Hidden Fame and the Genius in the Song: The Ninety Years of Bascom Lamar Lunsford and 'I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground.'
Greil Marcus
| Date: | 10-27-2011 |
| Time: | 6:00 pm to 7:00 pm |
| Location: | Ford Auditorium, Allen Memorial Medical Library |
| Registration: | Registration is Closed. |
Author, journalist and cultural critic Greil Marcus's talk focuses on Bascom Lamar Lunsford. Unknown to the nation and the world at large, Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973) of Turkey Creek, North Carolina, was for much of the 20th century a giant in the realm of American folklore. In 1930 he founded the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival, which continues to this day; he recorded hundreds of songs for the Library of Congress and performed in the White House for Franklin D. Roosevelt and King George V. And yet his deepest legacy may be a disappearing act: his immersion in a song that he recorded obsessively, over and over again. "I wish I was a mole in the ground," he sang in the 1920s, the '30s, '40s, the '50s, the '60s; his most lasting fame will rest on how completely, as an artist, he realized his desire and passed on a mystery that, today, performers from Marianne Faithfull to Blixa Bargeld to Eliza Carty, to mention only a few of the singers who have recorded the song in recent years, are still trying to solve.
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