Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif – CKCU – Tuesday May 30, 2023: Songs of Bertolt Brecht

Stranger Songs with Mike Regenstreif finds connections and develops themes in various genres. The show is broadcast on CKCU in Ottawa on Tuesdays from 3:30 until 5 pm (Eastern time) and is also available 24/7 for on-demand streaming.

CKCU can be heard live at 93.1 FM in Ottawa and https://www.ckcufm.com/ on the web. 

This episode of Stranger Songs was recorded and can already be streamed on-demand by clicking on “Listen Now” at … https://cod.ckcufm.com/programs/595/60634.html

Theme: Songs of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956).

Bertolt Brecht, who died in 1956 at age 58, was a German playwright and poet who believed in the power of the arts to advance progressive causes. One of his most famous quotations is, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”

Brecht collaborated worked with a number of composers – including Kurt Weill, Hans Eisler and others – to put his words to music.

Songs from The Threepenny Opera (1928). Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill.

Dave Van Ronk- Mack the Knife

Let No One Deceive You: Songs of Bertolt Brecht (Flying Fish)

Judy Collins- Pirate Jenny

Forever: An Anthology (Elektra)

The Fowler Brothers & Stan Ridgway- Cannon Song

Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill (A&M)

Beatrice Arthur- Barbara Song

The Threepenny Opera – 1954 Off Broadway Cast Recording (Decca)

William S. Burroughs- What Keeps Mankind Alive?

September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (Sony Classical)

Lotte Lenya- Solomon Song

The Threepenny Opera – 1954 Off Broadway Cast Recording (Decca)

Dave Van Ronk & Frankie Armstrong- Tango Ballad

Let No One Deceive You: Songs of Bertolt Brecht (Flying Fish)

Bertolt Brecht- Moritat von Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife)

September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (Sony Classical)

Songs from Happy End (1929). Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill.

Martha Schlamme- The Bilbao Song

A Kurt Weill Cabaret (MGM)

Lotte Lenya- Sailor’s Tango

Lotte Lenya Singt Kurt Weill (Philips)

Will Holt- Mandalay Song

A Kurt Weill Cabaret (MGM)

Bette Midler- Surabaya Johnny

Bette Midler (Atlantic)

Songs from The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944). Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht.

The songs from The Caucasian Chalk Circle have been set to music by many composers – with many productions of the play commissioning unique settings. These settings were composed by Dave Holt for a 1970s production by The Camp Meeker Players in Sonoma County, California. These unreleased recordings were recorded seven or eight years ago at a reunion of the cast. Thanks to Mitch Greenhill for sending the recordings and securing permission to use them on this program.

Carol Burleson, Mitch Greenhill & Dave Holt- Song of the Adoption

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (unreleased recording – used with permission)

Carol Burleson, Mitch Greenhill & Dave Holt- Song of the Child

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (unreleased recording – used with permission)

Carol Burleson, Mitch Greenhill & Dave Holt- Song of the Return

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (unreleased recording – used with permission)

Songs from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927). Lyrics by Bertolt Brecht, music by Kurt Weill..

Dave Van Ronk- We All Make the Bed That We Lie In

Let No One Deceive You: Songs of Bertolt Brecht (Flying Fish)

Marianne Faithfull- Alabama Song

20th Century Blues (RCA)

The Persuasions- Oh Heavenly Salvation

September Songs: The Music of Kurt Weill (Sony Classical)

Songs with words by Bertolt Brecht and music by Hans Eisler.

Pirate Jenny Trio- To the Little Radio

Cabaret Blues (Pirate Jenny Trio)

Frankie Armstrong- The Love Market

Let No One Deceive You: Songs of Bertolt Brecht (Flying Fish)

Pirate Jenny Trio- Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife

Cabaret Blues (Pirate Jenny Trio)

Frankie Armstrong- The Song of the Little Wind

Let No One Deceive You: Songs of Bertolt Brecht (Flying Fish)

Pirate Jenny Trio- Song of a German Mother

Cabaret Blues (Pirate Jenny Trio)

The program ends with an instrumental version of the song we started with.

Oscar Peterson & Itzhak Pearlman- Mack the Knife

Side By Side (Telarc)

Next week: Songs of Leonard Cohen – The Later Years.

Find me on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Dave Van Ronk – Hear Me Howl, Live 1964

DAVE VAN RONK

Hear Me Howl

RockBeat

rockbeatrecords.com

As I’ve noted before, the late, great Dave Van Ronk (1936-2002) was one of my teachers. I never took a guitar lesson from him but I learned a lot from him about the history of music – about Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton, Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt, Bertolt Brecht and many other seminal figures, and about a Greenwich Village scene that was happening about a dozen years or so before I first got there.

I first met Dave sometime around 1970 when he played at the short-lived Back Door Coffee House in Montreal. He was more than gracious in chatting with the teenaged me and in answering any and all the questions that this fascinated kid could throw at him. He also pointed me in some interesting directions in music to listen to.

A few years later, an actual friendship developed when we’d meet regularly at folk festivals, on trips that I took to New York City in the mid-‘70s to early-‘80s, and on his trips to Montreal to play at the Golem, the Montreal folk club I ran in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

I spent a few late nights sitting on Dave’s couch in New York, and a few more when he sat on my couch in Montreal, as we listened to music, talked about music and occasionally argued about politics.

More than the history of music, Dave taught me how to listen to music – I mean really listen to music. How to give the music I was listening to the attention it deserved. I remember one night in the 1980s when he was staying with me during a visit to Montreal to play at the Golem, he had me listen to a Lester Young saxophone solo on an LP that I had over and over again until I fully understood and appreciated some point Dave wanted me to understand about the solo.

Hear Me Howl, Live 1964 was recorded in concert at Indiana State University in Bloomington about six years before the first time I heard Dave live. By then, though, Dave was already hugely influential and a Greenwich Village legend known as “The Mayor of MacDougal Street.” As Bob Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles: Volume One, about his own early days in the Village a couple of years earlier, “Van Ronk could howl and whisper, turn blues into ballads and ballads into blues. I loved his style. He was what the city was all about. In Greenwich Village, Van Ronk was king of the street, he reigned supreme.” Although I’ve listened to all of Dave’s albums from those days countless times, and have Dave’s studio (and live) versions of almost all of these songs  – in fact, multiple versions of some of them – it’s still a treat to hear this never-before-released concert recording.

The 2-CD set includes such signature songs as “Green, Green Rocky Road,” “Cocaine Blues,” “He was Friend of Mine,” “Candy Man” and “St. James Infirmary” – numbers that I think Dave included in almost every concert I ever saw him do (and there were many in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s).

The set also shows just how varied Dave’s repertoire already was by 1964. Along with the expected doses of blues – Dave was one of the earliest and always one of the best of the blues revivalists – there are masterful performances of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s “Alabama Song”; a setting of William Butler Yeats’ “Song of the Wandering Aengus” learned from Judy Collins; “St. Louis Tickle,” a ragtime piece adapted by Dave for the guitar; and Billie Holiday’s classic “God Bless the Child.”

Some other favorites on Hear Me Howl include Jelly Roll Morton’s “Buddy Bolden’s Blues” (that I have a decent collection of Morton’s recordings on my shelves is because of Dave), two songs – “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” – learned from Bessie Smith recordings, the traditional folksong “Tell Old Bill,” and “One Meatball,” picked up from Josh White.

In addition to the 1964 concert recording, the second CD ends with a second previously-unreleased, and powerfully poignant version of “He was a Friend of Mine,” recorded in 1977 at the New York City memorial concert for Phil Ochs. 

The CD package also includes an excellent essay about Dave and the recordings by the always erudite Mary Katherine Aldin who co-produced these 50-year-old recordings for release with James Austin.

Like many other Dave Van Ronk collections, Hear Me Howl is an album I know I’ll return to often in the years to come.

Find me on Twitter. twitter.com/@mikeregenstreif

And on Facebook. facebook.com/mikeregenstreif

--Mike Regenstreif

Various Artists – Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Volumes 1 & 2

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Volumes 1 & 2
Smithsonian Folkways 
folkways.siu.edu

Between 1936 and 1939, prior to the Second World War, as fascism spread through parts of Europe, Spain’s fascists under Francisco Franco, with the military support of Hitler and Mussolini, fought a civil war against Spain’s democratically elected government. While the governments of the Western democracies in Europe and the Americas were not yet prepared to stand against the fascist evil that was seeking to conquer the world, about 40,000 young men from 52 countries went to Spain as volunteers in five International Brigades to fight fascism on behalf of the Republican, or Loyalist, side.

Among those volunteers were more than 1500 Canadians who formed the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the XV International Brigade and about 2800 Americans who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. (One of the highest ranking members of the members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, its political commissar, was John Gates (Solomon Regenstreif), who later became editor of the Daily Worker newspaper.)

Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Volumes 1 & 2 is a new CD that compiles two LPs of released by Folkways Records in 1961 and ’62. Those LPs were compilations of Spanish Civil War songs drawn from a variety of sources.

Volume 1, Part 1, originally released as Songs of the Lincoln Brigade, comprises six selections recorded in 1943 or ’44 in New York City by a group put together by Pete Seeger (then on a furlough from the U.S. Army). The section begins with Tom Glazer singing “Jarama Valley,” a song in English to the tune of “Red River Valley,” that was popular in Spain among members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Most of these songs – including “Viva La Quince Brigada (Long Live the 15th Brigade),” sung by Pete, and “Si Me Quieres Escribir (If You Want to Write to Me),” sung by the entire ensemble – would remain inspiring standards of the folk revival for many decades to come. I think Pete included at least one or more of them in virtually every one of the many concerts I saw him do over the years.

Volume 1, Part 2, originally released as Six Songs for Democracy, was recorded in Spain in 1938 in the midst of the war by Ernst Busch, a German singer and actor who was a volunteer with the International Brigades. Busch had fled Germany after the rise to power of the Nazis and his contributions include both Spanish songs like “Los Cuatro Generales (The Four Generals)” and German pieces like Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s “Das Lied Von Der Einheitsfront (Song of the United Front).” Among the most poignant songs Busch sings is “Die Moorsoldaten (The Peat Bog Soldiers),” a song written by prisoners in the Nazi concentration camp at Börgermoor and smuggled to Spain.

Volume 2, Part 1, begins with Woody Guthrie’s version of “Jarama Valley” and then continues with for more songs sung by Ernst Busch. From the sound quality, and because a couple of them feature an orchestra, I’m sure these were recorded much later than Busch’s selections from Volume 1.

Volume 2, Part 2, subtitled Songs We Remember, is a set of two songs and an instrumental are field recordings, each recorded in a different part of Spain during the 1930, featuring unidentified singers and musicians. Although these selections do not particularly pertain to the Spanish Civil War, they were included as a tribute to the feelings the members of the International Brigades had for the people of Spain.

Volume 2, Part 3, is a set of four songs from Behind the Barbed Wire, an album recorded in New York City in 1938 featuring Bart van der Schelling, a Dutch singer who had been wounded while fighting in Spain, and the Exiles Chorus, led by Earl Robinson. The songs from Behind the Barbed Wire, variously sung in Italian, German and French, were all songs that had been sung in concentration camps where anti-fascists had been imprisoned.

The recordings reissued on Songs of the Spanish Civil War, Volumes 1 & 2 are an inspiring reminder of a time when thousands of idealists from around the world did what they believed needed to be done to save the world from the scourge of fascism that would soon lead to the Second World War and the Holocaust – despite the fact that their own governments were not yet prepared to take a stand.

Two other albums of Spanish Civil War songs that I highly recommend, and which include much later interpretations of many of these same songs are Pasiones: Songs of the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 by Jamie O’Reilly and Michael Smith and Spain In My Heart: Songs of the Spanish Civil War sung by a variety of contemporary artists.

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--Mike Regenstreif