We're starting out this semester with a blending of the old and the new: ""Vincent Black Lightning 1952", by Richard Thompson.
Thompson started off musically back in the 1960's with a "folk-rock" band called Fairport Convention, which blended traditional English folk songs with modern instrumentation.
"Vincent Black Lightning", although decided modern, with motorcycles and whatnot, has a lot of the earmarks of a traditonal ballad, as we saw in class.
Here you can listen again to the song, as performed by Thompson himself. (We listened to a version by Iowa folksinger Greg Brown, which a personally prefer, but. . .) Or watch him, on YouTube.
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Hey- I thought I would drop in and leave a comment. I just read the post on Vincent 1952 and I just tried to listen to the other versions of the song. No sooner did I click on the link than I realized that our sound card was DEAD!!!! AHHHH! So I attempted to compromise by watching the video on Youtube without sound-it just wasn't the same.
In anycase, I enjoyed the version of the song we heard in class. It was interseting that the lyrics were rather sad/romantic and yet the music was fairly upbeat. For me, the music played a large role in creating Jame's character. The melody was sort of wild and meandering. Chords and sequences would be repeated, but they'd always have changes thrown in. This music gave me an image of James as a bad boy who is predicably bad yet unpredictable beacuse even he doesn't know where his life is going ("I'm 21 I might make 22").
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