The 2018 Newport Folk Festival is in the books. There were numerous highlights – new discoveries along with some revered favorites. While there, I spoke with a several artists backstage to get their thoughts on playing the iconic festival. All […]
Jean and Pete Partial content originally appeared in FolkWorks (www.folkworks.org) Remembering a great collaboration, I write “Liner Notes” this month remembering Pete Seeger and Jean Ritchie in friendship of song. First Meeting Pete states: “I was backstage at […]
Almost 60 years after the first Newport Folk Festival, we’re still struggling to define folk music. Well, maybe more accurately, we’re still trying to determine if there are any boundaries to folk music and trying to determine how porous those […]
A new book on the history of the Newport Folk Festival is a treasure trove for music fans. Former Providence Journal reporter Rick Massimo has written the first complete account of the legendary festival, describing its many successes and occasional blunders. […]
Many noteworthy events happened 50 years ago: France withdrew from NATO, India suffered its worst famine in 20 years, Medicare began in the USA and the Supreme Court decided the Miranda vs. Arizona case, which established rights for people accused […]
“Somebody’s gotta do it,” says Jay Sweet, producer of the Newport Folk Festival, when I ask what inspired him to take up the charge of keeping the long-running festival alive and relevant. “I felt like it was the granddaddy of […]
Welcome to the front porch of The Real Easy Ed, where each week I aggregate and update news, events, images, ideas, sound, fury, odds and ends. Just a little place to pause for a few minutes, get out of the sun […]
Ever been to a show and you are simply lost in what occurs in that two-to-three-hour span of time? You allow yourself to be overtaken by whatever happens. You trust yourself completly to the artists and the audience, and don’t […]
By now, the story is familiar: angry folk music purists were incensed at Bob Dylan, whom they had begun to revere as an eccentric, but ingenious, songwriter. Like a Messianic figure, he had come out of nowhere to New York […]
When Bob Dylan appeared with an electric band at the Newport Folk Festival, in July of 1965, he virtually stopped the folk revival of the 1950s and ‘60s in its tracks and awakened folkie youth culture to the joys of […]
