If you haven’t gotten enough of the Vuvuzela during the World Cup, YouTube is helpfully providing a special Vuvuzela button on selected videos (you can only hope that your video will be selected). Just click on the soccer ball icon and the haunting refrain of the Vuvuzela will be inserted into the audio track. In [...]
My mother, who lives in Los Angeles, has been telling me about the new, young conductor of the LA Philharmonic and his involvement in music education for disadvantaged kids but it didn’t really sink in until I watched some YouTube videos (see below) of performances by the youth symphony that he directs in his native [...]
This Thanksgiving day feels a bit melancholy to me. We’re in a time of radical change and the stresses and strains are being felt all over. This song, by Stephen Foster, is from hard times of another era (the great depression of 1850), yet speaks eloquently of bringing empathy to people of all circumstances. That [...]
Joe Pug told this story onstage at the fall Strawberry Music Festival, about a conversation he had not long ago with Steve Earle. Seems Joe was strolling around backstage with an unlit cigarette tucked behind his ear. Steve (pointing at cigarette): You better quit those things if you want to last 20 or 30 years [...]
Gillian Welch & David Rawlings: American Originals
I was surprised when I looked back over previous posts here and found that I hadn’t written anything about the amazing duo of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. I first became aware of Gillian Welch with her duet of I’ll Fly Away (with Alison Krauss) in the 2000 film O Brother, Where Art Thou. I [...]