Skip to main content

Friday Nite Videos -- May 15, 2015

Portside
BB King - 'The Thrill Is Gone'. BB King 'Swaps Some Blues' With a Prison Audience. Southern Rites (HBO Documentary). Jeb Bush’s ‘Weird’ Iraq Answers. Bernie Sanders: "Call Me a Democratic Socialist"!

BB King - 'The Thrill Is Gone'

BB King (1993), a world-reknowned musician and blues ambassador, performing his biggest hit at the Montreux, Switzerland, jazz festival.

B. B. King, Defining Bluesman

Tim Weiner The New York Times
“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me.” Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

Remembering Guy Carawan: The Man Who Popularized ‘We Shall Overcome’

Peter Dreier The Nation
Guy Carawan's music became the unofficial anthems of the Civil Rights movement. For over 50 years, Guy was the music director of Highlander Center, an inter-racial training center for labor, civil rights, and environmental activists, located in rural Tennessee. Guy graduated in 1949 from Occidental College, where he majored in math, played on the basketball team, and was a member of ATO fraternity - an unusual background for someone who would become a civil rights icon!

Friday Nite Videos -- May 8, 2015

Portside
Key & Peele - Negrotown. 2016 Could Dramatically Alter Social Security. Tracy Chapman - Stand By Me. What Energy Democracy Looks Like. Bill Withers: Grandma's Hands (Live at Carnegie Hall).

Friday Nite Videos -- May 1, 2015 (Five for May Day)

Portside
Whose country is this anyhow? Whose world is it going to be? Those are questions that May Day, the international workers' holiday, has always asked. Listen to these five songs of labor and struggle, from brand new to nearly a century old, and take pleasure and inspiration from how they point to answers.

Rihanna -- American Oxygen

What breathes life into the American Dream, what's creating the 'New America,' this song boldly claims in word and image, is the country's diverse people and their struggles. 

Dolly Parton -- 9 to 5

Dolly Parton's super lyrics and voice, with quick clips of Dolly, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda from the movie 9 to 5. All sentiments still relevant.

Subscribe to Music