When then-President Richard Nixon sat down at the piano on the stage of the Grand Old Opry in 1974, he was reinforcing a conservative, polemical wall of sound to help contain several decades of transformational popular music, from blues and jazz to rock & roll. Music was the last thing on his mind.

As part of his notorious race-based “southern strategy,” Nixon led the efforts of conservative elites to co-opt American country-western music. He got the idea from George Wallace’s 1968 campaign, which Wallace had filled with country stars like Hank Snow and Hank Williams Jr.

Alone in the walnut-paneled music room, his favorite of Fair Lane Mansion’s 56 rooms, automobile tycoon Henry Ford picks up one of his two Stradivarius violins. It is 1920 or so and Henry, cocooned in his woolen three-piece suit despite the summer heat, stretches his bow arm for a little elbow and shoulder room.

Henry plucks the A string uncertainly, then steps to the grand piano at the far end of the room and searches the keyboard for A. Counting forward on the white keys from Middle C – C, D, E, F, G, A – he pokes at the A, then plucks the A string of his violin again. His ear hears the same pitch. Unison, they call it, a good name for the sound of happy hands on his assembly line. He plucks the other strings and touches a couple of tuning pegs lightly, but doesn’t adjust them. Close enough.

Joan Baez – Diamonds And Rust

Bob Dylan – Man of Constant Sorrow

Hawaiian slack-key guitarist Makana didn’t exactly put his life on the line when he sang his protest song, “We are the Many,” to President Obama and other leaders at the Asian-Pacific Economic Conference dinner. But he did pull off a gutsy, well-meaning public relations coup on behalf of the global Occupy movement.

Jesus Hits Like An Atom Bomb: Lowell Blanchard and the Valley Trio, and,
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall–Bob Dylan

Somewhere over my computer screen is a modest group of thoughtful, worried, anxious and maybe hopeful folk who happened upon these words by choice or accident. Writers, communicating from a distance, have a moral responsibility to imagine their readers as individual embodied beings with their own histories, victories, challenges and tragedies.

A good writer’s motto: There are stories in readers’ eyes that are more poignant than your own.

The Byrds Live – The times they are a changin’

Bob Dylan — Thunder On The Mountain.

There was a frightening heaviness to the days following the Tucson shootings. Some years ago, Italo Calvino perfectly described the feeling I had last week: At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone: a slow petrification, more or less advanced depending on people and places but one that spared no [...]