Jerry Ewing’s PROG magazine has put a call out for nominations for this year’s READERS’ POLL. Here’s the handy-dandy link: PROG READERS’ POLL 2017.
Make sure you follow the directions for the email: “To vote, copy the categories below and e-mail us with the subject line ‘Readers’ Poll 2017’ to prog@futurenet.com.”
I have proudly sent in my nominations, but I would like to encourage you to consider two specific folks for nomination.
First, please consider nominating our own (well, she’s her own!) Alison Reijman as the “Unsung Hero.” I have known Alison–only through the internet and correspondence; sadly, never in person–for years now, and I can state that I know of no other person not directly employed by a record label, a PR firm, or a magazine dealing with PROG who has promoted the genre more than Alison has. She not only loves the music and the musicians, but she, herself, is a lovely, lovely person. She exemplifies, at least to my mind, all that is best in our strange but delightful little corner of the cultural world. She’s brilliant, free-spirited, spontaneous, tenacious, and exceedingly generous and kind.
Continue reading “Nominate Alison Reijman and Susie Bogdanowicz–PROG”
Beginning in 1959, John Fahey’s “Blind Joe Death” excursions for solo acoustic guitar were the first to radically reconsider traditional blues and old-time music, extending by personalizing what Harry Smith did with the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952): rather than mythologizing what at that time was a largely unknown recorded legacy, as Smith did, Fahey made it breathe life, by quoting in his riffs on the traditional all manner of contemporary music. There is not a folk or jazz or avant-garde or prog rock guitarist who doesn’t owe Fahey a debt for this, for not only breaking boundaries — with which he was hyper-literate — but making such things seem irrelevant in the music he made.
Progarchy 