Musicians

In 1961, the folk guitarist Barry Kornfeld moved back to Manhattan after spending a year in Boston. The Greenwich Village folk musicians he called friends, who before his trip to Boston had been enduring a hand-to-mouth existence, were now making a living playing their music in clubs along MacDougal Street — not necessarily “a good living,” Kornfeld noted, but certainly enough to get by. Kornfeld spotted another difference, too. Audiences at clubs weren’t merely clapping; they were snapping their fingers in appreciation, which felt like the hippest thing ever. Rolling Stone writer David Browne’s latest book, chronicling the history of Greenwich Village music, pivots around 1961.

It takes only a couple of hours by train from the southern reaches of rural Lincolnshire to central London. But for seventeen-year-old Bernie Taupin, leaving home in June 1967 to try his luck in the big city, the journey might as well have been to a distant planet, such was the gulf between his life as a casual farm-laborer and his ambitions to become an internationally acclaimed songwriter like his heroes Hank Snow or Merle Haggard.

In July 2022, hundreds of elegant opera-goers gathered on the lawns of Glyndebourne Manor in Sussex to picnic in the interval of a rarely performed early twentieth century work, The Wreckers, by the suffragette composer Dame Ethel Smyth. This strikingly powerful piece of music, which tells the story of Cornish villagers who lure ships onto rocks in order to plunder them, was the first opera by a female composer to be staged at the prestigious British festival and was extremely well-received. The Times of London praised its “wild waves of passion.” Yet The Wreckers has had a difficult history.