Electric Eden – Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music Rob Young Faber & Faber 664p. The Old Punter's Personal Reflections: Traditional folk songs may be valued not least for the spare, uncluttered economy of their language. Electric Eden cannot be said to share fully in this virtue. At 607 pages of text plus 55 of notes and index the book offers the length of, say, The Gest...
A Diamond on a Hilltop The ancient Somerset market town of Crewkerne, like many such places, lies in a bowl, its main roads rising from its centre to the approximate points of the compass. There is a particularly abrupt elevation to the east at the top of which, overlooking the town, is a majestic line of venerable trees known as the...
A Profile of Tom Munnelly “Your immortality is assured,” wrote B.H. Bronson to Tom Munnelly upon the inclusion of another of Tom’s finds in Bronson’s Traditional Tunes of the Child Ballads. Tom’s comment: “I still can’t afford a copy of the damn thing.” Tom Munnelly is employed by the Irish Department of Education as a folk song collector. He is the only...
BASEBALL BEFORE WE KNEW IT: A Search for the Roots of the Game By David Block University of Nebraska Press 340p “The age-old debate over baseball’s ancestry has always been long on bluster and short on facts.” Thus begins David Block’s remarkable book, in which he travels many scholarly miles in redressing the imbalance. The work is without question the most...
Rattling a Skeleton in the British Television Closet Over three consecutive nights in mid-January 1981 the ITV Network broadcast a four-part police drama serial. The first British-made production to be shown in the mini-series format, it drew audiences averaging 13 million. It was called Wolcott and concerned the adventures, trials and tribulations of a Metropolitan police detective constable in North East...
Joseph Mitchell, a 21 year-old aspiring newspaper reporter, arrived in New York City from his native North Carolina in October 1929 on the eve of the Black Tuesday Wall Street crash that heralded the Great Depression. Among the most (to use a word he rather overworked himself) salient personalities in contemporary journalism at the time was H.L. Mencken. A hugely...