Folksongs and singers in the news

A folksong-savvy friend in Boston alerted me to this month's stories about William Zantzinger, just as I was about to talk about oral traditions in news reporting in my Media History class. Here's the link he provided and a few more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/us/10zantzinger.html

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/01/26/090126ta_talk_simon



http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/slant/2004/11/10_200.html

http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/ochs/hattie-carroll.html

http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/lonesome-death-hattie-carroll

http://www.peteseeger.net/Brdside1.htm

Since my search brought me to Pete Seeger's site for an old issue of Broadside, the 1960s folksong magazine, I can't avoid pointing out Pete's most recent performance.

YouTube had taken one copy of a video of that song offline, so I went looking for alternatives. This one is still there via video.aol.com, but not high quality. Is that from an international station's copy of the HBO footage? Does HBO have a free "official" copy? Is this "not currently available" notice all there is?

Aha... found it. There are some official clips posted on YouTube by "Inauguration," and Pete and Bruce are there with "This Land is Your Land" (followed by Beyonce doing "America the Beautiful") in the final ten minutes of this two-hour coverage: We Are One: Opening Inaugural Ceremonies at the Lincoln Memorial.



But I've come in late on this controversy. We may have to come back to this for discussion of private property and copyright law... or maybe that's a whole other course. Come to think of it, maybe that Dylan video is a copyright violation that YouTube will be "taking down" sometime.