KURATED NO. 200
READERS’ CHOICE 2023
Part Three
PLAYLISTS
• A Touching One-Song Video Tribute to George Jones on YouTube
• A 3-Song Set of Socially Conscious Songs on YouTube
Neil Young’s song about climate change makes the cut in contributor Ron Verzuh’s 3-song selection of socially relevant songs. (Amy Harris photo)
Contributors
Part 3 of the Sixth Annual Edition of Reader’s Choice has illustrator Deb Rooney highlighting a tender country music YouTube video while writer and historian Ron Verzuh’s Top 3 songs address unions, war and climate change.
• VANCOUVER’S ROONEY shares an emotional 13-minute 2013 video tribute to George Jones by Patty Loveless and Vince Gill. Deb sets it up below. The first quote in the clip’s comment section says:
@race38dirt
“If you have never had to sing publicly at the death of a loved one, you will never understand the strength these two showed here. Music is for healing the heart and mind. This performance was beyond perfect. It did exactly what it was meant to do. This is not a show. This is a tribute.”
• FOLK MUSIC FAN Verzuh presents Woody Guthrie, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Neil Young singing songs with a social conscience.
The 6th Annual Readers’ Choice
Kurated readers share their favourite music of the last year in the annual Readers’ Choice series.
It’s kind of like a potluck dinner – you hope the sweets, the savouries and the mains balance out and that there’s appetizers too…
Kurated is a music sharing project.
Share it with your friends!
Stay tuned and enjoy,
Deb Rooney
Vancouver, BC
Patty Loveless comforts Vince Gill at the memorial for country music stalwart George Jones
A 1-Song Video Tribute
I have a performance that has always touched me: Vince Gill and Patti Loveless singing Rest High On The Mountain in tribute to George Jones after he died in 2013.
Gill was close to Jones and kept breaking down during the performance. Loveless was singing harmony and finessed it in such a lovely, kind and understanding way. She kept the song, and Gill, going to the end with such a gentle professionalism – never taking over, never overshadowing Gill (who wrote the song) – but somehow being the lead.
I’m in no way religious but the whole performance moved me.
(You have to endure the intro first…)
About Deb: Deb’s wit and illustrative flair have only gotten sharper since she left her working life behind a few years ago.
Ron Verzuh
Esquimalt, BC
Contributor Ron Verzuh notes that while Buffy Sainte-Marie’s reputation suffered last year, that shouldn’t detract from the importance and meaning of her socially conscious music. (Matt Barnes photo)
3 -Song Playlist
- Light A Candle
- Universal Soldier
- Union Maid
- With the recent successes of the United Auto Workers and the actors and Hollywood writers’ unions, Woodie Guthrie’s Union Maid, with its lyric “I’m stickin’ to the union,” resonates loudly still.
- Buffy Sainte-Marie took a nasty hit when CBC’s Fifth Estate exposed her as a “pretendian,” but that couldn’t dismiss the power of one of the great anti-war anthems, her Universal Soldier.
- Climate change is the issue that will determine our future. In 2009, Neil Young, a long-time environmentalist, penned Light a Candle. It still speaks to us as a plea to “give meaning to every move we make.”
About Ron: Ron Verzuh is a writer, historian and documentary filmmaker. His most recent book is Printer’s Devils: How a Feisty Pioneer Newspaper Shaped the History of British Columbia (Caitlin Press, 2023). He is the director-producer of the award-winning short film Joe Hill’s Secret Canadian Hideout. His work has appeared in academic journals, magazines, newspapers and on web sites. He lives in Esquimalt, BC.
