Category: music

Bermuda dancers, St. George’s

I arrived home from the Gym on a Sunday afternoon to find a fundraising festival in progress.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

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Martin Luther King Jr – I have a Dream

“I Have a Dream” is a public speech delivered by American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, in which he calls for an end to racism in the United States …

I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream – one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, “We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream…

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I’m reading a book about those days. President Kennedy playing a balancing act between King and his supporters and the segregationists, mostly whites in the southern States.

Amazing days. King was far from perfect. Nor was Kennedy perfect. (Both were womanizers, for example.) But I admire both in different ways.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963, but opposed by filibuster in the Senate.

Thereafter, President Lyndon B. Johnson pushed the bill forward, which in its final form was passed in the U.S. Congress by a Senate vote of 73-27 and House vote of 289-126 (70%-30%). The Act was signed into law by President Johnson …

Warm-up acts at the 1963 March on Washington:

Gospel legend Mahalia Jackson sang “How I Got Over“, and Marian Andersonsang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands“. …

Joan Baez led the crowds in several verses of “We Shall Overcome” and “Oh Freedom“. Bob Dylan performed “When the Ship Comes In“, for which he was joined by Baez. Dylan also performed “Only a Pawn in Their Game“, a provocative and not completely popular choice because it asserted that Byron de la Beckwith, as a poor white man, was not personally or primarily to blame for the murder of Medgar Evers.

Peter, Paul and Mary sang “If I Had a Hammer” and Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind“. Odetta sang “I’m On My Way“.

Charlton Heston, James Baldwin, Marlon Brando, and Harry Belafonte were there.

Charlton Heston supported civil rights?

Yep. He was a big booster of Democrats before switching to the dark side with Reagan and then the NRA.

German youth against the Nazis – “Swing Kids”

The Swing Youth (German: Swingjugend) were a group of jazz and swing lovers in Germany in the 1930s, mainly in Hamburg and Berlin. …

… composed of 14 to 21-year-old boys and girls in high school, most of them middle- or upper-class students …

They admired the British and American way of life, defining themselves in swing music and opposing the National-Socialist ideology, especially the Hitler Youth …

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. (Hollywood adaptation)

Here are a couple of historical photos.

great vocalists – Levon Helm

Though I don’t spend much time listening to music any longer, Levon Helm and The Band still often comes to mind.

Click PLAY or watch him on YouTube.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

These guys were genius in that era.

Up on Cripple Creek she sends me
If I spring a leak she mends me
I don’t have to speak she defends me
A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

Rolling Stone once named him one of the 100 Greatest Singers of All Time.

Influenced Jeff Tweedy, Lucinda Williams, John Hiatt

There is something about Levon Helm’s voice that is contained in all of our voices. It is ageless, timeless and has no race. He can sing with such depth and emotion, but he can also convey a good-old fun-time growl.

Levon died age-72 in 2013.

best song ever – Sara – Stevie Nicks

Wait a minute baby…
Stay with me awhile

Said you’d give me light
But you never told be about the fire

lyrics

Stevie Nicks has always been cryptic on the meaning of the song. It’s the “poet in her heart”.

I like that.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

I wrote Sara on the piano, by myself. The original Sara was 16 minutes long. …

I knew that Sara would be very popular because I loved writing that song. I’ve had more fun writing that…I remember the night I wrote it. ‘I sat up with a very good friend of mine whose name is Sara, who was married to Mick Fleetwood. She likes to think it’s completely about her, but it’s really not completely about her.

It’s about me, about her, about Mick, about Fleetwood Mac. Its about all of us at that point. There’s little bits about each one of us in that song and when it had all the other verses it really covered a vast bunch of people. Sara was the kind of song you could fall in love with,

Mick … was the ‘great dark wing’. And, ah, it was about everything that was going on at that particular time, too, but he was the, the reason for the, you know, the beginning of it.

Stevie Nicks, MTV Fanatic, 1998

Stevie Nicks on Sara – in her own words

For the record, I always liked the controversial original album Tusk.

Tusk