First Amendment Music

Dónde Jugarán Los Niños All of my previous posts have been around different songs that I know or have found. This past Thanksgiving break I went to a Maná concert.  Maná is an 1980's Latin American rock band from Mexico. They come from Guadalajara, Jalisco and are considered one of the most successful Latin American band. They are composed of lead vocalist, Fher Olvera, drummer Alex González, guitarist Sergio Vallín and Juan Calleros.  The concert was absolutely amazing and I was very impressed with the performances. The main singer Fher Olvera wore a variety of protest shirts. At one point during the concert Olvera spoke out about the climate crisis with a video praising Greta Thunberg and all her work. This was right before they played the song, "Dónde Jugarán Los Niños", which translates to "Where Would the Children Play".  The videos below are from the concert, from the performance of "Dónde Jugarán Los Niños" In this ...

Strange Fruit   Billie Holiday. Or better yet, Abel Meeropol, the man who wrote the poem that turned into this song.   Abel Meeropol graduated from a New York high school in 1921 and then went on to become an English teacher and teach there for 17 years. In the late 1930s, after seeing a particularly disturbing image depicting lynching, Meeropol wrote “Strange Fruit”, initially as a poem. He turned the poem into a song that made it’s way the club owner who passed it along to Billie Holiday.   Abel Meeropol was also a communist and was called to testify for both the song and his communist ties. Eventually he left his position at the school and quit the Communist Party. But his story doesn’t end there. He was a brave and softhearted person. In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed for espionage, leaving their two young sons orphaned. No relatives wanted to take in two boys who were so closely associated with communism. Meeropol and his wife Anne t...