Taking a break from GlobeSongs to bring you a holiday tune: “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” which was written by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane in 1943. I started teaching myself piano during COVID, and this is my first time accompanying myself on the keyboard rather than guitar. Wishing you joyous and cozy holidays…
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Algerian storytelling song “Raoui”
Episode 12 of GlobeSongs explores Algerian Berber singer-songwriter Souad Massi’s song “Raoui,” (راوي) or “Storyteller.” Watch to find out the background of this lovely tune and the origin of the word “ghoul.”
Russian folk song “Grushitsa”
Discover the lovely Russian folk song “Grushitsa,” or “Little Pear Tree,” on this week’s episode of GlobeSongs, and see for yourself where it might fit into a categorization of Russian ethnic music as authentic folk music, folkloric music, and “fakeloric” performance.
Muslims as Heroes in the Epic Turkish Series Ertuğrul
I recently got caught up in the Turkish television series Diriliş: Ertuğrul, translated as Resurrection: Ertuğrul. So caught up, that this usual non-watcher just finished season one, which has 76(!) ~40-minute episodes (broken down from its original, 26 episodes for shorter-attention-span Americans). I didn’t know anything about the series when I started it; I was…
Fun via Funicular in Funiculì, Funiculà
A fun Italian (Neapolitan) song on this week’s episode of GlobeSongs. “Funiculì, Funiculà” was written to celebrate the opening of the cable railway (funicular) up Mt. Vesuvius, and won first prize at the 1880 Piedigrotta Festival. It has since become nearly cliché as an Italian song, even though it was written not in standard Italian,…
GlobeSong 9 from Azerbaijan
Now up, the ninth episode of my GlobeSongs YouTube series, featuring the Azerbaijani song “Qal, Sene Qurban” (“Stay, You for Whom I Would Sacrifice”). This is a song that I learned and started performing during my Peace Corps service in Azerbaijan, and it appears on my 2013 album Who Are My People?. If you’d like…
Wilderness Solo II
The last time I slept alone, overnight, in the woods, was in September 2001, on an Outward Bound course that happened to also be in the Asheville area, during the week of the September 11th attacks. With my daughter at camp, I just did it again, and it felt significant to realize that that first…
À la Claire Fontaine
Discover this lovely French folk song (translation: “By the Clear Fountain”) and its variations in Canada and the Caribbean in this week’s episode of GlobeSongs, and decide for yourself whether this song may be connected to the Beatles’ “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”
Víctor Jara’s “Te Recuerdo Amanda”
New on GlobeSongs this week is the lovely Chilean folk song “Te Recuerdo Amanda,” by Víctor Jara, which I first heard while studying abroad in Santiago, Chile in 2002. Did you know that former military dictator Augusto Pinochet, in whose 1973 coup Jara and many others were murdered, was at that time living as a…
Mama Don’t Allow
The newest episode in my YouTube series GlobeSongs is on the American traditional song, “Mama Don’t Allow,” which was originally played by Black musicians in jug bands in the early 1900s and has been performed in a wide variety of styles over the years including bluegrass, jazz, and blues. My daughter joins me for our…