Rumor Mill News

Tuesdays, at The Micro Effect

11am - 2pm Pacific Time ~ Noon - 3pm Mountain Time ~1pm - 3pm Central Time ~ 2pm - 5pm Eastern Time



Tuesday, May 15, 2012

March on Wall Street South - Matt Hickson and Woody Guthrie remembered by Leslie Fish


Radio RMN


Tuesdays, at 

11am - 2pm Pacific Time ~ Noon - 3pm Mountain Time
1pm - 3pm Central Time ~ 2pm - 5pm Eastern Time
Call in numbers (888) 747-1968 or Or (208) 935 0094

 With host Melinda Pillsbury-Foster explore the roots of the issues which made it possible for the corporations to install their own operating system in our courts, in the economy, in government, and in all other parts of our lives. 
Today we are beginning with an update on the rise of protest around the Wall Street of the South, Charlotte, North Carolina, where a group is determined to enforce our freedom of speech as the National Convention of the Democratic Party approaches. Matt Hickson, an organizer, will be joining us to discuss what is happening on the ground there and their plans to continue the Evolution.
With the echoes of Evolution in the airways we will then spend two hours with a woman who sat with Woody Guthrie during the long months of his final illness, playing for him his own music and her own. Leslie Fish went on to become one of the next generation of bards who touch us profoundly. Come share with us as we hear the stories of life, death, and song which knit us together with a force more powerful than steel.
Standing your ground for freedom as we continue to Fight fascism begins where ever you are now.
  This is our Mission and we pursue it relentlessly. 

​This Week's Guests:                                                                  Tuesday, May 15th,  2012

Hour One 
 
Matthew Hickson is a New Yorker by birth and a Southerner by residency.  He has lived in North Carolinian for 7 years and is a student activist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  In 2008, Matt went to work for the Barack Obama campaign in Charlotte, North Carolina and began to feel the dissonance between the electoral politics of Right and Left, and the rest of people's lives which were so often ignored in our national discussion.  Matt's political work aims to move beyond this electoral dynamic and place the lives of poor and oppressed peoples at the center of our conversations about 'the political'.  
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Matt has engaged in fights around public worker's rights, the slashing of education budgets, and subsequent tuition increases.  He has also recently been part of actions at the shareholders meetings of Reynolds Tobacco and Bank of America. Currently, Matt is organizing for The Coalition to March on Wall St South, a group building people's power and voice at the Charlotte Democratic National Convention in September.
Weapons are being purchased, paid for by the American people, to be arrayed against those of us who protest. Knowing what lies ahead the Coalition will continue to take action. Bringing Left and Right together is a part of their mission.

Hour Two - Three
Leslie Fish is a legend in folk music. Her own bio is, itself, an interesting insight into who she is ans why her voice, and music, must be heard.
"I play 12-string guitar, 6-string guitar, some electric guitar, recorder and penny-whistle (not terribly well), autoharp, hand-drum, and I can fake it on electric bass. Keyboards? Hah! Just well enough to pick out a tune for transcribing. Plus my voice, of course. When I got my first guitar at 16 I'd already been into folk music, singing it anyway, for years; I spent about an hour a day playing/practicing with it, and would have done more if my parents hadn't yelled at me to quit making that godawful racket and do my homework. I think Mom was particularly pissed off because she'd tried for years to teach me piano (and Classical lyric-soprano singing -- even though my voice was obviously alto) because she wanted me to befome a proper Classic-music pianist/singer and maybe wind up at the Met -- and none of it took. Instead I was busy "wasting time with that awful cowboy music". Now that I'm successful enough to make my living at That Wretched Stuff, she never asks me anything about music. *Snicker* I use [a verse-long instrumental break] for dramatic purposes: to prepare the audience emotionally for the last (summarizing or punch-line) verse, or to heighten tension before the resolution. Naturally, the "break" can't be allowed to bore the audience, so I play my damndest then.
...Which songs am I proudest of? Well, there are a lot of them, but I'd have to say that "Hope Eyrie" heads the list. It's gone the farthest and influenced the most people. Oh, the tales I could tell about that one -- how it came to be written, how it became the anthem of the fandom/pro-space movement, how it was translated into Polish, smuggled into Poland and became the underground anthem of Solidarnosc -- hell, ask me later; Other songs I'm proud of: "Freedom Road", "They Were Having a Sale at the Gun-Store", "The Cripples' Shield-Wall", "White Man's Rain Chant (Lord of Thunders)" --they're all good solid songs, and they all have workable magic.
Song I'm least proud of: "Banned From Argo", no contest! I wrote it to order, to fill in a four-minute shortage on the master tape when we were recording SOLAR SAILORS, and hoo- boy, do I ever regret it! The damned piece of fluff became damn-near as popular as "Hope Eyrie".
My current filk-book has over 100 songs in it (I haven't counted), and there's my Kipling collection (at least another 50), my Pagan songs (at least 25 there) all the Misty Lackey poems I put tunes to that I don't have copies of (another 25 or so), plus some purely folkie-political stuff I have in other books at home. Say at least 200, maybe 300 -- and I'm constantly adding to it, so I have no way to tell.
Favorite filksong that I didn't write: "Worms of the Earth", by a band called Clam Chowder, popular around the SCA for the past couple of years. I heard it at Pennsic 19 and it blew me away. (Well, wait until I've been to another filksing, and that may change.) WOTE is one beautifully- written song, set purely "in period", and with a moral that I can't help agreeing with. Hmm, I can't say whether it's a filksong or actually a folksong; the border between the two is exceedingly fuzzy.



Site: Leslie Fish

No comments:

Post a Comment