Richard Elliott is a writer, university teacher, and journal editor based in Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of the book Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (2010), as well as articles and reviews covering a wide variety of popular music genres. Richard is currently working on a co-authored book on ritual, remembrance, and recorded sound.
Features
Friday, June 18 2010
Pete Seeger... Un Hombre Sincero
These two documents transport listeners and viewers back to the heart of the civil rights era and reaffirm Seeger's creation of a truly global music of conscience that can transcend the limitations of its local translations.
Wednesday, April 28 2010
Blood on the Tracks: Place and Displacement
Dylan’s work has been characterized by the poetics of place and displacement and a refutation of a fixed identity.
Columns
Friday, April 2 2010
Harry Smith: The Avant-Garde in the American Vernacular
This book comes very close to being a faithful mirror of the endlessly fascinating Harry Smith and, like its subject, will provoke, educate, and entertain in equal measure.
Reviews
Thursday, August 4 2011
Matana Roberts: COIN COIN Chapter One: Gens de Couleur Libres
Roberts gives eloquent voice to the fractured nature of identity, the way conflicting identifications jostle for prominence in our psyches, the multiple consciousness of modern hybridity.
Friday, July 8 2011
Gillian Welch: The Harrow & The Harvest
Ten more examples of what make Welch & Rawlings great: high lonesome harmonies, beautifully judged musicianship, exquisite songcraft, and a relationship with tradition that is both serious and playful.
Friday, June 17 2011
Ford & Lopatin: Channel Pressure
A work of heroic heritage -- reorganizing an era that is too often dismissed as sterile.
Tuesday, June 14 2011
Ana Moura: Coliseu
The familiar fado themes of love, loss, uncertainty, grief, pain, and disquiet are all hymned, while the city of Lisbon acts as a metaphor for other cities of the heart.
Friday, May 27 2011
Nicholas Urie: My Garden
Like Bukowski, the gloomy laureate whose work is re-sounded here, Nichloas Urie is not afraid to walk on the dark side. He's also able to find fragments of beauty in the gloom.
