Word: ballads
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Billie Joe, says Bobbie, is a ballad based on her recollection of life around...
...tales have a certain unity, concerned as they are with that incessant search for identity common to so many American writers. The title story is a discursive account of a momentous day in the life of a precocious five-year-old. The Misfits is the cow-country ballad about obsessed horse hunters that later became a celebrated movie starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift. One of the best stories, Fitter's Night, has a sibling relationship to Miller's 1955 Broadway play, A View from the Bridge. It describes the life and hilarious hard times...
...Only when the proceedings stop is it in trouble. For that reason, while saluting the urge which produced them, I have to register objection to three attempts to make legitimate this joyfully bastard show: the self-conscious counterpoint of the "Like You Like It" reprise; the weak, semi-serious ballad, "Is It Really Me"; and the tedious choreography of Pan's Dance, which wastes the considerable talents of Director Wilson and dancer Ron Porter...
...writes down a song that has been on his mind for years. He copyrights it and sends it to a publisher, where it languishes for months while Sadler plays medic and sings some more in Vietnam. An ABC film crew happens by the camp and records Sadler singing his "Ballad," and he is flown to Saigon to sing for the general. In the hospital (with a leg infection he got from stepping on a poison stick) Sadler "resolved that day to see that America heard my song, even if I had to give it away...
...remember listening to WBZ just over a year ago when Bruce Bradley introduced a new song. he predicted it would be in the top ten within a week. I thought he was crazy; I was wrong. "The Ballad of the Green Berets" sold something over two million copies, and brought fame and fortune to a 26-year-old high school drop-out named Barry Sadler, who has a son called Thor and a smart-aleck grin like that kid in your homeroom who used to shoot craps during morning announcements...