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…
Tag: video
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…
“What Have We Done?” (“Senzeni Na?”)
This week on GlobeSongs, a South African traditional funeral song that played an important role in the anti-apartheid movement and is of continued relevance to the Black Lives Matter movement today.
Discovering “Dona, Dona”
This week I’ve been busy researching the folk song “Dona, Dona” and learning the first verse and chorus in the original Yiddish. Did you know that it is not a traditional Yiddish folk song, but rather, was written for a Yiddish theatrical production in the 1930s? Learn more on the latest episode of GlobeSongs:
New Series: GlobeSongs
Hey y’all (as they say around these parts), I’m starting a new YouTube series called GlobeSongs, and have just uploaded the first video. Each episode, I will sing a different folk song from around the world and give it context, considering themes of culture, language, and geography. First up is the Scottish/Irish folk song, “Wild…
“Enough Stuff” Music Video
My daughter and I revisited the song “Enough Stuff” from my 2013 Who Are My People? album to try out more video editing and as an early celebration of Earth Day. I wrote the song in 2011 while serving as a Peace Corps Response volunteer in Benin, West Africa, and it was originally entitled “Waste”…
Jesse
I was captivated by the Janis Ian song “Jesse” recently and inspired to make a recording and video. The theme seems especially fitting during these pandemic times when so many are pining and isolated. Thanks to my daughter for the camera help!
Practicing Awareness
The past few days I have been thinking back to a radio piece I produced in 2006, a documentary called “Practicing Awareness” that was, on the surface, about the Japanese bamboo flute known as the shakuhachi, but was really about learning how to be in the world. The lesson that has been coming back to…