This article possibly contains original research .(December 2014) |
Linda Solomon (born May 10, 1937, Boston, Massachusetts) is an American music critic and editor. Although she has written about various aspects of popular culture, her main focus has been on folk music, blues, R&B, jazz and country music. Living at 95 Christopher Street in Greenwich Village during the early 1960s, she became a columnist for The Village Voice , capturing Village night life in club reviews for the weekly "Riffs" column.
"The Bet" is a memoir by Ted White describing Harlan Ellison, Linda Solomon and others involved in a curious incident at 95 Christopher in 1960. White wrote:
A dispute over the bandleader on one record in Solomon's collection prompted Ellison to bet his entire record collection against a single album in White's collection.
Ellison also mentioned her briefly in his memoir "Memos From Purgatory." [1]
She began doing record reviews in the early 1960s. Her Village Voice review of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963) has been quoted in several books, including David Hajdu's Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001):
In 1963-64, Solomon edited ABC-TV Hootenanny, a magazine featuring the folk musicians who appeared on the television series Hootenanny , telecast on ABC from April 6, 1963 to September 12, 1964. For one of the magazine's cover stories she interviewed Chad Mitchell and asked, "I've heard criticism of the Chad Mitchell Trio to the extent that politics and entertainment don't mix, that people come to a club or concert to be entertained and not to be confronted with the troubles of the world. Do you feel that your group is becoming too messagey?"
Mitchell responded:
Contributors to ABC-TV Hootenanny included Theodore Bikel and Jean Shepherd. At the same time that Solomon was editing ABC-TV Hootenanny, her friend Robert Shelton, with Lynn Musgrave, edited a different magazine with a similar title, Hootenanny. While Shelton and Musgrave covered the full range of folk music, Solomon's magazine mainly focused on the musicians booked on the ABC series. This included such talents as the Anchormen, Eddy Arnold, Theodore Bikel, Oscar Brand, The Brothers Four, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Judy Collins, the Cumberland Three, Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, Pete Fountain, Judy Henske, Jim Kweskin & the Jug Band, the Limeliters, the Smothers Brothers and Doc Watson.
In addition to work as a publicist for Chess Records, Solomon was the New York editor of NME during the 1970s. She has been a freelance contributor to numerous magazines and newspapers, including Celebrity, Country Music, Crawdaddy! , Down Beat , Hit Parader , NME, The News World, Nostalgia Illustrated, SoHo Weekly News and Us . Reviewing country singer-songwriter James Talley for the February 4, 1979 issue of The News World, she wrote:
She has written liner notes for folk music recordings, such as All Star Hootenanny (Columbia, 1964), along with liner notes for such recording artists as Charlie Byrd, John Handy, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Rich.
After 39 years living in New York's Greenwich Village, Solomon relocated to Houston, Texas in 1999.
Her father was the author-psychiatrist Dr. Philip Solomon, and her maternal uncle was the WPA artist Aaron Gelman.
Joan Chandos Baez is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist. Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums.
Robert Shelton, born Robert Shapiro was a music and film critic.
Another Side of Bob Dylan is the fourth studio album by the American singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, released on August 8, 1964, by Columbia Records.
Theodore Meir Bikel was an Austrian actor, folk singer, musician, composer, unionist, and political activist. He appeared in films, including The African Queen (1951), Moulin Rouge (1952), The Kidnappers (1953), The Enemy Below (1957), I Want to Live! (1958), My Fair Lady (1964), The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming (1966), and 200 Motels (1971). For his portrayal of Sheriff Max Muller in The Defiant Ones (1958), he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
The Newport Folk Festival is an annual American folk-oriented music festival in Newport, Rhode Island, which began in 1959 as a counterpart to the Newport Jazz Festival. The festival was founded by music promoter and Jazz Festival founder George Wein, music manager Albert Grossman, and folk singers Pete Seeger, Theodore Bikel, and Oscar Brand. It was one of the first modern music festivals in America, and remains a focal point in the expanding genre of folk music. The festival was held in Newport annually from 1959 to 1969, except in 1961 and 1962, first at Freebody Park and then at Festival Field. In 1985, Wein revived the festival in Newport, where it has been held at Fort Adams State Park ever since.
A hootenanny is a freewheeling, improvisatory musical event in the United States, often incorporating audience members in performances. It is particularly associated with folk music.
Albert Bernard Grossman was an American entrepreneur and manager in the American folk music and rock and roll scene. He was famous as the manager of many of the most popular and successful performers of folk and folk-rock music, including Bob Dylan; Janis Joplin; Peter, Paul and Mary; the Band; Odetta; Gordon Lightfoot; and Ian & Sylvia.
Joan Baez/5 is the fifth solo album and third studio album by American folk singer Joan Baez, released in October 1964. It peaked at number 12 on the Billboard 200 chart. The single "There But for Fortune" reached number 50 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the U.S. and became a top-ten single in the UK.
Margarita Mimi Baez Fariña was an American singer-songwriter and activist, the youngest of three daughters of mother Joan Chandos Bridge and Mexican-American physicist Albert Baez. She was the younger sister of the singer and activist Joan Baez.
Richard George Fariña was an American folksinger, songwriter, poet and novelist.
Sara Dylan is an American former actress and model who was the first wife of singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. In 1959, Noznisky married magazine photographer Hans Lownds; during their marriage, she was known as Sara Lownds.
Hootenanny was an American musical variety television show broadcast on ABC from April 1963 to September 1964. The program was hosted by Jack Linkletter. It primarily featured pop-oriented folk music acts, including The Journeymen, The Limeliters, the Chad Mitchell Trio, The New Christy Minstrels, The Brothers Four, Ian & Sylvia, The Big 3, Hoyt Axton, Judy Collins, Johnny Cash, The Carter Family, Flatt & Scruggs and the Foggy Mountain Boys, The Tarriers, Bud & Travis, Josh White, Josh White Jr., Leon Bibb, and the Smothers Brothers. Although both popular and influential, the program is primarily remembered today for the controversy created when the producers blacklisted certain folk music acts, which then led to a boycott by others.
Carolyn Sue Hester is an American folk singer and songwriter. She was a figure in the early 1960s American folk music revival.
The American folk music revival began during the 1940s and peaked in popularity in the mid-1960s. Its roots went earlier, and performers like Josh White, Burl Ives, Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Richard Dyer-Bennet, Oscar Brand, Jean Ritchie, John Jacob Niles, Susan Reed, Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Cisco Houston had enjoyed a limited general popularity in the 1930s and 1940s. The revival brought forward styles of American folk music that had in earlier times contributed to the development of country and western, blues, jazz, and rock and roll music.
Contemporary folk music refers to a wide variety of genres that emerged in the mid-20th century and afterwards which were associated with traditional folk music. Starting in the mid-20th century, a new form of popular folk music evolved from traditional folk music. This process and period is called the (second) folk revival and reached a zenith in the 1960s. The most common name for this new form of music is also "folk music", but is often called "contemporary folk music" or "folk revival music" to make the distinction. The transition was somewhat centered in the United States and is also called the American folk music revival. Fusion genres such as folk rock and others also evolved within this phenomenon. While contemporary folk music is a genre generally distinct from traditional folk music, it often shares the same English name, performers and venues as traditional folk music; even individual songs may be a blend of the two.
David Hajdu is an American columnist, author and professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He was the music critic for The New Republic for 12 years and is music editor at The Nation.
Gil Turner was an American folk singer-songwriter, magazine editor, Shakespearean actor, political activist, and for a time, a lay Baptist preacher. Turner was a prominent figure in the Greenwich Village scene of the early 1960s, where he was master of ceremonies at New York City's leading folk music venue, Gerde's Folk City, as well as co-editor of the protest song magazine Broadside. He also wrote for Sing Out!, the quarterly folk music journal.
The Pennywhistlers were an American singing group founded by folklorist and singer Ethel Raim and popular during the 1960s folk music revival. They specialized in Eastern European choral music, sung primarily a cappella. Folk singer Theodore Bikel, in his autobiography Theo, called them "the closest to the real thing in authenticity in the United States." They toured throughout the 1960s, appearing at the Sing Out! hootenanny at Carnegie Hall, the Fox Hollow Festival, and the Mariposa Folk Festival, among others. They shared the bill with performers such as Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Reverend Gary Davis, Leonard Cohen, and many others.
The Big Sur Folk Festival, held from 1964 to 1971 in California, was an informal gathering of prominent and emerging folk artists from across the United States. Nancy Jane Carlen (1941–2013) was working at the Esalen Institute when Joan Baez was asked to lead workshops on music. Carlen was a good friend of Baez, and they decided to invite other artists, which turned into the first festival.
"Morgan the Pirate" is a song by Richard Fariña, written in 1966 and released on the 1968 Richard and Mimi Fariña album Memories. Richard Fariña was dead by the time the song and album were released.