Monthly Archives: October, 2013

OCT 14, 2013 - In a great article and interview by David Daley on the Salon.com website, Daley writes about guitarist and musician Peter Buck, and how he he is deeply involved in helping lesser-known bands getting going and is so involved with making and producing music he actually made 4 albums in one month! His latest project is the band "Tired Pony" and they have just released their album "The Ghost of the Mountain". In the interview Buck talks about a lot of issues from releasing his first solo album on vinyl (he hates CDs) to how many of REM's "crew" they worked with went on to join Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Buck doesn't give many interviews, and this might be the last interview he will ever give. Read the interview on Salon.com here.

OCT 13, 2013 - Taylor Swift, the leading charitable musician of the year in 2012, has upped the ante even more. Taylor has given the biggest donation to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum ever, $4 million dollars, to open up a "Taylor Swift Education Center" on 2 floors in the building. Ms. Swift is no stranger to the place, for she performed volunteer fundraising when she was younger and even performed as a teenager at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, and even signing her first contract there. 

The Taylor Swift Education Center features 3 classrooms, a learning lab and a state-of-the-art children's exhibit gallery, and increases their classroom capacity by sevenfold. It features dozens of instruments, and curators on display restoring musical instruments that will eventually go on display. Read more on Taylor Swift's website here, and also check out a great article about it on GuardianLV.com here. Check out a comment from Taylor Swift at the unveiling of the Education Center below.

I was jamming out to one of my favorite folk-bluegrass songs, "Green Rolling Hills (of West Virginia)" and researching who wrote the song, I ran into an awesome story about a great activist musician named "Utah" Phillips. Bruce "Utah" Phillips was a legendary activist musician that is described as poet, storyteller, labor organizer, and the "Golden Voice of the Great Southwest". He was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1935, eventually joined the army in 1956, and saw the horrors of war with his own eyes in the Korea following the war there. On his return he threw himself into activism, and worked at Joe Hill House, a house of hospitality. He even ran for US Senate and the US Presidency. He was a big fixture in the folk music scene in Saratoga Springs, New York for years, and was a proud member of the IWW, or Industrial Workers of the World. His concerts were his opportunity to opine his political thoughts, and were in essence IWW meetings. He wrote "Enola Gay" in 1991, commenting on the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was also a member of Veterans for Peace, a huge group here in Washington, DC when it comes to rallies and activism. As you will see below, "Utah" often preceded his songs with long storytelling.

He eventually settled down in Nevada City, California where he started up a shelter Hospitality House, and also the Peace and Justice Center. He died in 2008 of heart disease.

In the 1970s "Utah" wrote "Green Rolling Hills", which has become a folk and bluegrass music scene staple, and sings of the troubles of a coal miner in West Virginia not finding work (probably because there is no union).  Emmylou Harris covered the song in her 1978 album "Quarter Moon in a Ten Cent Town", and Kathy Mattea has recently recorded a version of it. In a Herald-Dispatch.com obituary, "Utah" describes traveling through West Virginia and connecting with the folks there who want to leave because there are no jobs, but cannot leave because, "It's these hills. They keep you. And when they've got you, they won't let you go." Listen to "Enola Gay" from "Utah" Phillips, a legendary activist-musician who will be long remembered, in a Youtube video below. Check out the wonderful and rich world of activist-musician "Utah" Phillips at his website: TheLongMemory.com.  (photo credit: Carptrash/CC)

OCT 9, 2013 - One of JTMP's favorite activist musicians is David Rovics, who is a huge part of Occupy DC, and he has penned another great activist song about the Teabaggers shutting down the government. It's called "Government Shutdown", and it points out the total hypocrisy of how the Teabaggers want to shutdown parts of the government, and decrease spending...but of course we won't touch the corporate welfare subsidies or cut military spending one thin dime. He asks the great question. "Why don't we shut down the military too?" Check out David's new song in his YouTube video below.

OCT 7, 2013 - Miley Cyrus laid into the Republican extremist Teabaggers shutting down the whole government over Obamacare on SNL the other night and the video is hilarious; they're a bunch of crybabies in my opinion. Get over it. Anyways, I've been blogging about Miley Cyrus for the past few months, and here she is satirizing the Teabaggers on SNL. They spoof her song, "We Can't Stop", and she plays Michelle Bachmann; the batshit crazy US representative from Minnesota.