Word: minstrell
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...Harold's wife shows up with two Negroes, the skindiver and the man she really loves, a Brooks Brothers type who recites poetry and cherishes her femininity. Harold is more deeply nonplussed than he was by the notion of his wife's surrender to a typical minstrel man who is also a switch blade artist and a sexual athlete. Playgoers may be equally nonplussed by the belated stab at seriousness, especially after Friedman's nightlong skill at making race a laughing matter...
...bowl farmers seeking Pastures of Plenty, the spunky Union Maid who defied "goons and ginks and company finks," fast-living Jackhammer John, everyone traveling a hard road, but one that provided hope, blooming with all the gladness of his folk anthem, This Land Is Your Land. The gaunt Depression minstrel, with dried-grass hair and a reedy voice, spun off the Oklahoma plains like a cloud of the "dusty old dust" in his ballads to roam the nation singing in transient camps and saloons. His best stanzas staked the folk boom of the '60s, but by then their author...
Above all, he was a minstrel whose prose had the same resonating, twanging rhythms as his folk songs or his verse. Essentially, Carl Sandburg was an American troubadour...
Charles Ives--Yale man, insurance salesman, transcendentalist, composer--surely one of the most unusual figures in the history of music. Danbury Conn. was his musical matrix. In the solid German academic tradition, he was steeped in Handel, Bach, and Beethoven, as well as in the Puritan and Victorian hymns, minstrel tunes, and "sentimental drawing-room ballads" of late nineteenth-century America. Yet Ives was a composer far ahead of his time, employing radical devices such as polytonality, metrical modulation and tone clusters long before they appeared in the European musical spotlight...
...sign of the need comes from the young who are indeed looking for heroes. The seriousness of the search is only underlined by the weird pseudo heroes whom some have discovered, ranging from Bob Dylan, the long-playing minstrel of social protest, to the Beatles, who demonstrated a way to shock their elders and still be innocent...