Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance

Subject: RE: Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance
From: Emma B
Date: 04 Aug 08 - 04:29 PM

Personally while I have nothing but total respect for a performer of the calibre of a singer/songwriter like Pete Seeger and appreciate his ability to relate to his audience I see no similarity in the type of (learned) rhetoric cynically employed by careerist politicians and their speech writers - forgive me but I've maybe just had too many years of Bliar!

Subject: RE: Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance
From: GUEST,Volgadon
Date: 04 Aug 08 - 04:34 PM

To tie that in with music, Plastic Man.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance
From: Bill D
Date: 04 Aug 08 - 05:51 PM

"Pete Seeger came right out and said things, without shuffling. "

you mean, like in "Waist Deep in The Big Muddy"?

Pete's quote was.."I'm just a shoemaker.I go around the world making shoes....and if the shoe fits..."

Subject: RE: Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance
From: Emma B
Date: 04 Aug 08 - 05:54 PM

soft shoe shuffle? :)

Subject: RE: Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance
From: Ferrara
Date: 04 Aug 08 - 08:42 PM

Wonderful quotes form Woody G.

FWIW During his lifetime, I somehow formed the opinion that Saddam Hussein was an effective orator who knew how to inflame people's emotions and sway them with verbal imagery. I can't say specifically what I based it on, other than noticing the way he used Islamic images the way certain American speechmakers have used the flag and the Bible, to push their hearers' "hot buttons" and make them think he had to be right because his symbols were their symbols. He seems to have used words and catch phrases very effectively in other ways as well, to influence his audiences.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance
From: GUEST,DV
Date: 04 Aug 08 - 08:46 PM

Stringsinger has it right.

Subject: RE: Folklore: Obama and Folk Performance
From: Emma B
Date: 04 Aug 08 - 09:45 PM

I believe you have it right on Ferrara

People like Saddam and career politicians are skilled in giving the majority of 'folks' exactly what they want to hear; the well worn 'symbols' of rhetoric*

*rhetorical arguments*, as in politics or even justice, do not make use of demonstrable or tested truths, but resort to fallible opinions, popular perceptions, transient beliefs, chosen evidence or evidence at hand (like statistics), which are all properly called commonplaces as they help establish a commonality of understanding between the orator or rhetor and his/her audience."

"Rhetoric is not only a method for training effective communicators (rhetors); as a discipline for advanced study, it is a method for understanding on a theoretical as well as a practical level how humans use language ("discourse") to alter or shape our understanding of reality"

Wiki

On the contrary Pete Seeger -

'played on freight trains with the great Woody Guthrie; he played at hootenannies with the singer Leadbelly, and on the street corners of New York.
He played his "If I Had a Hammer" before it was denounced as "commie propaganda".
He co-wrote "We Shall Overcome" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" and he played them at peace marches, voter registration drives and backwater taverns.
He tried to play before the House Un-American Activities Committee; it forbade it.'

I remain unconvinced of any 'similarities'