Bob Stepno: podfolk

OK, so it's not really a podcast

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 06:18:21 GMT

Sorry, but I've let this site become a Web "cobweb" over the years, instead of ever launching the folk music podcast I hoped to create here. I do have a few more black & white photos that I took at folk festivals and dance camps 25 or 30 years ago, and as I get them scanned, I may put them here.

By the way, that's Elizabeth Cotten playing the banjo upside-down and left handed... and Paul Brown (now of NPR news) playing right-side up. Unfortunately, it's sad news that had me thinking of those photos and this neglected Web page tonight... I just learned that guitarist, teacher and instrument builder John Pearse passed away a couple of months ago. (http://www.jpstrings.com)

I met him at Pinewoods camp -- and bought my first mandolin from him -- the same summer I took the picture of Paul. I looked through my old photo albums, but there are no shots of John. However, his guitar playing is well documented in books, his video taped lessons and records... and there's a drawing of him on every pack of John Pearse guitar strings.

"Music really does make the world a better place," as his Web site says, and he certainly did his part to make that true.

It's of a bold reporter...

Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:24:57 GMT

When I was in high school, Phil Ochs' album "All the News that's Fit to Sing" convinced me that I needed a better guitar case than my crushable cardboard one... and a subscription to The New York Times. It also had a song that began, "It's of a bold reporter whose story I will tell..."

Maybe that album helped plant the seeds for my eventual career, one that didn't require rhyming or hitting notes above B-flat.

Journalist turned private investigator Larry Lopez just reminded me of that album and song by sending along this Boston Globe clip about a neighbor, William Worthy, the "bold reporter" Ochs sang about...

William Worthy isn't worthy to enter our door,
He went down to Cuba, he's not American any more.
But somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say,
'You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.'
--Phil Ochs

Unlike most folks immortalized in song, Mr. Worthy is still alive, but suffering from Alzheimer's disease. At least he's back on the radar of those who want to give him some overdue recognition, including Harvard's Nieman Foundation.

As the Nieman site notes, "Worthy traveled to both China (1956-57) and later to Cuba (1961) in violation of U.S. travel restrictions. The United States subsequently tried and sentenced him to jail. A federal appeals court overturned that conviction in 1964, ruling that the travel bans were unconstitutional. Worthy continued to report from overseas, visiting North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia."

Without any folksingers to consult for more details, I resorted to Google, which hooked me up with this profile in a Bates College alumni magazine, an additional account from Bates of Worthy's 1981 confrontation with the CIA, a testimonial at Cuba-watcher Walter Lippmann's site, the full lyrics to Ochs's song, the recording itself at Rhapsody, and an ironies-of-media-history tidbit: One liberal daily Worthy wrote for in the 1950s was, according to the accounts above... the New York Post.

Wed, 23 Jan 2008 23:06:17 GMT

Sorry... still no time to podcast... But I just discovered this heavily linked essay on "The 100 Greatest Acts of the Anglo-American Folk Music Tradition."

"A Combined Current/Retrospective Ranked List of Those Folk Acts
from Here and Other Countries Who Have Most Contributed
(and/or Are Most Contributing)
to This Folk Music Tradition in the United States"