Artists:Larry Long
From WWR
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From the time I could walk, I worked at my Grandfather's fish market on the east side of Des Moines, Iowa. My granddad was deeply religious. As a child I stood on street corners and outside jail cells listening to my grandfather preach to whomever would listen.
Granddad had to quit school in the sixth grade to work in the coal mines of Missouri. His family were working class Republicans, and, although he was generally anti-union, when it came to the coal miner Granddad was very pro-union. And so am I.
My father was from a poor working family. He became a Hills Brothers Coffee Salesman and a good one at that. He was transferred to Minneapolis, Minnesota where we moved into a predominantly Jewish suburb. We moved from baptisms to bar mitzvahs; from fundamentalism to music, art, and theater.
My father had a great love for the Jewish people he worked with, and they had a great love for him. After my father passed away at age 37 from a heart attack, the neighborhood grocers set up a scholarship fund for my two sisters and me. It wasn't enough to put us through college, but it was enough for me to buy a handmade guitar that I'm still playing to this day. If it wasn't for family, friends, faith, and Social Security my mother would have had a hard time making it through. Thank God for all four.
My mother moved from being a house wife to going out into the work force where women weren't paid a comparative wage for their labor. It wasn't long before she changed from being a Republican to being a Democrat.
I remember the day John F. Kennedy was shot, the day after my twelfth birthday. My father died a month later, that Christmas. I remember seeing Martin Luther King give his "I Have A Dream" speech. Soon after his death, my eight year-old cousin was raped and murdered in her own bed. The Vietnam war was raging.
That's when I picked up the guitar. Music brought comfort and still does. I wrote my first song when I was thirteen and I haven't stopped. I've now written close to a thousand songs. Larry on tracks
In the 1970s I hitch-hiked, hopped freights, and circled the western United States with Fiddlin' Pete Watercott. We traveled in a pick-up truck with a plywood topper that we called "The Lone Prairie Schooner" and "Red Caboose." Although we were both conscientious objectors to war, it was often the veterans of Foreign Wars who took us in. A Korean War veteran, hard-rock miner, and steward of the union, Al Olsen, gave me a 1961 Corvair that I drove from California to Minnesota in order to record a song I wrote for farmers fighting a high voltage power line. It was with a delegation of family farmers that I traveled from Minnesota to Washington D.C. in a one-hundred-mile tractorcade demonstrating for fair prices. Through this movement to save the family farm I met Pete Seeger, who inspired me to help start a campaign to clean up the Mississippi River in the 1980s. It was through my river work that I got invited to perform along the banks of the Amazon and Tiete Rivers of Brazil and on a peace cruise down the Volga River in the former Soviet Union. After discovering how much the world loved Woody Guthrie, I returned to bring his disowned spirit back to Okemah, Oklahoma for a first hometown tribute. In working on this tribute with local citizens and schools across the state, I discovered the joy of teaching. And it was through teaching I was hired to bring elders into the classroom throughout rural Alabama to develop an intergenerational process called Elders' Wisdom, Children's Song."
Throughout the years, the intent of my work has remained the same: to give thanks to those who work hard and give back to their communities, and to move people to action. More.
External links
| Larry Long on MySpace |
| Larry Long on Wikipedia |
More information
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This artist lives in Minnesota. |
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The gender of this artist/group is male. |
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Request a show of songs by Larry Long
| Song | Album | Length | Played | Overall | You | Tags | Single Request |
| Who Are The Terrorists | Be the Change | 4:28 | 20 |  14 votes |
You have to login to give your opinion about songs. | Protest / Organ / Jazzy / Iraq / George w bush / War / 911 / Terrorism / Pop | |
| Total Time | 4:28 |
The current music queue contains 14 songs that will take 1 hr to play.
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Artist name is|Larry Long Last played| more than 1 month ago ---------------------------------------- Show name| Songs by Larry Long Length| 15 minutes Order by| random Limit| 3 songs ----------------------------------------
Stats
- Spotlighted: Never
- Songs on WWR: 2
- Total plays: 37
- Total requests: 13
- Total listens: 850
- CDBaby referrals: 0
- CDBaby sales:
Other skins for artist pages
| Default / Simple / Classic / Jimbob / For Playing Around With / 12-stringer / Atuu / Mert / Kelli / Rubenerd / Kazookid |
