Category Music

After last year’s annual edition of this summatime summatime summatime ritual, it was brought to my attention by astute readers that the previous eight years’ worth of selections had yet to include a single song by either Jimmy Buffett or the Beach Boys, who, if they didn’t first propagate the idea of summer and its languid pleasures, at least had a major hand in refining them for the modern age.

Shocked, I vowed to set things aright in 2021, both to give honor where honor is due, and pleasure where pleasure is desired.

So on this first day of summer, the summer after the summer that kind of wasn’t because nothing quite was during Pandemipalooza 2020, we are going to hear from both Mr. Buffett and Messrs. Wilson, Love, et al, along with the first repeat appearance in this series. That honor goes to Martha Reeves and her Vandellas, who will unfortunately not be “Dancin’ in the Streets” as they did in the...

One of the things I love about Greg Brown’s “Rexroth’s Daughter” is Brown’s refusal to offer any kind of explanation or backdrop to the somewhat mysterious title, which is encompassed in the only line he repeats in the song’s 72 lines: “I’m lookin’ for Rexroth’s daughter.”

This is consonant with a certain strain of creative artist who simply wants to have his or her work stand on its own, meaning what it means to anyone who comes across it, without shaping a viewer’s/reader’s/listener’s response via either explanation or the creator’s biography.

That said, we can surmise easily enough that the reference is to the great poet Kenneth Rexroth, often called the “father” of the so-called “Beat Generation” literary movement that grew up around him in 1950s San Francisco, and which included the poets Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, among many others.

Rexroth was a self-taught intellectual ...

What to do with Stephen Foster? Among the greatest of American songwriters, reportedly the first to actually make a living at it (for a while), regarded by many scholars as the “father of American music.” Many of his 200+ songs written in the mid-19th century are embedded into the very fabric of American culture via countless cover versions by renowned musicians, abetted by millions of schoolchildren taking easily to his infectious, easily digestible tunes (“Beautiful Dreamer,” “Oh Susanna”, “Camptown Races,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “Swanee River,” “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair,” “The Hard Times Come Again No More”).

Author of these lines, written for his wife Jane:

Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world, heard in the day,
Lull’d by the moonlight have all pass’d away!
… Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

But there was this about...

Consider these lines from the early 1960s pop classic, “A Hundred Pounds of Clay”:

He took a hundred pounds of clay
And then He said “Hey, listen
I’m gonna fix this-a world today
Because I know what’s missin’
Then He rolled his big sleeves up
And a brand-new world began
He created a woman and-a
Lots of lovin’ for a man
Whoa-oh-oh, yes he did

And now these, five years later, from another hit, “Compared to What”:

Slaughterhouse is killin’ hogs
Twisted children killin’ frogs
Poor dumb rednecks rollin’ logs
Tired old lady kissin’ dogs
Hate the human, love that stinkin’ mutt (I can’t stand it!)
Try to make it real, compared to what? C’mon baby now!

Might it strike you as improbable that one artist played a major role in both of these songs, the first which he sang to a hit that peaked at #11 on the R&B charts, the second which he wrote but was beyond happy and surprised to see another artist take to ...

The Covid-19 pandemic has wreaked all manner of havoc and misery across the world, and in the way of all such human crises, it has also revealed deep reservoirs of our species’ adaptability, resourcefulness, and endurance. Part of that adaptation is purely practical: adjusting our behavior and lifestyle to minimize the risk of infection to ourselves and others, and making sure we will have enough food and shelter to survive the economic shock the pandemic has caused.

But another, arguably just as important part, has to do with meeting the internal challenges the pandemic poses, in the realm of what we commonly refer to as psyche, spirit, soul, and communion—that rich playground of the imagination where we grapple with questions of meaning and value, love and devotion, hope and despair.

Whatever our material accumulations, we are poor indeed without a sense of the larger and deeper context, purpose and de...