Past Programs
Folk - 2008
Guitar Evangelists
24/10/2008
Street musicians or buskers are usually at the bottom of the musical pecking order but you might be surprised to know there's a long and proud tradition of musical street preachers, guitar evangelists, who mix blues and gospel with some fierce guitar playing. This week we'll hear from some of the best including the Rev. Gary Davis recorded live in the early 1960s, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe from 1947. As well, there's the new generation of blues artists like Ruthie Foster raised in an African-American Baptist church. And on the comeback trail, a woman who started her career jamming in New York City's Greenwich Village with street preachers like Rev. Gary Davis and guitar prophets like Bob Dylan. I'm talking about Maria Muldaur.
To finish, a young blind guitar player from north eastern Arnhem Land, but an evangelist not for Christianity so much as for his own indigenous traditions. Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu is from the Yolgnu people and he sings in language about sacred places in the landscape and about the ancestral beings that originally shaped and named the Yolngu homelands.
Sacred Harp Singing
27/06/2008
A celebration of the voice this week with choirs great and small, from the valleys of Wales to the green hills of Alabama where the tradition of Sacred Harp Singing lives on. Sometimes called 'shape note singing' because the musical notation uses special shapes to help the singers, Sacred Harp Singing is a Protestant style of four-part singing that takes its name from a famous hymn book published in America in 1844 called The Sacred Harp. The sound is raw and intense and after decades in decline has undergone a revival in the United States, and around the world, partly due to the success of the soundtrack to the film, Cold Mountain, which featured Sacred Harp Singing.
Freedom Songs
04/01/2008
They were the songs that galvanised the American Civil Rights Movement in the late 1950s and early 60s. Taken up first by street protesters, and then by musicians like Pete Seeger, The Weavers and The Staple Singers, songs like 'We Shall Overcome' and 'Study War No More' became international anthems for freedom. But how many people realised they were singing versions of 19th century gospel songs and hymns?
When I was a student in Brisbane in the early 1980s I remember hearing protest songs being sung during the street marches that took place then. But it wasn't until recently that I found out many of those songs came out of the church. So tonight I thought I'd play you some of those songs, those reworked hymns, including 'Down by the Riverside' and 'We Shall Not be Moved'. And they're still going strong even now. We'll hear two very recent versions by Mavis Staples, and Bruce Springsteen, as well as some of the Civil Rights performers like The Weavers and The Freedom Singers.
First broadcast 13 July 2007.
