Comparative Video 101: 2018

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Roots Radio 22 & 23: Erewhon: Songs of Places Mythical and Mystical

This show was originally broadcast over the air in Los Angeles on January 20, 2018. The podcast is divided into two one-hour segments, the second appearing as the first file on the site and the first hour immediately to the right, the one with the picture of the moon.

In 1872, Samuel Butler published a kind of utopian satire that he titled Erewhon. Butler wanted the name to be "nowhere" spelled backward but realized it would be hard to pronounce, so he transposed the"h" and the "w" to be "AIR - a - wan." It's an odd book, but the title makes an admirable theme for this podcast. All of the songs in the show will be about places that do not exist in our real, three dimensional world - and you might be surprised by just how many of those songs there are.

Part 1

Show Theme: From "Forever and a Day" - The Kingston Trio

Opening: The Big Rock Candy Mountain - Burl Ives 2:41
Islands and Dreams
Island in the Sun - Harry Belafonte 3:22
Isle au Haut - Gordon Bok, Anna Mayo Muir, Ed Trickett 3:50
Fiddler's Green - The Dubliners 4:05
Shoals of Herring - North Sea Gas 3:42
The Pony Man - Gordon Lightfoot 3:28
The Pirates of Stone County Road - John Stewart 5:34

Towns
The Old Lucky Diamond Motel - Vince Gill 3:39
My Little Town - Simon & Garfunkel 3:30
My Home Town - Bruce Springsteen 4:17
Spoon River - Hank Cramer feat. Kelly Parkinson 3:03
Pooh Corner - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band 2:37
The Fox Went Out On A Chilly Night - Bob Shane 2:02

Part 2

ParadiseBound For The Promised Land - Bill Staines
12 Gates To The City - Rev. Gary Davis
New Jerusalem - Weavers
Poor Wayfarin' Stranger -Red Molly
Road to Shambala - BW Stevenson
Hobo's Lullaby - Emmylou Harris
Castles in the Air - Don McLean
Apocalypse Lullaby - The Wailin' Jennys

Distant ShoresWinkin', Blinkin' & Nod - Simon Sisters
After The Gold Rush - kd lang
In The Land Of Oden - Barry Kane & Barry McGuireLa Belle Dame Sans Merci - Jamestown Ferry

About This Site

Comparative Video 101 is a resource for performance videos of some of the classic popular folk songs of the last several decades with personal commentary on them by Jim Moran, a teacher of literature for nearly forty years and a folk musician and writer for a decade longer. He is also co-host of the "Roots Music And Beyond" radio program on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles.
Some of these posts appeared originally on the Kingston Crossroads message board, and many of the profiled songs were performed by the classic pop folk group the Kingston Trio.
The page will be updated once or more per month.
Your comments are welcome.

Important: Patience, Please

As of this writing in March of 2017, the Blogspot site that hosts CV101 has "deprecated" or made obsolete the old video code that I have been using since 2007 to make videos visible in these articles. That's ironic, since for several years Blogspot was not accepting the newer code that is now required, forcing me into a workaround that is now useless.
The upshot is this. Of the 222 posted articles, more than 200 include multiple YT videos, up to ten but averaging about seven per post - more than 1400 videos in all. The change has left me with the choice of either abandoning this project, which at its inception in 2006 elsewhere was a kind of pioneer in presenting embedded videos with commentary - or going into every single article and changing the code for every single video.
I hope that no one is surprised that I am choosing to do the latter. I do believe that there is some value in this site, and several hundred thousand people over the years have enjoyed it.
However - changing all those codes is going to take some serious time to complete, so I beg your indulgence. If you happen by here and find an article that intrigues you but that is missing all or some of the videos, please drop a short comment at the end of the post and I will get to the restoration as soon as I can.
As always, thanks for your attention to this project of mine.

Note #2 On The Posted Articles

Since Blogspot/Google has recently begun including readership statistics as part of its service to bloggers like me, I have become aware that the readership for these pages is far more extensive and international than I had ever dreamed, usually approaching 1,000 visitors per week from literally all around the world. I am profoundly appreciative of the interest in these posts and glad that folk music fans find enjoyment and value in them.

There are currently more than two hundred articles here, and nearly all of the twelve hundred posted videos in those articles are from YouTube. Most readers will already know that because YouTube is another subsidiary of Google, the latter company is being sued for copyright infringement by a significant number of content providers like Sony-BMG and Warner's Music Group. YouTube/Google's normal response to infringement claims is to remove the disputed videos or ban them from certain countries in which the claims have been filed.

This, of course, has a profound effect on the content of posts like the ones in this blog. Videos that I have selected for any given article can be and often have been removed at any time without warning. I try where possible to replace deleted videos with other versions of the same performance or with similar renditions of the songs, though this is not always possible.

Policing the hundred plus posts to be sure that there are interesting and representative video performances is itself a major undertaking, one that involves a significant commitment of time. I hope that those of you good enough to stop by this blog will have a bit of patience. I review as many of the older articles as I can every week with the goal of maintaining the integrity of each, and sometimes this enables me to find newer, better, and more exciting performances of the songs profiled here.

Once again, thanks for the interest!

Comparative Video 101

Sunday, April 15, 2018

Roots Radio 22 & 23: Erewhon: Songs of Places Mythical and Mystical

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Note #2 On The Posted Articles

Kingston Trio Albums On Which The Songs Appeared