The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #1532 Message #2418704
Posted By: PoppaGator
20-Aug-08 - 12:26 PM
Thread Name: Pirate Jenny & Mack the Knife
Subject: RE: Pirate Jenny & Mack the Knife
Rowan,
I don't mind being called a "pop-folkie," not at all. That's probably as accurate a description as any other pigeon-hole into which I might be put.
My tastes are pretty eclectic; while I have a special kind of interest in songs and genres that I would be able to perform on solo acoustic guitar and vocals-with-limitations, I enjoy listening to a much wider variety of music, mostly blues/jazz/R&B.
I really enjoy much of the popular music of my younger years, some of which I was too much of a folk-snob to admit liking at the time, including even some of the greatest of Motown and Stax/Volt AND the early "British Invasion." I didn't completely get over my case of folk/blues purism until Paul Butterfield proved to me that worthwhile music could be produced by electric guitars, bass and drums, and then Bob Dylan went onstage with Butterfield's band to bring a whole new dimension to rock n roll.
I'm not especially conversant with current-day pop music, because I'm fortunate enough to live in New Orleans, a community with its own incredibly vibrant musical culture, where brilliant young players are constantly creating new music with deep roots in a unique local tradition. I never listen to top-40 radio, hip-hop radio, "today's country" radio, or any of that crap, and hardly ever even overhear it. I don't watch "American Idol," and I don't even buy CDs. When I'm not watching TV or engaged in other non-musical activities, I listen to WWOZ FM 90.7 and, when play my guitar, I stick mostly to my frozen-in-time repertoire of blues, folk, acoustic psychedelia and Dylan, developed when I was a full-time busker from 1969 to 1972.
PS: I also first head this song on that Judy Collins album, but that doesn't mean I didn't know it was a Brecht-Weill composition ~ I read the liner notes! Plus which, I had enough general education and exposure to culture to have some idea of who they were, and that there was such a thing as "The Threepenny Opera" which also featured that Bobby Darin song, "Mack the Knife." (It wasn't until many years later that I learned about Louis Armstrong's earlier recording, which Darin and his arranger(s) essentially copied note-for-note.)