Blog #3

This week we moved into a new era; The Sixties-Folk Revival, Motown & Soul, British Invasion, and more. We began with The Urban Folk Revival. Folk music is music that was generally made at home, on the artist’s home porch or in a basement. It was generally not made to be popular but occasionally it certain songs would change and would become a hit. In comparison, popular music almost never changed into folk music. In the 60’s the folk music became “popular music” and that’s why they call It the “fold revival”. Recording really revolutionized folk music because we could listen to songs, record them, then transmit them into your own version.

John and Alan Lomax were famous for collecting folksongs and traveled around “collecting” these songs. The Lomax’s would often visit prisons because the prisoners would be doing hard labor. While doing hard labor in these prisons they would sing. So, that attracted the Lomax brothers to try and find their next star singer; and they did. He goes by the name of Leadbelly. The Lomaxs’ actually got Huddie Leadbelly out of prison and started him on a recording career that lead him to be a minor star. Leadbelly is known for the song “Goodnight Irene” that can be considered folk. Moving forward, we began studying Woody Guthrie and the song “Do Re Mi”. The meaning of Do Re Mi is a way of singing, singing scale or money of that matter.

Woodie Guthrie’s best known song is “This Land Is Your Land”. I was very familiar with this song, but only the first two verses which sounds very patriotic. But then as the song continues, the song becomes very questioning and sounds like a political action song that no one can stop Woodie from walking the freedom highway. This song is mainly referring to the politics of America and the height of the cold war.

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