Jesse and Phil, YouTube, Wikipedia & the Times

Catching up with Jesse Welles ...  

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 ran a thoughtful piece about his politics and support of freedom of speech, and his receiving the Spirit of Americana Free Speech in Music Award at the 2025 Americana Music Awards.

Meanwhile, after he received four Grammy nominations, National Public Radio summarized Welles' approach nicely: 

"... often short and satirical tunes, riding on his coarse voice and fingerpicked guitar strings, that respond to the major headlines of the week. They challenge the narratives presented to Americans by governments and corporations; they draw historical parallels and unearth underlying tensions that lead people to blame one another for institutional injustices."

Here's one more thoughtful article that "arrived after deadline," calling Jesse "A Populist for Progressives" .. 

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.

Wildwood Flowering in 2024

 I just saw a comment on the 1928 recording of Wildwood Flower by the Carter Family that set me off researching so much that I have to share the results here to justify the time I spent in "SecondHandSongs.com" "Discogs.com" and "YouTube.com" -- all amazing resources!

The commenter who got my attention said they always thought the song was from the 1960s. (It's actually from the 1860s, as someone pointed out in the same discussion.)

My (expanded) reply:

It definitely "came back" in the early 1960s!

The New Lost City Ramblers and Maybelle Carter did it at a Newport Folk Festival, Flatt & Scruggs did it at Carnegie Hall, the Stanley Brothers and a dozen others (even Duane Eddy's twangy electric guitar!) recorded it, and almost every high school and college student learning to play "folk guitar" struggled with Maybelle's "Carter scratch" bass-and-chord thumb-pick guitar style.

(Search YouTube for her 1961 Grand Ol' Opry live video with closeups.)

Some learned the tune with different lyrics -- Woody Guthrie's c.1942 song, "The Sinking of the Reuben James," about the first U.S. ship sunk in World War II. The song was brought back c. 1960 in thousands of concerts and coffee house singalongs by Pete Seeger, the Kingston Trio and more.

And then there was the pot-farming parody, "Wildwood Weed"... Even the NLCR did that one in concert, minus Maybelle! (But with a cute reference by Mike Seeger to his brother Pete.) Author credits for the parody apparently belong to Texas songwriter and radio host Don Bowman around 1964. Fascinating that YouTube has all of these versions.

I'll put a couple of YouTube videos here if the computer doesn't crash, then get on with my day...

1960s Folk: Greenwich Village, Harry Smith, Oscar Brand, and Joe Rubin

Compulsively wrote this on Facebook around 4 a.m. this morning, but thought I'd share it here too so that I can point non-Facebook friends to it.

Woke up in the middle of the night remembering the name of a song that eluded me at the jam session 10 hours earlier, so went looking for the song on YouTube -- and found this documentary about 20 years of a music-and-progressive-politics culture that was transmitted to me through the early-1960s record bins labelled "folk" and "blues" at the record shop a few blocks from my house... Joe Rubin, a white-haired gentleman I assumed was more into classical music and maybe jazz, ran the place and let me hang out in the back and play LPs that I couldn't afford. (While wondering if I ever thanked Mr. Rubin enough for putting so much music in my life, it just dawned on me that I may have first gone into his store to thank him -- for sponsoring a high school duckpin bowling team I was on!)

I read about the folks and songs on their LP liner notes, and in books by Alan Lomax, Carl Sandburg & Oscar Brand from the library, as well as the great booklet inside the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music record set, mentioned in the documentary as source material for many of the Greenwich Village folkies I admired... And I picked up an Oscar Brand folksong-guitar instruction book, a guitar, and a harmonica or two from an instrument store I'd walk by on my way home from school. (Nice clip of Oscar and the Simon Sisters in the film, along with so many others whose records were in those bins at Joe Rubin's record store.)

Before I went back to sleep I also found the song that I'd originally gone looking for, sometimes titled "Coffee Grows on Wild Oak Trees," and sometimes "Hello Susan Brown," including this recording, which was the first place I heard it about sixty years ago.

Remembering Josh White

Happy birthday to Josh White!
(February 11, 1914 – September 5, 1969)
I saw him on the old ABC Hootenanny TV show, and soon scraped together the price of a couple of his LPs. (Ones whose album covers weren't too risque to bring into the house; it was years before I got "Empty bed blues," and I don't think I ever let my mother see it.)
I also bought a 191-page Josh White Song Book to show my guitar teacher, who had started me on classical lessons because my first guitar had nylon strings. (Nylon was recommended by the Oscar Brand book I had started teaching myself out of a year earlier. I got a new guitar, with steel strings that Christmas after convincing my parents I was going to stick with it more than I had with the accordion a few years earlier. It was a long time before I could afford a Martin OO 21 like the one Josh played on his albums, but I got it eventually.)
Unfortunately, Josh's book wasn't a guitar instruction book. The $2.95 volume (pricey in 1963; my first Dylan songbook was $1.95) featured piano transcriptions of the songs, not his original guitar arrangements. 
I did learn something about music watching my teacher try to work things back to the guitar at my novice level. And I learned other things from the text by Robert Shelton, folk music critic at the New York Times (yes, that was a job then!), who provided song commentaries and a biography of Josh.
It wasn't as thorough as Elijah Wald's "Josh White, Society Blues" several decades later, but it made me feel like a folk blues insider... and, come to think of it, those song book introductory chapters were probably the only biography of a black person that I read in high school, two years before Alex Haley published "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings shared a link to a Spotify playlist with a birthday post today, inspiring my reminiscence..

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10157545963179815&id=10367554814

Rather than using Facebook to share a Spotify playlist, why doesn't Smithsonian Folkways just share a link to its own web page that sells a classic Josh White album, and lets you download its 14-page LP size booklet as a free PDF? I hope it's because Folkways makes some money from Spotify. Curiously, when I tried to post that question to the Smithsonian account on Facebook, Facebook marked my comment as spam! That reminded me to put my thoughts out here on the more open web, not just in Facebook's controlled space.

https://folkways.si.edu/josh-white/free-and-equal-blues/american-folk/music/album/smithsonian

Linking around a Web of ragged memories

As a pre-college-graduation present to myself many years ago, I bought a guitar from a guy who bought it from another guy, named Dave Lindorff... whom I have just stumbled upon, thanks to a Web link to some of his journalistic work. And one link does tend to lead to another.

I'm not sure I ever heard Dave play -- although I did learn a tune or two from his brother Gary. And I don't think I knew that Dave and I both chose journalism as a career some 40 years ago.

Strangely, though, one of the first songs I played on that old red sunburst Epiphone Frontier, with its pickguard decorated in cactus flowers and lariat loops, was "Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag," which Dave apparently updated a few years ago and still has on his MySpace page, playing roughly the same guitar part... which I guess we all learned from some combination of Country Joe, Jim Kweskin and Dave Van Ronk.

I still use the same guitar lick, which works on a medley I start with "Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate" -- not as politically meaningful, but timeless in its own way.

Mr. Lindorff, however, is now down in my record book as the only person I know of to attempt "City of New Orleans" on the Appalachian autoharp.

(As for the Epiphone, I traded it years ago for a Martin with a fatter fingerboard, but I saw one just like it at Gruhn Guitars last month and was momentarily tempted...)

Journalism as a pro-am lifestyle... sometimes with music

A UK university offers an MA in Social Media, asking & answering: "Is the MA in Social Media for me? If you are a media or cultural studies graduate, have experience in the web, PR, or marketing industries, and want an opportunity to explore the emerging area of social media through scholarly research or practice, then: yes."

Picking up threads from my recent Twitter obsession... Coincidentally, blogger MarketingProfs offers: "Everything I Need to Know About Twitter I Learned in J School" http://bit.ly/2lEzsm

And NYTimes.com blogs out its requests for local neighborhood citizen reporters to go to meetings: http://bit.ly/dxrW8

... with a Twitter boost from blogger & J-school prof Jeff Jarvis:
"NYT to public: 'Be the journalists.' The Local assigns the locals. http://bit.ly/11GNEB "

Maybe J-schools need a new slogan: "It's not a career; it's a lifestyle"?

And one you can combine with your other talents -- in this case, not the usual underground press, but something I considered when I lived in Boston.

At the time, I even had a line or two from this song in mind... "newspapermen meet the most interesting people..." along with this picture from one of my favorite LP jackets.

New slogan for banjo heads -- or laptop lids? -- "This machine surrounds unemployment and forces it to surrender."