The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: playlist

  • Songs with Moon in Title

    There’s a full moon this week, the daytime temps near 100, so we’ve been out walking late, out for some cooler air, the house so hot. A while back I made a playlist of songs with the word moon in the title:

    It’s Only a Paper Moon, Moonlight in Vermont, Moon River, Fly Me to the Moon, Moonglow, Paper Moon, Moondance, Moonlight in Vermont, Havanna Moon, Blue Moon of Kentucky, Blue Moon, Polka Dots and Moonbeams, The Moon Song, By the Light of the Silvery Moon, Moonlight Serendade, Moonlight Becomes You, No Moon at All, Oh You Crazy Moon, Shame on the Moon, Walking on the Moon, How High the Moon, When My Moon Turns to Gold Again, Au Clair de la lune, The Stars the Night the Moon, Shine on Harvest Moon, Harvest Moon, Moonlight (Claro de Luna).

    When we got back from our walk I played a few of the moon songs on the acoustic guitar. Still later, still unable to sleep, I got out of bed and from the open window took a photo of the moon. There’s nothing special about that photo, taken with my cell phone, of the moon over the fir trees over the old they say extinct volcano in the city.

    “Ah, they’ll never ever reach the moon, at least not the one we’re after,” sang Leonard Cohen, in “Sing Another Song, Boys” (1971), which doesn’t have the word moon in its title, so it didn’t make the playlist.

    Things appear different at night, are different. There are so many distractions during the day, chores, reels, but it’s different at night.

    “It’s easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing,” says Hemingway’s Jake Barnes, in “The Sun Also Rises,” from 1926.

    But a full moon can take the edge off of things at night, soften the heat. Draws you up. And besides, unlike Hemingway’s Jake, lately I’ve been looking forward to the night, a book waiting on the nightstand, moonlight streaming through the open window, lucky to have Susan by my side, not having Jake’s problem, my playlist of songs with moon in the title streaming in the kitchen earlier while I put together something cold for dinner, playing in my memory. Memories of the Moon. Moon Momentoes.

    And you don’t want to go getting too literal about it, so-called science of the thing, the light of the silvery moon, how it’s dead, and it doesn’t really have its own light, but is simply reflecting the sun. The mechanics of the thing. There you go again. See, you’ve ruined another night. The moon is a cartoon.





  • Bob Dylan’s “The Philosophy of Modern Song”: Playlists: Part Two

    Bob Dylan has a new book out, titled “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” in which he proffers nonlinear essays of original and freewheeling exegesis of sixty-six mostly 20th century songs. The book is a mosaic of writing and photographs, the pics spread thematically throughout the pages (many from Stock or Getty; tracking them all down to their original source would be a mountainous research climb). There is a table of contents, showing the titles of the songs, but no index. There are no footnotes.

    The book should be read aloud. If you’ve heard any of Dylan’s introductions featured in his now defunct Theme Time Radio Hour, you’ll know how the orality of the work is so important to its content. I’m reading the book aloud with Susan evenings this Fall. And I created a playlist on my YouTube Music channel of the sixty-six songs, so that we can listen to each song as we read the Dylan essay on it from the book.

    Dylan’s sixty-six songs don’t amount to a best-of list. Each song is approached with a creative reading and listening analysis and appreciation. But why the song was selected, made the list, fished up out of the overstocked pond of popular songs – well, I don’t know. The underlying philosophy might be that any song has a story behind the story, an environment it came out of, that warrants description and understanding and an in depth discursive discussion of its time and place, and some songs lend themselves to this kind of analysis more than others. There is a kind of, not formula, but song archetype that’s uncovered, that might teach us how better to listen.

    Here’s the playlist. Give it a listen, and get the book.

    The 66 songs from The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan, Simon & Schuster, 1 Nov 2022.

  • Playlists: Part One

    I recently subscribed to the YouTube Music streaming app, and have been making playlists. There are now many music apps to choose from. I was using Tidal and before that Spotify. To the neophyte, they’re all pretty much the same, click and listen. But for messing around, collecting music, forming playlists, using the app as a reference and research tool, YouTube Music seems to be working well, with one major caveat: lack of performer credits and original recording info easily obtainable while listening – but in that regard, neither Spotify nor Tidal were much better (Prime Music has some info, but lacks detail amid glitzy formatting, while YouTube Music has imported some Wiki discussion). The YouTube Music library is huge, and the search engine responds intuitively, bringing up at least as often as not what I’m looking for, and when not, the discoveries are a pleasure.

    I created a YouTube channel to post my playlists. The playlists I’m making are referenced to songs pulled from my music book collection: songs and pieces from readings from books on music, with a special emphasis on guitar.

    The first two playlists I made contain pieces adapted from Jerry Silverman instruction manuals, books I’ve managed to keep around me over the years: The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide: An Instruction Manual by Jerry Silverman, Based on the Folkways Record by Pete Seeger (an Oak Publication, New York, 1962), and The Art of the Folk-Blues Guitar: An Instruction Manual by Jerry Silverman (Oak Publications, New York, 1964, Library of Congress # 64-18168). These two books are similar in format, the old black and white pictures alone worth the price of admission, and include notes, tablature, chord diagrams, lyrics, musical analysis, and historical discussion.

    In his introduction to his Folk-Blues guitar book, Silverman outlines his predicament at the time: “… there is more information on blues in general in the New York Public Library, for example, in German and French than there is in English!” (11). And Silverman goes on to describe the problem, how, for example, working on his 1955 New York University Master’s Thesis on blues guitar, and his book “Folk Blues” that followed, discussion was limited to piano arrangements, since it was thought that “bona fide guitar arrangements would limit the book’s general usefullness.” This should come as no surprise – Julian Bream, the classical guitarist, when studying music at the Royal College of Music, in the early 1950’s, was told to leave his guitar at home, literally. The school had no guitar classes, no guitar program; the guitar was not considered a viable, virtuous instrument. There was no academically established canon of guitar music available for study or performance. This prejudice against the instrument, in spite of its obvious public popularity, was no doubt also pervasive and included in the States in attitudes opposed to black music, initially of rock and roll music, and of folk music in general, though what is now called the American folk music revival, lasting from the 30’s to the 60’s, did much to mainstream the popularity of the guitar and of blues and folk music.

    Silverman also describes his purpose as follows: “Naturally, some basis of what to listen and watch for and whom to imitate must be laid. Throwing the fledgling bluesnik into the turbulent waters of Bluesville without the necessary basic information and technique would render a distinct disservice to the general cause – not to mention the specific aspirant” (11). Of course whole rivers of water have passed under cities of bridges since Silverman’s early 1960’s comments. But the following statement explains something that has not changed: “To get to know how things really are done you must actually observe the player in action. Since there are so many individual styles one never stops learning if one can get to see as well as hear as many guitarists as possible” (Folksinger’s Guitar Guide, p. 5).

    The academic bias against the folk guitar may have been somewhat justified considering Woody Guthrie’s description of his method (quoted by Silverman in Folksinger’s Guitar Guide, p. 6): “Leadbelly learnt to play the guitar the same way I did, by ‘ear’, by ‘touch’ by ‘feel’, by ‘bluff’, by ‘guessin”, by ‘fakin’ and by a great crave and drive to keep on playing.”

    Well, these were real folks, with real blues. Hearing the lyrics, the stories, of these old tunes one may be surprised to learn or be reminded of how real and how blue. In creating my playlists, I want to stay true to original material but also to benefit from new styles and covers of these old songs.

    Give them a listen:

    Songlist adapted from Jerry Silverman’s The Art of the Folk-Blues Guitar, 1964
    Songlist adapted from Jerry Silverman’s The Folksinger’s Guitar Guide, 1962