“Long Black Veil”

Johnny Cash – 1959

“I say ‘Long Black Veil’ more to get students to experience Johnny Cash for the first time if they never have before. The reason I love to listen to Johnny Cash, and why he is one of my favorites, is just with the emotion that he can deliver in so many of his songs. A lot of them are country songs and they are kind of sad, and this one is a sad country song, but it has really interesting surprise twists in a way as you listen to it. It is probably easily my favorite Johnny Cash song and I have just always loved to listen to it. I think for any students that have not listened to much country music, or have heard that local country that you hear on the radio now, to get real country music they should start with Johnny Cash. He’s a good gateway drug.”

 

“A River Runs Through It and Other Stories,” 

Norman McClain – 1976

“I’m going to go with one that I have always enjoyed reading, and I have picked up periodically, and that’s Norman McClains ‘A River Runs Through It and Other Stories,’ and more so for the other stories than the titular one. As someone who’s spent a lot of time outside and is interested in conservation, I liked his very descriptive view into what life was like for those loggers in the American Northwest who still had to use hand saws and travel by a pack mule and to just know how rugged their life was. It’s not just a story about that, but he also has interest in the development of characters, and it’s just a really enjoyable story.”

 

 “A Fistful of Dollars”- 1964

“This is, again, almost an advocation for the genre, in watching Spaghetti Westerns. My favorite of the three ‘Man With No Name’ trilogy films would be ‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.’ It has a wonderful soundtrack, which you hear a lot now in commercials all the time. I just love the way that without a lot of dialogue, there is really a lot going on with the story and the way the director uses the camera. There are so many close ups of faces and parts of faces, and I’ve always just loved how it communicates what’s going on without there being a lot of words in the story. The sound itself is awful, you know, with it being the American over-dubbing. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time.”