Heart and Soul

This young singer brought up in Miami since the age of five sings the most authentic Cuban salsa music.

Of course the pornographc lesbian Ellen Degenerate has her claws on her and invited her on her show. Nonetheless the Havana Girl shows herself to be thoroughly heterosexual despite the Ellen Charm™.

I know. I had a flair for salsa dancing. During my Mexico years, I befriended a group of people who liked to frequent a small salsa joint, Bar Leon, in the city's Centro Historico (actually not a very safe district).

A dorm mate at the University of Connecticut from Puerto Rico taught me some basic steps and I practiced them in my cramped room with latino music from a cassette I had borrowed playing on my compact player. Even she was impressed by my results.

At Bar Leon, I would drag whatever partner I could find in my group who was naive enough, or curious enough, to go to the dance floor with me and I would dance as the GUIDE, something unheard of in Latino culture - the woman never GUIDES for the love of God!

Some young man either from the audience or from the floor would ask my clumsy partner to step aside and he would gently nudge me in the directions he would like me to go. He was the guide.

People thought I was some gringo Cuban (or from Vera Cruz). Never the African I was. Although in the my later encounters with deeply religious Catholic rural Mexicans, they thought Ethiopia was not "African" but rather the land by the Red Sea with Mosesian associations. "Vengo del pais por el Mar Rojo" I would dramatize my origins. One time, when a farmer knew I was coming back in the area (word gets around in those hilly villages), he came along to see who this person was. I don't think he was disappointed. But I brought things back to earth by asking him if any senora in his village could make me one of the embroidered tops typical of the region. He told me to come back in a couple of weeks. By then, I had left the region and was renegotiating my future - to stay on with my program or to start new frontiers. Of course I chose the latter.

Lyrcs to:
Havana, Oh na-na
Havana, ooh na-na
Half of my heart is in Havana, ooh-na-na
He took me back to East Atlanta, na-na-na
Oh, but my heart is in Havana (ay)
There's somethin' 'bout his manners
Havana, ooh na-na

He didn't walk up with that "how you doin'?"
(When he came in the room)
He said there's a lot of girls I can do with
(But I can't without you)
I knew him forever in a minute
(That summer night in June)
And papa says he got malo in him
He got me feelin' like

I knew it when I met him
I loved him when I left him
Got me feelin' like
Ooh-ooh-ooh, and then I had to tell him
I had to go, oh na-na-na-na-na

Havana, ooh na-na
Half of my heart is in Havana, ooh-na-na
He took me back to East Atlanta, na-na-na
Oh, but my heart is in Havana
My heart is in Havana
Havana, ooh na-na

Havana, ooh na-na
Half of my heart is in Havana, ooh-na-na
He took me back to East Atlanta, na-na-na
Oh, but my heart is in Havana
My heart is in Havana
Havana, ooh na-na

Take me back to my Havana

The Avett Brothers: The Return of American Music

Just know the kingdom of God is within you
Even though the battle is bound to continue

True Sadness

You were a friend to me when my wheels were off the track
I know you say there is no need, but I intend to pay you back
When my mind was turning loose and all my thoughts were turning black
You shined a light on me and I intend to pay you back

When I was a child, I depended on a bottle
Full-grown I've been known to lean on a bottle
But you're the real deal in a world of imposters
And I've seen the program make men out of monsters

'Cause I still wake up shaken by dreams
And I hate to say it but the way it seems
Is that no one is fine
Take the time to peel a few layers and you will find
True sadness

Adam and Eve must have really done a number
On that garden when the apple was finished
Leaving behind them a den made of sadness
A damage that can't or won't be replenished

'Cause I still wake up shaken by dreams
And I hate to say it but the way it seems
Is that no one is fine
Take the time to peel a few layers and you will find
True sadness

Angela became a target
As soon as her beauty was seen
By young men who try to reduce her down
To a scene on an X rated screen

Is she not more than the curve of her hips?
Is she not more than the shine on her lips?
Does she not dream to sing and to live and to dance down her own path
Without being torn apart?
Does she not have a heart?

I cannot go on with this evil inside me
I step out my front door and I feel it surround me
Just know the kingdom of God is within you
Even though the battle is bound to continue

'Cause I still wake up shaken by dreams
And I hate to say it but the way it seems
Is that no one is fine
Take the time to peel a few layers and you will find
True sadness
True sadness
True true sadness

Music for Spring

Simon and Garfunkel
Singing "See Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard"
From the album: The Central Park Concert, 1982
Recorded on September 1981 in Central Park

The Concert in Central Park is the
first live album by American folk rock duo Simon & Garfunkel,
released in February 1982 on Warner Bros. Records.
It was recorded in September 1981 at a free benefit concert
in Central Park, New York City, where the pair performed
in front of more than 500,000 people.
Proceeds went toward the redevelopment
and maintenance of the run-down green space
in the middle of Manhattan. This concert and
album marked the start of a short-lived reunion
for Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.[Source]

The song "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" was written by Paul Simon and is in his 1972 self-titled album Paul Simon.

The melody is lighthearted, but don't pay too much attention to the lyrics...
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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat
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English Folk Songs in America

Buck Creek Girls
By Appalachian folk singer Hobart Smith
(Below is more information on Hobart Smith)

Here is a track listing of the album where Buck Creek Girls appears.

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A reader posted this comment on Vaughn Williams and Holst's English Folk Songs.

Complementing RVW's [Ralph Vaughn Williams] and Holst's harvest of English folk song in the period were songcatchers, like Cecil Sharp, founder of the English Folksong society and instigator of the Morris Dance revival, who spent a couple of summers during World War I tramping Appalachia in search of pristine specimens of ancient English and Scottish folk song. Sharp was to collecting and preserving the northern British tradition as RVW and Holst were to the southern. You're right--the charm of folk song derives from its link to the landscape. American traditional and mountain music expresses the same appreciation and longing for the land--and, as it turns out, since those tunes find their roots in the old world, it's the same landscape, made even dearer by the singer's distance from it.

Here is more information on the "songcatchers" Cecil Sharp, and how he built a repertoire of English folk songs in America:

Hobart Smith (May 10, 1897—January 11, 1965) was an American old-time musician. He was most notable for his appearance with his sister, Texas Gladden, on a series of Library of Congress recordings in the 1940s and his later appearances at various festivals during the folk music revival of the 1960s. Smith is often remembered for his virtuosic performances on the banjo, and had also mastered various other instruments, including the fiddle, guitar, piano, harmonica, accordion, and organ...

During the years of the First World War, Sharp found it difficult to support himself through his customary efforts at lecturing and writing, and decided to make an extended visit to the United States. The visit, made with his collaborator Maud Karpeles during the years 1916–1918, was a great success. Large audiences came to hear Sharp lecture about folk music, and Sharp also took the opportunity to do field work on English folk songs that had survived in the more remote regions of southern Appalachia, pursuing a line of research pioneered by Olive Dame Campbell. Travelling through the mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, Sharp and Karpeles recorded a treasure trove of folk songs, many using the pentatonic scale and many in versions quite different from those Sharp had collected in rural England. Generally, Sharp recorded the tunes, while Karpeles was responsible for the words.

Sharp was greatly struck by the dignity, courtesy, and natural grace of the people who welcomed him and Karpeles in the Appalachians, and he defended their values and their way of life in print.

Sharp's work in promoting English folk song dance traditions in the US is carried on by the Country Dance and Song Society

The excerpt below is Hobart's account of his musical beginning. It appears to come from this source: Smith Hobart: "I grew up into it" DB no. 22 (1 sept, 1973), 18-22, Short autobiography, originally accompanying Folk-Legacy Records FSA-17. The link provides the rest of the narrative:

I Grew Up Into It
As Told By Hobart Smith:
I started playing the banjo when I was seven years old. When I was three, I commenced playin' on an old fire shovel. I was raised in an old log house that had a fireplace and my mother had a bar that went across the fireplace with hooks that came down to cook her stuff in the pots and then she had a big oven and lid and she'd bake her bread and pull out those coals with that shovel — cover it up with red-hot coals, you know — and bake her bread thataway. We didn't have any cook-stove at that time. They said I was just three years old, I'd get that fire shovel and just pick on it; and they asked me what I was pickin' and I just said "Sour Colics!"[Read the rest of the narrative here].

Despite the sad themes of many songs, the melodies appear less plaintive, and more confident, than the Irish melodies I wrote about here.

Next stop, Wales, then Scotland!

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Posted By: Kidist P. Asrat