“Kassidat”, the Arabic word for poetry, is one of the essential ingredients in Moroccan song. Despite the bewildering array of musical styles in Morocco, the Moroccan sense of poetry is found throughout the music, regardless of the style or language. This isn’t the language of high art, but an often impenetrable vernacular poetry of oblique references, symbols, metaphors, and double entendres that describes the lives of average Moroccans. — from Kassidat: Raw 45s from Morocco
For more information: dust-digital.com/kassidat
“I Shall Not Be Moved”
Blind Pete Burrell, vocal and guitar
Bogalusa, Louisiana
March 31, 1969
Recorded by David Evans
“When I recorded him in 1969, Blind Pete Burrell was in his late thirties. Some years earlier he had gone blind suddenly while watching television, he says. He plays guitar for himself and friends and sometimes at gospel programs in churches.”
From the album Sorrow Come Pass Me Around: A Survey of Rural Religious Black Music
For more information: http://dust-digital.com/sorrow
Thanks to Belle Mellor for illustrating our work in the current issue of the Economist. (via Monitor: Unforgotten songs | The Economist)
"Is not folksong the bond of union where all our musical tastes can meet?” Vaughan Williams wrote in 1932. “One day perhaps we shall find an ideal music which will be neither popular nor classical, highbrow or lowbrow, but an art in which all can take part."
Now reading/looking/listening: I Listen to the Wind That Obliterates My Traces.
John Fahey
“In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary,” says audio curator Greg Budney, describing a major milestone just achieved by the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. All archived analog recordings in the…
Semmes Chapel, Michigan City, Mississippi ca. 1920. Some blues researchers think it’s Charley Patton seated on the front row. Not sure if that’s him but it’s an amazing photo nonetheless.
