This afternoon’s playlist comes from Amanda Petrusich, a staff writer for Pitchfork and senior contributing editor for Paste. Her books include It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music and Pink Moon (33 1/3 series). Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Spin, the Village Voice, the Onion A.V. Club, the Oxford American, ReadyMade, eMusic.com, MSN.com, and elsewhere. She compiles the weekly pop listings for the Times. She’s currently at work on a book about record collectors, as will probably be plain by her selections below. Follow her on Twitter at @amandapetrusich.
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In the summer of 1952, the filmmaker and ethnomusicologist Harry Smith holed up in a little two-room office at 111 West 47th Street, (allegedly) chewing on peyote buttons and digging through his massive collection of 78rpm records to compile the mind-bending Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkways. Although it
What? Not a single mention of “Native New Yorker” by the disco group Odyssey? (Young and pretty, New York City girl….)
I have a soft spot for that song, Rick. I don’t know when I first heard it, but it stuck w/ me from the Studio 54 soundtrack, which was compiled by WFMU’s incomparable Monica. Cyrus and I play it as exit music for one of our Writing New York lectures, though I can’t remember which one off the top of my head.
Funny that disco comments come up on Amanda’s Harry Smith playlist!