Thomas Boyd

Website: www.rocknroots.org
Residence : New York, NY

Biographical information

Thomas Boyd is producer and host of "RocknRoots on the Web," an eclectic and opinionated survey of American vernacular music, whose webcasts and radio broadcasts have been enjoyed across the country and around the world. His show has featured appearances by Grammy-winning songwriter Julie Gold, blues legend Taj Mahal, cabaret standouts Dave´s True Story, and many others. Boyd is a singer-songwriter, musicologist and enthusiastic and knowledgeable fan of folk, jazz, blues, country, swing and more.

With his late partner Ann Sternberg, Boyd produced the radio special saluting the post-9/11 remix of "We Are Family." He performs regularly in the New York area. His music career grew out of his long experience in public affairs, media and community-building. He has worked as a senior U.S. Senate official, public service advertising executive, outreach worker in urban neighborhoods, college dean, and management consultant to public and private organizations.

Thomas Boyd is a native of Dayton, Ohio, with a graduate education from the University of Washington and teaching and leadership roles at American University, The New School, and Washington International College. He and his wife, the bestselling author Oralee Wachter, live in New York City.

Discussion topics

The Jews Who Led The Band
American vernacular music owes much of its spirit and significance to the contributions of hundreds of Jewish players, writers, promoters and popularizers. This fast-paced program celebrates the rhythms and rhymes of Jewish musical influences from the 17th Century right up to contemporary recording artists.

• how klezmer changed the sound of music, and made it swing
• writing the Great American Songbook
• an immigrant´s eye on the New World
• from this you make a living?
• Tin Pan Alley, the Brill Building, Hollywood
• a Jewish Music Hall of Fame
• betcha didn´t know. . .

We´ll listen to more than 40 tunes. . .we´ll sing along. . .and we´ll get to know about Jewish music and musicians who figure prominently in the evolving mainstream of American popular music.

Sing Like You Mean It
Once upon a time, folk music meant fraternity guys in matching shirts. . .ballads around the campfire. . .jolly three-chord ditties about highwaymen and frogs. But thanks to Jewish writers and performers, there´s another, more substantial thread in the folk tradition. This program traces Jewish influences in organizing, anti-war, pro-social music, and charts a line of spirited singing from the Almanac Singers, through the Depression, into the turbulent Sixties and all the way to very timely music from today´s singer-songwriters.

• the pioneers (Cohen, Dylan, Elliott, Goodman, Ochs, Kahn et al)
• the second and third waves (Bern, Sobule, Rovics, more)
• some non-Jews who got it (Gilkyson, Guthrie, Roche, others)
• how folksong matters in American social and political history
• Jewish themes in contemporary song

Thomas Boyd plays and sings, live, in this opinionated survey of Jewish folk influences. There will be recorded segments of more than 50 tunes. . .biographies of the well-known and the unknown Jewish musicians who gave folk its spine. . .and a lot of audience appreciation for the contributions they made.

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