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"Gypsy Davy" by Margaret MacArthur

"Gypsy Davy" by Margaret MacArthur from the album "Folksongs of Vermont" (FW05314)

Born in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, Margaret MacArthur spent her childhood moving around the western United States. Her first contact with folk music came in 1933, when her father began work at an Arizona timber company with displaced cowboys and folk singers who had collected songs throughout their travels. In 1948 MacArthur moved to Vermont, where she gathered the songs presented here from churches, friends, and broadsides found near her farm. When speaking of her death, Margaret MacArthur’s granddaughter Robin wrote, "On her deathbed she was sick with morphine, most of her memory gone, but she could still remember the lyrics to any ballad we asked her to sing. This music had etched itself into her soul; song and landscape and self had twined into a fabric that was lasting, resounding, and full of grace."

 

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Free Download: Antonio Vivaldi's "Mandolin Concerto, RV 425"

Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741) was an Italian composer of the Baroque era. He trained to be a local priest in Venice, and like his father, he played the violin in his youth. He principally traveled and composed in Italy; his operas and concertos advanced Italian music.

Vivaldi wrote over 500 pieces of orchestral music, including some 350 concertos. The sheer volume of concertos allowed him plenty of room for experimentation. He developed the ritornello, a three-movement concerto in which the final movement was a shorter variation of the first, as occurs in the Mandolin Concerto.

This recording is performed by the Ensemble Instrumental de Grenoble, Christian Schneider, mandolin.

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Free Download: "You're the One for Me" by David "Honeyboy" Edwards from the album "Mississippi Delta Bluesman"

"You're the One for Me" by David "Honeyboy" Edwards from the album "Mississippi Delta Bluesman" (SFW40132)

David "Honeyboy" Edwards embodies the continuity from blues' Mississippi Delta roots to electric Chicago blues. Honeyboy's string-snapping guitar riffs and soulful voice harken back to his friends and teachers Charley Patton, Big Joe Williams, Tommy Johnson, and Robert Johnson, who first forged the blues in Delta jooks and at country suppers during the Depression. Edwards crisscrossed the South in the company of such blues giants as Big Walter Horton, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Little Walter Jacobs. He settled in Chicago, where a post-WWII electric blues boom set the pattern for modern rock and roll. This recording captures him in a relaxed, unplugged, solo moment. Deep Delta blues from Robert Johnson's sidekick, whose searing vocals and stinging guitar bridge pre-war and post-war blues.

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Free Download: Benjamin Britten's "Missa Brevis, Op. 63"

Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) is a twentieth-century British composer and pianist. Encouraged by his mother, he began playing and composing at an early age. He rose to great prominence as composer of operas and had the opportunity to collaborate with great names of the twentieth century, such as with EM Forester on Billy Budd.

The Missa Brevis was written for the Westminter Cathedral Choir on the retirement of the choirmaster, George Malcolm. The mass is true to its origins: it does not have a Credo, traditional in Catholic masses, as it was written for an Episcopal mass.

This recording is performed by Bodra Smyana Children's Choir, Stojanka Slavova, organist.

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Free Download: "Jarocho II" by Nati Cano's Mariachi Los Camperos from the album "¡Llegaron Los Camperos!"

"Jarocho II" by Nati Cano's Mariachi Los Camperos from the album "¡Llegaron Los Camperos!"

Nati Cano’s Mariachi Los Camperos brings you their solid-gold Mexican sound acclaimed by audiences in New York’s Lincoln Center, Washington, DC’s Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, and other major venues throughout the United States Southwest and Mexico. Llegaron Los Camperos (Los Camperos Have Arrived) showcases the group’s concert stage repertoire, skillfully arranged versions of classic mariachi melodies and styles of traditional music from many regions of Mexico.

Mariachi Los Camperos de Nati Cano nos trae su sonido mexicano de oro puro, aclamado en conciertos en el Lincoln Center de Nueva York, el Kennedy Center de Washington, DC, el Smithsonian Folklife Festival, y en presentaciones de primera categoría a través del suroeste de los Estados Unidos y México. Llegaron Los Camperos despliega el repertorio de concierto del grupo, además de versiones de melodías clásicas artísticamente arregladas y estilos de música tradicional de muchas de las regiones de México. 

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Free Download: Johannes Brahms' "Tragic Overture in D minor, Op.81"

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) is a German composer and pianist whose music influenced many twentieth-century composers. He was born to a middle-class family in Hamburg and was composing by age 16. Brahms deeply appreciated and studied earlier composers, and in fact defended their relevance to a movement of composers led by Liszt. The Musicians of the Future, as they called themselves, thought that the future of music was in connecting it explicitly to an ideology or literary idea.

The Tragic Overture (1880) was written in conjunction with the Academic Festival Overture. Unlike much of the music at the time, the Tragic Overture has no specific story and instead is intended to express emotion. The piece reflects Beethoven's influence on the composer; like the Ninth Symphony, it is in D minor.

This recording is performed by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice, John Carewe conducting.

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Free Download: "A blanco y negro / In Black and White" by Riquelme Carrillo and band from the album "¡Ayombe! The Heart of Colombia’s Música Vallenata"

"A blanco y negro / In Black and White" by Riquelme Carrillo and band from the album "¡Ayombe! The Heart of Colombia’s Música Vallenata"

In the words of GRAMMY®-winning popular singer/actor Carlos Vives, "Colombia is one of those great musical quarries of the Americas, as have been the American South, the Antilles, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina." Since the late 20th century, the music of the vallenatos- people of a small valley region of the Caribbean coast- "has best portrayed the true way of being and feeling of the Colombian people." ¡Ayombe! The Heart of Colombia’s Música Vallenata, features two dozen seasoned vallenato performers spanning three generations, playing polished renditions of the music they know best-paseos, merengues, sones, and puyas.

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Free Download: Ludwig van Beethoven's "7th Symphony in A major, op.92"

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) is a German composer and is widely regarded as one of the most influential in Western music. He began to lose his hearing in 1801, and spent the last years of his life profoundly deaf; the tragic irony of this has been often observed.

The Seventh Symphony was written shortly after Wellington's victory at Waterloo. Civil unrest in France and the Napoleonic Wars had lasted for an entire generation, and the symphony seems to capture the celebratory mood in Europe. Indeed, Beethoven called it "one of the happiest products of my poor talents."

During his lifetime, the second movement was often performed separately from the rest of the symphony.

This recording is performed by the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine, Alain Lombard, conductor.

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Free Download: "Las tres fronteras (The Three Borders)" by Los Hermanos Lovos from the album "İSoy Salvadoreño!"

"Las tres fronteras (The Three Borders)" by Los Hermanos Lovos from the album "İSoy Salvadoreño!"

The low-slung mountains and rural villages of eastern El Salvador are home to one of the most joyous yet little-known regional musics of Latin America. Called chanchona—"big pig," the local name for the string bass—it is music made by and for country people. When the family group Los Hermanos Lovo fled the civil war of the 1980s and 1990s, they took their homegrown music with them to Washington, D.C. There, the lively sounds of the cumbia are as much an invitation to dance as a way of creating a sense of "home" and cultural solidarity.

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Free Download: "Pretty Saro" from the album Songs of Love and Politics, performed by Peggy Seeger

Our featured download from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is "Pretty Saro" from the album Songs of Love and Politics by Peggy Seeger.

A dominant figure in the folk song movement in the U.S. and England for more than 35 years, Peggy personally selected these traditional and original songs focused primarily on the themes of love and politics. Songs include "Freight Train," "First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," and "Gonna Be An Engineer."

"21 tracks display the variety of Peggy's repertoire, her range of styles, love of tradition and innovative songwriting prowess." — Homespun Tapes

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