Tag Archives: rutgers

We open the show with “The Purest Kind of Guy,” performed by Paul Robeson, a song from Marc Blitzstein’s 1941 opera No For An Answer which concerns the life and fate of members of a social club of Greek-American waiters, hotel-workers, restaurant-workers, chefs, laundresses, chambermaids, taxi-drivers, who are out-of-work. In 1958, Blitzstein was subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. House …

Today Bruce Franklin will be trying to connect lots of dots. He’lll argue, among other things, that we need to learn what three particular dead white guys are still trying to teach us. Two were bombardiers in WWII: Joseph Heller and Howard Zinn. One was bombed in WWII: Kurt Vonnegut. All three raised this question: Who won that so-called Good …

We open with Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock with “The Star Spangled Banner.” While there are any number of powerful songs we might use tonight, especially from the late 1960s and protests against the Vietnam War, this one seems to me most necessary. A black man, a trained paratrooper of the US Army, on a right-handed electric guitar, playing it upside …