a pillar of the community.

[jirainene]

venting is only annoying when i do it btw. everyone else is innocent and free of sin

stop reblogging this dawg this post wasnt supposed to breach containment 😭😭

[doctorsiren]

Oh Dipper, you would LOVE Chappell Roan

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF Afton siblings talk about their dreams

[lilaccatholic]

I miss tv in the 2010s every day. You could put anything on air and get a 22 episode order and a five season run. Once Upon a Time was on and it basically spit in your face and told you that Olaf the snowman was Emma's second great uncle twice removed and you just accepted it. Golden age of the silver screen

[hinamie]

I don't want to regret the way I lived

[soosoosoup]

✨💖Pop👊Pop👊 Poppy💖✨✨

[1976desire]

bob dylan on the cover of sing out magazine, october-november, 1962. cover photo by john cohen

[folk-enjoyer]

Suggested Song

(do you want the history of your favorite folk song? dm me or submit an ask, and I'll do a full rundown like here)

"Plastic Jesus" Tia Blake, 1971

Plastic Jesus was originally written by George Cromarty and Ed Rush in 1957 and performed live in 1962 at the San Francisco State College Folk Festival, where it was recorded and released later that year in their duo band The GoldcoastSingers.

the back of their debut Album reads

"On a foggy Sunday afternoon in March of 1962, THE GOLDCOAST SINGERS clambered on stage at San Francisco State College before an unsuspecting audience of 1,000 or so. After they were introduced as the final performers at the San Francisco State Folk Festival, people in the audience mumbled, "Who?". This query was followed by shouts of "More!". The reaction was, to say the least, wild. After five encores, breathless and perspiring like pigs, they came on for one last "song," entitled "Plastic Jesus." This ode flattened the audience. All through the performance people had been walking out of the auditorium grumbling, "Mis-guided youth" and "Whippersnappers," but the finale was too much for those whose soft spots had not yet been touched. A dozen (actually twelve) marched up the aisles in righteous indignation. The remaining nine hundred some odd rose in a tremendous ovation. Fortunately that concert was taped, and this record is the product"

I think that the truth is stretched here a bit, and like with the song "Plastic Jesus," it is meant to be comedic.

This is the only album produced by The Goldcoast Singers, but George Cromarty would continue to produce music as a solo artist.

later, in 1964, the song was recorded and performed by Ernie Marrs and was mentioned in Vol. 14, no. 2 in "Sing Out! Magazine.

with Ernie Marrs being credited with writing the lyrics.

Later, in 1967, the song was featured in the movie "Cool Hand Luke", performed by Paul Newman. Interesting for taking the satirical and comedic song and reimagining it as somber. this movie is likely what popularized the song in addition to its feature in the magazine.

in 1971, Tia Blake released what is effectively her only album in France, which led to it being mostly forgotten until it was re-released in 2011. Since then, it has become more well-known. This makes me very happy because i love this album! i think all the songs on it are beautiful and wonderfully made. It's a shame she didn't record more.

I think something very interesting happened with the song, and these 4 covers effectively tell a story with how they each re-imagine it.

the original lyrics by The Goldcoast Singers are biting with satire and are funny if not a bit mean-spirited. We, as the audience, are not meant to relate with the person with the plastic Jesus bobblehead.

then, ernie marrs' version doesn't have the intro of the original duo, and shortens the lyrics a bit, but like other works that Ernie Marrs helped write like "The People are Scratching" and "What a Friend we have in Congress" (1966) and (1963)

the humor and satire are a bit more gentle and more subtle. To me, it feels like if you aren't really paying attention, you could miss it. it's comedic, but it could pretty easily be remembered as a charming fun folk song rather than a satire on Christian commercialism and a way of making fun of rednecks.

the movie version song is completely different. I'll be honest, i have not seen this movie, but it seems like this song is 1. completely genuine and devoid of sarcasm, and 2. very, very sad. the song morphs into bitter melonchy. it is the farthest thing from funny.

Tia Blake's version returns the song to its roots. kind of. Her version is certainly happy, but it's also painfully genuine. It is also the only song in her 1971 album that i would describe as happy, the rest being mournful, spooky, or full of longing. plastic Jesus is an odd choice. AND, her cover is my favorite. I think there is something beautiful and whimsical about the story presented in the song, about having so much joy come from a mundane object. Its a cheerful and hopeful song in an otherwise tragic album.

the first time i heard the song by tia blake was in a folk punk playlist. i didn't understand why it was on there at first, but i do now. there is a sort of revolutionary optimism in finding hope from the mundane in the midst of hopeless circumstances.

for @ruzqtx

[wildspringday]

i miss when singers didn't have to be the most beautiful person you had ever seen

[broadsidemagazine]

"Yevtushenko, Lorca, and Bob Dylan", written by Josh Dunson

"Mr. Dylan's compositions don't fit into any pigeonhole; the minute you have one characterized, it flies away. His lyrics mix a solo sermon out of Guthrie's conversational folksay with a dash of Rimbaud's demonic imagery or even a bit of Yevtushenko's social criticism." Robert Shelton, New York Times, April 13, 1963

A lot of other people have been comparing Bob Dylan not only to Yevtushenko but to Garcia Lorca, especially after hearing Bob do his “Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall”.

It is difficult to fit any true poet in a “pigeonhole”. That's too small a space for a creative artist, too small for a roving singer like Bob Dylan. When asked how he writes his songs, Bob just says they're up there in the air, and he just picks them down, and if he didn't, somebody else would. I think there's more in this thought than merely modesty. In it there are many scatterings of truth.

Why is it when you read through great poets of different cultures and different times that much of their imagery is similar, and many times they talk about the same feelings and things? One way of answering this is to say there are certain common events all these poets see and react to -- war, love, nature, children; and that their images likewise come from common experience. The way Bob Dylan might answer it would be that these poets reached up into the same piece of air, and what they pulled down, in their individual ways, was their poems and their songs.

A number of people see Yevtushenko and Dylan as being close together. as both being social critics, and thereby playing a similar role in their respective countries. It seems to me that the impact of and the poetry itself are quite different. In Russia there is the tradition of the poet as an important social critic that dates back to Pushkin, and goes right through the Soviet period beginning with Mayakovsky and finally to the present day where Yevtushenko’s most recent book, published in 1962, sold out its edition of 100,000 copies. America's most important social critics have been her novelists, ie: Harriet B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and her journalists, ie: Lincoln Steffens’ Shame of the Cities. Our poets, even our popular ones like Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg, undergo book editions of 5 to 10 thousand with the publisher still taking a loss.

But we have had our great social poets, and I think when Bob’s work is fully evaluated he will number among them. Bob does not mince words when he speaks about the "masters of war”:

I hope that you die and your death will come soon, I’ll follow your casket by the pale afternoon, And I’ll watch while you’re lowered down to your death bed, Then I’ll stand over your grave ‘til I’m sure that you're dead.

Yevtushenko wishes death on the anti-semites in Babi Yar:

How horrible it is that pompous title the anti-semites calmly call themselves,  Society of the Russian Race. No part of me can ever forget it. When the last anti-semite on the earth is buried for ever let the International ring.

Yevtushenko sees in the death of the anti-semites a re-affirmation of the society in which he lives. Dylan in his songs too calls for the righting of the wrongs in his society, but they are so multitudinous and deeply imbedded what may be necessary is a new society as Woody Guthrie visualizes. A striking difference between Yevtushenko and Dylan is that Bob’s action is much more intense -- he will follow the war planner's casket to make sure that he is dead. And in “Emmett Till” he lashes out not only at the lynchers but at the great mass of us who by standing aside and failing to take action against racism permit it to continue:

If you can't speak out against this sort of thing, A crime that's so unjust,  Your eyes are filled with dead man's dirt, Your mind is filled with dust. Your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, Your blood must refuse to flow, For you would let this human race, Fall down so godawful low.

Intensity added to a wide-ranging view gives us this Dylan verse in “With God On Your Side” which has implications much deeper than only the problem of anti-semitism:

When the second World War came to an end We forgave the Germans and then we were friends. Though they murdered six million, In the ovens they fried, The Germans now, too Have God on their side.

I get the feeling on hearing Dylan and reading Lorca that they both pull their poems out of the same body of air, although there are marked differences and Bob has never read Lorca. It is as though they met one night on a mountainside and looked out over the world’s lands and oceans and saw the same things and agreed to tell us, each in his own way, what they saw. Bob sings: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warning” while Lorca says: “these clouds are broken by fistblows of coral that carry a fiery cocoon on their backs.”

Bob is much influenced by Woody Guthrie, of course, and I think it is here where comparisons become the most meaningful. Woody did not confine himself to “silo sermons” and those who say he “did not exceed the boundaries of talk song” should take another look at his work. His imagery many times is subtle, strong and lyrical:

I tell you about the winds and the weathers and oceans and the lands and the continents that have riz and sunk since this little hunk of dirt first whirled off the burning sun. I tell you of the men and the women that bathed their eyes in the zig zag lightning and hugged and kissed in the rumbling thunder and about every union wheel that ever did run down a union road…

Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain” and “Blowin In The Wind” come to mind right away. He means it sincerely when he sings in his “Letter To Woody”:

Hey Woody, but I know that you know All the things that I’m sayin and many times more.

(Broadside #27, June 1963)

[captivatedbyurhubris]

the fact that at "never once has he cheated on his wife" literally everyone turned to Zeus' actor & his reaction to it is sending me

[inkskinned]

something about you, and your voice, and your hands.

to be honest for a while now the world has passed over me in static. i feel it rumble overhead, unruly and unhappy, tire tracks over skin. when i close my eyes i see only refracted light and rain. no matter how much i sleep, i am exhausted over and over again. i have tried everything. girls and pills and makeup and prayer and chastity and sobriety and violence and tearing off a fancy dress and putting it on again. i might just be permanently shaped like this.

something about you, though. you cut into the soft bits. everything turns color-swift and loud. like you can push your hands through the fabric. like you can find me and pin me down. like all the running and fighting and biting down was pointless; i'd been home for longer than i'd counted. the first time you looked at me - really looked, caught my anxious eyes like a bird - i felt some little rabbit kick her legs, bound up somewhere in the razorwire radio silence dominating my heart.

i can't be known like that. i can't be touched like that. you can't love me like that.

i'll simply come apart.