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I reviewed Elijah's book on the 60s folk revival years ago and ended up
on his mailing list. He is very cool. (That's a term from the 60s.)
Dear Friends and Fellow Workers,
Quick headlines:
*Sandrine and I have moved to Philadelphia and are very pleased to be
here -- more on this below.
*Heads up about American Epic, the music doc currently airing on PBS,
for which I did the book.
*Reminder about my Songobiography, now up to 226 posts of performance
videos, history, and memoir.
*Exploring gig and travel opportunities, as musician, speaker, or in any
other capacity.
Starting with the time-sensitive: American Epic is currently airing on
PBS around the US. A decade-long labor of love by the Scots-English
producer/director team of Allison McGourty and Bernard MacMahon, it is a
deep and quirky exploration of early commercial rural recordings --
Bernard picked some favorite records and they set off across the United
States in search of the places and families of the original artists.
Some are familiar (The Carter Family, the Memphis Jug Band, Mississippi
John Hurt), some perhaps less so (Lydia Mendoza, Dick Justice, Cleoma
and Amede Breaux) and some are dauntingly obscure (Elder Burch, the Hopi
Indian Chanters, Joseph Kekuku).
I did the accompanying book, using their masses of interviews and
archival sources (lots of first-person recollections, including
unpublished material from Sara and Maybelle Carter), alongside beautiful
photos and ephemera, much of it new even to hardcore scholars. The
series likewise mixes contemporary interviews and landscapes with
archival material -- the idea was to reach a broad audience while also
coming up with stuff that would be exciting for longtime enthusiasts,
and I strongly encourage everyone to check it out. There's also a
broad-ranging 5-CD box set and a half dozen other CDs, remastered with
exceptionally great sound. All in all, quite a project -- along with the
book, I did some script doctoring and liner note tweaking, but all
credit to Bernard and Allison for their years of work, research, and
deep love for the music. And that doesn't even mention episode four,
with everyone from Jerron Paxton to Elton John, Ana Gabriel to Alabama
Shakes, Nas to Merle Haggard, cutting direct to disc on a weight-driven
lathe and a 1920s Western Electric recording rig. (For info on the whole
project, visit www.americanepic.com)
Meanwhile, big life changes: After a sojourn in the Boston area seeing
my mother through her final years and getting some academic credentials,
Sandrine and I have moved to Philadelphia. We've got an old row house
with a subway stop and a 24-hour diner on the corner in a spectacularly
varied neighborhood on the borderline between old Italian and African
American South Philly, with an overlay of Mexican, Vietnamese,
Indonesian, young hipster... we're just beginning to explore and get a
sense of the place. If you're local, please get in touch.
Why Philly? The simple answer is we visited and fell in love with the
city, the people, the house, the food, the art (murals, mosaics, music,
the Barnes), and the fact that it's a lot closer to a lot of other
places than Boston is. We were ready for a change, ready to get out
more, and this feels like a great base.
Which brings me to the travel: one of the ideas behind the
Songobiography (http://www.elijahwald.com/songblog/) was to reinvigorate
my career as a performing musician, both on my own and in a duo with
Sandrine on clarinet (no videos yet, but they're coming, and I'm loving
the give-and-take of that partnership). Once we're settled, we'd like to
be doing more traveling, both in the US and abroad (we both have EU
passports), whether as musicians, doing speaking dates, teaching,
researching, or just seeing some new places. So if you want to book us
or me for a date or a tour, or happen to have a place in a beautiful or
interesting location where we should visit, please get in touch.
In other news, Narcocorrido is finally getting a Mexican publisher and
will be appearing there later this year, I'm working on getting the
dissertation on Southwestern bilingualism and musical mixing published,
researching a project on immigration and open borders, playing lots of
music, walking the streets of Philadelphia, planning to be in New York
more often, hoping to get to Detroit in the relatively near future, also
Germany and France, also Mexico, maybe Cape Verde... but first have to
build some shelves and get the books out of the boxes.
All the best, and please let me know what you're up to,
Elijah
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