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Why didn't more people pay attention to Little Richard’s gospel music? Probably because gospel music is the music of good news and in these days there just isn’t any. Good news in today’s world is like a fugitive, treated like a hoodlum and put on the run. Castigated. All we see is good-for-nothing news. And we have to thank the media industry for that. It stirs people up. Gossip and dirty laundry. Dark news that depresses and horrifies you. On the other hand, gospel news is exemplary. It can give you courage. You can pace your life accordingly, or try...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Bob Dylan. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Yes, today's quote comes from a talented and enigmatic character whom most would associate with the Communist wing of the Human party, including myself. Yet words mean things; these words are just as hallow today as the lives that protected this nation, and more importantly, our Constitution. For without a Constitution to defend, we have nothing. It's really that simple. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using...

We remember Robert Zimmerman, who was born in Minnesota on this day in 1941.  We know him as Bob Dylan. As far as I know, Dylan has been quiet lately.  He seems to be enjoying retirement and having the rest of us listen to his songs.  (By the way, May is another anniversary of Dylan's second album, the one that included "Blowing in the wind.") Dylan did win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.  Eventually, he accepted the award, but his trip to Stockholm was typical Dylan, as I recall reading in The New Yorker: When he finally showed up in Stockholm, during an...

...As the clock struck midnight on the east coast Friday morning, Dylan released a new song, “Murder Most Foul,” that has a 16:57 running time — and it’s an epic free association on the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy...In the song’s view, the killing of JFK, “right there in front of everyone’s eyes,” is the “greatest magic trick” — and one he presumably thinks has some relevance in 2020.

Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky and activist Ammon Bundy take stands for the US Constitution in the face of America's "Coronavirus Crisis" but first..... French President Emmanuel Macron expressing his gratitude to Iraqi authorities over the release of four workers from a French Christian charity who were kidnapped in Iraq... Israel air force planes attacking targets in Gaza tonight after a rocket launched from the Gaza Strip.... President Trump calling for the ejection of libertarian Republican US Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky from the Republican Party for insisting on a roll call vote to pass the multi-billion dollars coronavirus bailout...

Musician’s “Dueling Banjos” cover from the Deliverance soundtrack became a huge hit in 1973Bluegrass musician Eric Weissberg, whose cover of the Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith instrumental “Dueling Banjos” became an unlikely pop hit when it appeared on the soundtrack to the 1972 film Deliverance, died Sunday at the age of 80 after a five-year struggle with dementia. His son, Will Weissberg, confirmed the musician’s death to Rolling Stone. “Eric Weissberg was a consummate musician, a solid and seemingly effortless player of stringed instruments of all kinds — banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, pedal steel, and string bass,” his lifelong friend and...

[Snip] Yes, we've lost some already. On top of the icons who died horribly young decades ago — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon — there's the litany of legends felled by illness, drugs, and just plain old age in more recent years: George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty. Those losses have been painful. But it's nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come. The grief and nostalgia will wash over us all. Yes, the Boomers left alive will take it...

Philip Adam, a visitor from England, was walking down Columbus Avenue shortly after 1 p.m. Sunday, March 24, when he fell into a line of people that jammed the entrance to City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. “Are they giving something away?” he inquired. They were. At that moment, renowned North Beach poet Jack Hirschman was standing on the floor of the famous bookstore, giving away his reading of the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem “At Sea.” It was a rare occasion that drew crowds of people who were pressed into the shelves, down the stairs to the cash registers and out the...

If we valued black art, Kendrick Lamar’s Pulitzer would have been for literature. When will the education system wake up to black creativity? I can’t help thinking that the Pulitzer prize committee missed a trick in their award to the rapper Kendrick Lamar this week. If they had given him the Pulitzer for literature rather than for music it would have elevated his artform and sent a message that would have resonated around the world: that rap is a legitimate form of poetry and should be put on a par with, and treated with the same deference as, Shakespeare and...

YouTube, that visual repository of everything forgotten, contains a 1993 interview from 1960s counterculture hero Bob Dylan airing heretical views on gun control that deserves a second look given the current debate. The man behind the microphone appears guilty of the same sin committed by so many of Dylan’s admirers: projection. They imagine their hero’s words as ones they would say, albeit in a less oracular, lyrical way. So, when he embraces Christianity or watches boxing or goes positively-fourth-street on members of the press, they provide explanations for why Bob Dylan was not himself that day, which is their way...

A guitar played by Bob Dylan at notable concerts in 1970s is expected to sell for more than $300,000 when it goes up for auction next month. Heritage Auctions said the 1963 Martin D-28 acoustic guitar that once belonged to the singer-songwriter will be offered up Nov. 11 in Dallas. Heritage says Dylan played the guitar through his set at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in New York City in 1971 and during his Rolling Thunder Revue tour from October 1975 to May 1976. The guitar is being sold by Larry Cragg, who was Dylan’s guitar repairman when Cragg bought...

The imminent release of “Trouble No More” -- the latest installment of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series; this one covers his controversial 1979-81 “Christian period” -- recalls the long-gone age of high-profile rock star conversions.Dylan became a Christian, George Harrison dived into Krishna consciousness, and Cat Stevens embraced Islam, and each demonstrated, yet again, that Leftist dogma is false. The content of one’s religious beliefs does matter, and influences those who take their religions seriously.Both Harrison and Dylan were widely criticized for their sanctimony. Reviewing Harrison’s 1973 album “Living in the Material World” in New Musical Express, Tony Tyler called the...

Three little Injuns out on a canoe, One tumbled overboard and then there were two… Sadly, it turned out to be true after all. After a full day of misinformation and premature rumors of death it appears that Tom Petty did indeed reach the end of the line last night. There have undoubtedly been weeks that have gotten off to a worse start than this one has, but I’m hard pressed to recall one right off hand. And so we remember Tom…I know he offered up dozens of great songs, with and without his Heartbreakers, but I was always...

Bob Dylan - Sweetheart Like YouFor those of you who missed this yesterday let me redirect you to Gerard’s recently reformatted and still excellent website, American Digest. One of yesterday’s posts, “Two riders were approaching:” All Along the Watchtower and Isaiah, contains a TED video titled Why Bob Dylan Won the Nobel Prize  - definitely worth your time to view. The last time we talked about Dylan around here was when he received the Medal of Freedom – from President Obama. I doubt he ever would have received that honor if the tenders knew who Dylan really was. But...

JTA - The fallout from Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature has taken a strange turn: The Jewish folk singer’s website has taken down its only brief mention of the award. Dylan has not acknowledged the award at any of his performances in the week since the Nobel committee’s Oct. 13 announcement, but his website made one allusion to it this week on a page promoting a new collection of his lyrics, “The Lyrics: 1961: 2012.” The page on bobdylan.com simply called him the “winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.” As of Friday morning, the reference has been erased...

A member of the Swedish Academy that awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in literature to Bob Dylan says the American singer-songwriter’s silence since receiving the honor is “impolite and arrogant.” Per Wastberg said Dylan’s lack of reaction to the honor the academy bestowed on him last week was predictable, but disrespectful nonetheless. “One can say that it is impolite and arrogant. He is who he is,” Wastberg was quoted as saying in Saturday’s edition of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter. …

SNIP The Swedish Academy admitted Monday that it has "given up" trying to reach Bob Dylan to inform him about his Nobel prize in literature. "Right now we are doing nothing," academy secretary Sara Danius told Swedish state radio SR. "I have called and sent emails to his closest collaborator and received very friendly replies. For now, that is certainly enough." Beyond informing the songwriter of his momentous achievement, the Nobel prize committee had hoped to invite Dylan to their Dec. 10 banquet in Sweden. But Dylan's mum on that too, leaving organizers to wonder if he'll stand up King...

With Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in literature, this year’s Nobel laureates became an all-male ensemble, something that’s not unusual in the 115-year-old history of the prestigious awards. But this is 2016. Critics are questioning why the Nobel judges couldn’t find a single woman across the planet worthy of being honored in any of the six prize categories. “No woman wins Nobel prize this year. Oh the times they ain’t a-changin’,” Leah Kaminsky, an Australian author and doctor, wrote on Twitter. Swedish writer and literature professor Ebba Witt-Brattstrom accused the Nobel judges of a lack of imagination after they...

Bob Dylan, regarded as the voice of a generation for his influential songs from the 1960s onwards, has won the Nobel Prize for Literature in a surprise decision that made him the only singer-songwriter to win the award. The 75-year-old Dylan — who won the prize for "having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition" — now finds himself in the company of Winston Churchill, Thomas Mann and Rudyard Kipling as Nobel laureates. The announcement was met with gasps in Stockholm's stately Royal Academy hall, followed — unusually — by some laughter. Dylan's songs, such as "Blowin'...

The Times of Israel reports: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now,” Bob Dylan sang in 1964’s “My Back Pages.”