At the time, Seeger was a vocal champion of modernist composition, and a Marxist. At its unveiling, Benton and his students sang the painter’s favorite American songs to guitar accompaniment by Charles Seeger, a Harvard-educated composer and musicologist then teaching at the New School and the Institute of Musical Art (later Julliard). In January 1930, Thomas Hart Benton completed America Today, a twelve-panel mural for the college’s flagship International Style building. This is something musicians have done at the New School for decades. Still: Near Union Square, where Tin Pan Alley was quartered in 1900, we were being enjoined to forgo other techniques and traditions in favor of a self-consciously reduced musical vocabulary, not just out of respect for its history, but for its perfect simplicity and elemental connection to…well, to what? The people, the land, what Mike Seeger calls “the true vine”? And I know the Sparks’ are no naïfs: you need six to play “Far From Any Road,” which the Handsome Family licensed as the theme for HBO’s True Detective. I have nothing against two-, one-, and no-chord songs. If you threw a II in there, or a turnaround or something, it would just be ridiculous.”

A song like “Froggie Went a-Courting,” that has two chords.

A big inspiration to me was going back to things that were recorded in the twenties that were leaderless, less full of ego. “Nobody who has spent any time studying music wants to write a bunch of songs that are just I-IV-V-I – diatonic songs in C. ” Afterwards, Brett (for the most part) answered a question about songwriting: Rennie Sparks, who writes their lyrics, read from her book of essays Wilderness Brett, who writes the music, joined her to play songs from their album of the same name, and Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home. In November 2013, Greil Marcus hosted a talk and performance at the New School for Social Research by the husband-and-wife duo the Handsome Family.

Georgia on my mind f major chords