About the Show
Foolkiller Folk
The Foolkiller Folk collective explores the storytelling, cultural, and protest power of folk music from as far back as the Child Ballads through as current as released today.
"When one becomes enlightened one kills the fool within" -Jack Conroy
What do these three themes have in common? Just the fact that we couldn’t put together a full show on any of them :-).
We started watching Fallout, were captivated by the theme song, concluded we must play it on the air, then decided the theme needed to be expanded into an entire set; the length of the Dick Gaughan set was limited by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act; and we were planning to finish up What We Heard at Folk Alliance today anyway.
A couple of notes:
Tom Lehrer (So Long Mom (A Song for World War III) and “We Will All Go Together When We Go“) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, satirist, mathematician, “a hero of the anti-nuclear, civil rights left” and a favorite of both Mark’s and Val’s.
The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades’s listening audience heard a graduation theme song, but Pat MacDonald maintains that it is really a song of a young nuclear scientist and his bright future due to the impending nuclear holocaust.
We first heard Tom Paine’s Bones done by The Trials of Cato at the Folk Alliance Conference. Tom Paine was an English-born American Founding Father, French Revolutionary, political activist, philosopher, political theorist, and revolutionary, best known for his pamphlets Common Sense and The Rights of Man. “They dug up the body in the dead of night. Men armed with shovels and pickaxes extracted the coffin and fled into the October darkness. Authorities gave chase until the body snatchers’ wagon raced over King’s Bridge and into Manhattan. Thus began the saga of the remains of Thomas Paine.”
Tune in and enjoy!
