Leonard Cohen has a new album out. The Guardian has it available as an album stream if you want a preview.
I have listened to it and can only say the man just gets better with age.
Leonard Cohen has an undeserved reputation as an artist who will cause you to slit your wrists. I find that he has precisely the opposite effect on me. He calms me down and helps me reconnect with reality.
The album can be heard here. There is also a link on the page to an excellent interview from Saturday’s Guardian.
I have just heard the sad news that Bert Jansch has died. He had cancer and passed away early this morning.
He is probably best known for his involvement with the acoustic group Pentangle. His solo career, before and after Pentangle was also brilliant.
Folkies of my generation knew that nobody, but nobody could play the acoustic guitar like Bert Jansch. He was a brilliant interpreter of traditional material as his version of the Irish classic Blackwaterside shows.
He was also a fine songwriter, probably his best known song was ‘Needle of Death’ partly a gentle, non-judgemental elegy to a friend who died of a heroin overdose and partly a stark anti-drugs song..
Other people will write far more eloquent obituaries than I can. All I know is that the world feels diminished by his passing. As someone said with Davy Graham gone, and now Bert, “who is left to play ‘Anji’?”
I’m not sure exactly when and where I first became aware of the singing and the songs of Hazel Dickens. In fact I am certain that I had heard and sung along to some of her great Union ballads years before I discovered that she had written them.
Hazel died yesterday (22nd April 2011) aged 75 (obituary here) having sung and fought for working people, especially coal miners and women all her life. She was born and brought up in the West Virginia coalfields. Her voice was unmistakable. Her singing was a major influence on Emmylou Harris and many other ‘Americana’ and modern Bluegrass artists.
Just heard the sad news that the bluegrass performer Hazel Dickens has died. She was a great union supporting singer and songwriter in the tradition of Aunt Molly Jackson and Florence Reece, who wrote ‘Which Side Are You On’. I had the pleasure of doing a miners benefit with her in Chapel Hill North Carolina in 1988. She also recorded the definitive version of ‘Long Black Veil’ with Alice Gerrard in the 1960s
A Scotsman in Suburbia 