The New Deal’s War on The Bill of Rights

An urgent and galvanizing argument for an Economic Bill of Rights—and its potential to confer true freedom on all Americans.

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In 1997, PBS began airing Sessions at West 54th, a program far removed from the live music fare aimed at the older set that one usually finds on the network. Instead, Sessions at West 54th brought the hottest and hippest acts to New York to perform live in front of a studio audience. And one of the first acts asked to appear was Ben Folds Five. Which was a very big deal to the leader of the band. "I viewed it as an equal to a classic BBC live music television show," says Ben Folds. "I walked into it thinking, 'This is the one I leave [behind],' because it felt like some kind of a time capsule gig."

The late Paul Oliver (1927-2017) spent a great deal of his adult life researching and writing about the blues. In a literary career that spanned more than half a century, Oliver wrote ten books about various aspects of the blues, with the emphasis on the artists who recorded, and the music they made, from the mid-1920s to the outbreak of World War Two. In 1960 Oliver's second book 'Blues Fell This Morning' set the benchmark for all subsequent blues literature. It's still universally acclaimed to this day and has been in print ever since. Like many of Oliver's subsequent books, 'Blues Fell This Morning' was accompanied by a companion vinyl album of the same title. Its original release was greeted with the same degree of enthusiasm as the book. Many of the artists it featured had long been forgotten by all but a few. Some remain virtually or completely unknown to this day.