Jesse and Phil, YouTube, Wikipedia & the Times

Catching up...  

I don't do Instagram or TikTok, so I'd been listening to Jesse Welles' songs on YouTube, Facebook and Bandcamp for some months before he made his way to the Stephen Colbert Late Show in November 2025... 

He sang one song at the end of the program, "Join ICE," and another on the show's YouTube channel, "RED," for which he put on a red shirt to accompany his red Ovation guitar and the red-white-and-blue flags that served as a backdrop for both songs. I wonder how many Colbert viewers first saw Welles sing RED in a video from September's Farm Aid concert. 

As someone whose earliest political education came from Phil Ochs (even via the Chad Mitchell Trio!), Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips and other topical folksingers in the 1960s and '70s, I'm finding Jesse Welles' following on social media -- and his songs -- both encouraging and a nostalgic reminder that singers can make important statements and get people listening, and a few "stars" even keep going to a healthy old age... 

Heck, a couple of weeks before the Colbert show he sang both his song "No More Kings" and Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" with Joan Baez at The Fillmore in San Francisco on Nov. 4, all uploaded to Facebook by fans in the audience.  

(Also preserved: Jesse leading a sing-along of John Fogerty's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain," with 84-year-old Joan dancing joyfully stage and giving Welles a kiss on the cheek at the end. "The torch has been passed," one of the comments says.) 

(Here's a link to "Red" from the Colbert show, since I'm having trouble embedding a third YouTube video  on this blog page. Maybe it's time to re-learning how to use the Blogger editing system on my MacBook instead of using the Blogger app on my Android phone.) 

The other song I've been thinking about enough to go searching for on YouTube and elsewhere is Phil Ochs' warning to performers, "Don't Play the Chords of Fame," as recorded by Phil himself -- once with John Lennon, and by Melanie Safka at Phil's memorial concert in 1976, which I stumbled on online, then wound up spending a nice afternoon listening, remembering, and reading Phil's detailed biography at Wikipedia, among other things. 

I'm wishing Jesse Welles the best as he packs for already sold-out European and Australian tour dates over the next two months. I considered rushing to get tickets for his February shows in Asheville and Knoxville, but the ticket prices and three-hour drives discouraged me, and now a week later they're sold-out and wait-listed. 

I can't help noticing on his Wikipedia biography that (unlike Baez, Dylan or Ochs) his "overnight success" these past two years came when he was already over 30, although his fans on Facebook and YouTube frequently comment about "this kid," which makes me think they are closer to my age than his, closer to the generation whose young 1960s activists used to say we should "never trust anyone over 30." Fans sang him happy birthday last week at concerts in New York, so I suspect they all know he was born Nov. 22, 1992, according to Wikipedia.  

I'm not much of a late-night TV watcher, but Welles apparently made it from his social media presence to the Jimmy Kimmel show last spring. Back in July, someone started a YouTube archive channel for clips going back into the earlier years of Welles' career, separate from the channel where I've been following his more recent incarnation.

As a New Yorker subscriber, I'm still waiting for one of their legendary "profiles" on this guy from Arkansas, but a search of the magazine website found the New Yorker writers already quoting his songs when taking America's cultural temperature -- probably starting a year ago in a piece about the shooting of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, which Welles had written about.

 "The standout among the neo-murder balladeers is the topical folk singer Jesse Welles, whose delivery and persona takes John Prine’s craggy empathy and adds a tincture of Brian Jones’s sinister charisma. His “United Health” dispenses with Thompson’s death in record time (“The ingredients you got bake the cake that you get”) and manages a potted history of the titular company inside a single verse (“Way back in seventy and seven / Mister Richard T. Burke started buyin’ H.M.O.s. . .”). It also neatly encapsulates the economic logic of for-profit insurance: “There’s an office in a building and a person in a chair / And you paid for it all though you may be unaware / You paid for the paper, you paid for the phone / You paid for everything they need to deny you what you’re owed.”

 ... and again in an article titled "Should College Get Harder," back in September.

 “There’s a mutually agreed upon mediocrity between the students and the teachers and administrative faculty,” the folk singer Jesse Welles explains, in his song “College.” “You pretend to try, they’ll pretend you earned the grade.” If you want to be a doctor or an engineer, Welles sings, college might be worth it; otherwise, you might “skip the Adderall prescription,” and acquire “a YouTube subscription.”

I remember seeing that Rolling Stone had a December 2024 article, but my subscription lapsed over 30 years ago, so I just read the opening and went back to YouTube videos, via a Medium post about a public radio interview.

Manhattanites got to see Welles in person last February or, if they missed that tour, to read about him in The New York Times (Feb.12, 2024; free link):

"Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and a sandpapery voice, has risen to recent prominence posting videos to social media of himself alone in the woods near his home in northwest Arkansas, performing wryly funny, politically engaged folk songs. He’s managed to turn subjects like the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms."

Personally, rather than join the crowds when he gets back to the U.S.A. for two months of already sold-out shows, I stopped by Bandcamp to buy a record and liked the note posted there that all sales proceeds to the end of the year are going to charity. Now I'm waiting for a songbook... or at least good discussion of a fan's comments that he must be using artificial intelligence to crank out so many good lyrics, which I certainly haven't finished reading online.

Wrapping up, here is a link to an article from last March about his approach to the music business, from all those videos he was posting to the album he released of audio from them.. more than 60 songs at once! The same publication, Saving Country Music, also named him its songwriter of the year for 2024.

And, finally, I just noticed which of Welles' many videos has the most views on YouTube... and, surprise, it's not something he wrote -- and it's not a solo. At 3,259,494 views and rising*, it's an Oct. 31, 2024, backporch (or front porch?) video of John Fogerty's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?" -- sung by Jesse in the foreground, but swapping verses with Matt Quinn of the band Mt. Joy up on the porch. Quinn has also performed with Welles on stage. (Maybe some of those clicks are from other guitar players trying to figure out Quinn's guitar tuning, which appears to be a fourth low, baritone-style. I've got one of those myself.)

Notes:

Nov. 26 update -- *-the YouTube play statistic on that last clip rose by more than 100 people in the five minutes it took me to add it to this blogpost. Somebody else must be linking to it! 

Apologies for the erratic appearance of this page... I've added links at various times using Blogger on a MacBook and with Blogger's Android app -- which caused the YouTube videos to disappear. I'm pretty rusty at this stuff.

Meanwhile, thanks to one viewer for asking if there was a way to subscribe to this blog -- something I haven't investigated adding since changing it from an academic tool to a post-retirement personal bookmark list and diary of my musical interests. If I write in it more often, maybe I'll risk trying to update its layout and incorporate an RSS feed or email subscription widget.

Singing out '66

Let's Sing Out! 1966

I shared this on Facebook this morning adding lots of links to Pages for some of the people mentioned , and leaving questions about how long the program "Let's Sing Out!" was broadcast back in the day...

I love it when serendipity brings this particular episode of Oscar Brand 's singalong folk music program from 1966 Canada to the top of my YouTube feed. It includes Maria D'Amato and Geoff Muldaur in great Jim Kweskin Jug Band numbers... the "folk revival" romance that changed her name to Maria Muldaur before her solo career started.

It's also fascinating to hear host Oscar Brand and his Canadian studio audience sing an abolitionist American Civil War song that probably has never been sung with those verses on American television... and there's more beautiful singing by Len Chandler and Bonnie Dobson, shown in the still frame that Facebook should be placing with this text has a link to the video.

I'm pretty sure that by my freshman or sophomore year in college I had records by all of these performers, but never got to see *any* of them in person or on American TV. :-( 

(I caught up with a few of them at folk festivals or concerts eventually -- worth the wait, even 10 to 40 years later.)

For a bonus, hold on to the end of the recording to hear Len Chandler's tribute to topical songwriting, "If telling where it's at is out, I don't want to be in," written (with a beat) when commercial folk rock was distracting the audience from the Vietnam War and Civil Rights protests. Reminds me of what Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer,  Tom Paxton and more are doing to bring back topical songwriting today. Maybe they could even update Len's song?!

Footnote: Jeannie Brand-Derienzo, Oscar's daughter, wrote back to say the series was broadcast from 1963-67.  I noticed that Wikipedia has a Let's Sing Out! page, which says the show began on the CTV Television Network from 1963 to 1966, then moved to CBC Television until 1968, but there was no full list of performers. But that led me to a Canadian TV history website for more details: The weekly Friday night show was begun by producer Syd Banks on the commercial CTV network, moved to other nights in later seasons, and in an unusual move, the national "public broadcasting" network CBC picked it up in 1967 and also offered reruns in summer 1968.

Unfortunately the broadcasting-history.ca site also has no comprehensive list of performers. However, searching the site for Oscar Brand lists eight series that he had some part in, including a cutely named Sunday evening "Brand New Scene," produced by the same Syd Banks for CTV when his Let's Sing Out! moved to CBC. Banks also produced a Tuesday night "A-Singin'", but both of those shows which only lasted a season.  Skimming the YouTube posts, I've seen at least fragments of "Let's Sing Out!" with  performances by Joni Mitchell, Jimmy Driftwood, Dave Van Ronk, Simon & Garfunkel, the Simon Sisters, the Chapin Brothers, and more. Several of Joni (Anderson) Mitchell's appearances have been clipped and uploaded to YouTube, sometimes with only glimpses of other performers, like Patrick Sky and the Chapins. Here's are a couple of examples...

If there are full-length recordings of those dozens of Canadian broadcasts, they should have their own cable channel or a box of DVDs for sale today! But even having a few clips out there where folks can see it now is a joy! Come to think of it, if the ABC Hootenanny format of college campus concerts by folk-revival performers inspired "Let's Sing Out!", I count that as a positive contribution the often-maligned ABC Hootenanny show made to the universe, along with bringing the Chad Mitchell Trio, Josh White and Judy Collins, and a positive image of college campus life, to my home TV screen when I was still in high school. ❤️  

I do wish Hootenanny had welcomed Pete Seeger and more of the traditional singers he had on his less widely heard "Rainbow Quest" TV show. Today, I'm happy to see Rainbow Quest has made it to YouTube too -- almost 37 hours worth, with Pete joined by old-time, bluegrass, blues, Irish and topical singers!

Could I be an old time fiddler?

Hmm... I wonder how many official over age 62 "old timers" are going to show up for this event I just read about today?

 I wonder if I can learn to play the fiddle in 30 days? I got my first fiddle at age 70 and did take a few lessons about 6 years ago, even though I decided an injury to my right hand made it too awkward to hold the bow, but I do still have a fiddle.

If only they had started the old-timer category at 75, I might even have a chance, but I don't know about competing about all those talented, full of get up and go 60-somethings who have been playing  since childhood.

Vestibules? Yes, vestibules

"What's on my mind?" a certain social media app asked me this morning. Honestly, for some reason, what was on my mind was the word vestibule, particularly vestibules as places worth mentioning in popular song.

When Helen Kane boop-boop-a-dooped her way toward musical stardom by singing the song "That's My Weakness Now" in 1928, she did not mention a vestibule. When Cliff Edwards, aka Ukulele Ike, recorded it a few months later, he did. And there was something in the tone of his voice that suggested more things went on in vestibules than I was aware of.

There were 14 other 1928 recordings of that song and I haven't listened to them all to tabulate the vestibule references.

Helen Kane wasn't the first to record it. Among the others were Paul Whiteman's band with the Rhythm Boys, including a young Bing Crosby. The database doesn't list any other women singing it, though. Is it wrong? 

This also made me want to go find the original sheet music to see what original verses Helen might have left out to do her boop-booping, including with the vestibule reference -- if it was in the original publication. 

I guess I'm not really tempted to write a musicology master's thesis on the significance of the vestibule in popular song lyrics, if someone else hasn't done it already, or doesn't see this post and beat me to it. 

But, honestly, from Sam Stept & Bud Green to Chuck Berry to Bruce Springsteen, They Might Be Giants, and Wu-Tang Clan, they've all been to the vestibule for inspiration. You could look it up! My favorite discovery was a John Prine song I had never heard! 

Kane's version, says CatsPyjamas1 at youtube, <<Charted at #5 in 1928. Helen's first record release. Also #17 for Russ Morgan in 1949. With the Nat Shilkret Orchestra. Also recorded by Cliff Edwards in 1928. Written by Sam H. Stept and Bud Green. Recorded July 16, 1928. B-side is "Get Out and Get Under the Moon".>>

If you haven't guessed by now, this post is an attempt to salvage all the impulsive research that I did on Facebook this morning and post it out here where folks on the free and equal web can see it. It will probably take me a couple of visits to add all the links and lyrics here, because I started this with several apps on my smartphone and my eyes are getting tired. 

I sure found out a lot about vestibules in popular song. But I'll have to edit this on my laptop to add some YouTube videos!

End of the first draft at 12:39 on Friday the 13th of June 2025, with some updating a dozen days later.

Another Tiple player from the 1920s!

 I thought I'd written about Frank Crumit before, as a prominent vocalist and ukulele player a century ago... but it looks the site "OldTimeBlues" beat me to it, so here's what they have to say, with a picture of Crumit holding a tiple, and two recordings of his singing with other instruments.

Another YouTube user has built a 30-song Frank Crumit playlist, so I'll be listening to his great old-time songs -- and for the jangly sound of the tiple! (What's a tiple?)

I think "Ukulele Lady" was the first Crumit classic I ever heard... and I think my mother sang "What Kind of Noise..." On both, it sounds like Frank and accompanists used uke, maybe a mandolin-family instrument, and other backing instruments, but I don't hear a tiple... and the image with the second video looks to be another member of the ukulele family, an eight-string "taropatch."

1960s, Dylan, folk music & me ...

I haven't even seen the A Complete Unknown Dylan-goes-electric movie yet, but Facebook discussions around it and conversations online with 1960s music scene survivors have really sent me down a week-long memory search and musical rabbit hole. (Come to think of it, I'm much more successful at being a complete unknown than he is.) 

For one of those Facebook conversations, I assembled this musical still-life photograph, which brought back more memories, eventually hypertext-assisted into this blog post. But I started out slow, drawn back into playing old songs from those books for the living room furniture. For instance, I couldn't believe that the 1963 M. Witmark and Sons portfolio of songs from Dylan's second album (purchased new, when $1.95 was a non-trivial sum for a high school kid) came with piano arrangements, with little chord diagrams for guitar players. I also have the similar volume for his third album.

 Guitarists reading this will be charmed to learn that book gave the guitar chords for playing "Blowin' in the Wind" in the key of Eb -- without suggesting use of a capo. "Girl of the North Country" was in Ab. (I still have never mastered the Db chord fingering it suggested, although the Eb 7th fingering has come in handy, pushed up a half step.) In any case, these were not keys I could play or sing in, so the book was a fine education in chord transposition. 

However, "With God on Our Side" was presented in the key of C, where Dylan played it, and I see pencil notes indicating that 16-year-old me was already figuring out the harmonica solo! Unfortunately, or fortunately, my voice couldn't hit the high notes in that one, which may be why I backed off on the idea of singing it in a 1964 "hootenanny" at my high school. Or maybe I was just chicken. It was a Catholic high school, better at teaching grammar than progressive politics, although mimeo copies of "The John Birch Society" were circulating thanks to one teacher, making me a Chad Mitchell Trio fan. 

I did sing San Francisco Bay Blues in that hootenanny, with the guitar and the harmonica, and some classmate introduced me saying I sounded "something like Bob Dylan, but that's not a bad thing." Actually, I learned the Jesse Fuller song from a transcription of a Ramblin' Jack Elliott performance, not from Dylan, and I don't think the emcee had never heard me sing or play; I think he was just judging by the hardware around my neck.

Thanks to Jeannie Brand-Derienzo, another Facebook friend, for sending me that mint copy of her dad Oscar Brand's instruction book, which was where I started learning to play the guitar. I think I traded away my original copy, and my first guitar, for my first banjo -- while I was still in high school. I still have an LP of Oscar singing historical satirical songs like, "A dollar ain't a dollar anymore" and "The Dodger Song," which still seem quite timely. (Feel free to join in while you read the rest of this. The lyrics are on those two links, one an Aaron Copland arrangement, but I prefer Oscar's singing below.) I also have several of Oscar's books and song collections.

I never did get to meet Oscar Brand, or even see him in person, but his books, records and broadcasting career were a huge part of my 1960s folk music education -- and I appreciate his work even more recently, thanks to YouTube's sharing of clips from his Canadian television show, "Let's Sing Out," with guests including musical heroes of mine who I never saw on American TV, including Dave Van Ronk, Joni Mitchell and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band. Oscar's WNYC  radio show "Folk Song Festival" is online in bits and pieces too, including clips from his 1961 interview with a very young Bob Dylan, making up stories about his past.
But over the years coffee houses (The Exit in New Haven, the Sounding Board in Hartford), plus bars, clubs and concerts did give me a chance to hear -- and even meet -- some of those musical heroes in person. And get on stage myself. At Pinewoods, along with the banjo lessons with Paul Brown, I took classes with the great Irish sean nos singer Joe Heaney, Janette Carter (founder of the Carter Family Fold here in Virginia), west coast oldtime music encyclopedia Hank Bradley,  singer and dance caller & teacher Sandy Bradley from Seattle, the Horse Flies from Ithaca, and more. Some of those other Pinewoods faces have reappeared in other states and other decades, including a hammered dulcimer player I met at a Blacksburg jam session who figured out we had been "campers" at Pinewoods that same week some 35 years earlier. 

That banjo had hung on the wall for a dozen years before I took learning it seriously, first from books by Pete Seeger and Peggy Seeger, then some recorded lessons by the late Happy Traum, whose Homespun Tapes banjo course I won in a photo contest at Pickin' magazine. My entry was a picture of Connecticut fiddler Will Welling at a New England Fiddle Contest in Hartford. Will gave me a copy of his tune book in return for a copy of the picture, and I had it in my guitar case when I went to Pinewoods, which was also where I acquired my first mandolin and started to pick tunes out of that book over the coming weeks -- and years.

But guitar with Hank Bradley and banjo with Paul Brown were my official instrumental classes at Pinewoods in 1978 or '79. Paul played more fiddle in the next class I took with him, with Terri McMurray playing banjo and banjo-uke, and both of them sharing wonderful stories about the old-time musicians they had learned from in the '60s and '70s. That class was in 2015 at the Augusta Heritage Workshops in Elkins, West Virginia. (Paul and I had a lot of catching up to do come including two journalism careers, his with NPR, mine with newspapers and magazines. And now he's writing his own thoughtful newsletter about public affairs, while I dither around on Facebook and three intermittent blogs.)

I emphasized Paul in the Facebook post this longer essay is partly copied and pasted from, because he and I have a lot of mutual Facebook friends. And his banjo class really was great, but the two-week stay at Pinewoods also included folksong classes with older singers I admired, my first Appalachian clogging class with Bob Dalsemar (teacher) and Ruth Pershing (teacher, caller, and dance ethnograper), and meeting lots of new friends and dance partner. 

Dance partners, especially. Come to think of it, "You'll love it; it's like Club Med in the woods," was a friend's motivating line that probably has never appeared in the Country Dance and Song Society brochures. CDSS was and is a great dance and music community, and I did try commuting from Hartford to New York on Amtrak for most of a year to keep a romance going with someone I met at Pinewoods. But the music pulled me in another direction -- grad school in anthropology and ethnomusicology at Wesleyan, which I started at the rate of a course a semester, my tuition paid by the newspaper where I worked -- whose generous fringe benefits probably helped keep away unions for 200+ years. 

After a couple years of part-time study at Wesleyan, I'd been at the Hartford Courant for 11 years, and was able to "retire" the year the paper was sold to a chain. I cashed in my employee stock so that I could finish off my studies full-time, including a 10-week research summer in County Mayo, Ireland, meeting great folks like John Hoban. To learn some jigs and reels, and accompany John Prine songs in the pub, I carried along that mandolin I'd bought at Pinewoods from a great guitar player named John Pearse. It was an old Martin with a broken side he had repaired while working for the Martin guitar company. He left to found his own company, making guitar strings among other things until his death in 2008. I still use the strings with his picture on the package. Greg Ryan, from New York, was my mandolin teacher in Ireland, picking up where I'd left off with classmate Jim Cowdery at Wesleyan. I kept that mandolin for 40 years before selling it to a friend who still plays it on stage and at jam sessions here in Southwestern Virginia. 

Unlike Dylan, I did not take to songwriting or get very good at singing or entertaining audiences, or ever get to play on stage at the Newport Folk Festival.  But, ironically, after I stumbled back into journalism, I did wind up on stage at Newport once, in the early 1990s. I was there taking pictures of my favorite harmony-singing trio, The Roches (shown earlier). I was trying to find a photo angle that would put enough pretty sailboats in the background to convince the editor of Soundings, a boating magazine, to put the picture on the cover, along with my article about "boats and music." Her reply, "Nope, boats have to be in the foreground on the cover." 

But the article and a few pictures did run inside the magazine, and living around the corner from Soundings in Essex, Conn., also put me around the corner from the Griswold Inn, which briefly landed me and that old mandolin in a sea chantey singing group (Cliff Haslam & the Jovial Crew). We even played the Mystic Sea Music Festival once, around 1992, before I went off to grad school again, at UNC in Chapel Hill... which in a roundabout way brought me here to Southwestern Virginia, retired from teaching journalism, and playing old time music at jam sessions and dances. (Maybe this is the summer I'll get to the Mystic festival's successor, the Connecticut Sea Music Festival, with its roots in Cliff Haslam's Griswold Inn sessions. Alas, it's usually the same weekend as the Mount Airy Fiddler's Convention in North Carolina, which has become an annual ritual for me too.)

No wonder my house and brain are so cluttered with instruments and the musical memories sampled in that photograph. By the way, only the Burl Ives book and the 1930s Kay mandolin in that picture were acquired "second-hand," but it is all secondhand music, full of memories and history, and that's what I like about it.

It's not entirely relevant to this musical discussion, but (also in a roundabout way) my 1978-83 master's degree in ethnomusicology led to a 1988 master's about hypertext, which is why there are 30 or more links here to Web pages, YouTube videos and podcasts. A late-in-life diagnosis of ADHD may have more than a little to do with it too, and I hope some readers find them as  enjoyably distracting as I did. Onward...