Television: Jul. 24, 1964

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DUTCHMAN. A sex-teasing white girl lures and then tongue-lashes a sedate Negro in a subway car until he turns on her with a venomous tirade of racial hate. Playwright LeRoi Jones aims to terrify, and between stations he succeeds.

THE TROJAN WOMEN. This tragic masterpiece by Euripides is 2,400 years old, but in its current superb production, it is the most profoundly alive drama to be found in New York.

RECORDS

Folk Music & Blues

A FOLKSINGER'S CHOICE (Elektra). Known especially for his performances of Yiddish and Hebrew songs, Theodore Bikel turns now to traditional Scotch, Irish and contemporary American music. Bikel can change dialects at the sound of a chord, and is at home wherever there is a smile (Away with Rum) or a tear (Come Away Me Undo).

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S FIT TO SING (Elektra) and perhaps more is sung by Songwriter Phil Ochs, who moves in the same circles as Bob Dylan and, like him, is a disciple of Woody Guthrie. Only 23, Ochs has put to music most of yesterday's headlines: Too Many Martyrs (about Medgar Evers), Talking Cuban Crisis and even the Automation Song. The songs most likely to last are poetic if heavy protests like Knock on the Door, an indictment of Soviet terror, and Lou Marsh, a ballad about a social worker murdered in Spanish Harlem.

THE RURAL BLUES (RBF; 2 LPs). These are the original blues, collected and classified by their indefatigable historian, Samuel Charters, and sung by some of the Southern Negroes who in the last 50 years developed the new form from the work songs of slave days. The recording includes singers like Sleepy John Estes, Bukka White, Peg Leg Howell, Ham Gravy, and Kokomo Arnold (with his wild falsetto). Not all the songs are as rural as Skip Jones's Little Cow and Calf Is Gonna Die Blues.

GOOD TIME! (Vanguard). The three young Rooftop Singers are working well-explored territory (Rock Island Line, Old Joe Clark, It Don't Mean a Thing), but they make the songs worth hearing again because of their style and a gleeful spontaneity reminiscent of the early Weavers.

OUT CAME THE BLUES (Decca). Some of the rural bluesmen made it to Chicago, and this swinging thesaurus of the '30s was mostly recorded there. It celebrates the faithlessness of women (Big Joe Turner's Little Bittie Gal's Blues and Johnnie Temple's Louise Louise Blues) and, on the other hand, the rascality of men, as in My Man Jumped Salty on Me, sung by Rosetta Crawford. According to Georgia White, "The blues ain't nothin' but a good woman feelin' bad."

FOLK BANJO STYLES (Elektra). The banjo, the only instrument native to the U.S., is becoming as much a part of the summer landscape as the mosquito. Here is a recital (Flop-Eared Mule, Nine Hundred Miles, Goodbye Old Booze) in various styles by four experts. On the sleeve, there is a written exposition for beginning listeners of plain and fancy picking: frailing, up-picking, two-finger, three-finger, and the virtuoso Scruggs style.

IT MUST HAVE BEEN SOMETHING I SAID!