Before Bob Dylan was Bob Dylan, he was a disciple of Woody Guthrie. But Guthrie and his contemporaries were more than folk singers — they were blacklisted radicals, shaping American music while staring down the Red Scare.
The film, A Complete Unknown, accurately portrays Dylan's two sides—a brilliant creative genius as a songwriter/poet and a narcissist who used and discarded people on behalf of his ambition. It tells a good story, but certainly not all the stories.
Advice for defeating the authoritarian threat
Today, this classic folk song is usually sung as a popular pro-America anthem by Americans of every background. But it was written to have a radical edge that hollered for the country to make its bounty available to rich and poor alike.
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The story of the 1948 plane crash that took the lives of 32 passengers told by Woody Guthrie's poem Deportee, performed with guttural vocals, hard-edged, stripped down, foot-stomping acoustic instrumentation
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Hey, Louisiana. How about mandating these biblical verses at school assemblies?
The Woody Guthrie Museum has done a public service spotlighting Ochs’s career. Phil Ochs’s biting commentaries remain resonant in an era where the U.S. government provokes wars overseas and sends young men to fight and die on dubious grounds.
The world needs millions to join in this fight, this fight back! In the United States, there have been models enough of genuine patriots. There is a need for U.S. patriots who are at the same time “world patriots.”
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