Word: folke
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...like Commodus, Gotti, who died of cancer in a prison hospital last week at 61, made up for his shortcomings with entertainments. He threw Fourth of July parties for his neighbors in Queens, N.Y., making himself the toast of the locals. (His folk-heroism was always a peculiarly parochial, New York City phenomenon, like Ed Koch or egg creams.) He made like a mobster out of central casting, plunging into night life wearing $2,000 suits (hence his nickname "the Dapper Don") and taunting the feds by being acquitted three times (hence, "the Teflon Don") before the charges stuck...
...fair to say that Wade Horn is not your typical George W. Bush appointee. For one thing, the 47-year-old volunteered for George McGovern and played guitar in a folk-rock ensemble that favored trippy tunes like A Horse with No Name by America. Unlike Rumsfeld or Powell, he's so soft-spoken, you have to lean in to hear him. When he spouts statistics about family-dissolution rates, you wonder how he found himself in the towel-snapping world...
Ralph Stanley has been performing the music he calls old-time mountain soul since 1946, but only recently has he started attracting audiences beyond folk and bluegrass festivals. "I've got 4-year-olds wandering up to me now and singing O Death," Stanley says of his star turn on the O Brother, Where Art Thou? sound track. "It's pretty funny...
...jobs cooking and cleaning. Whatever the roots of their popularity, these musicians may be helping preserve the cultural traditions of an entire region. Bands like Taraf learned their craft while Eastern Europe was still shut behind the Iron Curtain and so avoided the market forces that have weakened other folk traditions. Now, says Simon Broughton, were it not for Roma, the popular music of Romania, Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia and many parts of Greece would be in a dire state: "The way to preserve this music is to use it, and that is what the Roma are doing. As for Roma...
...says how he played clarinet, and also wrestled for three years: “I wasn’t very good at it. Pretty bad, actually.” Explaining his “eclectic” musical tastes, he says he likes a lot of Irish and folk music, and Hindi music as well. Commercial music, he says, feels processed and “very refined,” but English or American or Irish folk is “less processed. When you listen to folk music, it still has that raw edge—like biting into...