All posts tagged: Folk

What a Muslim folk trickster can teach us about the danger of holding a single worldview

What a Muslim folk trickster can teach us about the danger of holding a single worldview

Published by Sam Flores

(The Conversation) — White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told CNN in January 2026 that “we live in a world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power” – what he called the “iron laws of the world.” This “might-makes-right” mindset, which seems to permeate the Trump administration, sees the world through a singular prism and leaves little room for understanding others or their perspectives. Although President Donald Trump later said that he did “believe” in international “niceties,” his administration has focused on the exercise of raw power – as seen in its military operations against Venezuela and Iran – while cutting programs that seek to foster understanding. In September 2025, for example, the Department of Education terminated US$86 million in Title VI funding for foreign language and area studies programs at universities across the country, calling them “inconsistent with administration priorities.” Consider also the drastic cuts to international exchange programs and the administration withdrawing the country from 66 global cooperation organizations, including UNESCO, the …

Alan Lomax’s Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 20,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings

Alan Lomax’s Massive Music Archive Is Online: Features 20,000 Historic Blues & Folk Recordings

Published by José Betancourt

A huge trea­sure trove of songs and inter­views record­ed by the leg­endary folk­lorist Alan Lomax from the 1940s into the 1990s has been dig­i­tized and made avail­able online for free lis­ten­ing. The Asso­ci­a­tion for Cul­tur­al Equi­ty, a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion found­ed by Lomax in the 1980s, has post­ed some 20,000 record­ings. “For the first time,” Cul­tur­al Equi­ty Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Don Flem­ing told NPR’s Joel Rose, “every­thing that we’ve dig­i­tized of Alan’s field record­ing trips are online, on our Web site. It’s every take, all the way through. False takes, inter­views, music.” It’s an amaz­ing resource. For a quick taste, here are a few exam­ples from one of the best-known areas of Lomax’s research, his record­ings of tra­di­tion­al African Amer­i­can cul­ture: But that’s just scratch­ing the sur­face of what’s inside the enor­mous archive. Lomax’s work extend­ed far beyond the Deep South, into oth­er areas and cul­tures of Amer­i­ca, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. “He believed that all cul­tures should be looked at on an even play­ing field,” his daugh­ter Anna Lomax Wood told NPR. “Not that they’re …

British folk icon Labi Siffre, 80, announces first new album in 28 years

British folk icon Labi Siffre, 80, announces first new album in 28 years

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Labi Siffre, the 80-year-old British folk singer, has announced his first new album in 28 years. Siffre is making a comeback with his aptly titled upcoming album, Unfinished Business, out later this year with Demon Music Group. Upon the announcement of his return, the singer made a rare appearance on BBC Radio 2 to perform orchestral versions of “My Song,” a cover of “Baby I Need Your Loving,” and Unfinished Business’s new lead single, “Far Away.” His last albums, The Last Songs and the spoken-word poetry record Monument, both came out in 1998, while his latest song released before “Far Away” was “(Love Is Love Is Love) Why Isn’t Love Enough?” in 2020. While Siffre — a Black, gay musician who rose to fame in the ‘70s — might have been considered overlooked in his time, the singer has recently gained traction with …

‘It was spooky’: folk singer Olivia Chaney on how a song reflecting her own Brontë-ish love triangle wound up in Wuthering Heights | Music

‘It was spooky’: folk singer Olivia Chaney on how a song reflecting her own Brontë-ish love triangle wound up in Wuthering Heights | Music

Published by Sam Flores

An hour into Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Margot Robbie is in a gauzy wedding dress, gliding forlornly across the moors towards the man her character feels she has to marry. A lone female English voice appears to accompany her, high and pure against the buzzing drone of a harmonium, singing about a woman roaming alone, and a man who, for “seven years, left the land”, before his eventual return. Long before Emerald Fennell found Olivia Chaney’s version of 19th-century ballad the Dark Eyed Sailor online, Chaney was preparing to sing it for a 2013 live session on Mark Radcliffe’s BBC Radio 2 folk show, in the midst of her own Brontë-esque love triangle. “I was at the beginning of my relationship with the man who is now my husband and the father of my two children – he nearly married someone else, and I nearly had kids with someone else.” She recounts this from her Yorkshire living room, minutes after getting home from the nursery run. “So to see this song first pop up to …

Tessa Rose Jackson: The Lighthouse review – grief, grace and memory in a luminous folk rebirth | Folk music

Tessa Rose Jackson: The Lighthouse review – grief, grace and memory in a luminous folk rebirth | Folk music

Published by Sam Flores

The warm sounds of folk guitar provide the roots of Tessa Rose Jackson’s first album under her own name, time-travelling from Bert Jansch to REM to Sharon Van Etten in every strum and squeak. The Dutch-British musician previously recorded as Someone, creating three albums in dream-pop shades, but her fourth – a rawer, richer affair, made alone in rural France – digs into ancestry, mortality and memory. The artwork for The Lighthouse by Tessa Rose Jackson. The Lighthouse begins with its title track. Strums of perfect fifths, low moans of woodwind and thundering rumbles of percussion frame a journey towards a beacon at “high tide on a lonesome wind”. The death of one of Jackson’s two mothers when she was a teenager informs her lyrics here and elsewhere: in The Bricks That Make the Building, a sweet, psych-folk jewel which meditates on “the earth that feeds the garden / The breath that helps the child sing” and Gently Now, which begins in soft clouds of birdsong, then tackles how growing older can cosset the process …

Tucker Zimmerman death: Folk singer adored by David Bowie dies with wife in fire aged 84

Tucker Zimmerman death: Folk singer adored by David Bowie dies with wife in fire aged 84

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the inside track from Roisin O’Connor with our free weekly music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Get our free music newsletter Now Hear This Tucker Zimmerman, the folk singer who made his name with his 1969 album Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman, has died. He was 84. He and Marie-Claire Lambert, his wife of over 50 years, were killed in a fire at their home in the Belgian town of Saint-Georges-sur-Meuse, outside the city of Liege. His death was announced on Facebook by the acclaimed record producer Tony Visconti, who wrote: “I just received tragic news from Quanah Zimmerman, the son of singer and songwriter Tucker Zimmerman. Tucker and his wonderful wife, Marie-Claire perished in a house fire yesterday.” Visconti, who produced Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman, continued: “I am stunned. I met Tucker and Marie-Claire in London, 1967. Tucker was a master musician and songwriter from San Francisco. His songs were biting and revolutionary.” David Bowie often cited Ten Songs by Tucker Zimmerman as one of …