Welcome!
If you are just joining the podcast…welcome! It’s nice to have you here. You can start listening now, or if you prefer, jump back to the beginning and get caught up.
Episode Two
As mentioned in Episode One, our tour guide is the spirit of the legendary songwriter, protester, idealist, itinerant hobo, and family man, Woody Guthrie.
In the 1950s, we follow Woody to Greenwich Village in America’s “Big Apple” — New York City. There we find a young Paul Simon about to make it big with songs like:
* “The 59th Bridge Street Song”
* “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” aka “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme”
But it was Paul Simon’s song “The Boxer” that caught my ear in 1969 when I was just a 13-year-old music lover. That song, recorded by Simon&Garfunkel, became New York City’s anthem after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, when terrorists brought down the twin towers of the city’s World Trade Center.
Bridges Over Troubled Waters
In another part of the city, a young black woman sang Simon’s song “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” to a congregation in the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, a historically African/American part of the City. That woman was the Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin. Her gospel-influenced version of the song can be heard here.
Credits
The above painting, and many others you’ll see in the show notes for this tour, was painted by my friend Daniel Campbell. You can see more of Dan’s excellent work from here.
While I was already a Paul Simon fan, a new book about him by Malcolm Gladwell and Bruce Headlam, titled “Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon,” took my admiration to a whole new level. It is from this audiobook that I clipped the quote by producer and musician Aaron Lindsey.
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg
“On the Road,” written by Jack Kerouac in the late 1950s, is well worth a read if you want to feel heat from the fire that was about to burn down America in the 1960s.
Likewise, the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, written in the mid-50s, pulls the curtain back on his generation’s emerging anxiety about what they saw as destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. Listen to Ginsberg read the whole poem from here.
Bob Dylan
I play snippets from Dylan’s songs “Song for Woody” and “Blowin' in the Wind.”
That’s a Wrap!
Coming up on the next show, we’ll visit some of DC’s famous memorials and also a few of its lesser-known haunts, which you would only know about if you lived in the city, and I did.
We’ll learn about DC’s homegrown Go-Go music and get a visit from one of its most beautiful ghosts. You won’t want to miss it, so stay on the bus, and I’ll see you…next time.
