By Ken Paulson
Americana artists loom large at this year’s Freedom Sings concert at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville.
Gretchen Peters, Kim Richey, Bill Lloyd, Ashley Cleveland, Danny Flowers, Don Henry, Jonell Mosser and Jason White are among Americana-linked performers scheduled for the Oct. 3 event.
(Disclosure: I help plan and host this fund-raiser each year.)
Here’s some background from the First Amendment Center’s site:
” Fourteen years ago the First Amendment Center took a distinctly musical turn.
Our Nashville-based center decided to take advantage of its presence in Music City and organized a charitable event focusing on free speech and music. The concept was simple: Music is free speech with a melody; this new “Freedom Sings” project would feature songs that had once been censored or challenged.
This year’s Freedom Sings concert … will focus on the years 1972-1974, which we’ve collectively tagged “The Watergate Years.”
As we researched music from those three years, we were surprised at how apolitical popular music had become. The strident anti-war anthems of the late 1960s were gone, and only a handful of songs seemed to focus on the turmoil of the times. This was a period in which the nation was still trying to extricate itself from Vietnam, we had our first taste of the oil crisis and the presidency was embroiled in scandal. And yet pop songs largely avoided all of those issues.
This year’s Freedom Sings focuses less on censored music and more on the songs and artists that broke new ground, addressing new topics in new ways. These include “Superfly,” Curtis Mayfield’s take on inner city life, Merle Haggard’s, “If I Can Make It to December,” Paul Simon’s poignant “American Tune” and Randy Newman’s “Sail Away.”
Reservations for the Oct. 3 concert are available at http://www.bluebirdcafe.com/how-to-make-reservations/.