Western Music: Saturday Music Club on Thursday

Ennio Morricone: Per Qualche Dollaro in Piu (For a Few Dollars More)(live performance, with a few flubs)

Per Qualche Dollaro in Piu original recordings

Gustav Holst: "Jupiter, Bringer of Jollity" from The Planets

(inspiration for no few Hollywood western themes)

Jerome Moross: The Big Country

Joseph Horowitz: "Composing the American Frontier" (NPR article/playlist) includes performances of 

Virgil Thomson: The Plow that Broke the Plains (excerpt)

Aaron Copland: "Billy the Kid" (excerpt)

Antonin Dvorak: "Suite in A"  (excerpt)

Roy Harris: "Symphony No. 3" (excerpt)

Arthur Farwell: "Navajo Dance No.2"

immediately after each, an NPR news report will begin, jarringly

Leigh Harline: Warlock

Aaron Copland: Rodeo

Hot Rize: "Western Skies"

Hot Rize as Red Knuckles and the Trailblazers

The Texas Playboys and Asleep at the Wheel:

Mary Youngblood: "Hearts Desire"

The Modern Folk Quartet: "Ox Driver"

Odetta: 900 Miles

Johnny Cash: "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie"

John Carroll and the Marx Bros.: "Riding the Range"

Saturday Music Club on Thursday: Sinister

The Roches: "Missing"

Annie Humphrey: "They Found Her"


Trusty: "Honey Mustard" (hit this text link to go directly to the song)


X: "Johnny Hit and Run Paulene"


Smart Went Crazy: "Sugar in Your Gas Tank"


Combustible Edison: "Pink Victim"


Billie Holiday: "Gloomy Sunday"


The Staple Singers: "Wish I Had Answered"


The Weavers: "Sinner Man"


The Jaynetts: "Sally Go 'Round the Roses"


Joan Armatrading: "Call Me Names"

Ronnie Gilbert, RIP

Ronnie Gilbert, the sole female singer among the folk-music superstars the Weavers for all but their earliest formative days, and a solo artist, activist, actor and psychologist over the years since the band called it a day in 1964, died on Saturday, though I managed to not get the unfortunate update till seeing Jarry House's post just now.   Bruce Weber in the NY Times; Sing Out! hasn't managed to post their remembrance yet...

Ronnie Gilbert eulogizes her mother, 1985:


Ronnie Gilbert and Holly Near:  "Hay Una Mujer Desaparecida"


HARP: Holly Near, Arlo Guthrie, Ronnie Gilbert, Pete Seeger: "Wimoweh" ("Mbube")


Ronnie Gilbert and Judy Collins: "Goodnight, Irene"


The Weavers: "Venga Jaleo"


Ronnie Gilbert: "Joe Hill"


The Weavers: "Sinner Man"


From Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers: "Union Miners"


The Weavers: "Kisses Sweeter than Wine"


Ronnie Gilbert with the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra: "Trouble in Mind"


The Weavers: "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You" among their 1951 promo films.

Saturday Music Club: further afield...

Light in Babylon: "Hinech Yafa"

Studio version/promo video

Barcelona Gipsy Klezmer Orchestra: "Shalom Alechem"


Mahotella Queens: "Umculo Khawupheli"


Rai No Ris, live in Khatmandu, Nepal 2012


The Floorbirds: "Moonshiner"


Cuarteto Zupay: "Jacinto Chiclana" (lyrics by Jorge Luis Borges, music by Astor Piazzolla)

FFB: Lee Hays: short stories for ELLERY QUEEN'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE and BESTSELLER MYSTERY MAGAZINE; Doris Willens: LONESOME TRAVELER: THE LIFE OF LEE HAYS

from the FictionMags Index:

HAYS, LEE (1914-1981) (chron.)

•  * Banquet and a Half, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Oct 1954
•  * Monday’s Washday, (ss) Bestseller Mystery Magazine May 1959
•  * On the Banks of the Ohio, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Mar 1949
•  * Pour on Water, (ss) Bestseller Mystery Magazine Sep 1959
•  * Three Against Deeth, (ss) Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine Dec 1948; A modern (colloquial dialect) English version of Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale.”

The text of "Pour on Water" as published in Bestseller Mystery Magazine, 9/59.

I started reading, in what's turned out to be a very busy week, Doris Willens's biography of Lee Hays, with no precognition that it would be the week we'd lose Pete Seeger, Hays's longest-term collaborator in such projects as the Almanac Singers, People's Songs and, of course, the Weavers...they also wrote together, most famously "The Hammer Song" or "If I Had a Hammer"...a modest success in the Weavers' recording but one of their most commonly covered songs, and among the biggest hits Peter, Paul and Mary, and Trini Lopez, would have.  The nephew of Vance Randolph (the folklore collector who published notable collections of Ozark Mountains-dwellers and others' stories and songs beginning with The Ozarks, 1931), Hays faced early tragedy (in Hays' teen years, his father died in an auto accident, leading his mother to retreat from reality and be institutionalized; Hays began the first of many periods of couch-surfing, mostly with siblings, one of whom got him a library job which led indirectly to his radicalization and lifelong interest in social justice issues and activism).  Hays would spend most of the rest of his life trying to overcome his own emotional baggage as well as the very real sorts of threat that his fellow Southerners, among other sorts of yahoo very much including the Red-baiters of the turn of the 1950s, could pose; meanwhile, he would throw off sparks in all sorts of ways, in writing dialect-heavy short stories for Fredric Dannay and Robert P. Mills at EQMM and Bestseller Mystery when the mood struck him, in his various organizational activities around folk music and otherwise (in the mid-'50s doldrums after the blacklisting had temporarily sidelined the Weavers, Hays recruited his biographer, Doris Willens, then Doris Kaplan, a new mother and temporarily on maternity leave from a journalism career, and actor/writer/musician Alan Arkin and members of Arkin's family to become the Baby Sitters, who would record at least four albums-worth of folk music, including their own compositions, for children), and yet, as Willens notes, he never did get around to writing the autobiography he easily could have, and as Seeger would repeatedly note, his old bandmate would consistently badger Hays into one project or another after the latter's retirement from performance, including writing the script for the documentary The Weavers: Wasn't That a Time!  

What a person can accomplish while waiting, sometimes rather irritably, for other things to happen, is one of the lessons of this book and Hays's life...the points should be taken. And Hays's stories about the villainous (or at least severely mischievous and arguably justified) Opal (the boy) and Sam (the girl) should be read...the example linked to above is short and eminently worth reading, particularly for those looking for something somewhere between Walt Kelly and James Lee Burke in appeal...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.

Not one of George Salter's better efforts among EQMM covers. Pity Hays's debut as a
fiction-writer had to take place in an issue packed with such obscure fellow-contributors...

Hays, Kaplan/Willens, and the Arkins/Dana with some fellow-travelers.

The Weavers: "Lonesome Traveler"

Composed by Lee Hays, who sings lead. The Decca Records recording with the Gordon Jenkins chorus and orchestra.

Pete Seeger

Pete Seeger

The Almanac Singers: "Which Side Are You On?"


The Weavers: "Follow the Drinking Gourd"

The version without Lee Hays's introduction, and with the Gordon Jenkins Orchestra

The Weavers: "Tzena, Tzena, Tzena"


The Weavers: "If I Had a Hammer"


The Weavers: "Banks of Marble"


Pete Seeger: "Buffalo Skinners"


Pete Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers (the Seeger Brothers): "Ragtime Annie" Medley on PS's tv series Rainbow Quest


Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash: "Worried Man Blues"; "Cripple Creek"


Pete Seeger: "Quite Early Morning"


Pete Seeger, Toshi Seeger and the Weavers on this blog.

Toshi Seeger, RIP

Sing Out! magazine's bulletin/obituary.