Word: joshed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...judge by the initial ovation, last night's crowd in Sanders Theatre expected great things from Josh White and his crew. It whistled, cheered, stamped, snapped its fingers and sang for two hours, and went away highly pleased...
...Josh White suffers from having been over-recorded, which means that his audiences know his songs as well as he does. Yet he has to be seen to be appreciated; he is a powerful, vital and ingratiating man. In some concerts he has depended too much on his considerable charm, and simply gone through the motions on his songs. Last night he sang ten ballads and blues with drive and bite, and succeeded completely in keeping his familiar material alive...
...House of the Rising Sun and Hard Times Blues. White followed these with a blues version of Molly Malone. This song, like Barbara Allen before the intermission, illustrates his tendency to convert songs alien to his background into personal vehicles; his Barbara and Molly come from New Orleans, but Josh makes them convincing...
...Gary is Josh's perennial second-fiddle, an even more ingratiating figure who never falls victim to the slickness of his mentor. He began with a hammed-up version of Foggy, Foggy Dew, with exquisite footnotes from Josh's guitar, and the audience was his within a minute. His version of the Saints Go Marching In seemed to be a parody of his own singing, while his concluding His Eye Is On the Sparrow, aside from its own merits, convinced a perplexed audience that he was sober...
Asked where the new material, the new folk singers, would come from, he said, "from the teenagers, the ones who fall in love with the songs. There are a lot of them. Josh Jr.--he's 16--and some I'm training, and Stan Wilson, and Dean Gitter will be good some day, and a pupil of Lead Belly's--I can't think of his name--on the twelve string guitar, who's damn near as good." He brought himself up short and stretched his hands wide apart. "By damn near as good, I mean that...