ERIC BIBB ‘Dear America’

$26.00 Inc GST

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Description

Eric Bibb has known many different Americas; the good, the bad and the ugly. Born in New York City in 1951, the thunderbolt of the Sixties folk revival remains so alive in the 69-year-old’s memory that he can still recall the idealism on the night air of Greenwich Village and picture Bob Dylan standing in his living room. Yet just as vivid are the dark societal flash points of the last year, when protesters highlighted the open wound of US race relations while a bitter Presidential election scrawled jagged battle lines.

Destiny is a glib concept, but from his earliest years, all the signposts were pointing Bibb towards a life less ordinary. His father, the late Leon Bibb, was the big bang that set it all off: a charismatic singer, actor and leader of men, who marched at Selma with Martin Luther King in ’65, moved in the orbit of social earth-shakers like Bob Dylan and Paul Robeson (Eric’s godfather), and brought home the ethos that art was more powerful when imbued with real life. “My dad was the door to the world that I live in,” nods Bibb, who took ownership of his first acoustic guitar aged seven and never put it down. “That whole connection between music and forward-thinking social movements has always been at the bedrock. I never ‘decided’ I was going to be a writer of socially pointed songs. It was intrinsic. It has to be there. I write what I see.”