#nancy white

[sft-babes]

Bunny Yeager photog

[theegregore]

Nancy White at Romer Young in San Francisco

[radiodark]

I've been thinking a lot about a slice of this album from 1983 I grew up with, Seasons of Change, from Priscilla Herdman (who did a lot of folk covers), which had three songs in succession that are haunting me right now-

Written by Canadian satirist Nancy White, who subtitled it "A LAMENT FOR THE DISAPPEARED PEOPLE OF ARGENTINA, EL SALVADOR, CHILE, URUGUAY, GUATEMALA, ETC" and printed in the liner notes:

"This song was written in 1978 when Toronto’s Chilean community staged a hunger strike to pressure the junta in Santiago to release information about Chile’s 2500 “desaparecidos” (disappeared ones), some of whom had been missing since the coup in ‘73. These people were abducted, jailed, probably tortured and possibly killed; their families live year after year with the horror and the grief, and no answers come."

(Herdman's website lists the songwriter as Utah Phillips/Priscilla Herdman, but I suspect it's a Utah Phillips song and the credit reflects the level of arrangement she did for her version. ) On one of his albums he talks about writing it:

I had been listening to the reports from Nicaragua in the waning days of Somoza's dictatorship, and the news was full of stories about people disappeared, about kids disapeared, that just vanished from the lives of their parents, were carried off by the military. I was working out in my garden up there in Spokane and I was listening to the sound of my children playing in the front yard. And I wondered- what would it be like, if suddenly I heard their playing stop, and I went out to see what was the matter and they were gone, and I had to realize I would never see them again. Gary Cristall from Toronto was down there during the rebellion, during the revolution, and he was visiting the Liberated Areas, and I said to him, "Gary, what is a Liberated Area? What happens in a Liberated Area?" And he said, "Near as I can tell, it's the peasants just tear up the coffee plants and plant rice and beans."

Deportees (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos) is, much more famously, Woodie Guthrie's lament for the loss of 28 migrant farm workers (a mix of folks being deported and folks returning to Mexico at the termination of their contracts as part of the Bracero Guest Worker Program) who died in 1948 when their plane crashed near Los Gatos Canyon in California, with initial news reports listing only the pilot, first officer, stewardess, and immigration guard on the plane and the remainder simply described as "deportees", their bodies placed in a mass grave and labeled only as "Mexican Nationals".

Guthrie wrote it as a poem, which was put to music a decade later by a schoolteacher named Martin Hoffman, and then popularized by Pete Seeger. Guthrie himself never put out a recording, though the Smithsonian recently announced that a reel-to-reel home recording of his from the 50s has been "restored through the use of AI" and can be listened to here- they don't provide the original for comparison though, so it's hard to tell if the tech was 100% corrective or if it could have hallucinated any tonal differences when filling in the gaps of the original.

It seems unneccessary and inadequate to reflect on why these songs resonate today, so I shan't, but I hope you enjoy. Herdman's tunes were by and large my first entry into adult folk music, having graduated from her cassettes for kids, and while she's not so known for her own activism or songwriting chops her curation of covers and traditional tunes and the dialogues she'd create between songs on an album still anchor me.

[questcequecestqueca]

Nancy White - Bunny Yeager

Nudes & Noises

[robcottingham]

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 1: Nancy White

Social Speech Podcast, Episode 1: Nancy White

The social web has gone a long way toward changing what it means to be in the audience at a speech – making an audience member less a passive spectator listening to a monologue, and more an active participant in a conversation among peers.

And nobody does that quite like Nancy White– except she doesn’t just rely on digital technology. She’s one of the best group facilitators in the business,…

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[spacecamp1]

Nancy White 2016, 2017

[theegregore]

Nancy White at Romer Young in San Francisco

[coxefamily]

Phil Baker recently sent me some great photos from the Baker side. His back story:

"Purely by chance, I happened to open a drawer in the ancient  highboy that has occupied a space in our living room for decades. In it, I found several old photos in their original frames. Three of them were of interest to me and could be to you: 

#1- A great shot of 3 children having a tea party with actual identification as my mother, her sister, Nancy, and My Aunt Susan..."