American Folk Movement - The Most Influentials According To WBK.fm

[bujhee kom]

Jadukor bhai mentioned a young English singer/song-writer named Adele and I looked her up and and thought of making a thread dedicated to these great artists/individuals mentioned below. I find the below American Folk artists to be the most influential in constructing, reconstructing, awakaning the American Conscience and for me, personally, influenced me heavily in my thought process and my design work for the built environment and the ecological art.

Although the thread may sound and look like a thread with posts of Youtube provided songs/performances of these below mentioned musicians/singer/song-writers and may look similar to the "What Are You Listening At The Moment" thread, dear Mod bhais and admin bhais, please let me do this thread as it will be a refined collection of specific types of songs/writings/expressions - with which I will eventually show a parallel between these American philosophers/thinkers/singer-song writers and the Bengali Lalon/Baul Musik and Spirituals i,e Puradash Baul and the great late Hon. Lalon Shah (may Allah bless his soul). I believe I will be able to establish and show how they (the American vocal Folk artists) speak of the same thing, same pain and suffering of a human soul and the same human experience and feelings of the Spiritual Movements of Bengal furhter down the road.....I mean I hope to create another thread where we shall discus the Bengali Root/Spiriual sounds and musik.

All bhais and apus, please contribute as well.

[bujhee kom]

[bujhee kom]

[bujhee kom]

[Zeeshan]

a redneck avy is de rigeur bro

[bujhee kom]

[bujhee kom]

Gopal, listen to the words my dear lil baby brother....If I needed you, would you come for me? I know YOU would...If You needed me, I would come for you, I would come to you, I would swim the sea, climb the mountains and come to EASE your pain baby! I would appear as Morphine to you! This is pure Sylvia Plath. This is Plathian talk at it's finest.

Dosto, Redneck-era jodi egula bujhto, taholey tow ora manoosh hoye jeto!

[Zunaid]

I give you Joan Baez. Zee - how red was her neck?

And Bob Dylan and Harry Belafonte.

[bujhee kom]

Uncleji, just about to introduce Ms. Baez any moment now...will start with her song for Bangladesh...

And then Dylan and Belafonte will follow....thank you Dr. Zed uncle

[bujhee kom]

[Zeeshan]

One of the most moving piece of literary work I read in my English class. (Please let me know if it's in the spirit of the thread or else I'll edit/delete it):

Howl by Allen Ginsberg

For
Carl Solomon


I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night
with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al-
cohol and cock and endless balls,
incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and
lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of
Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo-
tionless world of Time between,
Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery
dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops,
storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon
blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree
vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook-
lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind,
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo,
who sank all night in submarine light of Bickford's
floated out and sat through the stale beer after
noon in desolate Fugazzi's, listening to the crack
of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to
pad to bar to Bellevue to museum to the Brook-
lyn Bridge,
lost battalion of platonic conversationalists jumping
down the stoops off fire escapes off windowsills
off Empire State out of the moon,
yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts
and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks
and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days
and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for the
Synagogue cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Zen New Jersey leaving a
trail of ambiguous picture postcards of Atlantic
City Hall,
suffering Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-grind-
ings and migraines of China under junk-with-
drawal in Newark's bleak furnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the
railroad yard wondering where to go, and went,
leaving no broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in boxcars boxcars boxcars racketing
through snow toward lonesome farms in grand-
father night,
who studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telep-
athy and bop kabbalah because the cosmos in-
stinctively vibrated at their feet in Kansas,
who loned it through the streets of Idaho seeking vis-
ionary indian angels who were visionary indian
angels,
who thought they were only mad when Baltimore
gleamed in supernatural ecstasy,
who jumped in limousines with the Chinaman of Okla-
homa on the impulse of winter midnight street
light smalltown rain,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Houston
seeking jazz or sex or soup, and followed the
brilliant Spaniard to converse about America
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and so took ship
to Africa,
who disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico leaving
behind nothing but the shadow of dungarees
and the lava and ash of poetry scattered in fire
place Chicago,
who reappeared on the West Coast investigating the
F.B.I. in beards and shorts with big pacifist
eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incom-
prehensible leaflets,
who burned cigarette holes in their arms protesting
the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism,
who distributed Supercommunist pamphlets in Union
Square weeping and undressing while the sirens
of Los Alamos wailed them down, and wailed
down Wall, and the Staten Island ferry also
wailed,
who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked
and trembling before the machinery of other
skeletons,
who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight
in policecars for committing no crime but their
own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,
who howled on their knees in the subway and were
dragged off the roof waving genitals and manu-
scripts,
who let themselves be ****ed in the *** by saintly
motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,
who blew and were blown by those human seraphim,
the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean
love,
who balled in the morning in the evenings in rose
gardens and the grass of public parks and
cemeteries scattering their semen freely to
whomever come who may,
who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up
with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath
when the blond & naked angel came to pierce
them with a sword,
who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate
the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar
the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb
and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but
sit on her *** and snip the intellectual golden
threads of the craftsman's loom,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of
beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes a can-
dle and fell off the bed, and continued along
the floor and down the hall and ended fainting
on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and
come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,
who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling
in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning
but prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sun
rise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad
stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these
poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver--joy
to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls
in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses'
rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with
gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely pet-
ticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station
solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,
who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in
dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and
picked themselves up out of basements hung
over with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third
Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemploy-
ment offices,
who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on
the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the
East River to open to a room full of steamheat
and opium,
who created great suicidal dramas on the apartment
cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime
blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall
be crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested
the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of
Bowery,
who wept at the romance of the streets with their
pushcarts full of onions and bad music,
who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the
bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in
their lofts,
who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned
with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded
by orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty
incantations which in the yellow morning were
stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht
& tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable
kingdom,
who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for
an egg,
who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot
for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks
fell on their heads every day for the next decade,
who cut their wrists three times successively unsuccess-
fully, gave up and were forced to open antique
stores where they thought they were growing
old and cried,
who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits
on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse
& the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments
of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the
fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinis-
ter intelligent editors, or were run down by the
drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,
who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually hap-
pened and walked away unknown and forgotten
into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alley
ways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,
who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of
the subway window, jumped in the filthy Pas-
saic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street,
danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed
phonograph records of nostalgic European
1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and
threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans
in their ears and the blast of colossal steam
whistles,
who barreled down the highways of the past journeying
to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude
watch or Birmingham jazz incarnation,
who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out
if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had
a vision to find out Eternity,
who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who
came back to Denver & waited in vain, who
watched over Denver & brooded & loned in
Denver and finally went away to find out the
Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,
who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying
for each other's salvation and light and breasts,
until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,
who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for
impossible criminals with golden heads and the
charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet
blues to Alcatraz,
who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky
Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys
or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or
Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the
daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hyp
notism & were left with their insanity & their
hands & a hung jury,
who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturers on Dadaism
and subsequently presented themselves on the
granite steps of the madhouse with shaven heads
and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding in-
stantaneous lobotomy,
and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin
Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psycho-
therapy occupational therapy pingpong &
amnesia,
who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic
pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,
returning years later truly bald except for a wig of
blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible mad
man doom of the wards of the madtowns of the
East,
Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid
halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rock-
ing and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench
dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a night-
mare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the
moon,
with mother finally ******, and the last fantastic book
flung out of the tenement window, and the last
door closed at 4. A.M. and the last telephone
slammed at the wall in reply and the last fur-
nished room emptied down to the last piece of
mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted
on a wire hanger in the closet, and even that
imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of
hallucination--
ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and
now you're really in the total animal soup of
time--
and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed
with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use
of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrat-
ing plane,
who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space
through images juxtaposed, and trapped the
archangel of the soul between 2 visual images
and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun
and dash of consciousness together jumping
with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna
Deus
to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human
prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown,
yet putting down here what might be left to say
in time come after death,
and rose reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in
the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the
suffering of America's naked mind for love into
an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone
cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio
with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
years.

II

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years' animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!

III

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland
where you're madder than I am
I'm with you in Rockland
where you must feel very strange
I'm with you in Rockland
where you imitate the shade of my mother
I'm with you in Rockland
where you've murdered your twelve secretaries
I'm with you in Rockland
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I'm with you in Rockland
where we are great writers on the same dreadful
typewriter
I'm with you in Rockland
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I'm with you in Rockland
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I'm with you in Rockland
where you drink the tea of the breasts of the
spinsters of Utica
I'm with you in Rockland
where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the
harpies of the Bronx
I'm with you in Rockland
where you scream in a straightjacket that you're
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the
abyss
I'm with you in Rockland
where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul
is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I'm with you in Rockland
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I'm with you in Rockland
where you accuse your doctors of insanity and
plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the
fascist national Golgotha
I'm with you in Rockland
where you will split the heavens of Long Island
and resurrect your living human Jesus from the
superhuman tomb
I'm with you in Rockland
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I'm with you in Rockland
where we hug and kiss the United States under
our bedsheets the United States that coughs all
night and won't let us sleep
I'm with you in Rockland
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
here O victory forget your underwear we're
free
I'm with you in Rockland
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-
journey on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

San Francisco 1955-56

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets...erg/poems/8315

[bujhee kom]

Most powerful song EVER written about the American dream. (according to WBK.fm)

[bujhee kom]

Dosto Gopal, right place and right time bhai, awesome, bautiful and striking, powerful....Ginsberg BELONGS only in HERE. This is what I am talking about.

[bujhee kom]

[Zunaid]

PS: BK, Good to have you back!

I also raise you Joan Armatrading.

[bujhee kom]

Originally Posted by Zunaid
PS: BK, Good to have you back!

I also raise you Joan Armatrading.

Thank you my dearest uncle~ right on, Armatrading is to follow soon.

[Zeeshan]

Originally Posted by bujhee kom
Thank you my dearest uncle~ right on, Armatrading is to follow soon.

A blurb with each post would be nice bk bhai letting us know the theme so that we can explore more by ourselves.

[bujhee kom]

Originally Posted by Zeeshan
A blurb with each post would be nice bk bhai letting us know the theme so that we can explore more by ourselves.

Very good idea, you are right Gopal...by the way most of the songs here, almost all the songs posted here are politically inpired or inspiring, reflection of a mental state at a bottom of all human suffering, struggle and desperation to live a life as a human being.

Why Towns Van Zandt? Mr. Van Zandt wrote and spoke of human poverty and pain, not exactly an exact copy of the Afrikan American Delta Blues (Inshallah, I am going to open and in-depth Delta Blues Thread explainign, portraying the Afrikan-American experience and the Deep South's role in inventing the Americana called the blues musik) , but of course extremely heavily influenced and guided by the Blues movement/expecience. Van Zandt spoke vividly of substance abuse, cheap liqour and the loss of loved ones, he is one of the single most mainstream influencial White singer/song-writers who single-handedly sang, wrote and spoke for the Mexican immigrants and their state of mind and experience in the American desert in the American west. Van Zandt covered a lot on depression and suffering from depression and cheap alcohol, morphine, codine, cocane and heroin until the day he died at the age 52 day after the release from a Rehab. He was a proud American and he sang about the American South, but he also felt very close to Mexico, specifically the Eastern coast of Mexico.


Iris Dement is very political just like Towns Van Zandt. She is known for writing songs about memories (Like many other song-writers but still very differently), she is also from the South like Van Zandt and Dement studied musik in Nashville and had very structured Guiter based Country/Gospel musik education. Thus you see the heavy influence of Country in her songs, But she is always and will always be known as the most politically critical of the U.S. Foreign Policy, Anti-war, Folk Singer performer.

Emmylou Harris was extremely beautiful when she was young in the 60's as you can see, she has an amazingly rare voice....she did sing a lot of country musik, published a lot of country albums, but still she is also known to be a very strong Folk singer/voice in this domain.

[bujhee kom]

[bujhee kom]

The National Anthem for the American Leftist Movement. Main main theme song for the Wall Street Occupiers. Please bhais and apus, do not read the comments underneath if you do go to the Youtube site and start to follow around Iris Dement, she is EXTREMELY hated by the American Right-wingers.....Internet is an open passage/conduit/tunnel of garbage and it is very very hard to control....even here in BC, the admin/Mod bhais struggle here to keep rubbish from flood BC, a lot of it is freedom of speech and people's deep emotion and all, democracy/internet brings a a lot of garnage, but still it is good that everyone is getting a chance to speak their feelings and mind. My requests to you all is just don't read them, there are a lot of hatred in them and when we are very young, things effect us in a worse way sometimes, I think. So babd people will say bad things, just don't read them or ignore them.

[Zeeshan]

"Do not..."

You just made me click the link bhai. :p

[bujhee kom]

Kate Campbell is one of the most vocal and expressive, gifted, powerful singer/song-writer of the American Integration movement, Equality movement and the Afrikan-American experience in America. Ms. Campbell being white, and being being born in America's musically most influencial and richest of all places, New Orleans, had never forgot the 60's Civil Rights movement and Afrikan American suffering and thus constantly wrote of the civil rights effects, lack of, or the experience and the old south and new south all.Cambell speaks of Rev. King, the American Boxing Champ Joe Louis and many other revered or forgotten Afrikan American heros and she is highly motivated ansd influenced by the teachings of Rev. Martin Luther King.

[Zeeshan]

Hey BK bhai, you don't have to write the blurb if you don't want to. It was just a suggestion. (Didn't want to be imposing on you and impede your flow... )

[bujhee kom]

She talks heavily of Alabama, not just in this song alone, she is from one of those most rare breeds of 'Honest' singer/song-writers that America ever gave birth to. This song is A MUST LISTEN. Her songs, mind and open humane views made her unpopular among her own people, but she doesn't "give a sh!t" ...in her own words heheheh...

[bujhee kom]

Tequmseh Valley also sung by Towns Van Zandt and many others but here we have the great beautiful voice of Nanci Griffith who I once had a big crush on and had fantasized of being married to her.