Video: American Seams | The Plains
The stories of three quilters combine to reveal an intimate portrait of rural women in the American West. Featuring Brenda Bailey, Sara Buscaglia, and Susan “Traditional Woman” Hudson.
Video: Mississippi John Hurt | Spike Driver’s Blues
Mississippi John Hurt used a syncopated finger picking style of guitar playing that he taught himself. According to the music critic Robert Christgau, “No one else has talked the blues with such delicacy or restraint.”
Jianqing Zheng: Site Visit
The Valley Store in Avalon, Mississippi, long abandoned, still holds its worn-out sign above the locked double doors. Many years ago, John Hurt lived nearby.
Bob Dylan: Nobel Lecture
When awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, Bob Dylan gave no comment for two weeks, ignored the Academy’s calls, didn’t attend the ceremony, and collected the award in a hoodie four months later. But Dylan later sent them a rambling, 27-minute ode to literature.
Mike Schneider: Stirring Up the “Great Folk Scare”
There’s nothing easy-going about the folk songs of the Greenwich Village revival, not the ones Dylan sang — a man-killing woman, catastrophic floods, a man driven insane by love — songs that taught him there’s nothing new on Earth.
Video: Do You Want To Go Down This Way, Or Go Back The Way We Came?
A new film elegy by Bryan Konefsky that uses the lens of loss and grief to explore intersections between memory and artifact.
Video: Crying Glacier (2024)
A sound artist tries to conserve the sounds of a melting glacier in the Swiss Alps before it might disappear forever.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer: Talking with My Daughter about Grief
We lie in the dark
and speak about anything
but what I ache to speak about.
Video: Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer
Grandma got run over by a reindeer
Walking home from our house Christmas Eve.
You can say there’s no such thing as Santa,
But as for me and Grandpa, we believe.
Barbara Hamby: Ode to the ‘Messiah’, Thai Horror Movies, and Everything I Can’t Believe
When I decide to go to hear Handel’s Messiah in London
at the composer’s parish church, my husband says
he’d rather see a Thai horror movie, so we plan to meet later
at our favorite Moroccan lair
Ted Olson: Bob Dylan and the creative leap that transformed modern music
Sixty years ago, on Halloween Night 1964, a 23-year-old Dylan took the stage at New York City’s Philharmonic Hall. He had become a star within the niche genre of revivalist folk music. But by 1964 Dylan was building a much larger fanbase through performing and recording his own songs.
Louise Bogan: Musician
Now with great ease, and slow,
The thumb, the finger, the strong
Delicate hand plucks the long
String it was born to know.
Video: Hildegard of Bingen | Love Aboundeth In All Things
There are more surviving chants by Hildegard than by any other composer from the entire Middle Ages, and she is one of the few known composers to have written both the music and the words.
Michael Simms: Strange Meadowlark
years later jazz, a free communal experience
embodying love, saved me just as poetry saved me
