TRACK #400:

Hallowe’en, Hallowe’en by Oscar Brand

Well, here we are, 400 tracks. It’s wild to think that this playlist has made it to 400 songs. If you had asked me back in 2012, when I first started writing about these songs on Tumbler, if I’d still be doing this in 2025, I’d have said you were nuts. I wouldn’t have been surprised that there were 400 songs (there’s always been too many songs to talk about) but I would have been surprised I had actually kept up the practice consistently enough to make it to 400.

So, this one should probably be a special kind of addition. And though after 399 songs you might imagine we’ve exhausted the reserves, I think we have just the right creepy old tune to ring in the occasion; a tune that’s been sitting patiently in the bullpen, waiting for the right moment to arrive and I think 400 is just that moment.

The name Oscar Brand might not be immediately familiar to some readers, unless of course those readers happen to be pretty big fans of Folk music. Cause Oscar was an incredibly influential cornerstone of the folk music scene of the mid-20th century. A Canadian by birth, Oscar moved to at the United States at a fairly young age. Despite that, he played extensively in Canada throughout his career and even hosted the Canadian Television program called Let’s Sing Out in the mid 60’s. which gave the world their first views of artists like Joni Mitchell, Dave Van Ronk and Phil Ochs.

While Oscar was an accomplished musician in his own right and his television show was a big hit, his most enduring contribution is without a doubt his radio program, Oscar Brand’s Folksong Festival.

For 70 years Oscar hosted this New York AM radio program, the longest running radio program with a singular host in the history of American broadcasting. The show ran from 1945 until Oscar’s death in 2016 and was hugely responsible for ushering in the folk era of American Music. It was this show that introduced America to practically every singer/songwriter you can name. Interviews with Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, and Peter Seeger (among countless others) were all broadcast to the country first by Oscar on WNYC-AM 820.

However, the most incredible aspect of the program was that Oscar did it as a complete labor of love. He received no payment for the entire run of the show. In an effort to keep it an uncensored bastion of free speech, safe from disingenuous attack, he ran it exclusively as a public service, even forgoing payments to the artists that appeared.

This freedom would become incredibly important as Oscar’s show grew up during McCarthyism, where many of the folks singers Oscar interviewed were being considered “Communist.” Oscar provided a platform for blacklisted artists to speak out without fear of financial repercussions because there weren’t any purse strings that could be used to pull him. That didn’t stop the House Un-American Activities Committee from branding his program “a pipeline to communism” for essentially providing Americans the ability to exercise their first amendment right.

Though he released over 60 albums since 1949, it is his 1979 release Trick Or Treat: Hallowe’en Celebrated In Story And Song that brings us here tonight. This full blown Halloween record  featuring songs and stories for children makes for great vintage holiday listening. It’s like what The Old Gray Goose’s album might sound like if Goose was an accomplished folk singer and a more disciplined storyteller that didn’t have such a thick accent. I know that sounds 100% less awesome than The Goose (and it is, to be sure) but it definitely makes for a much more, shall we say, reasonable album.

Out of all these songs and stories, our selection for the evening and our 400th track has got to be Hallowe’en, Hallowe’en. Oscar attempts to tell some visiting trick or treaters a Halloween story, but when they show absolutely zero interest and beat feet, he decides we need to hear it instead. A bit presumptuous to just assume we wanna hear this shit if the kids didn’t, you ask me. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.

So let’s sit back this October evening and let a folk legend tell us a spooky story about the origin or our haunted Holiday.