Ha! I’ve pulled up most of these in the last week, and put the Minstrel opus in as a link to my comment in Michael Moynihan’s piece about Seeger’s politics and his casting out of Dylan after he Went Electric.
It’s the section comparing Seeger’s affect with Dylan’s more accurate connection to folk that made me think of it: “It’s something else again: everything that the folk revival had tried to purge from folk music, pouring back in through Bob Dylan’s singing”
I will say that I have always thought you were too hard on yourself as a high-schooler in the concluding anecdote. I was born in 1971, so it was just slightly before my time. I fondly remember watching the Jackson 5 cartoon show and wouldn’t think of their music as alien, and as a teenager I loved the R Crumb album covers and had no idea they were related to minstrelsy, but I don’t think you did at that time, either. Ben Appel recently said something on a podcast I listen to: Every activist is using their activism to work through a past trauma. I think it’s broader than that, and it applies to everyone, so when I read your work I sometimes go back to you in that lounge, trying to fight off a hurt black girl’s accusation of “racist!”, plunged beyond a teenager’s depth, and I hope you can forgive both yourself and that girl, and not assume either of you were on the side of the angels, just people who sometimes lash out. (Especially teenagers!)
Ha! I’ve pulled up most of these in the last week, and put the Minstrel opus in as a link to my comment in Michael Moynihan’s piece about Seeger’s politics and his casting out of Dylan after he Went Electric.
It’s the section comparing Seeger’s affect with Dylan’s more accurate connection to folk that made me think of it: “It’s something else again: everything that the folk revival had tried to purge from folk music, pouring back in through Bob Dylan’s singing”
I will say that I have always thought you were too hard on yourself as a high-schooler in the concluding anecdote. I was born in 1971, so it was just slightly before my time. I fondly remember watching the Jackson 5 cartoon show and wouldn’t think of their music as alien, and as a teenager I loved the R Crumb album covers and had no idea they were related to minstrelsy, but I don’t think you did at that time, either. Ben Appel recently said something on a podcast I listen to: Every activist is using their activism to work through a past trauma. I think it’s broader than that, and it applies to everyone, so when I read your work I sometimes go back to you in that lounge, trying to fight off a hurt black girl’s accusation of “racist!”, plunged beyond a teenager’s depth, and I hope you can forgive both yourself and that girl, and not assume either of you were on the side of the angels, just people who sometimes lash out. (Especially teenagers!)