Jingle Jangle Morning Folk-Rock in the 1960s

 

 

Jingle Jangle Morning is the story of how folk and rock merged in the 1960s to create folk-rock, injecting social consciousness and poetic lyricism into popular music to scale heights that neither folk nor rock could have reached without blending. It draws on more than 100 first-hand interviews with key musicians, producers, promoters, and journalists, from stars like Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, Donovan, John Sebastian of the Lovin' Spoonful, and Judy Collins to behind-the-scenes producers and cult artists. Starting with the folk revival of the early 1960s, it covers the folk-rock movement from the first stars to electrify folk (especially the Byrds and Bob Dylan) to stars like Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, as well as underrated greats (like Richard & Mimi Fariña, Fred Neil, Tim Buckley, and Nick Drake to nearly unknown cult artists. Previously published in two separate volumes as Turn! Turn! Turn! and Eight Miles High, this combines those books into one, adding 35,000 words of updates and new material. It also adds a 75,000-word mini-book with in-depth descriptions of nearly 200 folk-rock recordings from the era, which together would comprise the ideal 1960s folk-rock box set. All branches of the decade’s folk-rock are covered, from early electric folk-rock, protest folk-rock, and folk-rock-psychedelia to singer-songwriters, country-rock, and the distinctively British form of folk-rock.

 

Richie Unterberger (Author) 

 

Sixto Rodriguez • Searching for Sugar Man [OST]

Detroit, años 70. Unos cazatalentos te descubren en un “cuchitril” y te proponen de grabar un álbum, pero no triunfa… mejor dicho, es un fracaso.
Al cabo de un tiempo llega una copia de tu disco en un rincón de mundo cómo podría ser Sudáfrica. Sin saber cómo, éste disco es un éxito en ventas y, por alguna razón, se convierte en himno de un movimiento social, en éste caso la resistencia contra el apartheid.
Tres décadas después, un tal Malik Bendjelloul, recoje tu historia, la convierte en un precioso documental y se hace con nada menos que un Óscar… Y después de esto evidentemente viene el boom mediático, y ya no sorprende tanto que el nombre de Rodríguez aparezca en el cartel del Coachella como uno de los grandes atractivos…

Sugar man, won’t you hurry
‘Cos I’m tired of these scenes
For a blue coin won’t you bring back
All those colors to my dreams

La verdad es que no se entiende el porqué el disco no triunfó desde un inicio. Ni tampoco porqué acaba triunfando al cabo de 30 años. Quizás esto demuestra la fuerza del azar… De todas formas, la moraleja es que “las cosas caen por su propio peso” tanto para bien como para mal. Y en éste caso la historia le ha acabado haciendo justicia.
http://lovevinyls.com/2013/05/searching-for-sugar-man-rodriguez/

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Automatic translation: 

Detroit, 70s. Some scouts discover you in a "hovel" and propose you to record an album, but it does not succeed ... rather, it is a failure.After a while, a copy of your album arrives in a corner of the world, how could South Africa be? Without knowing how, this album is a success in sales and, for some reason, it becomes the anthem of a social movement, in this case the resistance against apartheid.Three decades later, a certain Malik Bendjelloul, pick up your story, makes it a beautiful documentary and is made with nothing less than an Oscar ... And after this evidently comes the media boom, and it is no longer so surprising that the name of Rodriguez appears in the Coachella poster as one of the great attractions ...

Sugar man, won’t you hurry
‘Cos I’m tired of these scenes
For a blue coin won’t you bring back
All those colors to my dreams

The truth is that you can not understand why the album did not triumph from the beginning. Nor why it ends up triumphing after 30 years. Perhaps this shows the strength of chance ... In any case, the moral is that "things fall under their own weight" for good as well as for bad. And in this case, history has ended up doing justice.http://lovevinyls.com/2013/05/searching-for-sugar-man-rodriguez/

 

 

 

 

http://sugarman.org/

 

Roots of the Revival American and British Folk Music in the 1950s

 

 

In Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s, Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel Clare Donaldson present a transatlantic history of folk's midcentury resurgence that juxtaposes the related but distinct revivals that took place in the United States and Great Britain.

 After setting the stage with the work of music collectors in the nineteenth century, the authors explore the so-called recovery of folk music practices and performers by Alan Lomax and others, including journeys to and within the British Isles that allowed artists and folk music advocates to absorb native forms and facilitate the music's transatlantic exchange. Cohen and Donaldson place the musical and cultural connections of the twin revivals within the decade's social and musical milieu and grapple with the performers' leftist political agendas and artistic challenges, including the fierce debates over "authenticity" in practice and repertoire that erupted when artists like Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio carried folk into the popular music mainstream.

From work songs to skiffle, from the Weavers in Greenwich Village to Burl Ives on the BBC, Roots of the Revival offers a frank and wide-ranging consideration of a time, a movement, and a transformative period in American and British pop culture.

 

Sérgio Mendes & Brasil '66 • Stillness

 

Review by Richard S. Ginell
Stillness is a concept album -- the title tune opens and closes it in moody stillness -- and a transition piece all at once, for Sergio Mendes seemed to be searching for a viable way out of the Brasil '66 formula. Indeed, "Righteous Life," using a different L.A. rhythm section, is really a folk-rock record, a good one, and a far cry from the bossa-propelled '60s. So is the funky voodoo cover of Stephen Stills' "For What It's Worth" in its own way, though the old Brasil '66 sound does come in very handy in a superb treatment of another folk-rock song, Joni Mitchell's "Chelsea Morning." Yet Mendes also experiments with different, more authentically Brazilian rhythm patterns in a brilliantly propulsive rendition of Gilberto Gil's "Viramundo" and a lovely Oscar Castro-Neves/Sebastiao Neto tone poem, "Celebration of the Sunrise." This would also be Lani Hall's farewell to Sergio Mendes, leaving the band in mid-album on the way to becoming Mrs. Herb Alpert and starting a solo career, to be replaced by the Brazilian Gracinha Leporace, who is now Mrs. Sergio Mendes. Overlooked in its day, Stillness is the great sleeper album of Sergio Mendes' first A&M period.
https://www.allmusic.com/album/stillness-mw0000463072

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Reseña de Richard S. Ginell
Stillness es un álbum conceptual -la melodía que da título al disco lo abre y lo cierra en una taciturna quietud- y una pieza de transición a la vez, ya que Sergio Mendes parecía estar buscando una salida viable a la fórmula de Brasil '66. De hecho, «Righteous Life», que utiliza una sección rítmica diferente de Los Ángeles, es en realidad un disco de folk-rock, muy bueno y muy alejado de la bossa de los sesenta. También lo es, a su manera, la versión funky vudú de «For What It's Worth» de Stephen Stills, aunque el viejo sonido de Brasil '66 resulta muy útil en un magnífico tratamiento de otra canción folk-rock, «Chelsea Morning» de Joni Mitchell. Pero Mendes también experimenta con patrones rítmicos diferentes, más auténticamente brasileños, en una interpretación brillantemente propulsiva de «Viramundo», de Gilberto Gil, y en un precioso poema tonal de Oscar Castro-Neves/Sebastiao Neto, «Celebration of the Sunrise». También sería la despedida de Lani Hall de Sergio Mendes, que dejó la banda a mitad del álbum camino de convertirse en la señora de Herb Alpert e iniciar una carrera en solitario, para ser sustituida por la brasileña Gracinha Leporace, que ahora es la señora de Sergio Mendes. Pasado por alto en su día, Stillness es el gran álbum olvidado de la primera etapa de Sergio Mendes en A&M.
https://www.allmusic.com/album/stillness-mw0000463072


 

https://sergiomendesmusic.com/

 

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Youngː The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup

Even in the larger-than-life world of rock and roll, it was hard to imagine four more different men. David Crosby, the opinionated hippie guru. Stephen Stills, the perpetually driven musician. Graham Nash, the tactful pop craftsman. Neil Young, the creatively restless loner. But together, few groups were as in sync with their times as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Starting with the original trio's landmark 1969 debut album, the group embodied much about its era: communal musicmaking, protest songs that took on the establishment and Richard Nixon, and liberal attitudes toward partners and lifestyles. Their group or individual songs--"Wooden Ships," "Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," "After the Gold Rush," "For What It's Worth" (with Stills and Young's Buffalo Springfield), "Love the One You're With," "Long Time Gone," "Just a Song Before I Go," "Southern Cross"--became the soundtrack of a generation.

But their story would rarely be as harmonious as their legendary and influential vocal blend. In the years that followed, these four volatile men would continually break up, reunite, and disband again--all against a backdrop of social and musical change, recurring disagreements and jealousies, and self-destructive tendencies that threatened to cripple them both as a group and as individuals.

In Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young: The Wild, Definitive Saga of Rock's Greatest Supergroup, longtime music journalist and Rolling Stone writer David Browne presents the ultimate deep dive into rock and roll's most musical and turbulent brotherhood on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. Featuring exclusive interviews with David Crosby and Graham Nash along with band members, colleagues, fellow superstars, former managers, employees, and lovers-and with access to unreleased music and documents--Browne takes readers backstage and onstage, into the musicians' homes, recording studios, and psyches, to chronicle the creative and psychological ties that have bound these men together--and sometimes torn them apart. This is the sweeping story of rock's longest-running, most dysfunctional, yet pre-eminent musical family, delivered with the epic feel their story rightly deserves.

 

David Browne (Author)