Diamonds are a Folksinger’s Best Friend
Chuck Brodsky looks at life through baseball
PREVIEW
CHUCK BRODSKY
Saturday, March 24
Nickelodeon Music Club
Throughout recent history, folk songs have been written about a plethora of socially relevant topics. Take a look through the Smithsonian Folkways song catalogue, and you’ll likely come across many of the issues that have been covered in traditional folk music. Justice. Freedom. War. Race relations. Death. Murder. Agriculture. Peace. Love. Understanding. Labour. Culture. Baseball.
Yup, baseball.
No, Bob Dylan did not sing "A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall and Cancel the Game," nor did Robert Johnson pen "Come On In My Dugout." But Asheville, North Carolina’s Chuck Brodsky, whose style has been compared many times to the likes of Dylan, Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, is quickly establishing himself as a modern-day folk troubadour with a penchant for songs about America’s national pastime.
With six of his songs residing in the sound recording library of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Brodsky approaches baseball like many traditional folk singers of the past treated their musical topics – by creating vivid images with the stories, the flavour and the characters. His latest album, Last of the Old Time, contains two baseball-related tunes – one about 1940s baseball clown/coach Max Patkin, and another about Fred Merkle, a player for the Giants who was forever cursed by making a "bonehead" play and losing a 1908 pennant game against the Cubs. In both cases, Brodsky transports the listener back in time, where they sit in the stands watching the action with the smell of peanuts and popcorn thick in the air.
"That’s probably where my passion for baseball came from – I’m really drawn to the characters of the game, particularly the characters from the past," says Brodsky. "I think nowadays the players have gotten kind of spoiled, and are multimillionaires. It’s just not the same as it used to be – years ago there was a real innocence (to the game)."
Like many of his other songs, Brodsky’s baseball tunes come from myriad sources. "I’m always looking for an oddball baseball story," he says. "Sometimes it will be from a magazine article, or maybe somebody came across it and thought I’d be interested in it. There’s no telling. I just feel fortunate that great stories come my way."
Brodsky does not just sing about baseball – but his baseball songs are about as close he gets to writing any sort of love songs and they are often metaphors for life in general.
"I use the songs as a vehicle to make some statements about things, or maybe let my own values come across," he says. "I can identify with Max Patkin the baseball clown, and through his own values I can assert mine. I think I reflect where I'm coming from through the things I choose to point out about him. So I do use the baseball songs to sometimes say other things."
Brodsky often uses his songs to comment on how society has changed over the decades, and how we’ve perhaps lost something along the way.
"I think some of the things I’m trying to say are reflections about the way the world has become so corporate in the last 15 or 20 years, and how the corporate world has taken over the entertainment industry in particular," he says. "There are certain values that our society is letting slip away, and I guess that’s what I’m trying to write about in a lot of the songs." |
