Elijah Wald | |
|---|---|
 Wald in 2016 | |
| Background information | |
| Born | 1959 (age 64–65) Cambridge, Massachusetts, US |
| Genres | Blues, folk |
| Occupation(s) | Musician, author |
| Instrument(s) | Guitar |
| Website | elijahwald |
Elijah Wald (born 1959) is an American folk blues guitarist, music journalist, and a blues, pop, and cultural music historian. He is a 2002 Grammy Award winner for his liner notes to The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box: The Journey of Chris Strachwitz. [1]
Wald was born in 1959 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. [2] His parents were George Wald (co-recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) and Ruth Hubbard, a biologist, [3] with whom Elijah co-authored Exploding the Gene Myth . [4]
At age 18, Wald departed for Europe to try to make a living as a folk-blues guitarist. For approximately the next 12 years, he traveled the world. He fronted a blues band in Seville, Spain, a swing trio in Antwerp, Belgium, and a rock band in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and studied with Congolese guitarist Jean-Bosco Mwenda. Returning to the United States, he played in "low dives and honky-tonks", and recorded two albums: the LP Songster, Fingerpicker, Shirtmaker [2] on his and Bill Morrissey's short-lived label Reckless Records [5] and the CD Street Corner Cowboys (Black Rose Records, 2000). [2] He also arranged and played guitar on one track of Dave Van Ronk's album of Bertolt Brecht songs, and performed as a sideman with Eric Von Schmidt and for several years with the legendary black string band leader Howard Armstrong.
For many years he wrote for the Boston Globe on "roots music" and "world music"; he also wrote on American and international music for various magazines. [2] In 2000, he was one of many freelancers who left the Globe in a dispute over reprint rights. [6]
By the time he and the Globe parted ways, he was already becoming an increasingly established writer. He had been a major collaborator in the Smithsonian Institution's multimedia project River of Song , a survey of contemporary music along the Mississippi River, and had just finished Josh White: Society Blues, a biography of the folk-blues singer Josh White. [2]
Since 2000, he has written numerous books; several of them had CDs as companion pieces. His subject matter has included Mexican corridos and narcocorridos , hitchhiking, the blues musician Robert Johnson and, in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll, American popular music for roughly the first three-quarters of the 20th century. He co-authored Dave Van Ronk's posthumously published memoir, The Mayor of MacDougal Street (the main inspiration for the Coen Brothers movie Inside Llewyn Davis), wrote the Grammy-winning liner notes for The Arhoolie Records 40th Anniversary Box: The Journey of Chris Strachwitz , made an instructional DVD for guitarists on the music of Joseph Spence (part of a series issued by Stefan Grossman), and has curated and/or written liner notes for numerous CD compilations and re-releases.
After teaching on and off in the musicology department of the University of California Los Angeles for several years, he moved back to the Boston area and got a doctorate in ethnomusicology and sociolinguistics from Tufts University. He now lives in Philadelphia with his wife, ceramic artist Sandrine Sheon.
A recurring theme in Wald's work is to identify and confront myths, especially but not exclusively those that have come to surround prominent figures in popular music. [7]
"Myths", Wald remarked in 2002, "are marvelous things, the keys to understanding a culture.
"For forty years, white folks have had this myth about Robert Johnson selling his soul to the Devil, and that says a great deal about white fantasies of blackness and its links to mysterious, sexy, forbidden powers.
"Back in 1936, black folks in the Delta had a different blues myth. It was that a guy who got good enough on guitar and learned how to play the latest hip sounds could get the hell out of the cotton fields and make enough money to move to Chicago, wear sharp new suits, and drive a Terraplane." [8]
Indeed, his first book was a collaboration with his biologist mother entitled Exploding the Gene Myth, in which they wrote that "The myth of the all-powerful gene is based on flawed science that discounts the environment in which we and our genes exist." [9] "There are no definitive histories," he would come to write in How the Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n' Roll (2009) "because the past keeps looking different as the present changes." [10]
This is a very partial list.
| International | |
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| National | |
| Artists | |
| Other | |
Mance Lipscomb was an American blues singer, guitarist and songster. He was born Beau De Glen Lipscomb near Navasota, Texas. As a youth he took the name Mance from a friend of his oldest brother, Charlie.
Robert Leroy Johnson was an American blues musician and songwriter. His landmark recordings in 1936 and 1937 display a combination of singing, guitar skills, and songwriting talent that has influenced later generations of musicians. Although his recording career spanned only seven months, he is recognized as a master of the blues, particularly the Delta blues style, and one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame describes him as perhaps "the first ever rock star".
David Kenneth Ritz Van Ronk was an American folk singer. An important figure in the American folk music revival and New York City's Greenwich Village scene in the 1960s, he was nicknamed the "Mayor of MacDougal Street".
A narcocorrido is a subgenre of the Regional Mexican corrido genre, from which several other genres have evolved. This type of music is heard and produced on both sides of the Mexico–US border. It uses a danceable, polka, waltz or mazurka rhythmic base.
"He Was a Friend of Mine" is a traditional folk song in which the singer laments the death of a friend. Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax was the first to collect the song, in 1939, describing it as a "blues" that was "a dirge for a dead comrade."
"Cross Road Blues" is a song written by the American blues artist Robert Johnson. He performed it as a solo piece with his vocal and acoustic slide guitar in the Delta blues-style. The song has become part of the Robert Johnson mythology as referring to the place where he supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for his musical talent. This is based largely on folklore of the American South that identifies a crossroads as the site where such pacts are made, although the lyrics do not contain any references to Satan or a Faustian bargain.
Weldon H. Philip Bonner, better known as Juke Boy Bonner was an American blues singer, harmonica player, and guitarist. He was influenced by Lightnin' Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, and Slim Harpo. He accompanied himself on guitar, harmonica, and drums in songs such as "Going Back to the Country", "Life Is a Nightmare", and "Struggle Here in Houston".
"Dust My Broom" is a blues song originally recorded as "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom" by American blues artist Robert Johnson in 1936. It is a solo performance in the Delta blues-style with Johnson's vocal accompanied by his acoustic guitar. As with many of his songs, it is based on earlier blues songs, the earliest of which has been identified as "I Believe I'll Make a Change", recorded by the Sparks brothers as "Pinetop and Lindberg" in 1932. Johnson's guitar work features an early use of a boogie rhythm pattern, which is seen as a major innovation, as well as a repeating triplets figure.
John Jackson was an American Piedmont blues musician. Music was not his primary activity until his accidental "discovery" by the folklorist Chuck Perdue in the 1960s. Jackson had effectively given up playing in his community in 1949.
Dave Van Ronk and the Ragtime Jug Stompers is an album featuring Dave Van Ronk playing with a jug band.
Inside Dave Van Ronk is a 1964 album by American folksinger Dave Van Ronk.
Somebody Else, Not Me is a 1980 album by American folk and blues singer Dave Van Ronk.
The Mayor of MacDougal Street: Rarities 1957-1969 is a compilation album by American folksinger Dave Van Ronk, released in 2005.
"The House of the Rising Sun" is a traditional folk song, sometimes called "Rising Sun Blues". It tells of a person's life gone wrong in the city of New Orleans. Many versions also urge a sibling or parents and children to avoid the same fate. The most successful commercial version, recorded in 1964 by the British rock band The Animals, was a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and in the US and Canada. As a traditional folk song recorded by an electric rock band, it has been described as the "first folk rock hit".
"Let the Good Times Roll" is a jump blues song recorded in 1946 by Louis Jordan and his Tympany Five. A mid-tempo twelve-bar blues, the song became a blues standard and one of Jordan's best-known songs.
Joel Selvin is an American San Francisco-based music critic and author known for his weekly column in the San Francisco Chronicle, which ran from 1972 to 2009. Selvin has written books covering various aspects of pop music—including the No. 1 New York Times best-seller Red: My Uncensored Life In Rock with Sammy Hagar—and has interviewed many musical artists. Selvin has published articles in Rolling Stone, the Los Angeles Times, Billboard, and Melody Maker, and has written liner notes for dozens of recorded albums. He has appeared in documentaries about the music scene and has occasionally taken the stage himself as a rock and roll singer.
The Search for Robert Johnson is a 1992 British television documentary film about the American Delta blues musician Robert Johnson, hosted by John Hammond, and produced and directed by Chris Hunt. In the film, Hammond journeys through the American Deep South to pursue topics such as Johnson's birth date, place and parents, his early musical development, performances and travels, romances, his mythic "pact with the devil," his death in the late 1930s, the discovery of possible offspring, and the uncertainty over where Johnson is buried. Throughout, Johnson's music is both foreground and background, from recordings of Johnson and as performed on camera by Hammond, David "Honeyboy" Edwards, and Johnny Shines.
"Bon Ton Roula" is a zydeco-influenced blues song first recorded by Clarence Garlow in 1949. The following year, it became a hit, reaching number seven in Billboard magazine's Rhythm & Blues chart and introduced the style to a national audience.
Lightnin'! is an album by the blues musician Lightnin' Hopkins recorded in California in 1969 and released on the Poppy label as a double LP.
Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers is a 1993 book by biologist Ruth Hubbard and her son Elijah Wald, published by Beacon Press. The book is critical of many potential and actual uses of human genetic information, such as attempts to develop personalized medical treatments for diseases based on an individual's genome. A second edition was published in 1999, adding discussions of cloning and pharming, among other subjects.
