Did an obscure Bob Dylan song by way of Woody Guthrie predict the 2023 battle for women’s rights?
A recent story out of Danville, Illinois makes 1984's 'New Danville Girl' — co-written by Sam Shepard — seem eerily prescient
Woody Guthrie
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Culture Happy birthday Woody Guthrie, our greatest Hanukkah songwriter
The composer of 'Hanuka Gelt' and 'This Land Is Your Land' would have turned 110 today
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Culture Inside The 1949 Westchester KKK Attack Where Rioters Chanted ‘We’re Hitler’s Boys’
This article was originally published on September 2, 2009. It was re-published for the 70th anniversary of the Peekskill Riots on August 26, 2019, and lightly edited to reflect the new anniversary of the event. Peekskill, New York, on the bank of the Hudson River, was home to L. Frank Baum, the author of “The…
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Culture How an Okie Named Woody Guthrie Became Our Best Hanukkah Tunesmith
For 20 years, I was a pop music critic. Every year as the calendar wound down, here came one of music journalism’s over-roasted chestnuts: the annual roundup of new Christmas albums. I never groaned. I’m one of those Christmas music people. As soon as the Thanksgiving turkey is down my gullet, I’m trotting out the…
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Opinion On Bob Dylan’s Birthday, 4 Israeli Artists Reminisce
In honor of Bob Dylan’s 73rd birthday on Saturday (May 24), Maariv asked four Israeli singer-songwriters — Eran Tzur, Sun Tailor, Dan Toren and Uzi Ramirez — to write about the “defining moment” in Dylan’s influence on them personally “as musicians, artists and listeners.” Each brief contribution is accompanied by a musical clip that the…
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Opinion Music for May Day: Songs of Kibbutzim & Coal Mines
Here’s a little video collection I put together for May Day 2010, with some updates, to help get in the holiday spirit. Fortunately, it’s still relevant. Unfortunately, that’s because we haven’t made much progress in the interim toward economic justice. First of all, the anthem of Zionist labor, Chaim Nachman Bialik’s “Birkat Ha’am” (“The People’s…
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Culture What’s More American Than Bob Dylan — and Super Bowl Car Ad?
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” people who don’t know much about Bob Dylan have said, in response to his surprising, patriotic Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler. To them, Dylan is still someone he never was: a Sixties icon, a protest singer who would never sell out. “Sad, sad, sad,” moaned one of my Facebook…
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The Schmooze Woody Guthrie Gets Onstage Musical Treatment
Woody Guthrie sang of America’s “redwood forests” and “gulf stream waters.” The traveling troubadour and American folk poet electrified a nation with his paeans to America’s indomitable spirit and beauty. Oklahoma-born and Texas-raised, he also ignited mighty debates with songs and writings that took on the establishment and sought to elevate the working masses. His…
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