tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18759804122126820992024-03-13T11:14:58.138-07:00Comparative Video 101Selected Videos Of And Commentary About Some Classic Folk, Roots, And Americana SongsJim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.comBlogger205125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-71615404678471909192017-09-04T13:00:00.000-07:002018-01-05T09:37:21.870-08:00The Longest Farewell - "Adieu, Foulard"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b>My long time folk music friend Rick Daly </b>from Connecticut had a bit of extra time on his hands a year or so ago so he decided to look up the translation of the word <i>foulard</i>, part of the name of a lovely and heartbreakingly sad old French song from Martinique whose proper title is "<i>Adieu foulard, adieu madras</i>." Now people of Rick's age and mine likely know what "madras" means, if for no other reason than the brief fad that swept the country around 1960 of madras shorts and madras shirts. If you recall, those items were generally sold in inauthentic plaid-like patterns, and they were made from really cheap cotton and even cheaper dye in the city of Madras (since renamed Chennai) in India. What was distinctive about them was that when they were washed, even in the coldest water, the dyes would streak or run and the original pattern would turn into something approaching a psychedelic vision, giving rise to the term "bleeding madras." The fad didn't last very long because the dye often clung to the inside of the washer and/or dryer and could ruin the next load of clothes, and the garments themselves seldom survived more than three or four trips to the laundry machines. So why is someone apparently composing a musical ode saying goodbye to cheap shorts? Friend Rick was even more puzzled when he found out that <i>foulard</i> is usually translated as "headscarf" or even "headkerchief," which apparently renders the title into English as something like "Goodbye Headscarf, Goodbye Cheap Cotton."<br />
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Of course, the song's title means nothing of the sort. The picture above shows Martinican women dressed in their traditional <i>foulards</i> and <i>madras</i>, a costume that likely dates back to the era of slavery, when as slaves they were dressed in the cheapest material available to their masters. I believe that I detect in the colors and flourishes of these designs a kind of quiet rebellion against bondage, as the women long ago made an artistic virtue out of brutal necessaity - as if to say "You may control our bodies but you cannot confine our souls, and we choose to adorn those bodies with color, beauty, and grace." A second glance at this picture demonstrates how brilliantly they succeded in doing exactly that.<br />
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Yet the song whose published title was originally "<i><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Adieu les jolis foulards, Adieu tous le madras</span></i><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">" ("Farewell to the pretty scarves, farewell to all the cotton clothes") did not emanate from these women but rather from a member of the masters class, an aristocrat from pre-revolutionary France named François Claude Amour, marquis de Bouillé. De </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé was a cousin of our friend the marquis de Lafayette, and like his cousin d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé was a brave and able soldier who also played a key role in our revolution by keeping British forces in the Caribbean occupied in defending themselves against </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé's raids and attacks and hence unable to aid their country's forces in North America proper. Prior to that war, </span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé had been the governor of the French Windward Islands, which included Martinique and where </span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé lived for two years. It was during that governorship, probably in 1769, that </span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé composed the song that he seems to have called <i>“Les adieux d’une créole</i>,” or "The Farewells Of A Creole Woman."</span></span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Right off the bat we have a number of problems understanding both the context and the meaning of the lyric for several reasons, and these center on the multiple and if I may say radically differing understandings of what is meant by </span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><i>créole </i>and its English counterpart "Creole." Today, both terms imply a person of racially mixed ancestry (usually African and European but also possibly Native and Euro or even Native and African) in the Caribbean or Louisiana. But to the French of </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé's 18th century, the word could also mean a white French person who was born in the island colonies and not in France proper, much as the British in the same century coined the derogatory term "American" to describe people of English descent born in North America and whose birth implied a lack of refinement and common couth.* Like the French, our Anglo-Saxon forbears also used the term "Creole" at times to refer to their own Euro-Caribbean colonists who may have dared to inter-marry with other white but non-English folks of (God forbid!) French or Spanish descent. Look back at the character of Bertha Antoinette Mason in Brontë's <i>Jane Eyre</i> for an example of the disastrous results of such nation-mixing (as the Brits saw it, at least).</span></span></span></span><br />
<span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><br /></span></span></span></span>
<span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">If you're still with me after that paragraph, you may be wondering "so what?" Well, here's what: with all the variations over the centuries in the French lyrics, we are left wondering exactly who is saying goodbye to whom. In a remarkable and moving essay published a few years ago and called <a href="https://www.academia.edu/2561732/Singing_by_Heart_A_Meditation_on_Adieu_foulard_adieu_madras_">"Singing By Heart: A Meditation On 'Adieu foulard, adieu Madras</a></span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><a href="https://www.academia.edu/2561732/Singing_by_Heart_A_Meditation_on_Adieu_foulard_adieu_madras_"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">,</span></span></span></span>'"</a> Dr. Sarah Waisvisz of the Department of English at Carleton University in Canada, herself a woman of mixed ethnicity including a Martinican grandmother, suggests that the lyric is to be sung by a </span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><i>créole</i> woman to her departing French lover, perhaps even </span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé himself. This would fit with both </span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">d</span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">e </span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Bouillé's original title and with Dr. </span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Waisvisz's emphasis on the chorus, which she translates as meaning "“My darling is leaving/sadly, sadly, it is forever.” </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Waisvisz also stresses the utter finality of "adieu" - the word is not a simple "goodbye" in French (that would be the more common "au revoir" or "à bientôt," roughly "see you next time") but rather "farewell," or to give it its proper weight in English "fare thee well." It is, as </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">Waisvisz asserts, "a song of goodbyes.... a song of diasporas. Of exiles. Of loss. Of a lost home impossible to return to, impossible to find again, but impossible to ignore."</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">This understanding helps us to grasp the title, if indeed it is a woman addressing a man. She appears to be saying something to the effect of "Goodbye my love - you will miss all the color and passion of me, your island woman of forbidden love, and I know you will never return." It works equally well for me - perhaps even a bit better - if in some of the gender-neutral lyrics it could be the Euro man regretting his departure from the passion and romance of his island lady - with her <i>foulards</i> and <i>madras</i> - to return to the repressed culture of his native land.</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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<span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;"><span class="a" style="left: 813px; top: 4810px;">With that in mind, I'd like to present as the first version of the song the one of this group that is perhaps the least traditional but at the same time the most apprehendable to those of us who speak English. It is a solo by Bob Shane of the Kingston Trio for an album that was never released until Collector's Choice did so forty years after the tracks were laid down:</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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The English translation that Shane employs here is accurate in terms of the emotion of the tune if not literally in terms of the meaning of the French lyrics. The straightforward and very simple folk accompaniment allows the primary emphasis to fall on Shane's superb evocation of the emotion of loss that is at the heart of tune.<br />
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Next is a much more recent and modern-sounding pop vocal by Tanya St-Val, a lady of Martinque's island neighbor Guadeloupe. She is abetted by male vocalist Kali here:<br />
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St-Val is an accomplished singer of both operetta and jazz, so I suppose she can be excused for investing the vocal with a bit of that post 1980s female pop singers' breathiness. For me, however, the female/male interplay here covers a multitude of sins, as do her multi-tracked final choruses. Really good, and the song more as I think that Dr. Waisvisz understands it.<br />
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St-Val's fellow Guadeloupean, albeit from two generations before her 1966 birth, Gilles Sala delivers the number with a simple folk accompaniment but with a dramatic and highly-trained pop vocal style:<br />
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Sala's approach is more what I think we would have gotten from his contemporaries like Franks Sinatra, Andy Williams, and Jerry Vale had they attempted a rendition of the song.<br />
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Finally, a lovely solo instrumental on classical guitar arranged by Roland Dyens and performed with sensitivity and technical skill by Edwin Erpenbach:<br />
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Dyens' arrangement and Erpenbach's rendition invest the tune with the more complicated and jazz-inflected chording that was favored by yet another Guadeloupean, Henri Salvador, in his major 1957 hit version of the number.<br />
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For some people, perhaps once in a lifetime, your heart is so broken, so shattered by a loss so profound that you know it can never be made completely whole again, as does the speaker in this song. Never. The finality of that realization and the necessity of trying to continue living in spite of it is, for want of a better phrase, sublimely human. And for those who know whereof I speak - "Adieu, foulard" is your song.<br />
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*Regarding the term "American" above: take a look back at Jonathan Swift's great 1729 satire "A Modest Proposal," the one where Swift suggests that the answer to poverty in Ireland is that parents raise babies to be sold for meat. Swift writes: "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled ..."<br />
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<b>Addendum</b><br />
My friend Bakersfield Dan<b> </b>Hartfield pointed out that Bob Shane's almost certain source for his version, complete with the English lyric, was San Francisco world music pioneer Stan Wilson, whose vast knowledge of folk and pop numbers contributed mightily to the repertoires of the early Kingston Trio as well as to other Bay Area pop folk acts like The Gateway Singers and The Limeliters. Shane was largely mentored in professional entertainment by Wilson (and Josh White as well), and the extent of Shane's debt to Wilson can be heard in Wilson's own surpassingly lovely rendition of "Adieu, Foulard":<br />
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Here is a translation into English of the oldest version of the song:<br />
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Good-bye lovely scarves, good-bye Madras<br />
Good-bye golden necklaces<br />
My sweetheart is leaving me<br />
Alas! Alas! It is for ever<br />
<br />
Good-morning, Mr Governor
I come to submit a request<br />
To ask your permission<br />
To leave my sweetheart to me<br />
<br />
My young lady it is too late<br />
Your sweetheart has already embarked<br />
The ship is close to the dock<br />
And is ready to sail<br />
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Good-bye lovely scarves, good-bye Madras<br />
Good-bye golden necklaces<br />
My sweetheart is leaving me<br />
Alas! Alas! It is for ever...<br />
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<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-5499513574202932992017-08-19T23:44:00.001-07:002021-02-11T17:30:58.049-08:00From John Stewart & John Phillips: "Oh, Miss Mary"<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdUtC-8fpU6TCoPFvHVMBPAd5iLsw-A4d2Q7QXqJ0wIuqvGnnaUyr7b8eDN7CDPHzQFVN4QI3fv_umnt7J_BpHbK4nTQ1e_G5wDgVkG_ZqYOPB8QB1f4ZezaAgjkTtsI3-2w0yTEhDA8/s1600/JSsm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKdUtC-8fpU6TCoPFvHVMBPAd5iLsw-A4d2Q7QXqJ0wIuqvGnnaUyr7b8eDN7CDPHzQFVN4QI3fv_umnt7J_BpHbK4nTQ1e_G5wDgVkG_ZqYOPB8QB1f4ZezaAgjkTtsI3-2w0yTEhDA8/s320/JSsm.jpg" width="500" /></a><span style="font-size: small;"><i>(L-R - John Stewart, Barry McGuire, Scott McKenzie, and Michelle
Phillips sing at the memorial for John Phillips - Los Angeles, 2001)</i></span><br />
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<b>When John Phillips died </b>at the age of 65 in 2001, the obituaries and memorials quite naturally focused on his position as the founder, lead writer, and vocal arranger for the mid-1960s folk-rock band The Mamas and The Papas - as well they should have, since Phillips' vocal scores for the group were masterful and mature, surpassed in both complexity and sheer beauty in the pop-rock era by probably only Brian Wilson's arrangements for The Beach Boys. Phillips took the four voices of the band and layered a dozen and more tracks on top of each other, creating a shimmering wall of sound even when the group was singing in unison and not Phillips' famous harmonies and vocal counterpoint.<br />
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What most of the obits noted only in passing, however, was that Phillips began his career in professional music as a pop-folk musician with a band that he formed called The Journeymen. Active from 1961 to 1964, The Journeymen were highly regarded for both their adventurous song selection and arrangements and for the blend that they achieved, with Phillips bringing in his childhood friend and long-time singing partner Scott McKenzie - he of the sweet and highly trained tenor voice that we all heard a few years later performing a Phillips song titled "If You're Going To San Francisco" - and an excellent vocalist in Richard Weissman, who also happened to be (and remains being) one of the greatest banjo players in the history of the U.S. The group was piloted by Frank Werber, manager and to a degree creator of the Kingston Trio, which even in 1961 was clobbering most of its competition in the folk and pop worlds in terms of record sales and income. Werber helped The Journeymen to win a recording contract with Capitol Records, also the KT's label, and Werber may have been grooming Phillips' trio as a possible replacement for the Kingstons since the latter group's founding member and chief arranger Dave Guard had left that group in a huff, hurling the KT and Capitol into a state of uncertain anxiety.<br />
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It was at Capitol that Phillips met John Stewart, chosen over Phillips as Dave Guard's replacement in the KT largely because Stewart was an excellent banjo player and Phillips was not - and the banjo was an absolutely essential element in the sound that had rocketed the Kingstons to the top of the charts in album sales for the three years prior. Phillips and Stewart seemed to bond almost instantly. Both were songwriters, both liked folk music, and both had senses of humor that could be described charitably as somewhat off-beat. Stewart may even have flirted with the idea of joining Phillips in The Journeymen as a full partner, whereas in the KT Stewart was merely a salaried employee.<br />
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The friendship quite naturally led to the two collaborating in the writing of four songs: "Chilly Winds," "Don't Turn Around," "You Can Rattle My Cage," and "Oh, Miss Mary." The Kingston Trio recorded the first and last of these, The Journeymen the last three. All are well-crafted tunes of the kind that were derided by purists of the time as "fake folk" or "faux-folk," songs that were designed to sound at least vaguely traditional but which had no "authenticity" or folk provenance. Yet "Chilly Winds" and "Oh Miss Mary" have been near the top of the list of favorite songs among KT fans for decades, as are two other Phillips compositions, "Goin' Away For To Leave You" and "Oh Sail Away" (written with Weissman).<br />
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There was very nearly one more. Stewart enjoyed recounting from the stage at the Trio Fantasy Camp in Arizona that Phillips, in professional limbo between The Journeymen and The Mamas and The Papas, had visited him in San Francisco in late 1964 and had played for him a recent composition that just knocked Stewart's socks off. Stewart wanted the KT to record it immediately, so he pushed Phillips into his own car and rocketed over to Columbus Tower, an office building owned by the Trio and home to their corporate headquarters. Phillips refused to leave the lobby of the building and go to Werber's penthouse office because "Frank doesn't like me very much." Stewart replied that that was nonsense and that Werber had an ear for good songs and that Phillips' new one was fantastic. So Stewart went up to Werber's office alone and told Frank that he had Phillips in the lobby and that the latter had with him a song that was a sure-fire hit. "Phillips?" screamed Werber. "In my building??? Get that drug-addled psychopath out of here right away! I'll call the cops on him!' "But the song, " pleaded Stewart. "We're never going to record anything by that loser again!" Werber fired back.<br />
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The song that so excited Stewart was "California Dreaming."<br />
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Though not a blockbuster like "Dreaming," "Oh Miss Mary" made Stewart and Phillips a fair bit of coin, appearing as it did on the KT's popular and well-received 1962 <i>College Concert</i> album that rose to #3 on the <i>Billboard</i> album charts and that sold over 400,000 units. It's a wispy, delightful little bit of faux-folk fluff with an infectious, lilting rhythm and a chorus you'd swear you'd heard before the first time you listen to it. The lead on the verses here is handled by the irrepressible Nick Reynolds:<br />
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The KT had pretty much made its folk bones with tunes like this - banjo numbers that plowed ahead and put the singers' natural exuberance on display. So it's no wonder that The Journeymen's version of the song with Phillips singing lead, even with its vocals arranged with perhaps more sophistication, doesn't quite measure up in the energy department:<br />
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Energy was never a problem for The New Christy Minstrels, who slow the tempo a bit but add an almost jazzy swing to it here:<br />
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The female voices - original members Gayle Caldwell and Peggy Connelly, I believe - add a nice touch, and I do believe that I detect the distinctive sound of one of my friend Art Podell's arrangements.
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Barry McGuire may be in the chorus there, but his 1963 "solo" record <i>The Barry McGuire Album </i>included a version with his trademark growl and also featured on it "The Stars of the New Christy Minstrels" - it's a different take on the song:<br />
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We'll close our selection of versions with a fine one by Bill Mumy from his album <i>Thank You Kindly</i>. Now, you already know Bill Mumy, who as a child actor starred in <i>Lost In Space</i> and perhaps even more memorably as little Anthony Fremont, the monstrous six-year-old boy who terrorizes his family and neighbors with his psychokinetic powers ("Wish it into the cornfield, son!") on <i>The Twilight Zone</i> episode called "It's A Good Life." What you might not know is that Mumy grew up to be a successful award-winning and Emmy-nominated musician, singer and composer, one who has always loved folk music with an especial appreciation for John Stewart and the KT. He delivers an energetic reading of the Phillips-Stewart number here:<br />
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A final note might be in order. Now no one is more impatient than I am with folks who read too much into a song or poem, but in recent years I've noticed something interesting about "Oh Miss Mary." Its composition in 1961 or '62 came at a time when neither families nor society smiled benignly on girls who went off wandering on their own chasing rainbows and crossing rivers. Think, for example, of the delightfully earnest Betty Anderson (portrayed fetchingly by Elinor Donahue) on the old 1950s-60s sitcom <i>Father Knows Best</i>. Think Betty's going to do this kind of thing? Yet her granddaughters well may be pursuing exactly such a course. As I write this, two of the young women who were my high school students and who are now in their middle twenties are off on their own "Miss Mary" excursions. One has been crossing oceans in a sailboat and has wound up in places as diverse as Gibraltar and Brazil. Another has lived on three continents and for the last several months has been motoring around Europe completely on her own, crossing a somewhat dangerous border into Serbia just this morning. I'm pretty sure that neither women's places in the world nor the future of society occurred to John Stewart and John Phillips when they wrote "Oh Miss Mary" - it was just an enjoyable little tune to play on guitar and banjo. But without intending to do so, they may just have penned a song whose time has finally come. I'm wondering where my own young "Miss Marys" will be off to next.<br />
<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-18999868767100514242016-12-26T13:29:00.000-08:002017-04-11T10:13:32.662-07:00For The Season #9: "Good King Wenceslas"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>One of the ongoing pleasures </b></span>of the holiday season for me is revisiting Charles Dickens's <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, first in its original format as a novella - and a ripping good read it is and remains being - and then in looking at several of the almost 30 film versions out there today, most all of which make a commendable effort to translate to the screen a complex narrative replete with interior monologue from the storyteller. No single movie of the tale manages to relate the full work in all of its deliciously Dickensian asides and details, and directors inevitably must choose which aspects of the <i>Carol </i>that they want to emphasize. Should the redemptive transformation of an old curmudgeon take center stage, or should the more explicitly religious idea of a hell-bound monster derailed from that destination by the intercessory power of a loving God be the point of emphasis? The cute little crippled and dying boy or the deeply loving nature of his devoted father and the clearer but tougher vision of his mother? The evils and injustices of the world and the society portrayed in the book (and this is, as we shall see, a large part of the author's intent) or the power of a right-minded individual to rectify some of those evils and injustices?<br />
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Like all great stories, <i>A Christmas Carol </i>speaks to each of us in different ways. If you haven't read it of late and/or if you mainly know it or only know it through one or more of the films, it might not be a bad idea at all to give the original text another look. It's not long, it's available free online at multiple sites, and you might well be surprised how much of the original story hasn't made it into any of the movies - and how much of the tale is spot-on relevant today and how thoroughly its importance and its value transcend the Christmas season. It is a book for all seasons in its attempt to wrestle with the same issues of social justice and welfare that have raised their heads into elections around the world in the last year or two, and it emanates from the exact same time, place, and cultural context of its analogue in popular folk music, the great (post) Christmas carol "Good Kings Wenceslas."<br />
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And "Wenceslas" most emphatically is a folk song. Its lyrics, characterized as they are by the call to works of charity in the closing couplet, were the sole work of High Church Anglican priest and composer John Mason Neale (1818-1866), but the melody was delivered to Neale by his choirmaster and collaborator Thomas Helmore (1811-1890), who had found the tune (a spring carol called "Tempus adest floridum" or "The time of flowers has come") in an already-ancient book of anonymous medieval songs from Finland. Now, Neale and Helmore together left a powerful and deep mark on the music of Christmas that we know in English today, having composed and/or re-worked the best-known Advent carol in "O Come, O Come Emmanuel," two very popular Christmas songs in "Christ Was Born On Christmas Day" and "Good Christian Men, Rejoice," and the only St. Stephen's Day carol that most of us have ever heard, "Good King Wenceslas."<br />
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Neale and Helmore published a truly impressive number of hymnals and other collections of sacred songs over the years of their collaboration, but our case in point here relates to their 1853 <i>Carols For Christmas-Tide</i> in which "Wenceslas" debuted and which appeared exactly a decade after the Dickens classic. "Wenceslas" and <i>A Christmas Carol</i> reach the selfsame conclusion, albeit via very different plot lines. The transformation of Ebeneezer Scrooge is confirmed not by word or by attitude but by deed - Dickens remarks at the close of the tale that<br />
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<i>He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world...and to Tiny Tim, who did not die, he was a second father.</i><br />
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Wenceslas, already regarded as a saint by his people, acts with sympathy and compassion to alleviate the sufferings of a poor man in the depths of winter, giving Neale the opportunity to moralize an explicit lesson in a lyric that becomes a sermon:
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<i>Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing, </i><br />
<i>Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.</i><br />
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It is that "wealth or rank possessing" note by Neale that draws him closest in theme to Dickens. Charles D. was most certainly a liberal reformer in his day, having been born into a middle class family that had fallen on hard times resulting in several nightmare years in his childhood that saw him living in workhouses (an enforced servitude of the homeless and jobless poor, notorious for their exploitation and harsh treatment of their residents) and even debtor prisons with his father. These experiences clearly became the grist for the plot lines of some of Dickens's best-known and most successful novels -<i> David Copperfield</i>, <i>Oliver Twist</i>, <i>Hard Times</i>, and of course <i>A Christmas Carol</i> among many others. Dickens came to regard both Adam Smith's promulgation of unregulated capitalism and John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism as pernicious lies that ignored the realities of the lives and plights of his own childhood and of millions of others like him in the Industrial Revolution era of the United Kingdom.<br />
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Neale shared many of Dickens's convictions, but please. We are not talking here about bomb-throwing anarchists or even members of Britain's incipient Socialist movement. We are talking about a pair of Victorian gentlemen of the upper middle class, High Church Anglicans both, men whose response to the savage inequities of the 19th century capitalist economy would warm the cockles of even the flintiest of hearts of modern American conservatives. For Neale and Dickens both believed that poverty could be alleviated and economic injustices resolved by moral action from those of wealth and privilege, not in the patronizing manner of the French concept of <i>noblesse oblige</i> but rather in the high-minded understanding of the Christian imperative to care for those in need. Dickens's reformed Scrooge and Neale's Wenceslas are literary embodiments of that belief, deeply held by both writers.<br />
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It likely doesn't matter that the Wenceslas story is entirely apocryphal or that the actual man was a Duke of Bohemia with the familiar Czech name of Václav who was murdered by his own brother. What bothered some of Neale's 19th century critics was that he and Helmore had co-opted the melody of a perfectly serviceable religious song about God's glory reflected in Spring and turned it into what one Grinch-like writer referred to as "insipid sentimentality" and "Christmas doggerel." No matter; "Good King Wenceslas" is doing quite well, thank you, more than 160 years after it first appeared. However, in the interests of fairness and full disclosure, here is that "Tempus adest floridum" root song in all its pristine glory:<br />
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There is much to like here, and the sprightly, even optimistic rhythm and melody fit perfectly with the lyric's joyful evocation of the wonders of Spring:<br />
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<i>Spring has now unwrapped the flowers, day is fast reviving, </i><br />
<i>Life in all her growing powers towards the light is striving: </i><br />
<i>Gone the iron touch of cold, winter time and frost time, </i><br />
<i>Seedlings, working through the mould, now make up for lost time.</i><br />
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For a sense of how this may have sounded in the era of its 1582 publication, here is Ernst Stoltz playing an authentic Renaissance lute with an anachronistic but charming and unobtrusive modern guitar:<br />
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For a solid pop-folk rendition of "Wenceslas," we turn to the Kingston Trio:<br />
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This is the longest-running iteration of the group that will celebrate its 60th anniversary next year, the configuration that has been touring together since 2005 and that features Bill Zorn doing the lead with the King's dialogue and George Grove and Rick Dougherty harmonizing beautifully with the page's lines. That kind of antiphony is characteristic of much medieval music, even if Grove's tastefully understated banjo line is not.<br />
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My good friend George, however, is not the only performer to see the possibility of an Americanization of this most English of carols via the inclusion of the banjo. Here is Dr. Josh Turknett, a neuroscientist and major proponent of clawhammer banjo music, with a delightful frailed version of the tune: <br />
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And if you were never quite sure what the difference was between the folk/clawhammer/frailing style of banjo playing and modern bluegrass banjo music, take a listen to Banjo Ben Clark with his instructional video in bluegrass rolls and fills - using this ancient carol as his model:<br />
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You can find scores more experimental versions of the song all over YouTube and other video sites, including reggae and blues and jazz and fiddle renditions. I love them all for their innovativeness and originality, just as I remarked above that I love the many cinematic versions of <i>A Christmas Carol</i>, however far they may stray from the author's initial intent. But "Good King Wenceslas" is in its own origins a stately English carol composed for Helmore's choir, so our last version today will be a recording of the great Robert Shaw Chamber Singers performing the traditional song as most of us first heard it:<br />
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Shaw's always tasteful arrangements and disciplined direction are here enhanced in this 1990s recording by baritone Victor Ledbetter singing the King's lines and mezzo-soprano Katherine Murray as the page.<br />
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The poor we have always with us, as Scripture reminds us, and both Charles Dickens and John Mason Neale use the Christmas season and its attendant joy to inspire people of good will everywhere to do what they could to meet the challenge of dealing with that sad fact. Their solution may not be mine and may not be yours, but it is an idea worthy of the earnest men who propounded it a century and a half ago. May we all feel blessed enough this Christmas season to share some of what we have with those who have less and bring the reformed miser and saintly king to life once again in our own world.<br />
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*The first eight songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes include #1 <span style="font-size: 85%; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">- </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2008/12/for-season-we-wish-you-merry-christmas.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"We Wish You A Merry Christmas"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #2 - </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/12/for-season-2-all-through-nightar-hyd-y.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #3 - "</span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/12/for-season-3-when-was-jesus-bornthe.html" style="font-weight: bold;">When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year</a>"; <b>#4 </b>- <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/for-season-4-gloucestershire-wassail_23.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Gloucestershire Wassail Song"</span></a>; <b>#5</b> - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/for-season-5-noel-nouveletsing-we-here.html"><b>"Sing We Here Noel</b>"</a>; <b>#6</b> - <b><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-season-6-bitter-withymary-mild.html">"The Bitter Withy/Mary Mild"</a>; <b>#7 - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2014/12/for-season-7-coventry-carollully-lullay.html">"The Coventry Carol</a>"</b>; </b>and<b> <b>#8 - <a href="https://compvid101.blogspot.com/2015/12/for-season-8-cherry-tree-carol.html">"The Cherry Tree Carol."</a></b> </b>Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include<b> <b><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/shane-and-drakes-white-snows-of-winter.html">"The White Snows Of Winter"</a></b>, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/children-go-where-i-send-thee.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Children, Go Where I Send Thee"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/01/edric-connor-and-virgin-mary-had-baby.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/01/riu-riu-chiuguardo-del-lobo.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span>and<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/09/go-tell-it-on-mountain.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Go Tell It On The Mountain".</span></a>
</b>Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-32152624830444127492015-12-25T23:52:00.001-08:002020-12-21T15:39:54.530-08:00For The Season #8: "The Cherry Tree Carol"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>One of the most charmingly poignant</b></span> of all English Christmas carols is also one of the oldest, a fitting companion in both its age and its source to <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-season-6-bitter-withymary-mild.html">"The Bitter Withy"</a>, which was the subject of my Christmas post two years ago. Both carols date at least to the middle of the fifteenth century and almost surely even earlier since each song appears in both handwritten and printed copies in Middle English, that odd hybrid of Anglo-Saxon and Old French that was the percursor of the Modern English that emerged around the time of Shakespeare. Yes, as an English teacher for 40 years I am well aware that lots of people think of Willie Shakes as "old English," but his work really isn't that at all. Most of us can make easy sense of at least half of what Shakespeare wrote simply by listening closely to good actors perform his plays or recite his poems. How hard is "<i>To be or not to be...</i>" or "<i>But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun</i>" to understand, grammatically at least? Want a bit of genuine Old English to chew on a bit this fine Christmas morn? OK, try this on for size:<br />
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<i>Fæder ūre, ðū ðē eart on heofonum,<br /> Sī ðīn nama gehālgod.<br /> Tō becume ðīn rice.<br /> Gewurde ðīn willa<br /> On eorþan swā swā on heofonum</i>.<br />
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Got it, right? Plain as day, no? OK - even in Shakespeare's time, those five lines were incomprehensible to the average person and were translated from that 9th century Old English to this, although with slightly different spelling:<br />
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<i>Our Father, who art in heaven,</i><br />
<i>Hallowed by Thy name.</i><br />
<i>Thy kingdom come</i><br />
<i>Thy will be done</i><br />
<i>On earth as it is in heaven.</i><br />
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As grad students like myself decades ago could attest, Middle English is tough but much less of a challenge. For example, here is the opening of "The Cherry Tree Carol" in one of its earliest printed versions, from about 1478, shortly after William Caxton brought the first Gutenberg printing press to England. Jesus' mother-to-be Mary speaks first:<br />
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<i>A my swete husbond, wold ye telle to me<br />
What tre is yon standynge upon yon hylle?</i><br />
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You scarcely need me to tell you that Mary is saying "<i>Ah, my sweet husband, would you tell me/What tree is yonder standing upon yon hill?</i>" Even at that, Middle English was a thing of the past a generation or two before Shakespeare's 1564 birth - but its grammar, syntax, much of its vocabulary, and certainly its aural rhythms were so close to our own language that a) most of us could go back to 1478 and after a few days of adjusting our pronunciation and adding some now-archaic words to our repertoire, we could make ourselves understood, and b) many poems and songs like "The Bitter Withy" and "The Cherry Tree Carol" transitioned fairly easily from Middle to Modern English.<i> </i><br />
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The source for<i> </i>"The Cherry Tree Carol" is likely the same Apocryphal <i>Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew </i>that also provided the major plot points for "The Bitter Withy," though as with that song as discussed in the article linked above, the English composers adjusted the stories and their details to the landscape of Britain. But just as "Withy" conflated some details of the apocryphal story and changed others outright, "Cherry Tree" alters the time, place, and circumstance of the earlier tale. Cherry trees were as uncommon in the ancient Middle East as they are common in England and across most all of northern Europe, and the analogous story in <i>Pseudo-Matthew </i>has<i> </i>baby Jesus commanding a much more geographically-correct palm tree - a date palm, presumably - to bestow its fruit in his mother's lap. Virtually no one in late medieval England would have ever seen a date or a palm, so cherries made an admirable and familiar substitution, with the added advantage of a kind of archetypal fertility symbolism as well.<br />
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"Withy" and "Cherry Tree," however, part company to a degree in the nature of their emphases. "The Bitter Withy," you may recall, has a little boy Jesus building a bridge of sunbeams with which to entice some disdainful rich lads to play with him. Jesus' divinity enables him to do this and to prance across the bridge, while the other boys plunge to their deaths when they try to follow him. Now, the divinity element was a given in any Jesus story that appeared by the eighth century date of <i>Pseudo-Matthew</i>, but even then the question of whether the infinite God could be truly a finite human was still a matter of (secret) debate. "Withy" comes down emphatically on the "yes" side, with little Jesus experiencing and reacting to some very recognizable human emotions: desire for companionship, sadness over rejection, anger, and resentment of his mother's punishment of his misdeeds. "Cherry Tree," however, invents a non-canonical miracle when infant Jesus, still <i>in utero</i>, commands the aforementioned cherry tree to yield its fruit to his mother, who is suffering the scorn and rejection of her husband, who has just learned that she is pregnant with a child he knows is not his. Little fetus Jesus is thus shown to have the full power of the God of Nature and a preternatural ability to talk, and the net effect is to stress that this is no ordinary mortal boy.<br />
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The first version of "The Cherry Tree Carol" that I recall hearing remains my favorite. It was Mike Kobluk's solo on The (Chad) Mitchell Trio's 1965 LP, <i>Typical American Boys</i>:<br />
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Kobluk is a marvelous interpretive singer, as this track demonstrates. His lead on the CMT's ensemble performance of Ian Tyson's "Four Strong Winds" is a large part of why I believe that cut to be the finest version of the song ever recorded.<br />
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"Cherry Tree" is arguably more deeply embedded in the English aural landscape than it is in the American, so it is to me no surprise that Gordon Sumner/Sting does as fine a job with it as he does here:<br />
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I had liked Sting's work fronting The Police in the early 1980s, but with the release of his <i>Ten Summoner's Tales</i> album a decade later, I became a major fan as I realized both how much of a genuinely literary background this former secondary-level English teacher had, and how skillfully he had integrated significant elements of British Isles balladry into his writing. "Fields Of Gold" from 1993's <i>Summoner's Tales</i> is a nearly perfect amalgam of a kind of Romantic-era poetic sensibility with the structure of a 14th century Middle English ballad. Quite an achievement, really - and a key to how he can translate this old song into his own vocal style and idiom.<br />
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Now I don't need much of an excuse ever to include a Judy Collins performance in these posts; she is one of the greatest singers of my lifetime, and like her contemporaries Linda Ronstadt and Joan Baez, she has worked her vocal magic across a variety of genres and styles. But Collins brings something special to ballad-based folk tunes, most especially I think when she deals with a protagonist in the lyrics who is a female, often one in some sort of travail. "Anathea" and "In The Hills Of Shiloh" from her early repertoire spring instantly to mind. That sensibility lends an immediate and striking pathos to the lyrics of "The Cherry Tree Carol," with Collins here in a 1996 performance at the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina:<br />
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The source story in <i>Pseudo-Matthew</i> creates a different context for the miracle than does "Cherry Tree." Instead of the latter's journey during Joseph and Mary's betrothal period, the <i>Pseudo-Matthew</i> context is the Flight Into Egypt, when the Holy Family as it came to be termed is fleeing from the murderous wrath of King Herod (see last year's <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2014/12/for-season-7-coventry-carollully-lullay.html">"Coventry Carol" post</a> for more on this delightful character). Both J and M are suffering from thirst and hunger, and that prompts infant Jesus to command the palm tree to bow down and give them its fruit and to "open a veyne" to supply them with water as well. There is no recrimmination here regarding the parentage of Jesus, and it is that aspect of the cherry tree tune - emanating as it does from Joseph's moral rectitude - that adds the element of pathos to Mary's silent suffering of an understandable but unjust accusation, as well as her wonder at the miracle and her resolute determination as she "went home with her heavy load" of cherries. Judy Collins' sensitive reading captures all of that quite effectively here.<br />
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For something entirely different, here is The Mark O'Connor Bluegrass Band with an instrumental rendition:<br />
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O'Connor's group is adept at creating the more usual blazing bluegrass sound in the rest of its repertoire, but I think that it takes a stroke of imaginative musical genius to recognize the idea that the standard bluegrass instrumental blend could be put to so quiet and moving a rendition. "The Cherry Tree Carol" not surprisingly does appear here and there in southern Appalachian folklore, though not at all as O'Connor and his band present it. <br />
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There are scores of variations on the lyrics of "The Cherry Tree Carol" across the English-speaking world, and a YouTube search will turn up more than a hundred recording and performance videos of the number, a significant percentage of which are by large chorales and classical orchestras. But "The Cherry Tree Carol" came into existence as an acoustic folk song, as we would term it today, and that is why I greatly prefer the simplicity inherent in these four renditions. The ancient roots of the song and its hauntingly beautiful melody make it a companion worthy to stand with its better-known relatives in the body of music associated with Christmas.<br />
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*The first seven songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes include #1 <span style="font-size: 85%; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">- </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2008/12/for-season-we-wish-you-merry-christmas.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"We Wish You A Merry Christmas"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #2 - </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/12/for-season-2-all-through-nightar-hyd-y.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #3 - "</span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/12/for-season-3-when-was-jesus-bornthe.html" style="font-weight: bold;">When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year</a>"; <b>#4 </b>- <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/for-season-4-gloucestershire-wassail_23.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Gloucestershire Wassail Song"</span></a>; <b>#5</b> - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/for-season-5-noel-nouveletsing-we-here.html"><b>"Sing We Here Noel</b>"</a>; <b>#6</b> - <b><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-season-6-bitter-withymary-mild.html">"The Bitter Withy/Mary Mild"</a>; </b>and <b>#7 - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2014/12/for-season-7-coventry-carollully-lullay.html">"The Coventry Carol</a>."
</b> Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include <b><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/shane-and-drakes-white-snows-of-winter.html">"The White Snows Of Winter"</a></b>, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/children-go-where-i-send-thee.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Children, Go Where I Send Thee"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/01/edric-connor-and-virgin-mary-had-baby.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/01/riu-riu-chiuguardo-del-lobo.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span>and<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/09/go-tell-it-on-mountain.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Go Tell It On The Mountain".</span></a>
Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-3766807119052690562015-12-21T15:15:00.000-08:002016-05-20T20:15:38.619-07:00Nick Reynolds And "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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The late <a href="http://nrmem.blogspot.com/">Nick Reynolds</a> was allotted by Providence with a greater range of talents and interests than most of those mere mortals among us could ever imagine. He was best known, of course, more than half a century ago as a singer and percussionist with the Kingston Trio in its heyday in the late 1950s and early 1960s; the high harmonies that he generally created himself became an integral part of the group's signature sound. And because he could play a bit of guitar and needed to find a rhythm instrument whose sound could cut through that of the booming rosewood Martin guitars of his bandmates Bob Shane and Dave Guard, Reynolds adopted the all-but-forgotten four-string tenor guitar, so effectively resurrecting the instrument in public awareness that when the national Tenor Guitar Foundation opened a hall of fame in 2011, its first inductee was Reynolds - even though there were many other distinguished tenor players from earlier generations, including actor Scatman Crothers and Mousketeer-in-chief Jimmie Dodd.<br />
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In the picture above, Nick's original Martin tenor had been modified to an eight-string version of the instrument, with the extra four strings being doubles and octaves, much as you would find on a 12-string guitar. Holding the instrument in this photo from about 1962 is Nick's son Josh, himself now an accomplished professional in advertising and communications and the chief proponent of his father's musical legacy as well. And "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight," a sadly little-known Christmas tune from an excellent but largely forgotten record album, is a song whose inclusion on that LP is precisely because of Nick and Josh.<br />
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The record itself was <i>The Last Month Of The Year</i>, released in early October of 1960. It was a startlingly different kind of holiday album, as Bill Bush notes in his 2012 book<i> Greenback Dollar</i> that chronicles the earliest years of the Kingston Trio:<br />
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What the album <i>did</i> include was a genuinely eclectic mix of songs: a medieval French carol, an ancient Welsh lullaby, a couple of seventeenth century English wassailing tunes, two African-American spirituals, and more, all masterfully arranged to stay within the musicians' somewhat limited vocal and instrumental ranges while at the same time respecting the traditions from which the songs sprang and in the process creating as memorable and original a holiday album as U.S. pop music had ever seen to that point in time.<br />
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But <i>Last Month</i> was a landmark KT album in other and less positive ways as well. It was the Trio's sixth studio album, with the first five reaching #1 on the <i>Billboard</i> 200 album charts and attaining gold record status. Further, the Kingstons had had the top-selling album in the country for 18 weeks in 1959 and a fairly astounding 24 weeks in 1960. <i>Last Month</i>'s top chart position of #11 and eventual sales of 200,000 units may not have been chopped liver and well may have been a signature effort for less dominant performers - but it was so disappointing for a group that had sold about five million recordings in the previous two years that the band's label, Capitol Records, pulled the LP off of the market and offered it for sale for only two more years during the holiday shopping season.<br />
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That is a large part of the reason why pretty much only the hardest core of Kingston Trio fans have ever heard "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight." And a pity that is. Bill Bush remarks above that each Trio member volunteered suggestions for songs to include on the album, and "Goodnight" was one of Nick Reynolds' two choices, with the Welsh "All Through The Night" being the other. Reynolds claimed copyright for both of those numbers, though it would have been for the arrangement and some slight modifications to the lyrics for "Night," which is hundreds of years old. The case isn't so clear for "Goodnight, My Baby," though. Josh had been born a few weeks prior to the early summer recording of <i>Last Month</i>, and Reynolds remarked to Bush that "I was just knocked out by having a kid." If there had been an antecedent melody from which Reynolds derived "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight," it is still clear that Reynolds reshaped it and supplied lyrics that conformed to his characteristically emotional reaction to new fatherhood. I believe that those emotions are audible in Reynolds' vocals here:<br />
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While some of the arrangements and performances on this LP are most assuredly more intricate - and nine of them appear in other CV101 articles - none is more heartfelt, and for some people whom I know very, very well who are intimately familiar with this album - this is their favorite track - new parents, many of them, and that is not surprising.<br />
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Nor is it surprising that today's KT of George Grove, Bill Zorn, and Rick Dougherty also regularly include "Goodnight, My baby" in their annual series of holiday concerts, as they did here in their 2008 Christmas CD <i>On A Cold Winter's Night</i>: <br />
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Lead vocal here is by Dougherty, who owns the sweetest and truest tenor voice of any of the singers who have ever been a part of the group - by which no disrespect is intended toward Nick, who was actually a high baritone with an amazing and elastic upper range.<br />
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The other professional folk group still performing the number also has roots deep in the 1960s pop folk revival. The Makem and Spain Brothers originally included three of the sons of Tommy Makem, who was one of the greatest experts on and performers of traditional Irish balladry - and though contemporary with the KT, a major influence of the latter group's selection of Irish material as well.<br />
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This was from a December 2012 show in Boothbay, Maine.<br />
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"Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight" remains among my favorite contemporary Christmas songs for its simple innocence. I was about ten years old when I first heard the tune, a bit past belief in St. Nick but only growing into the adult's appreciation of the magic created by that belief in the ready imaginations of so many little children. I watched as my seven younger brothers and sisters grew into and through that belief and all that it entailed, and no memories of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood remain more precious and vivid to me than those of Christmas Eves long past. Our family ritual was always the same: following an early light dinner, the youngest four or five would be bathed, pajama-ed, and brought downstairs to the living room for the ceremonial taping of the socks to the fireplace mantel, to be followed by all of the children sitting around my mother, each clutching one of the figurines of our Nativity set, moving them toward the stable as my mother intoned her greatly simplified retelling of the <i>Gospel of St. Luke</i> - and thence to bed, with the little ones in a hyper state of excitement for the five or so minutes it took them to fall asleep. Something about "Goodnight, My Baby, Goodnight" takes me back to those times like virtually nothing else can.<br />
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Upcoming in a couple of days - the eighth edition of a "For The Season" articles on a traditional carol.Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-79855311129953528572015-12-21T10:00:00.000-08:002015-12-21T10:00:21.057-08:00A Brief Note On CV101<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLuWZpUAJnZue7LM7n-7g5aa5qXArqV6O0IDlgQ82P8AkaFqniMo7OmXvDaznamKSWu9GHy9Qn0yU5Xj4mDYkvfh2WQ0OIcVHlaW18c26ftkS-sb8F_6USlTrSAXmlRgyOe5-J4IMQRC0/s1600/FINGERPICKING43-630-80.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLuWZpUAJnZue7LM7n-7g5aa5qXArqV6O0IDlgQ82P8AkaFqniMo7OmXvDaznamKSWu9GHy9Qn0yU5Xj4mDYkvfh2WQ0OIcVHlaW18c26ftkS-sb8F_6USlTrSAXmlRgyOe5-J4IMQRC0/s320/FINGERPICKING43-630-80.jpg" /></a></div><b>For most of this year</b></span> nearly past, I have used these blog pages to post radio shows and podcasts and have drifted rather far afield from the original intent of the venture - which was to use what was still the fairly new phenomena (in mid-2008 when we started up here) of YouTube and other video sites to explore the ways that acoustic folk and roots and singer-songwriter tunes transform themselves over time and in the hands of different interpretive artists. As of today, a bit short of eight years into the project, Comparative Video 101 has 203 posted articles (exclusive of this year's 12 radio/podcast pieces) with just under a quarter of a million posts viewed/accessed since Google started keeping stats in May 2010, with readership since January 2013 in 161 countries worldwide.</br>
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Needless to say, I have been delighted and gratified by this response. However infinitesimally small these numbers may be in the vast universe of the worldwide web, they are beyond anything that I ever thought either possible or likely, especially for articles that are actually personal essays on songs and performers who for the most part enjoyed their greatest popularity more than half a century ago. There is often a bit of background in the pieces (and as an academic myself, I wouldn't call it "research" <i>per se</i>), but the writing in these pages with which I am most satisfied is that which details emotional connections - mine and others' - to the songs and the manner in which they have resonated with me, often in fascinatingly evolving ways, through all the decades that I have known them.</br>
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All of this is simply preparatory to a relaunch of the song and performer articles, in addition to a continuation of the podcast and radio show postings. One of the constants here over the years has been an annual "For The Season" publication in the last seven Decembers of a profile of an often lesser-known traditional Christmas tune, in addition to five more articles about other songs with at least a tangential relationship to our Christian solstice celebration. I have two such essays in process now and will post them during this upcoming week, signalling (I hope) a return to form for this blog in 2016. To paraphrase John Paul Jones - I have not yet begun to write - or as Shakespeare notes in <i>The Tempest</i> - "What's past is prologue."Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-48771760480068167592015-01-31T18:40:00.001-08:002020-11-17T12:28:06.768-08:00In Memoriam Rod McKuen: "Love's Been Good To Me"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2MlNkw2PCfPSaEaW3n9a8UMx89rVDwwzDyaBFXqUiAL6N_O2-azObrX7LY9Y41NBnfienT4oxrckB_jeny5zL13apOW8MaXHa6jAGLuWN9AdRD_z0Lk_6p0HpHBatYQtTrd38KsSLXKo/s1600/McKc.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2MlNkw2PCfPSaEaW3n9a8UMx89rVDwwzDyaBFXqUiAL6N_O2-azObrX7LY9Y41NBnfienT4oxrckB_jeny5zL13apOW8MaXHa6jAGLuWN9AdRD_z0Lk_6p0HpHBatYQtTrd38KsSLXKo/s1600/McKc.jpg" height="368" width="500" /></a></div><b><span style="font-size: large;">Rod McKuen's death on Thursday</span> </b>at the age of 81 was another one of those all-too-frequent-these-days John Donne moments, as in Donne's famous meditation on the connectedness of all people that climaxes with "Therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee." That funeral bell tolls perhaps rather more loudly for McKuen than it may well do for many of the rest of us, because for several decades McKuen was a major force in U.S. popular culture, with his songs selling tens of millions of copies (generally recorded by higher-profile artists than McKuen was like Frank Sinatra, Andy Williams, Judy Collins, Glenn Yarbrough, Madonna, and many more) and his books of simple, emotional poetry appearing ubiquitously for some years on high school and college campuses throughout the land. By his own count, McKuen had recorded over two hundred albums and earned 63 gold and platinum records worldwide. In television and film, McKuen also racked up an impressive list of credits, as his IMDB page indicates <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0572106/">HERE</a>, and I recall seeing him quite accidentally and surprisingly one late night as an actor in a B western from the late 1950s.
Yet though his death was treated as a major event in national newspapers and websites, it was often accompanied by the sort of "I always wondered what happened to him" reaction, or less kindly, "I didn't even know he was still alive." This was due in part because McKuen's fifteen minutes of fame had expired decades before, but also because a major bout of clinical depression stemming from an abusive childhood engulfed him in the 1980s, in his early mid-life when he had been at his most productive, and he disappeared from the public eye for some time. He emerged from that shadow later in the decade, but times and styles had passed him by. McKuen continued to work - to write, to score, to perform - right up until shortly before his death, though on a smaller stage and with less public acclaim.<br />
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McKuen's name has appeared in the posts on this site with some frequency, primarily because the pop-folk groups of the late 1950s and early 1960s like the Kingston Trio, The Limeliters, The Brothers Four, and others were the first to record and attract wide attention to his songs, including tunes profiled on this site <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/08/seasons-in-sun.html">"Seasons In The Sun,"</a> <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/09/rod-mckuens-doesnt-anybody-know-my-name.html">"Doesn't Anybody Know My Name?",</a> and <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/03/world-i-used-to-know.html">"The World I Used To Know"</a>. I'd like to crib from myself a bit here from those earlier articles because they express better than any rewrite could what I have thought of McKuen through the decades. First -<br />
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<i><span style="font-size: normal;">While I am not a fan at all of McKuen's attempts at poetry, I hold him
in high regard as a composer and lyricist, one whose musical vision in
both songs and orchestral compositions was so idiosyncratic and so
out-of-step with the pop culture of his times that an artist whose songs
sold tens of millions of recordings (and "Seasons In The Sun" as done by Terry
Jacks is one of only a handful of single records with certified
worldwide sales of ten million or more units), who had arguably the
greatest pop vocalist of the last century record an entire album of his
compositions (Frank Sinatra's 1969 <b>A Man Alone</b>), and who sold millions
of books when a genuine bestseller scores in the tens of thousands in
hardcover - this artist is nearly anonymous today, despite being a
healthy and active senior citizen. So much for the glory of the world....Part
of the problem with McKuen's legacy, and here I mean the fact that this
artist whose works in different genres were wildly popular in their day
(even though he never evolved into a leading performer himself) is so
largely unknown to younger generations today and forgotten by his own,
is that McKuen's music was never quite either fish or fowl - never
traditional-sounding or protest-oriented enough to be remembered as folk
but never quite complex enough to bear comparison with the work of
great pop songsmiths like Cole Porter or Johnny Mercer.</span></i><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: normal;">And more to the point of today's song - </span><i><span style="font-size: normal;"> </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span></i>
<i>I always thought that McKuen the composer was at his best when, as with
French writers like Brel, his lyrics and melodies were tinged with a
kind of fin de siècle
melancholy, a sadness as gentle as an autumn mist. Think, for instance,
of the lyric derived from William Butler Yeats in McKuen's "Isle in the
Water" - the subtle changes he makes to Yeats' poem and his original
lines make even this love song quietly wistful. "Love's Been Good To Me"
is one of the 60s best reflective ballads... </i><br />
<br />
"Love's Been Good To Me" is as fine a song as McKuen ever wrote at expressing quietly a sense of passing time and its attendant loss, and as such makes a fine eulogy for its composer. It is in its chord structure and lyric sensibility most definitely a mainstream pop number, and of course the best-known version was as a middling hit for Frank Sinatra, recorded for the aforementioned <i>A Man Alone</i> album. Yet interestingly, the song comes across most effectively in the roots-y performances below by Johnny Cash and the Kingston Trio, both of whom respect the song's pop origins but present it with minimal instrumentation and without the lush orchestrations common to most other versions - and as we will see at the end, it is this simpler and less ornate approach that McKuen himself took with the song in his later years.<br />
<br />
McKuen first recorded his song in early 1964:<br />
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McKuen was self-taught as a musician, and in his early years as a performer in the late 1950s in San Francisco's North Beach clubs like The Purple Onion, he accompanied both his singing and his poetry reading with a simply-played guitar. However, his time in Paris with Jacques Brel from about 1960 through 1963 became for McKuen a kind of education in music theory and arrangement, and when he returned to the U.S., he did so with sufficient knowledge to score the orchstrations on many of his albums, as he did here.<br />
<br />
The first cover version of the tune was by the Kingston Trio, at the end of 1964 about six months after McKuen's original:<br />
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The lead here is by Bob Shane, quite naturally since he had the best voice in the group and because he was the member most comfortable with pop numbers and Broadway tunes and the like. The Kingstons had never liked being characterized as "folk," and from their first album six years prior to this recording and on from there, the Trio had always included pop-styled selections, sometimes to the chagrin of their record labels Capitol and (here) Decca, which were trying to market the band as "folk." As wrong-headed as that was, it did have its advantages for the companies: neither label had to hire anyone to score and play orchestral arrangements to back the group, and the guitar-only accompaniment for this track enhances the effect of McKuen's quiet if sentimental lyricism.<br />
<br />
Johnny Cash had long been an admirer of McKuen, which might strike one as strange at first given Cash's identity as a country/rockabilly/roots artist - but The Man In Black responded most strongly to and recorded many of McKuen's earlier and folkier creations, and Cash featured McKuen several times as a guest on the former's long-running and highly-rated television show. It is no surprise then that Cash included a couple of McKuen tunes in his last studio sessions, the widely-lauded "American Recordings" for the label of the same name. In fact, the fifth album in the series is <i>A Hundred Highways</i>, the title clearly derived from the lyric of this song:<br />
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Cash's aged, craggy voice at this late point in his life and career is perfect for the lyric, and I find it singularly affecting, as are many of Cash's other tracks from those last years of his life.<br />
<br />
Clearly, you can't talk about "Love's Been Good To Me" without including Frank Sinatra's rendition. Sinatra was so taken with McKuen's compositions that the <i>A Man Alone</i> LP includes only RM numbers, and "Love" was chosen as the flagship single from the album:<br />
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<br />
The 45rpm reached only #75 on the <i>Billboard</i> Hot 100 but scored a number eight position on the adult/contemporary charts. The orchestration here is somewhat muted by Sinatra standards; Ol' Blue Eyes generally went for accompaniments that in many cases might today be described as over-done or schmaltzy...<br />
<br />
....which is why I especially like what McKuen is doing with his song here, in the television show from 2009 at Royal Theatre Carré in Amsterdam: <br />
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<br />
There is a clear connection here to what Johnny Cash did with the tune. McKuen's vocals had always been throaty, but the addition of a few decades of wear and tear to his voice helps here to transform a ballad that might have seemed to be the superficial sentiments of a callow playboy when sung by a youth into a far more moving and reflective retrospection by an older man on a life now all-but-over. That is why for my money this last version and Cash's are the best ones ever waxed and help to transform a middle-of-the-road pop composition into something deeper and more satisfying. <br />
<br />
McKuen enjoyed a career that could be fairly described, like the artist himself, as bi-polar. He sold over a million books of poetry in 1968 alone - in an industry in which even then selling fifty thousand units would make a book a number one bestseller - but he was excoriated by serious critics with a savage vituperation that I have seldom seen launched at any other artist in my lifetime. As a lifelong devotee of poetry, I have never had much use for McKuen's verse - but did he deserve this, a day after his death?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/01/31/382851558/rod-mckuen-the-cheeseburger-to-poetrys-haute-cuisine">"Rod McKuen, The Cheeseburger To Poetry's Haute Cuisine"</a><br />
<br />
I think not. Neither his music nor his writing might be to everyone's taste, but his compositions of both spoke deeply to millions of people throughout the world, and that counts for something in my book - quite a lot, really. And so it was that I was pleased to see that McKuen may well have written his own epitaph in an interview in 2001 when he observed that, "I battled my way back to some kind of sanity by finally realizing I had absolutely nothing to be depressed about...I’ve had and am having a great life and I’ve never been happier. Besides, who knows how much time I have left on this earth? I have too much to do and too many things started and unfinished to afford the luxury of being unhappy."<br />
<br />
For that - good on ya, mate.
<br />
<br />
Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-34640567083088075522014-12-25T17:57:00.000-08:002017-04-11T10:14:33.412-07:00For The Season #7: "The Coventry Carol/Lully, Lullay Thou Little Tiny Child"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-size: small;">(L - François-Joseph Navez, 'The Massacre of the Innocents,' 1824)</span></i><br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b>The seasonal celebrations </b></span>that occur around the winter solstice, psychologists tell us, are for many people fraught with an anxiety and sadness that is usually incomprehensible to those who have never endured it. It seems contradictory at first: this season that across religions and cultures and millennia is the joy-filled welcoming of the return of the sun and the lengthening of daylight hours through the newly-minted winter and into the spring just does not seem to correlate with a darkness and despair that would appear to be more appropriate to autumn. But that "black dog" of depression, as Winston Churchill termed it, bides its time in the deepest recesses of the mind and heart, awaiting its chance and any excuse to pounce and to tear at the peace and well-being of the lonely and the fragile.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;">It may be Seasonal Affective Disorder; it may be a bit of good old Kierkegaardian existential angst; it may be simply a consequence of the dissonance between the perceived happiness of others and the quiet desperation of one's own soul as the year draws to an end. But whatever its source, this profound sadness affects millions during the solstice celebrations, a melancholy counterpoint to the joys and reunions and feasts inherent in the holidays. And perhaps surprisingly, this dark thread through the red and gold fabrics of Christmas extends itself even into the music of the day, nowhere more so than in "The Coventry Carol," whose tragedy is derived from scripture and theology but that I do believe bears some relation, however apparently obliquely, to that Yule-related black dog. More on that connection later.</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;">"The Coventry Carol" is very, very old, dating back in all likelihood to the middle of the fourteenth century, a point immediately evident to anyone with even a smattering of familiarity with late medieval music, since "Coventry's" musical setting in a minor key resolving into a final major chord is typical of much of the other music that survives from that long-vanished era. Some sources erroneously report the song as a product of the 16th century, but that results only from the fact that the lyrics were first published in 1534. There is reliable evidence, however, that </span></span><i>The Shearmen and Tailors' Pageant,</i> the play for which the piece was composed, was performed as early as the 1370s and perhaps even earlier.<br />
<br />
The so-called "Massacre of the Innocents," the Biblical tale that provides the inspiration for the lyrics of the song as the mothers of Bethlehem mourn the approaching murders of the babes to whom they sing, is itself an oddity. The story appears only in <i>The Gospel of St. Matthew</i>, strange because <i>Matthew</i> is one of the three "synoptic gospels" whose plots and incidents are nearly identical and which may well be derived from an older proto-gospel - and neither <i>Mark</i> nor <i>Luke</i>, the other two Synoptics, make mention of the event. The "raging Herod" motif is common enough, befitting a character who in history was ruthless and desperate enough to have his own sons executed for fear they would usurp his throne, and that bit of unpleasantness may well have given rise to this otherwise unsubstantiated account of the slaughter of male babies whom Herod feared might replace him.<br />
<br />
As with most of the physical events described in the <i>New Testament</i>, the jury is still and probably permanently out as to the historicity of this event. Guided by faith, literalists will accept it as fact; guided by doubt, skeptics will scoff. Most middle-of-the-road scholarship leaves the factuality question alone in favor of trying to understand the metaphorical significance of the story in the larger context of the gospel message - which also creates some problems, as below.<br />
<br />
But the peasantry and yeomanry of 14th century England (and not coincidentally the scores of medieval and Renaissance painters who used the motif) had no such confusion; for them, the Massacre was a real event, a fitting reminder of the degenerate nature of sinful humankind, and one deserving of memorialization in this lovely but heart-rendingly tragic carol. I think we can catch a sense of the original sound of the song in this acoustic instrumental solo by Trond Bengtson, performed most appropriately on a medieval-styled lute:<br />
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Bengtson has chosen a slow and measured rhythm for his performance, fully in keeping with the pace of most medieval pieces and accentuating the deep, despairing sadness of the event. Likewise, The Robert Shaw Chamber Singers, an offshoot of Shaw's famous Chorale, here in 1993 deliver the lyric with similar pacing:<br />
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Shaw breaks one of his own precedents here. His arrangements were often built around the male baritone section singing the lead on the melody; here, in keeping with the plaint of the grieving mothers, the lead belongs to the sopranos. My friend, the late Joe Frazier of Chad Mitchell Trio fame, had been one of those aforementioned baritones in this group in the years before he joined the CMT.<br />
<br />
"The Coventry Carol" quite naturally lends itself to female voices and interpretations, and scores of the popular music world's best sopranos like Joan Baez and Hayley Westenra and more have recorded excellent versions, for the most part with full orchestrations. Given my preference for the simplicity of acoustic folk music, however, the soloist I want to present here is a 20-year-old amateur who looks rather younger and who lives in Indonesia. Her real name is Saskia Kusrahadianti and her YouTube username is ScheherazadEify. Either way - you really need to hear this:<br />
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That's a lot of voice coming from so diminutive a person. Her lyric interpretation is outstanding, and she makes the interesting artistic choice to end each verse on a minor chord without the resolution to the major heard in most every other arrangement.<br />
<br />
Most, but not all. This next is the track that leads off the Kingston Trio's highly original and now-classic 1960 <i>Last Month of the Year</i> holiday album. Beyond creating an instrumental setting that employs a celeste and bouzouki, the Trio makes an interesting thematic choice for the verse-ending major or minor decision:<br />
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The Kingstons are splitting the difference, so to speak. The last chord of each of the first two verses is a minor, with the attendant sadness implied by that. The third and final verse, however, ends on the major - a resolution, as it were, from dark to light. Given the lyric, this cannot quite be termed a happy or uplifting conclusion; rather, it sounds as if it is intended as the one ray of possibility in the stormy nightmare that the song describes.<br />
<br />
And that would be entirely fitting, given the Massacre's strange place in the canon of Christian lore. Some scholars suggest that it is simply a literary device employed by the author of <i>Matthew</i> to effect a kind of fulfillment of prophecy from earlier scriptures. Others, as I note above, regard it as an example of an inherent evil, the "total depravity" of the individual soul that necessitated the birth of a savior who was destined to endure a savage and sacrificial execution in order to redeem unrepentant humanity. That dark thread of death pervades other Christmas carols, ancient and modern. The myrrh of the funeral appears in nearly every Three Kings carol, and the savior's death itself is referenced in others, like the more modern "I Wonder As I Wander." "The Coventry Carol" implies this as well: a world so brutal that innocent children can be murdered at the whim of a sociopathic monster is one in desperate need of salvation, a salvation hinted at in the final major chord of the original song and the Kingston Trio's arrangement.<br />
<br />
In a larger sense, too, "The Coventry Carol" glosses in a way on the seasonal despair with which I opened this essay. The mothers in the song articulate their grief over the coming loss of their sons and in so doing express what is always most tragic about death, for the survivors of the departed, at least. It is not simply the end of another's life; it is the ultimate and permanent separation from that beloved other that induces the wild grief we all know too well. Those among us who suffer loneliness and alienation and disaffection at this time of year do so largely because of isolation and separation, and we could wish that, just as the birth of the baby in Bethlehem promises the possibility of eventual reunion with those now gone, those who so suffer can find their own major chord resolution into light at some time during this, the season of light.<br />
<br />
_________________________________________________________<br />
<br />
*The first six songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes include #1 <span style="font-size: 85%; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">- </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2008/12/for-season-we-wish-you-merry-christmas.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"We Wish You A Merry Christmas"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #2 - </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/12/for-season-2-all-through-nightar-hyd-y.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #3 - "</span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/12/for-season-3-when-was-jesus-bornthe.html" style="font-weight: bold;">When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year</a>"; #4 - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/for-season-4-gloucestershire-wassail_23.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Gloucestershire Wassail Song"</span></a>; #5 - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/for-season-5-noel-nouveletsing-we-here.html"><b>"Sing We Here Noel</b>"</a>; and #6 - <b><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-season-6-bitter-withymary-mild.html">"The Bitter Withy/Mary Mild."</a>
</b> Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include <b><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/shane-and-drakes-white-snows-of-winter.html">"The White Snows Of Winter"</a></b>, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/children-go-where-i-send-thee.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Children, Go Where I Send Thee"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/01/edric-connor-and-virgin-mary-had-baby.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/01/riu-riu-chiuguardo-del-lobo.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span>and<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/09/go-tell-it-on-mountain.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Go Tell It On The Mountain".</span></a>
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<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-21614939139051366962014-05-01T14:49:00.000-07:002017-08-17T17:25:16.071-07:00Judy Collins: A Retrospective On Her 75th Birthday<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Judy Collins, a genuine national treasure</b></span>, turns 75 today. Probably no other single artist has been at the very center of my musical soul for the last 50 years and more, and not simply for the stunning clarity of her voice or the impeccable taste of her song selections and arrangements and her too-infrequent compositions. Collins' growth as a concert performer, her restless and daring search for different forms of expression, and her commitment to both her craft and her convictions make her for me the very personification of what an artist should be. She has enjoyed an enormous commercial success without ever seeming to have been corrupted or confined by it, and while my deepest affection for her music lies in her earliest efforts as a solitary folk musician performing traditional songs accompanied only by her very well-played guitar, I appreciate equally the fact that Collins has been able to transcend categorization to become simply one of America's greatest singers over the last half a century.<br />
<br />
Collins has also written seven books, most of them autobiographical and three dealing with the personal tragedy of the loss of her son to suicide. However, unlike many of the performers of today - and I would add especially the legion of lesser female singers who make more money even than Collins ever did for work of stupendously inferior quality to hers - Collins never lived her life in the tabloids or other similarly salacious media. Her biography is interesting and at times moving, and for those so inclined there is a fairly good summary of it <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Collins">HERE</a>. But I am old enough and old-school enough to have little interest in that beyond what she herself has chosen to share in her books. Judy Collins is first and foremost a great performing artist, and even presenting a modest sampling of that art is challenge enough for one article.<br />
<br />
<b>Judy Collins, Folksinger</b><br />
A recent article noted that the brilliance of Collins' vocals often obscured what a fine guitarist she was. She showed what I would term a creative fidelity to the roots of the folk songs she performed, as here. Collins never tried to act the part of a rural inheritor of the folk tradition; she was an educated, modern woman who was comfortable presenting old songs in a contemporary idiom - a genuine urban traditionalist, but in the broader and not the more restrictive meaning of the term. <br />
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<b>Judy Collins, Composer - Singer-Songwriter</b><br />
Collins has only<b> </b>about twenty songs copyrighted under her own name<b>. </b>These are two of the best, and they have always left me wishing she had written at least twenty more. They demonstrate what happens when a lyricist with real poetic flair combines in a composer who actually studied music formally. I believe the word that I am searching for here, and one that I would append to nearly no other of the 60s era singer-songwriters, is "sublime."<b><br /></b><br />
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<b>Judy Collins, Interpretive Artist</b><br />
It is worth noting, I think, that except for Seeger, not one of the composers whose work Collins is interpreting here was a tenth as well-known as she was at the point in time that she first waxed their songs. The fact that each is today regarded as a major artist is due in part to the high profile that Collins gave to their work early in their careers. <b><br /></b><br />
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<i>Of and with Pete Seeger</i><br />
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<i>Of Joni Mitchell</i><br />
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<i>Of Leonard Cohen</i><br />
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<i>Of Bob Dylan</i><br />
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<i>Of Ian Tyson</i><br />
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<i>....and more recently, Collins performing a Sandy Denny song that she first recorded in 1970.</i><br />
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I saw Collins in concert about a year and a half ago at the Carpenter Theater at Long Beach State. She has lost only a little of the supple flexibility and beauty of her voice through all the decades of her career, and as might be expected, the range and emotional power of her interpretive abilities has only broadened and deepened with age. Fortunate indeed are those of us who know her work: she has the voice of an angel and has graced our national musical life for more than half a century now, and I hope for many more years to come.Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-42105957109677832452014-03-17T15:35:00.000-07:002017-09-05T07:01:09.769-07:00"Bound For South Australia"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQKnpJCNo11dtKFus0qBisdDpR3cBw5euhsZNokycTB2xo9wMLa9_csaDj-ve-8fnRLiy5i_8Kd8-EaXiG5SjYz7gZoENcTqrs6uAxQHfK9SeK_OmuA9QTBBUQWFReZJDqzQoPWMDorQM/s1600/ery_humm_2007_2268_large.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="324" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQKnpJCNo11dtKFus0qBisdDpR3cBw5euhsZNokycTB2xo9wMLa9_csaDj-ve-8fnRLiy5i_8Kd8-EaXiG5SjYz7gZoENcTqrs6uAxQHfK9SeK_OmuA9QTBBUQWFReZJDqzQoPWMDorQM/s1600/ery_humm_2007_2268_large.jpg" width="480" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: normal;"><b>The general and often foolish gaiety </b></span>that accompanies most St. Patrick's Day celebrations here in the U.S. serves two purposes. First and more obviously, the hats and parades and buttons and green-dyed rivers and all afford those of us of Irish descent a moment or two per year where we are able to assert a degree of kinship with a mythic and far-off land that many of us have never seen but from which our ancestors emigrated, usually many generations prior. In this respect, St. Patrick's Day in America differs little from the ways in which New York City's Italian-American population for decades observed October's Columbus Day, or the great Southwest's Mexican-Americans continue to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, a relatively minor holiday in Old Mexico that has been inflated into a major commercial event hiding behind a <i>fiesta</i> here in <i>El Norte</i>. But second and less obviously, the public demonstrations of pride and joy in one's Hibernian roots, especially in Boston, New York City, Chicago, and other eastern and midwestern metropolises, acts as a counter-balance to an inherent and often oppressive melancholy that seems to be part of the Irish character, however much it may be mitigated by residence in countries like the U.S. and Canada and Australia that are far more congenial to people's hopes and aspirations than the mother country ever was for most of its long and troubled history. As quintessentially-Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats remarked about one of his characters, "He had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him through temporary periods of joy." Amen.<br />
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In Ireland, traditional St. Patrick's Day celebrations were much different than the "sure an' begorrah" fakery prevalent in the U.S. Families would attend an early morning mass - it is, after all, a saint's day - and would assemble for a mid-afternoon dinner. Soda bread, yes - but corned beef and cabbage is an American invention, largely because beef brisket was the absolute cheapest cut available to the immigrants in 19th century, and beef of any kind was a luxury item unaffordable to the vast majority of the residents of the old country. Most of the Irish were lucky to get fish into their diets on occasion; for a real feast, mutton was the likelier main course for the relatively affluent and chicken or maybe mackerel for the majority. The St. Patrick's Day parades, which may have originated in the U.S., sprouted up in Ireland as dangerous and revolutionary acts of defiance against British rule. They were fraught with the risks of violence or arrest - in British-occupied Ulster well into the 1970s - and served as a rallying point for Irish nationalism, as surely as was "the wearin' of the green," equally suppressed by our English friends, who never quite seemed to understand why those troublesome Celts refused to embrace the high honor of being annexed into the British Empire along with Africans and Indians and other unlettered primitives around the world.<br />
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The political repression and the countless failed revolutions were at least as influential as the Great Hunger of the 1840s in impelling millions of the Irish to seek sunnier shores in the middle and late 19th century. To America and Canada they came in droves, of course, to labor in factories and build railroads and homestead land on the Great Plains ten times richer than they ever could have imagined existed. But they also went in significant numbers to Australia, both as convicts from the country's very beginnings at Botany Bay in the 1790s and as emigrants through the next hundred years. In fact, it could be argued that whatever the "national character" of Australia may be today, it is far more shaded by the influence of its Irish transplants than either of those of the U.S. or Canada. To Australia, the Irish brought their abiding love for horses and sheep and strong drink along with their undiminished abhorrence of British tyranny. They also brought their ballads - and thus helped to shape the musical aspects of the emergent Australian folk culture.<br />
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"Bound For South Australia" is with "The Wild Colonial Boy" among the absolute best examples of the Irish-Australian ballads. Its rollicking tempo, its idealization of "Miss Nancy Blair" (who may well be a lady of the evening profession), and its chest-thumping pride in surviving the brutal gantlet of a sea passage around Cape Horn - these elements connect the tune most clearly and emphatically to similar Irish songs and sea shanties like "The Holy Ground" and "Haul Away, Joe." Scholar and folksinger A.L. Lloyd (an Englishman, for what that's worth) identifies "South Australia" as a capstan shanty, with its repeated "Heave away, haul away" fulfilling the same function of providing a rhythm for the backbreaking work of raising anchor or hoisting sails that "Way, haul away/We'll haul away, Joe" does in the aforementioned tune. "South Australia" first appears in print in the 1880s, and though it is likely somewhat older than that, it cannot be by much - anyone who was born in South Australia as in the lyric could hardly have been so prior to perhaps 1830 or thereabouts - there just weren't many women among the transported convicts who formed the bulk of the country's earliest population.<br />
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Lloyd recorded the song in 1958, and there do not seem to be many waxings earlier than that, though the song enjoyed a robust popularity Down Under through the normal folkways of oral transmission and school sing-alongs and the like. "South Australia" became a high-profile part of the English-language ballad repertoire, however, through this 1962 recording by The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who were riding the crest of a phenomenal popularity first in America and then in their native Ireland:<br />
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The group took especial care with this track and most of the others on <i>The Boys Won't Leave The Girls Alone</i> on Columbia Records, the band's first real, professionally-produced studio album. In concert, the Clancys' only instrumental accompaniment at the time was brother Liam's effective but very simple guitar work, with occasional additional backing by Tommy Makem on pennywhistle or banjo, which Makem was still learning to play. For "South Australia," however, producer and band bass player Robert Morgan recruited an all-star line-up, with top-flight jazz musician Bill Lee (father of filmmaker Spike) on bass, studio pro and classically-trained John Stauber on guitar with the irrepressible Bruce Langhorne (both names should be familiar to all fans of early '60s folk recordings), and banjo by Eric Weissberg, member of The Tarriers and a decade later the player on "Dueling Banjos" in the film <i>Deliverance</i>. Weissberg also just happens to be one of the two or three best, most versatile, and most influential of all the musicians to come out of the folk revival in America. Harmonica support comes from eldest Clancy brother Paddy.<br />
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Most subsequent versions of "South Australia" can be traced in melody and lyric to the Clancys - but predictably, not that of Ireland's other great ballad group, The Dubliners, who have their own arrangement:<br />
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This is one of the last performances of the almost-original group, including founding member Ronnie Drew, now departed, and lead sung by the late, great Barney McKenna, who died just two years ago. Though McKenna is singing here to a simple fiddle accompaniment, he was probably the greatest tenor banjo player of the whole revival period, in Ireland or anywhere else.<br />
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While I have never been a big fan of The Pogues' approach to Irish folk music, they have always brought an undeniable energy to their style, and I rather like what they do with the tune here:<br />
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Lead singer Shane McGowan's throaty bellowing seems more appropriate here than it does on many of the band's other cuts. IMO, of course.<br />
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Oddly enough, it was difficult to find a video of an actual Australian singing the song. The Bushwackers Band is a fine Aussie band, but their version is a bit limp, so we turn instead to Salty Pete:<br />
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Pete's pronunciation of all the "aways" in the tune are a dead giveaway as to his country of origin.<br />
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Now, no Aussie musician today is more revered - and justifiably so - than master guitarist Tommy Emmanuel. Here, complete with flubs and outtakes, is Emmanuel's instrumental of "South Australia" with "The Sailor's Hornpipe" cut in for good measure:<br />
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You almost want to believe that you are seeing CGI here. Human hands just cannot be capable of such speed and dexterity - can they?<br />
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"Bound For South Australia" has been one of my favorite Irish-based ballads since I was a boy decades ago. It is simple, direct, energetic, and maybe just a tad naughty to boot - an unbeatable combination, as far as I am concerned. In fact, this being St. Paddy's Day and all - I think I'll post this, pour a glass of Jameson's, take out the trusty old Martin D18 on which I learned the song, and sing me some choruses of "South Australia." I have, as Errol Flynn's character remarks in<i> Captain Blood</i>, "the honor to be Irish," by extension at least, and I can think of no more satisfying ways of celebrating my ethnic heritage today.<br />
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<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-9005024883603872832014-01-31T18:37:00.001-08:002022-05-04T00:00:45.352-07:00In Honor Of Pete Seeger: "Guantanamera"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The best picture</b></span> of Pete Seeger is any one like this one: a tall, spare figure - so tall and so spare that his famous 25-fret long-necked banjo looks perfectly proportional in his hands - standing alone center stage in a large concert hall, left arm raised and hand outstretched to the audience to encourage the people to sing along, to join him, and with him to become part of the song. It hardly mattered what the song was - an old English or Appalachian ballad, an African lullaby, a hard-driving rambling tune, a fiery pro-union or anti-war anthem - all Pete Seeger wanted was for people to sing it with him, and more to the overarching point of his life and career, with each other. "I think God is everything," Seeger remarked in an interview a few years back. "Whenever I open my eyes I’m looking at God.
Whenever I’m listening to someone or something I’m listening to God." For Pete, the voice of the people, or perhaps the voices of people - that was where dwelt the divine, and it made itself manifest in the sounds of people singing.<br />
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Seeger's death at age 94 earlier this week has generated a truly impressive tidal wave of accolades, remembrances, appreciations, and commentaries, and this is not in the least surprising because he was a gigantic presence in American cultural life for seventy years. While he was always quick to credit the resurgence of interest in folk music in this country to his friend Woody Guthrie ("We are all Woody's children," he often remarked) and to collectors like the Lomaxes, father and son, Seeger's own achievement is in fact far more significant in many ways. The Lomaxes were academic collectors working for the Library of Congress, almost a guarantee of anonymity except in dusty university libraries. Guthrie enjoyed a degree of popularity as a radio host and concert performer, and his record sales were more than respectable for a rural guy without formal training - who also happened to be a political radical. And of course, Guthrie was struck down by Huntington's disease in his prime, diagnosed and hospitalized at the age of 40 in 1952, unable to perform or write very much for the last fifteen years of his life. That sad fact throws into even sharper relief Alan Lomax's comment that the folk song revival actually began when Guthrie met Seeger at a concert in 1940 - because Guthrie's incapacity left Seeger to carry the movement forward at the precise moment of the coming of age of American mass media with television, long-playing records, and a national audience for music.<br />
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That moment also coincided almost exactly with Seeger's fall from public grace due to his Communist Party associations, leading to his subsequent blacklisting during the worst years of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Seeger's Weavers - largely his own creation - had made itself the country's first legitimate pop folk group, performing a national and international repertoire of songs with consummate professionalism, where previously popular aggregations like The Carter Family had been generally more regional in the music that they knew and played. But after <i>Red Channels</i> outed Seeger and fellow Weaver Lee Hays as CPUSA members (probably past tense by then, but at that point in history it didn't matter), the Weavers were dumped by Decca Records and had virtually all of their bookings and radio airplay cancelled.<br />
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It was this phase of Seeger's career especially that prompted the few but predictable discordant notes sounded in the press following his death. Some of that commentary was pointed and, to a degree at least, accurate: it took Seeger more than 30 years openly to repudiate the horrors of Stalinism that he had once endorsed, for example. But some of it was also of the "I-hope-the-old-Commie-is-burning-in-hell" stripe - mean-spirited, focused on particular aspects of Seeger's work and not the whole of it, and even in some cases trashing not only the man but the entire folk song revival - because the writers hated Seeger, they had to go after his life's edifice as well. A particularly egregious example is from David P. Goldman, who had grown up in a politically leftist family but had gravitated through his life to the other side of the political spectrum: <i>"I was not just a Pete Seeger fan, but a to-the-hammer-born,
born-and-bred cradle fan of Pete Seeger. With those credentials, permit
me to take note of his passing with the observation that he was a fraud,
a phony, a poseur, an imposter. The notion of folk music he espoused
was a put-on from beginning to end." </i>Interestingly, Goldman's complaint is not simply the radical bent of much of Seeger's political music: it is the music itself he abhors as "pap," in addition to asserting that there is no "real American folk music" except the blues. The rest of what we think of as our folk heritage he dismisses as half an artificial construct of Pete's commie pals and the rest as the result of the unreconstructed ignorance of backwater rural rubes.<br />
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Well, each to his own - though you cannot help being reminded of the old parable of the three blind men trying to describe an elephant. My own observations on Seeger's politics can be found in the fourth paragraph of a piece I wrote eight years ago <a href="http://vividair.blogspot.com/2006/05/real-american-idol.html">HERE</a>, thank you. You don't start a worker's revolution with a banjo, and Seeger never intended to do so. In fact, he observed later in life that "if by some freak of history communism had caught up with this country, I
would have been one of the first people thrown in jail." His collectivism, as I noted, was grounded in a very different set of values. And more to the point of this site - Seeger's repertoire was not some faked-up amalgam of silly old songs; it was one of the first very real iterations of world music, of the sense that one of the most important things shared by all people everywhere was music. As an expression of that belief, Seeger spent his entire career finding, learning, and performing songs from scores of countries around the world, with the traditional songs of England and Ireland and Scotland and American cowboys and riverboatmen and slaves occupying a central but not exclusive position in his concerts. Songs of India and Israel, South Africa and Norway, Australia and South America became familiar to Anglophone Americans through Seeger's recordings and performances.<br />
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Undoubtedly, the best-known of these Seeger discoveries is <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/01/for-solomon-linda-and-new-era.html">"Mbube"/"Wimoweh"</a>, but a close second is probably "Guantanamera" from Cuba, which as with many folk songs has a delightfully tangled history. The melody probably originated as a peon's song in the Cuban province of Oriente in the late 19th century, but possibly much earlier. Most Cuban scholars identify the two-word refrain as a salute to both the well-born women of the province ("<i>las Guantanameras</i>") and the simple peasant girls (whose songs had been termed "<i>las guajiras</i>"), making the tune a sort of all-purpose courting number. However, the simple and repetitive chorus and the strict and regular meter of the lines of the verses made the original song a kind of Cuban "Hey LiLee LiLee," with street musicians and bar patrons and partygoers extemporizing verses as they went along, turning the news of the day and the sorrows of life and some randy jokes into a song that changed every time it was sung. One of the exponents of this format for "Guantanamera" - and quite controversially, one of the copyright holders - was the great Cuban bandleader <span style="font-size: normal;">Joseíto Fernández (1908-1979), who began performing the number on Havana radio around 1930. Here is </span><span style="font-size: normal;"><span class="notranslate"><span style="line-height: normal;"><span class="text">Fernández from a television show some twenty years later:</span></span></span></span><br />
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My Spanish is limited but enough to recognize some of what Fernández is saying, and it is definitely not the lyric with which we are familiar today. That lyric is derived from the great Cuban poet and revolutionary and national hero José Martí, who was killed in battle at the age of 42 in 1895 while trying to free his native land from Spanish colonial domination. Martí was an essayist, philosopher, and firebrand in addition to being a poet, sort of what you would get in American history and culture if you spliced the DNA of Thoreau, Whitman - and John Brown. The idea of taking the words of one of Cuba's most admired and lyrical writers and adding them to a popular and lovely melody is probably attributable to teacher <span style="font-size: normal;"><span class="text"><span style="font-size: normal;">Julian Orbón, who claimed to have done so around 1946. This new "Guantanamera" became an instant sensation in Cuba and was carried throughout Latin America by the fabulous Celia Cruz, the Queen of Latin Music, with a distinctively<i> salsa </i>flavored arrangement. Cruz is interspersing her own lyrics with Martí's in the best tradition of the song, but the blueprint of the modern version is audible here.</span></span></span><br />
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Orbón's intent was to take stanzas from five of Martí's short poems and conflate them into a single lyric. This arrangement was picked up by composer Hector Angulo, who studied in New York in the late 1950s and ran across Pete Seeger, who recognized immediately both the beauty of the melody and the poems. Seeger learned it and it became a popular part of Pete's concert repertoire. The gentle and reflective approach to the song, respecting as it does the sense of Martí's stanzas, received its widest exposure at first through Seeger's popular and widely-selling 1963 <i>Carnegie Hall Concert</i> LP:<br />
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It was this version that inspired The Sandpipers, a west coast vocal group being groomed by no one less than Herb Alpert, to record and release the number in 1966:<br />
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The Sandpipers' version won a gold record, was nominated for a Grammy, and went as high as #7 on the U.S. singles charts.<br />
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"Guantanamera" has continued since then to be a very popular staple of the world music song bag, with literally hundreds of cover versions currently available. Two of the best, I think, reflect the built-in flexibility of the number to differing interpretations - first, a distinctively Puerto Rican take by José Feliciano:<br />
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and a delightful mariachi version by Mariachi Imperiale de México:<br />
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I love the full-on treatment here - guitars, violins, coronets, <i>guitarrón</i>, percussion, the works.<br />
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But as T.S. Eliot wrote - in my end is my beginning, and I want to conclude with another version from Pete Seeger, with whom this post started long ago. This is a performance of "Guantanamera" by Seeger with his grandson Tao Rodriquez from 1993 at Wolf Trap in Virginia. The keyboardist is Arlo Guthrie, Woody's son and Seeger's frequent performing partner, and the back-up singers include Woody's daughter Cathy amd granddaughters Annie and Sara Lee:<br />
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Pete Seeger was 74 when this was recorded, at an age when lots of folks pack it in and move to the Sun Belt. Not Seeger. Can we watch him in this video and listen to him and not hear and sense the love of life and music and people that animated his public work for more than 70 years? Can we not see him for what he was, a national American treasure and a gifted artist well worthy of the hundreds of awards he earned? And were we not singularly blessed as a nation to have had him with us for another twenty years following?
Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-65622188233886072552014-01-01T18:33:00.001-08:002022-10-12T22:02:06.776-07:00John Denver: "Leaving, On A Jet Plane"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><b>December 31st would have been </b><span style="font-size: normal;">John Denver's 70th birthday had he lived, and that fact leads me rather more toward contemplation than to speculation. I have almost no inkling of what Denver might have done with these last sixteen years, and the October 1997 accident that took his life also ended his longed-for return to the center stage of American popular culture. Moreover, the period of his stratospheric popularity in the 1970s has retreated much, much farther into the past, irrelevant to the collective memory of the half of the population in the U.S. who were not even born when JD ruled the charts and airwaves or who were at best infants and toddlers - and for many of whom Denver's whooping enthusiasm in the concert videos posted to YouTube and his earnest if apparently at times naive promotion of the New Age and environmental causes of his day seem as alien to their lives and times as do the singer's granny glasses and bell bottoms.</span></span><br />
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Which is too bad, really, because Denver wrote some excellent songs in the folk idiom and performed them with consummate skill. I addressed these points recently and in more detail than I will here when I profiled <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/10/john-denvers-take-me-home-country-roads.html">"Take Me Home, Country Roads"</a> last October. What was implicit at the end of that piece - when I quoted legendary producer Milt Okun's fervent wish that Denver would be taken seriously as an American musical artist on the same plane with Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland - was that JD was never embraced by any commuinity of critics, neither the pop and rock newspaper wags nor the academics of the professoriat, some of whom have been tripping over each other to get Bob Dylan either a real Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel Prize For Literature, or both. I know of more than a few Denver fanatics who just do not understand this at all, either the lack of attention to their hero or to the adulation accorded to Dylan and other singer-songwriters of the era, both famous and obscure, whose creative output seems generally to be more highly regarded than Denver's is, even with the re-evaluation of JD that is going on now and that I also discussed in the linked article.<br />
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The reasons for this oversight are varied, but they probably come down to what is perceived as a lack of depth and sophistication in Denver's music, something no one ever alleged about Dylan's lyrics or those of a few dozen other musical artists who like Bobby D at least skirted around the edges of the folk revival and accompanied their creations for the most part with acoustic guitars. Yet once again in this regard, Denver is being unfairly slighted. Though his highest-profile hit songs may well have been cheerful hymns to the beauties of nature and the wonders of romantic love, there was a decidedly darker undercurrent in much of Denver's writing - a melancholia approaching depression in a fine song like "Eclipse," for instance, or the urban alienation of "Fly Away." And always - always - Denver wrote about loneliness and about isolation and about the consequences of the failure of the romantic dreams that he so famously extolled in the hits.<br />
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These two distinctly different sides of Denver's writing are evident in the first two of his compositions to be recorded professionally. The very first, copyrighted under his real name as "H.J. Deutschendorf, Jr.", was called "For Bobbie" and appeared on the second album that JD waxed as a replacement member of The Mitchell Trio in 1965. Though that original recording has yet to be posted on YouTube, Denver reunited with the original Chad Mitchell Trio for a number of concerts in 1987, and the his performance here from those shows (with his former partners in the group, Mike Kobluk and Joe Frazier) is virtually identical to the '65 studio recording:<br />
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The song was covered most famously by pop-folk superstars Peter, Paul and Mary, who renamed it "For Baby" and converted it into a tune for a newborn child. But Denver continued to perform it and record it with the original title and lyric - and the original intent as a competent if simple love ballad. It is pleasant enough, but had JD been planning a career based on songs like this, he would have been better off returning to Texas Tech.<br />
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Fortunately and famously, Denver was capable of much better writing, and his talent for matching words with melodies emerged in an emphatically more accomplished second recording, a 1966 composition that JD wanted to call "Babe, I Hate To Go." The title was nixed as drab and unimaginative by Milt Okun, who suggested that Denver use the first line of the chorus as the title instead of the last, and thus was "Leaving, On A Jet Plane" born. The last incarnation of the Mitchell Trio (with Kobluk and David Boise) recorded "Jet Plane" - complete with the comma that has since disappeared from the title but with which the tune is still under copyright - for the band's final album in 1967 called <i>Alive</i>:<br />
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Both the tune and lyrics here are greatly superior to the "Bobbie" number, but the performance seems rushed, as if Denver has not yet realized that he has written a somewhat sad song about lovers parting, with the "wedding ring" bit in the third verse coming across as a hopeful and possibly desperate antidote to the singer's sorrow as he contemplates the upcoming loneliness of the road. Denver's original solo rendition on his first commercially-produced album, 1969's <i>Rhymes and Reasons</i>, has similar pacing, if a somewhat more reflective interpretation of the lyric: <br />
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Several years later, however, when JD re-recorded some of his earlier tunes for the monster nine-times platinum-selling <i>John Denver's Greatest Hits</i>, Denver had altered both the speed of the melody and the more sober and quiet voice of the story:<br />
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With slight variations, this is the interpretation that Denver used in concert for the rest of his career.<br />
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Still, "Leaving, On A Jet Plane" and Denver's career would likely have been lost in obscurity (the sales of the first two recordings above were negligible) had Milt Okun not also acted as musical director for the aforementioned high profile PP&M, which may well have been the only pop-folk group whose popularity survived the onslaught of the British Invasion of rock music following the 1964 arrival of The Beatles in the U.S. Okun brought "Jet Plane" to PP&M, who included it in their 1967 offering <i>Album 1700</i>, surely one of the group's best and most accomplished efforts. For reasons now unknown, the band's label, Warner Brothers, waited until 1969 to release the tune as a 45rpm single, which became PP&M's last charting single (of several) and the only one to hit the #1 spot on <i>Billboard's</i> main pop charts.<br />
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"Jet Plane" became the signature number for the late Mary Travers, who recorded and performed it solo as well as with the trio. Further, the song's appearance on the popular <i>1700</i> album was what enabled Okun and Denver's other representatives to market the young unknown singer-songwriter to major label RCA. JD's <i>Rhymes and Reasons</i> debut, in fact, was released at precisely the time in autumn of 1969 that PP&M's "Jet Plane" was ascending the pop music singles charts. Additionally, one of Denver's first network TV appearances during his solo career was sitting in with PP&M for "Jet Plane" on one of the trio's specials, this one in 1969 at the height of the song's popularity - and the beginning of Denver's.<br />
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The tune has been covered by professionals hundreds and hundreds of times, in virtually every musical mode imaginable. A sampling of some of the more interesting takes - first, a version in memory of my father, a man of generally impeccable musical tastes ranging from Glenn Miller and George Gershwin to his annual seasonal subscription to the prestigious Chicago Symphony but who for some mysterious reason also loved the musical stylings of The Ray Conniff Singers:<br />
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Should that not be sufficiently abusive of the lyric and grating to the senses, I submit that this punk version by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes will do the trick:<br />
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Rather more interesting to me, not to say palatable, is what rapper and actor Mose Def does with the song:<br />
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It is a sampling of the number and not the song that John Denver wrote, but it somehow works for me in the way that Lindsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac remarked to John Stewart that a good pop recording should be repetitive and hypnotic.<br />
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Perhaps because of Mary Travers' top flight vocals on the hit version, "Jet Plane" has become a perennial favorite for female soloists. One of the most popular and widely-heard versions of fairly recent vintage was by Canadian Chantal Kreviazuk as part of the hit 1998 movie <i>Armageddon</i>:<br />
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Kreviazuk is a more than competent pro, and the jazz-tinged chord structure of her accompaniment creates a very different effect from Denver's original earnest folkie-ness.<br />
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For a contemporary female vocalist's interpretation, though, my favorite hands down is by Vienna Teng, a young Stanford engineering graduate whom I first heard ten years ago late at night while randomly flipping through television programs and seeing her do one song as the closing act on <i>The David Letterman Show</i>. Teng is a proficient and introspective songwriter with four albums to her credit (though she is apparently on a bit of a performing hiatus while she is working simultaneously on an MBA and M.S. at the University of Michigan), and her vocal delivery is nothing if not sensitive:<br />
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Teng gets a little too hushed at points here, perhaps, but in her favor it can be said that she at least avoids the breathiness of most of the <i>American Idol</i> generation of singers and demonstrates a genuine awareness of the meaning of Denver's lyric.<br />
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"There are no second acts in American lives," F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously observed, but he was not saying that revivals and comebacks are impossible. Rather, he meant that artists' careers in this country tended to be all build-up followed by decline, without the requisite second act as in the plays of his day in which the protagonist could learn and grow and develop depth and complexity in conflict in the middle of the story. I have often thought that such was the case with John Denver, who shot to international stardom and maintained a breakneck pace of developing his entertainment projects and promoting his environmental causes without being able to step aside for a time and rethink and broaden his songwriting interests. Throughout his career, he essentially got better and better at doing the same thing, though as his personal life darkened in his later years, so too did the tone of many of his musical creations. To say so is not to fault Denver; having once written a song as good as "Leaving, On A Jet Plane" is, as profoundly moving as it has been to so many people over the passing decades and generations and expressing both the light and dark of his creative vision, it would have been virtually impossible and likely foolish as well for JD not to try to forge such an expression once more. That he may never again have created so enduring a song as this speaks to his fallible humanity; that he never stopped trying, to his quality and commitment as an artist.
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<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-63793943279820040082013-12-23T00:17:00.000-08:002017-11-04T10:17:58.574-07:00For The Season #6* :"The Bitter Withy/Mary Mild"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>The picture</b></span> to the left is a detail from a 14th century mural found in an abandoned Orthodox Christian monastery in Ethopia. The scene depicted is perhaps just a bit startling to those of us raised in conventional Western religious traditions because it clearly shows the Virgin Mary (identifiable, of course, from her blue garb and the orange halo) armed with a doubled-up rope with which she is walloping little Jesus, distinguishable as well by that oddly-colored holy diadem. The good monks wanted viewers to understand that this is a real and painful whipping: note the consternation on the face of the non-holy child to the left as he witnesses the severe chastisement of his chum for transgressions unknown. Little Jesus seems to be taking it all pretty well - there is an almost nirvanic calm in his facial expression that stands in stark contrast to Mary's cross look, which seems to be a combination of sorrow and anger. The point of this mural - its theme, if you will - is that little Jesus was a boy like any other boy, one who needed severe discipline at times as all normal boys do. The net effect of the work is to emphasize the humanity of Jesus, which was a hotly-contested point of faith in the early Christian centuries, as some of the so-called heresies of the times asserted that God the Creator could not truly become one of his own creations and that therefore the "true God, true man" passage in the Nicene creed was false and the humanity of Jesus an illusion.<br />
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There is clearly no passage in the canonical books of <i>The Bible</i> describing anything remotely like this charming little domestic scene - but there are many such in several of the Gnostic and Apocryphal writings going back as far as the second century. And more to our concern here - one of the oldest Christmas carols extant in the English language climaxes with an incident very much like this. That carol is "The Bitter Withy," the significance of whose title will be clarified a bit later below. In the original carol, Jesus does receive a whipping from his mother for what I think most of us will agree was a pretty ugly little trick. But "The Bitter Withy" is as little-known in the U.S. as it is widely-known in the British Isles, and consequently I had never heard any version of it until an expurgated editing of the lyric ("bowdlerized" would probably be more accurate) was sung by the Kingston Trio on its wonderful and unique 1960 Christmas album, <i>The Last Month Of The Year</i>. Trio member Bob Shane and his friend Tom Drake - the pair who crafted the beautiful <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/shane-and-drakes-white-snows-of-winter.html">"White Snows Of Winter"</a> profiled last December - re-wrote the "Withy" song into a softer and less assaultive ballad that they titled "Mary Mild" from references in the lyrics:<br />
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This is a lovely arrangement with excellent harmonies and an appealing slight swing to the rhythm. It also highlights what the Trio members did best - the strong lead vocal by Shane, the beautiful and impassioned high harmony by Nick Reynolds, and the baritone vocal underpinning and tasteful banjo work by Dave Guard.<br />
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But it also highlighted what according to the group's critics they did worst - which was to take a real folk song that had been sung for literally hundreds of years and utterly ruin it by perverting the song away from its original intent. To understand the extent to which that accusation might be true, you would need to hear the original carol - and see the connection to the picture at the head of this post. Here with "The Bitter Withy" is a beloved Scots folk group that took its name from this very song - their 1981 version of the original melody and lyric:
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Just to make sure that we all heard that correctly - we have the same skipping little Jesus wanting to play at ball as in "Mary Mild." We also have the same disdainful rich boys ("born in a baron's hall," in some versions) and the bridge of sunbeams. But then the tragedy as divine little JC merrily prances over the bridge, enticing the other lads to follow. Without miraculous powers such as could create that bridge, though, our nasty little preppie One Percenters plunge to their deaths in the river or lake below. Their mothers complain, and in response Mary becomes anything but mild as she makes a switch from a willow branch (an alternate name for the tree being the "withy") and cracks the little Savior three times across the butt, presumably once for each of the little scamps whose lives he has just ended. In mortified response, Jesus curses the withy tree from which the branch "that causes me to smart" has come, commanding that henceforth it "shall be very first tree/To perish at the heart," or rot from within, as the common belief is that willows do.<br />
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Another more contemporary rendition might be in order before we get to the fascinating origins of this highly unusual song. Here is UK folk music royalty Maddy Prior with her arrangement from 2008**:
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Prior's performance here accentuates the medieval origins of the tune, and her upbeat tempo and little circular dance moves during the instrumentals remind us of a point I have made in my earlier Christmas pieces linked below - that the word "carol" derives from the Celtic term <i>coroli</i>, which meant a celebratory circle chain dance around a central object, like a Maypole, for instance. Prior is a knowledgeable folklorist as well, and her gleeful vocals evoke what we must assume was the delight that the peasantry of the middle ages would have taken in a story in which the contemptuous and self-assured upper class boys get their comeuppance at the hands of the humble, unrecognized divinity among them. Those brats chose the wrong kid to mess with.<br />
<br />
An equally authentic-sounding middle ages rendition comes from Kerfuffle, an English roots band that flourished in the first decade of this century and still gets together to play old music during the holidays:
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Many of the late medieval and early modern English folk songs were written in the dark and melancholy sound of a minor key, and Kerfuffle's arrangement here in just such a mode emphasizes the dark themes of the song.<br />
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None of the known apocryphal gospels - of which<i> The Gospel of Thomas</i>, <i>The Gospel of James</i>, and <i>The Gospel of Mary Magdalene</i> are the most prominent - contain this exact incident, though they are replete with some very un-Savior-like deeds and pronouncements by Jesus, accounting in part for their exclusion from the biblical canon. However, the very early <i>Infancy Gospel of Thomas</i> (from about 185 CE) and its 7th century descendant known as the <i>Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew</i> do contain incidents reminiscent of both "The Bitter Withy" and that other lovely and equally ancient tune, "The Cherry Tree Carol." <i>Pseudo-Matthew</i> presents Jesus as using divine power to strike down a rich boy who had pranked him:<br />
<br />
<i>"He was playing with some children at the bed of the Jordan. And as He sat there, Jesus made to Himself seven pools of clay, and to each of them He made passages, through which at His command He brought water from the torrent into the pool, and took it back again. Then one of those children, a son of the devil, moved with envy, shut the passages which supplied the pools with water, and overthrew what Jesus had built up. Then said Jesus to him: Woe unto thee, thou son of death, thou son of Satan! Dost thou destroy the works which I have wrought? And immediately he who had done this died. Then with great uproar the parents of the dead boy cried out against Mary and Joseph, saying to them: Your son has cursed our son, and he is dead..."</i><br />
<br />
Two other boys meet similar fates for even lesser infractions. Many of the basic elements of "The Bitter Withy" appear here: Jesus at play near the water, the miraculous creation of the "pools," the antagonism of an unpleasant boy, the striking down of said boy, and the complaints of the bereaved parents to Mary.<br />
<br />
Many scholars today believe that copies of the Apocrypha made their way to England in the high Middle Ages despite the fact that they were suppressed in continental Europe. In addition to the aforementioned two carols whose stories have antecedents in these books, other tantalizing clues pervade English Christianity. For instance, the non-biblical tradition that Joseph of Arimathea, he who in the gospel stories provided a tomb for the crucified Jesus, made his way to Britain in possession of the spear that pierced Christ's side and the communion wine cup from the Last Supper - the Christian version of the mythic Holy Grail - appears in both Saxon and Anglo-Norman tales and occupies a central position in the King Arthur stories. Vague references to such a journey appear in later versions of the Apocrypha, as does the legend that Jesus himself visited ancient Britannia during the "lost years" of his young adulthood, expressed most famously by the great 19th century engraver, artist and poet William Blake in his lyric "The New Jerusalem," which since 1916 has also been a well-known and beloved hymn in High Church Anglicanism:<br />
<br />
<i>And did those feet in ancient time.<br />
Walk upon England's mountains green:<br />
And was the holy Lamb of God,<br />
On England's pleasant pastures seen!</i><br />
<br />
So how, one wonders, did such a strange tale become associated with Christmas celebrations? Though the Jesus of the lyric is a child, the only Christmas-y reference is to the assertion that he "was but a poor maid's child/Born in an oxen stall" - and that is clearly intended as a derisive taunt by the soon-to-be-departed rich kids and not at all the powerfully sacred scene in Bethlehem envisioned in contemporary Christianity. The answer, I think, appears in Maddy Prior's choreography above. "The Bitter Withy" is a true carol, one that in its origins was intended for dance as well as for group singing. The real appeal of the words for the medieval English peasantry and yeomanry is the identification of the child Jesus as "one of us" - and not in the sophisticated theological sense noted above in the first paragraph of "true God, true man" but rather more in the "poor maid's child" sense, someone who like them was of the downtrodden and wretched of the earth, but who was endowed with powers that enabled him to deal out the kind of appropriate justice to the impious and arrogant masters of the land, something that the serfs themselves could never do except in their wildest dreams. Or, perhaps, in a Christmas dance and song.<br />
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<br />
**<b>Maddy Prior's Full Lyric</b><br />
<b> </b>
<br />
As I fell out on a bright holiday<br />
Small hail from the sky did fall<br />
Our Saviour asked his mother dear<br />
If he might go and play at ball<br />
<br />
"At ball? At ball? My own dear son?<br />
It's time that you were gone,<br />
And don't let me hear any mischief<br />
At night when you come home."<br />
<br />
So it's up the hill, and down the hill<br />
Our sweet young Saviour run,<br />
Until he met three rich young lords<br />
"Good morning" to each one.<br />
<br />
"Good morn", "good morn", "good morn"<br />
said they, "Good morning" then said He<br />
"And which one of you three rich young lords<br />
will play at the ball with me?"<br />
<br />
"Ah, we're all lords' and ladies' sons<br />
born in a bower and hall<br />
And you are nought but a poor maid's child<br />
Born in an ox's stall"<br />
<br />
"If I am nought but a poor maid's child<br />
born in a ox's stall<br />
I'll make you believe at your latter end<br />
I'm an angel above you all"<br />
<br />
So he made a bridge of beams of the sun<br />
And over the river ran he<br />
And after him ran these rich young lords<br />
And drowned they all three.<br />
<br />
Then it's up the hill, and it's down the hill<br />
Three rich young mothers run<br />
Crying "Mary Mild, fetch home her child<br />
For ours he's drowned each one."<br />
<br />
So Mary Mild fetched home her child<br />
And laid him across her knee<br />
And with a handful of withy twigs<br />
She gave him lashes three.<br />
<br />
"Ah bitter withy. Ah bitter withy<br />
that causes me to smart,<br />
And the withy shall be very first tree<br />
To perish at the heart."<br />
<br />
___________________________________________________________________
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*The first five songs in this series of holiday-related folk tunes included #1 <span style="font-size: 85%; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">- </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2008/12/for-season-we-wish-you-merry-christmas.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"We Wish You A Merry Christmas"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #2 - </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/12/for-season-2-all-through-nightar-hyd-y.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"All Through The Night/Ar Hyd Y Nos"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">; #3 - "</span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/12/for-season-3-when-was-jesus-bornthe.html" style="font-weight: bold;">When Was Jesus Born/The Last Month Of The Year</a>"; #4 - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/for-season-4-gloucestershire-wassail_23.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Gloucestershire Wassail Song"</span></a>, and #5 - <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/for-season-5-noel-nouveletsing-we-here.html"><b>"Sing We Here Noel</b>"</a>. Other Christmas-themed articles on CompVid101 include <b><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/12/shane-and-drakes-white-snows-of-winter.html">"The White Snows Of Winter"</a></b>, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/12/children-go-where-i-send-thee.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Children, Go Where I Send Thee"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/01/edric-connor-and-virgin-mary-had-baby.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"The Virgin Mary Had A Baby Boy"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/01/riu-riu-chiuguardo-del-lobo.html" style="font-weight: bold;">"Riu Riu Chiu/Guardo Del Lobo"</a><span style="font-weight: bold;">, </span>and<span style="font-weight: bold;"> </span><a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2011/09/go-tell-it-on-mountain.html"><span style="font-weight: bold;">"Go Tell It On The Mountain".</span></a>
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<br />
<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-9080257507837946402013-11-22T10:53:00.000-08:002019-12-01T08:10:47.129-08:00JFK 50 Years Later: Songs Of November 22, 1963<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/1/1f/John_F._Kennedy,_official_portrait.jpg/400px-John_F._Kennedy,_official_portrait.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://theinfosphere.org/images/thumb/1/1f/John_F._Kennedy,_official_portrait.jpg/400px-John_F._Kennedy,_official_portrait.jpg" height="400" width="266" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><i>"This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more
beautifully, more devotedly, than ever before. And with each note we will honor the spirit of John Kennedy, commemorate his courage, and
reaffirm his faith in the Triumph of the Mind."</i></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: normal;"><span style="font-size: normal;"><i>- Leonard Bernstein, November 25, 1963 </i></span><b> </b></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Friday, November 22, 1963</b></span> was the only day I missed during my freshman year of high school because I was in bed with a left ear severely infected from early-season practice for the school swimming team. I had been hospitalized briefly two years before for mastoiditis in the same ear, a potentially very serious ailment, so my parents insisted I stay home that day (really against my wishes since I was terrified of falling behind in algebra) and allow the antibiotics prescribed by Dr. McMahon after his house call the day before to take their effect.<br />
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Not long after 12:30pm in Chicago, my mother came into the room I shared with my older brother, her face ashen and serious. "Mrs. Schroeder just called," she said. "She heard on television that several shots had been fired at President Kennedy's car in Texas. They don't know if he was hurt or not. I know how important history is to you, and today may be a day that people will remember for a long time." With that, she helped me bundle up and go downstairs to the family room and turn on the television, the television that was absolutely never on during the day except on weekends for sports - which is why Mrs. Schroeder, a devotee of the classic soap opera<i></i><i> As The World Turns</i> (which began in the Midwest at 12:30) and a good friend and neighbor who knew of the blanket of electronic silence that enveloped the Moran home during the daylight hours, thought it important to call my mother with the news.<br />
<br />
My two youngest brothers, the only ones of the nine of us at the time (the tenth was gestating at that point) who were not in school yet, were already down for their afternoon naps, so my mother and I watched the events of the afternoon unfold as they happened, largely in undisturbed silence, broken only by my mother several times after the 1pm death announcement with "Those poor little children! Those poor, poor children!" in reference to Kennedy's daughter and son, both younger than seven and now fatherless. In the midst of the earliest hours of a developing national cataclysm, this was exactly the aspect of the event that for me was quite understandably what affected my mother most deeply.<br />
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But she knew also her many children well, and she was exactly right about my preoccupation with all things historical - at that point, primarily the day-to-day remembrances of the events of the American Civil War a hundred years earlier. The centennial of the delivery of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address had just passed on November 19th, and the memorials of that event were fittingly quiet and sober, in memory now almost a prelude to the darkness to come upon the nation so swiftly and so soon after.<br />
<br />
For me, history was never a dry compendium of names and dates. It was rather a set of vivid stories of people and events and conflicts, much more like a great and engrossing novel or an epic film than a subject fit only for school time boredom and resentment. I can trace much of my love of folk music to my love of history, or perhaps I could better explain them as twin children born of the same colorful childhood imagination. Robert Rogers of Rogers' Rangers, for example, was not for me merely a minor footnote in colonial history but was rather a giant figure of daring romance whom I had met in the 700 pages of Kenneth Roberts' wonderful <i>Northwest Passage</i>, still among my all-time favorite novels. Similarly, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/09/escape-of-old-john-webb.html">"The Escape Of Old John Webb"</a> was more than just a song that I enjoyed hearing and singing; it was an adventure of which I was a part, a tale in which it was I who was breaking locks and bolts to free old John, if only in fantasy.<br />
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Hence my mother's concern that since I was home, by chance or by an act of providence, I should be able to see what was happening on a day that indeed people have remembered for a long time. <br />
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I cannot say that I was thinking of songs or music during the dark weekend that followed the assassination - but others were. The producers and crew of the UK's satirical Saturday evening revue <i>That Was The Week That Was</i> hosted by David Frost, a show already familiar to many Americans from excerpts broadcast on U.S. network variety shows, quickly re-tooled the program to become a memorial to JFK. At the center of the shortened and somber broadcast was a song written that day by Herb Kretzmer and David Lee that they titled "The Summer Of His Years." It was sung on the show by regular cast member Millicent Martin. While no video of the actual show is currently available (even though it was broadcast on Sunday the 24th on American networks), Martin reprised her performance a month later on <i>TW3</i>'s year-end review. The song begins at about 2:05.<br />
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I remember being stunned by this performance. I could not conceive that a song so articulate, so appropriate, and so complete could be composed, arranged, rehearsed, and performed so quickly after the event.<br />
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Across the continent from me in California, Beach Boys Brian Wilson and Mike Love were working on songs for a new album on November 22nd. Years later, Love remembered that<br />
<br />
<i>"The Warmth of the Sun" was started in the early morning hours of the same morning that President Kennedy was killed in Dallas. The melody was so haunting, sad, melancholy, that the only thing that I could think of lyrically was the loss of love, when interest slips and feelings aren't reciprocated... though I wanted to have a silver lining on that cumulus nimbus cloud so I wrote the lyrics from the perspective of, 'Yes, things have changed and love is no longer there, but the memory of it lingers like the warmth of the sun.'</i><br />
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Love's commentary notwithstanding, I never saw much of a connection between the teen angst of "The Warmth of the Sun" and Kennedy's death - but others have, and the date and circumstances of its composition make it a necessary inclusion here.<br />
<br />
Also in California on the same Friday, the Kingston Trio was in San Francisco working on its own new album, an uncharacteristically sober group of songs for an LP to be titled <i>Time To Think.</i> The news of Kennedy's assassination struck Trio member and songwriter John Stewart especially hard, and on Friday evening he tried to come to terms with his emotions by writing "Song For A Friend." When the album was released a few months later, the liner notes reported that the song was recorded on November 25, 1963, the day of JFK's funeral.<br />
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Stewart would go on to a long and distinguished if under-appreciated career as a singer-songwriter, but here at the age of 24 he is clearly still a journeyman learning his craft."Song For A Friend" has utter sincerity and some fine if sentimental imagery going for it, but it is a far cry from the sophisticated imagistic lyrics that would characterize much of Stewart's later work, including more than a dozen songs that referenced the assassination in one way or another. Compare "Friend," for example, to the recently-profiled <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/06/rfk-poetry-of-memory-john-stewarts.html">"Dreamers On The Rise"</a> from the 1980s, which though growing more directly out of Robert Kennedy's death also makes at least oblique reference to JFK's - and is a far better song.<br />
<br />
In fact, all of these first three selections are probably of more interest as historical artifacts than they are as representations of great songwriting. I would not put either the Wilson/Love tune or Stewart's composition in the top 25 of the best songs of either of them.<br />
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"The Summer Of His Years" may be a bit of a different story, though as a topical song addressing a specific event it has probably outlived its ability to have the same kind of impact that it did at the point of its initial performance. Pop singer Connie Francis had a somewhat successful single with it in early 1964, but I thought that a far better recording was released by the Chad Mitchell Trio later that same year on its album <i>Reflecting</i>:<br />
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The CMT fused "Summer" with George F. Root's Civil War classic "The Battle Cry of Freedom," and if the former song does not rise to the same level of excellence that the latter does, the trio's medley works well as an expression of hope and the need to go on - and "Summer" bears up well while occupying the same track as "Battle Cry."<br />
<br />
Roger McGuinn, who had cut his teeth professionally backing up the Chad Mitchel Trio under his real name of Jim, also reacted quickly to Kennedy's murder. He took an old public domain song that had been popularized around Greenwich Village in the 1950s by Dave van Ronk and Erc Von Schmidt called "He Was A Friend Of Mine" and according to McGuinn "[re]wrote the song the night John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I suppose you could say it's one of the earliest Byrds songs. The arrangement used was as I'd always sung it." McGuinn's lyrics point directly to the assassination: <br />
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The formation of The Byrds was a year in McGuinn's future when he completed his adaptation; the band waxed it in November of 1965.<br />
<br />
That same month, singer-songwriter Phil Ochs, whose work is currently enjoying a long-overdue renascence, was touring England and wrote the first draft of what might be regarded as his <i>magnum opus</i>, "The Crucifixion." Where Ochs' previous best-known and best songs had been pointed, pithy, and often by turns uproariously satirical or prophetically angry, "The Crucifixion" is a long and sometimes rambling meditation that uses the Passion of the Christ as a metaphor for the contemporary propensity to sacrifice society's heroes. <br />
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While Ochs' larger point might have been philosophical, he also made clear that the parallels to Kennedy's death were intentional. "The Kennedy assassination," said Ochs, "in a way was destroying our best in some kind of ritual. People say they really love the reformer, they love the radical, but they want to see him killed. It's a certain part of the human psyche..." Robert F. Kennedy reportedly teared up when Ochs sang the song for him, sensing immediately the connection to his brother, whose death even a mere two years later had begun to assume the mantle of a martyrdom.<br />
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Probably the highest profile song to grow out of the assassination trauma appeared three years later in 1968. Again and like Stewart's "Dreamers" primarily a reaction to the murders that year of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Dick Holler's "Abraham, Martin, and John" continued the mythologization of the three title figures, and as recorded by former teen heartthrob Dion DiMucci reached #4 of American singles charts late in the year: <br />
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The commercial success of the recording resuscitated Dion's flagging career, and the overt and unapologetic sentimentality of the number seemed perfectly attuned to the needs of an American public that had grown understandably weary of the senseless and seemingly unending sequence of horrendous, violent shocks - the murders and riots and bitter, divisive civil strife - that assaulted the nation's consciousness through the decade and shook its self-perception to its very heart. It was far more comforting to picture four men who had died pointless, brutal, and bloody deaths "walking up over the hill" than it was to confront the awful truth that a republic of ideas had become, as it sometimes had at prior points in its history, a shooting gallery for the psychotic, the alienated, and the disaffected. Leonard Bernstein's "triumph of the mind" quoted above seemed a distant dream at best and mendacious and fraudulent lie at worst. Transgressions born in blood just could not be redeemed in song.<br />
<br />
Yet through the decades since 11/22/63, songwriters have kept on trying to do so - or at least to come to terms with what did or did not happen that day. A number of websites have attempted to develop comprehensive lists of tunes that have touched on that event, the most nearly complete of which seems to me at be at <a href="http://turnmeondeadman.com/jfk-assassination-songs/">TurnMeOnDeadMan.com</a> (the site's name being an allusion to the "death of Paul McCartney" flap around 1970). Scores of songs and versions of songs are listed here, including quite a few from punk and indie and alternative rock bands ranging from major artists to the deservedly anonymous. Some of the selections there and on other lists border on the silly. Paul Simon's "Sounds of Silence" may have been written in 1964, for example, but Simon is concerned with urban alienation, with how Walt Whitman's beautiful and vibrant 19th century "Mannahatta" - "The beautiful city, the city of hurried and sparkling waters! the city of spires and masts!" - could have degenerated into the lonely dark alleys and mean streets of his later "The Boxer" - and neither Kennedy nor his assassination had anything to do with that.<br />
<br />
That list also omits some of the songs and some of the renditions included here - not surprisingly, I would say. Most of the selections in this post emerged from the pop folk era, and the impact and importance of that style of music has been largely forgotten, however extensively its DNA remains in the American pop bloodstream. Could I add but one song to the list, I think it well might be this one - an obscure John Stewart number written around 1990 that expresses a sense of all that has been lost since that day in Dallas:<br />
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I am not sure that I have ever fully endorsed the sentiment of Stewart's last line, much as I have a visceral recognition of what he is trying to say. The world changed on that day, and something was lost that has never been fully recovered. To suggest as many have that our "innocence" perished in Dealey Plaza that day would be to ignore the reality of an American history filled with awful experiences as recent as the Second World War or as remote as slavery and the Civil War it spawned. We could hardly have been termed "innocent" in 1963, whatever else we were. And two generations of Americans - my students, many of them - have been born and come of age in the five decades since the assassination. Each has grown to maturity with its own sense of itself, of its country, of what the promise of America has meant to it. <br />
<br />
I have thought long and hard as this anniversary approached about what it meant to me and to my country, and I have no simple or easy answers. I was not, as my friend Mike Peterson observed in his excellent posts on 11/20 and 11/22 in his popular <a href="http://www.comicstripoftheday.com/">Comic Strip of the Day</a> website, personally traumatized by the assassination, though I remember being fearful and disoriented for some time afterward, and I wept unabashedly during the broadcast of the funeral on Monday the 25th - not at the rehearsed salute of JFK's son but rather at the sight of his two grief-stricken brothers standing in despairing silence at the eternal flame. Something was lost indeed - but what? Simplicity? Security? my own childhood? I cannot say in clear and uncertain terms.<br />
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But for me the answer may well exist somewhere in the pairing of these last two videos. In 1993 at a John Stewart show I picked up a CD called <i>The Trio Years</i> in which Stewart in the late 1980s had re-recorded some of the songs he had written when he was a member of the Kingston Trio 25 years earlier. One track hit me with overwhelming force, a song called "New Frontier" that had been the title song of a KT album released in early 1963 and that in its first incarnation had been the youthful Stewart's ebulliently optimistic response to the ebullient optimism of the early Kennedy years:<br />
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Twenty-five years later, Stewart heard his own song this way:<br />
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The forward-looking voice of the young man has evolved into the retrospective voice of the old, a progress from unquestioning idealism to, perhaps, a wisdom tempered by experience. The man who died in Dallas exactly fifty years ago as I write this - 12:30pm CST - left behind a promise unfulfilled, a promise touched upon to one degree or another in many of the songs here. The imperative to fulfill as much of one's own promise in that time allotted to us may be the one lonely, solitary meaning to take away from the otherwise pointless tragedy of a half century ago.<br />
<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-68998813237267093562013-11-18T01:03:00.000-08:002014-02-10T23:47:18.315-08:00Gordon Lightfoot: In Celebration Of His 75th Birthday<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><b>Gordon Lightfoot</b> is 75 today, and that is a happy fact for any number of reasons - the first of which, of course, is that he is still with us to celebrate the day after his well-documented close brush with the Great Beyond in 2002. Lightfoot's survival of a stomach aneurysm, his five weeks in a coma, and his subsequent direction from his hospital bed of the production and remixing of his last studio album (<i>Harmony</i>, released in 2004) are a testament to his toughness and grit, to say the very least. It is also a pleasure to see Lightfoot alive and kicking and in plenty good enough shape to accept all the awards and accolades and honors that have been heaped on him in recent years. This adulation has come now, perhaps, because as with several of his artist contemporaries (<a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/10/john-denvers-take-me-home-country-roads.html">John Denver</a> springs immediately to mind, as I note in the linked article), the pop music world in the U.S. had largely forgotten about Gord after his five minutes of fame (about five years, actually) in the 1970s, and Lightfoot's near-fatal illness may well have prompted people to dust off all those old tapes and LPs and realize what a treasure his career has been. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;">Denver never lived to see the popular and critical reconsideration of his work (again, discussed at more length in the article above), but Lightfoot has accepted it all with characteristic grace, with obvious enjoyment, and with a quiet understanding of what his music has meant to two generations of Canadians and Americans. Lightfoot touches on all of this during this brief interview segment from the CBC in 2008 as he turned 70. It is a pretty good short intro to the man and his music as well:</span><br />
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I had my own say on Lightfoot a year and a half ago in a post that celebrated both the 50 year mark of Gord's career and one of my own favorite Lightfoot numbers, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/05/gordon-lightfoots-bitter-green.html">"Bitter Green."</a> I do not want to repeat myself, so all I will say from that post at the moment is that of all the great folk-styled singer-songwriters of the Sixties and later - Paul Simon, John Denver, Joni Mitchell, John Stewart, Kate Wolf, Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, and so many more - Gordon Lightfoot remains my single favorite through the five decades since I first heard his music. Why that is so is easy to express. Even given the wide range of experiences, events, and ideas that his songs have dealt with, through all these years Lightfoot has remained faithful to his original vision, and that vision is closer to real folk music than that of probably any of his contemporaries except Paxton. The acoustic purity and deceptive simplicity of Lightfoot's recorded songs mark him to my way of thinking as a great artist, one who expresses the profound complexity of human experience within a genre whose dictates demand an accessibility and singability that would seem to obstruct such expression. Lightfoot accomplishes much while using rather little: a few acoustic instruments, usually, and his own voice, often unsupported by back-up singers or even double-tracked harmony. His entire body of work is concrete exemplification of the principle that less is often more.<br />
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It would be a fool's errand to try to assert what Gordon Lightfoot's best songs are, and God knows I would be hard pressed even to narrow my own favorites to twenty or twenty-five compositions. Yet of those, six or seven immediately suggested themselves to me to be appropriate for this article, mostly because these are some of the ones that I find myself returning to year after year and decade after decade to listen to, to reflect upon, and to play and sing for myself and my friends.<br />
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<b>"Early Morning Rain"</b>
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This, of course, was the composition that put Lightfoot on the map, largely as a result of its appearing on two high-profile LPs. Canadian stars and Lightfoot mentors Ian and Sylvia recorded the tune even before GL did and named their fourth album on Vanguard after it, and the song's appearance on Peter, Paul and Mary's <i>See What Tomorrow Brings</i> record gave it its widest audience, since that LP reached #11 on the <i>Billboard</i> album charts and earned a gold record for the trio. Yet both groups softened the number, giving it a tinge of melancholy but downplaying the anguished near-despair of the song as Lightfoot wrote it - and as he performs it here, from 1979:<br />
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<b>"Song For A Winter's Night"</b>
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As I mentioned in the "Bitter Green" post above, many of Lightfoot's most beloved songs are of love neglected or lost. This is one of the best of those.
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<b>"Affair On Eighth Avenue"</b>
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...speaking of which...
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The entire BBC concert from which this performance is taken is available on YouTube and will be linked at the end of this article.<br />
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<b>"The Minstrel Of The Dawn"</b>
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In which the troubadour sings of the life of the troubadour:
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<b>"10 Degrees And Getting Colder"</b>
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Combining the troubadour and lost-traveler-on-the-open-road-motifs:
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<b>"Did She Mention My Name?"</b>
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A rather more upbeat reflection on love and separation:
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<b>"Farewell To Nova Scotia"</b>
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Finally, a reminder that Lightfoot started out as a folksinger with a masterful way with a traditional tune like this:
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Lightfoot continues to tour, averaging about one show per week, mostly in Canada but with frequent forays south of the border. It is a schedule busy enough to keep him sharp and engaged as a performer, and if time has diminshed the voice somewhat, the spirit is as willing as ever. Lightfoot usually demurs in interviews when people ask him what he thinks his legacy will be, and I understand that. As in the first video above, he thinks of himself as a working and touring songwriter and musician - a troubadour, in other words - and that is where his focus lies. But I closed the "Bitter Green" post with my assessment of his legacy, and at the risk of becoming self-referential, I would like reiterate it here:
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<i>...in the last half century Gordon Lightfoot's music has embedded itself in Canada's cultural consciousness fully as much as has that of Ian Tyson or Joni Mitchell or Neil Young....Americans seem seldom to place GL on as lofty a pedestal as those others, possibly because of the very transparent emotion of his songs that make compositions like "Bitter Green" so beloved. But that transparent emotion is part of what has enabled Stephen Foster's songs to remain popular 150 years after their composition, and I'd bet that if you asked Lightfoot if he would rather be equated with Neil Young now or with Stephen Foster in a century or so, I think I know what he would say.</i>
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Four of the videos above are taken from an hour-long BBC concert special from 1972. It is a shortened version of the full show I saw that year during his "Summer Side of Life" tour. The DVD of that show is no longer available, but the entire television performance has been uploaded in HD to YouTube:<br />
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<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqS310cQ0CI">Lightfoot On The BBC: Full Show</a><br />
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It is well worth the time and concludes with a masterful rendition of "Canadian Railroad Trilogy," another gem.
Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-8008571331061074132013-10-21T01:46:00.002-07:002021-01-25T23:14:07.457-08:00Down By The Mission "San Miguel"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>One of the sidelights</b></span> of the American folk revival (from roughly 1930 through about 1970) was the creation of hundreds and then thousands of songs labeled "folk" by their composers or by the record companies or by the music press. At first, of course, ethnologists regarded the thought that a "new" song could be labeled as folk as absurd. The very definition of the genre at its inception as an academic phenomenon was that folk music consisted almost exclusively of traditional songs passed down orally through many generations - and consequently songs whose authorship was usually unknown. Exemptions to the rule were sometimes granted to songs of known authorship that had worked themselves into the folkways of the country, like those of Stephen Foster for instance, or songs whose authorship was discovered by dint of hard scholarly work by those same ethnologists and music historians. Less often, topical songs that provided some cultural insight into a particular period or event were also granted a pass and allowed to enter the sacred Temple of Folk - think of the songs from the Civil War era by George F. Root ("The Battle Cry of Freedom," "Just Before The Battle, Mother") or Daniel D. Emmett ("Dixie") or Patrick Gilmore ("When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again").<br />
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These prescriptions and definitions were turned topsy-turvy by the commercial aspects of the folk revival. When mass media in the form of radio and recordings became the primary formats through which music was disseminated (as opposed to previously when live performances and sheet music and family and local gatherings did the job), the public's insatiable appetite for the novel and new, and not coincidentally many performers' desires for more personal artistic expression than traditional music afforded, the term "folk" came to be appended to newer songs that would not have made the grade just a generation before. And when folk became a big-time commercial phenomenon in the late 1950s, after a few years of bitter debate about "authenticity" in the music press and among performers, the thought that a "folk song" necessarily had anything to do with "traditional" went the way of bobby socks, black and white television, and honor among politicians - gone, and scarcely ever seen again.<br />
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Today, no fully satisfying and comprehensive definition for what folk music is exists at all - beyond, of course, Big Bill Broonzy's oft-quoted quip that "All songs are folk songs - I never heard no horse sing." On the whole, this is probably a good thing, since we can recognize distinct elements of traditional folk like melody, form, and instrumentation in the compositions of skilled crafters like Pete Seeger, Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Billy Edd Wheeler, Bob Dylan, and many more. At the same time, though, another and perhaps lesser brand of song also emerged, derided by critics as "fake folk" or "faux folk" - tunes that sought to <i>imitate</i> traditional tunes rather than to evoke the spirit of the old in contemporary compositions. A song like Jimmy Driftwood's "The Battle of New Orleans" might serve as a good and representative example of these, or perhaps Hoyt Axton's "Greenback Dollar." Nothing wrong with these at all as pop songs written in folk style, but to call them "folk" per se still excites the dyspeptic ire of some critics, one of whom wrote a few years back that "The invention of the faux-childlike faux-folk song was one of the greatest forces in the infantilization of American culture." I'd recommend that the writer take a deep breath and then inhale a couple of belts of a good whiskey - if such a fate has befallen the good old U.S. of A., it wasn't folk music fake or otherwise that made it happen.<br />
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One writer/composer who enjoyed a degree of success at creating such songs was Texan Jane Bowers (1921-2000), for whom music publisher and watchdog BMI lists 35 copyrights still in force. In the latter stages of her composing career, from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s, she was identified primarily as a kind of in-house composer for the Kingston Trio, occasionally in collaboration with KT founding member <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/12/remembering-dave-guard.html">Dave Guard</a>, and the group recorded 10 of those 35 tunes. But a significant number of other folk and country artists like Johnny Cash, Donovan, Lonnie Donegan, Bob Dylan, and Guy Clark also recorded Bowers' tunes. In fact, Bowers' best-known and most enduring song, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2008/10/print-legend-remember-alamo.html">"Remember The Alamo"</a>, the one recorded by most of the aforementioned performers, was initially waxed in 1956 by country great Tex Ritter, three years before it appeared on the Kingston LP <i>At Large</i>.<br />
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Bowers wrote a wide range of folk- and country-inflected tunes, but her stock-in-trade was embodying re-imagined and mythologized history in the lyrics of her many of her songs and then creating a tune to match them, as was the case with "Alamo," which the linked article discusses. Bowers' take on early Southwest history, from California and Texas most particularly, was imaginative, to be charitable. In <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/03/si-me-quieres-escribircoast-of.html">"Coast of California"</a>, for example, a song beloved of many KT fans, Bowers fantasizes a pirate type of tale in which some buccaneers intend to boost a hidden treasure from a cave near Ensenada in Baja California. It is purported to be "treasure stolen from the Incas," hidden in the cave when the treasure ship <i>"Clara</i> ran aground." Bowers never explains why a treasure ship bound for Spain would have headed <b>north</b> to Baja from the Incas' native Peru when treasure ships originating there routinely sailed south and hazarded the Straits of Magellan around the tip of South America and thence into the Atlantic and home. And I had to laugh at the lyric<br />
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<i>There's a mountain in the ocean on the coast of California<br />
And deep within its side, the tides of night alone reveal<br />
El Diego's hidden cave</i><br />
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There are plenty of mountains in California both Upper and Lower, but none in the ocean unless you count the Channel Islands, a good 250 miles from Ensenada. Yes yes, I know it's just a song - but this is all pretty egregious.<br />
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Even with missteps like those, however, Bowers' best work retains both a special kind of lyricism and a well-crafted sense of drama - two qualities that are abundantly clear in her very interesting early Southwestern romantic tune, "San Miguel." The plot line at first seems simple enough. A household servant of a <i>rancho</i> near a Mission San Miguel (there are three: one in Santa Fe, one near San Antonio in Bowers' native Texas, and the most famous and possibly the site of this song, San Miguel Arcángel near present day Paso Robles, California) waits upon the mistress of the <i>casa grande</i>,
La Doña María, married to the <i>ranchero</i>. Our narrator named Manuel, however humble he may be, has fallen in love with the great lady. In his imagination, the mission bell warns him against harboring so impossible a dream, though he also imagines that<br />
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<i>I hear with my heart what she says with her eyes</i><br />
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- and the cryptic and pregnant final line of the lyric implies that Manuel may indeed have hope for the lady's reciprocation of his love.<br />
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From here, though, the plot thickens. Manuel is a laborer familiar with the mission, and this and the omission of a surname for him point to the likelihood that he is either a Native American or perhaps a <i>mestizo</i>. Bowers' lyric endows Manuel with a child-like simplicity, which in the early twentieth century of Bowers' childhood was considered to be a significant sign of the moral innocence of the natives (in stark contrast to the actual missionaries' sense that they were idolatrous devil worshipers) in a kind of Rousseauian "noble savage" ideal. But the very thought that a romantic attachment could be created or maintained across racial lines would have been charged with controversy both in the colonial era of the tale as well as in the decade of the song's composition. Bowers is treading here, however lightly, on dangerous ground. The mournful and melancholy tune, structured in a mostly minor key and with an authentic and accurate Spanish chord progression, underscores both Manuel's sadness and the secret and forbidden nature of his passion.<br />
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The first recording of "San Miguel" was as a vocal solo by the KT's Dave Guard on the group's third studio album, <i>Here We Go Again</i>:<br />
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The song is ideally suited to Guard's vocal style and his own sense of drama, and Bowers may well have had Guard in mind when she wrote the number, this despite a sometimes problematic relationship between the two over copyrights and arrangements.<br />
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The <i>Here We Go Again</i> album was a raging success, capturing a Grammy nomination in 1960 and entrenching itself as the #1 album on the <i>Billboard</i> charts for an impressive 9 weeks, which was behind only the Trio's <i>At Large</i> and the original Broadway cast album of <i>The Sound of Music</i> for the longest tenure in the top slot in 1959 and 1960. Not surprisingly, a goodly number of the songs on the record were covered by other artists, including "San Miguel." British skiffle legend Lonnie Donegan recorded "San Miguel" two years following in 1961:<br />
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Donegan is doing his dead level best here, but he has made some odd creative choices. His uptempo and heavily percussive arrangement takes most of the drama out of the lyric, replacing it with a kind of anguished teenaged angst. And while Lonnie is trying to invest his singing with what he feels is a Spanish flavor, he is making a huge linguistic mistake. The pronunciation of the letter r is of course markedly different in English and Spanish - in the latter, the tip of the tongue starts on the roof of the mouth and creates a kind of clipped roll to the sound. Donegan, however, is pronouncing most of his r sounds with a trill, which is used in Spanish only for the letter when doubled, as in <i>ahorro</i> - but never for an interior single letter, as here Donegan does in "María" and "Carlos" and a host of other words. And I cannot figure out why Donegan would say "Manuel" correctly (as "man-WELL") but fail so excruciatingly as he does by changing the pronunciation of "Miguel" from the correct "mee-GELL" to the awful "mee-GWELL." A sign of the times, I suppose - at least Lonnie is trying.<br />
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Nearly a decade later, popular French folk and ballad artist Hugues Aufray, who covered many American folk tunes (most famously "Santiano," a major hit for him, and an entire album of Bob Dylan songs) translated the number into his native tongue:<br />
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This was from late 1968. My French is a bit rusty, but Aufray's translation sounds fairly accurate to me. He also employs a guitar accompaniment strongly reminiscent of Dave Guard's.<br />
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In the 1970s, popular British-Kenyan balladeer Roger Whittaker gave the number his own distinctive treatment:<br />
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Whittaker has made another interesting creative choice here. Like Donegan, he has speeded up the tempo considerably from the original, but he has done so with an eye to creating a flamenco interpretation of the number, emphasized here by the lead guitar line.<br />
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Finally - a version performed by three friends of mine - George Grove, a member of the Kingston Trio now for 37 years, plus KT bassist Paul Gabrielson, with lead vocal by Alan Hollister:<br />
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The occasion of the performance was the annual KT Fantasy Camp in 2009. Alan creates exactly the right mood vocally, and his hand-strummed guitar accompaniment (something that I have seen him do countless times when we have played together) is perfect for the song. George is staying faithful to the original KT arrangement as he always does but at the same time embellishing it subtly and tastefully - as he also always does. George has a beautiful take on the song himself on one of his solo albums, but unfortunately it isn't on YouTube right now.<br />
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Jane Bowers was not trying to pass off "San Miguel" as anything other than what it was: a darkly atmospheric modern evocation of the Spanish colonial era, one which hints at issues which plagued their society and continue to some degree to plague our own. I doubt that she would ever have termed it a "folk song," given the span of her life and the era in which she wrote it. It isn't fake or faux anything, and I doubt that anyone got infantilized by listening to the number and loving it. Ironically, however, Bowers' respect for the authentic music of the era of the narrative, audible in the well-designed melody and in her good faith attempt to write lyrics that captured the ambiance of the time and place, render "San Miguel" rather closer to whatever "real" folk music is than most anything claiming the title that is released today.<br />
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<i>In the interests of full disclosure and historical accuracy: the picture above is an 1832 painting of Mission San Gabriel, which happens to be a ten minute walk from where I now sit and whose church remains to this day as depicted here. I just couldn't find a good enough illustration for the real San Miguel.</i><br />
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Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-45678609403573011492013-10-13T17:31:00.002-07:002022-10-12T14:10:20.160-07:00John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads"<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiok1iG6DPSAB-VL4HBYNuZtFPqwhjjJyOPGku9WjuzxVdVETqjQ9_s6mz63hadigO1jw2AG-t0dfyCbVI-LDS-doNveBb9sPpjtpidiNbwqk90NKdqLdMQcG33B-DZ3uyhl30WU-aeTZ1e6Y2XKVDCJVinemsCh9vfOpQpXftu_3nrO6vpN56ZYMv4/s3840/CR.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0; text-align: center; clear: left; float: left;"><img alt="" border="0" width="320" data-original-height="2160" data-original-width="3840" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiok1iG6DPSAB-VL4HBYNuZtFPqwhjjJyOPGku9WjuzxVdVETqjQ9_s6mz63hadigO1jw2AG-t0dfyCbVI-LDS-doNveBb9sPpjtpidiNbwqk90NKdqLdMQcG33B-DZ3uyhl30WU-aeTZ1e6Y2XKVDCJVinemsCh9vfOpQpXftu_3nrO6vpN56ZYMv4/s320/CR.jpg"/></a></div>The death</b></span> of John Denver sixteen years ago yesterday was a jolting moment for many people of my generation, a quiet reminder that all things must pass and that youth and life are fleeting and fragile. This was so both for those who loved JD for the soaring idealism and romanticism of his compositions and the ringing clarity of his voice, as well as for those who derided him as a shallow and sentimental poetaster who purveyed a uniquely awful brand of musical treacle. But love him or hate him, you could for all intents and purposes not ignore him for the two or three years of his peak popularity - roughly 1973 to 1976 - because he was absolutely everywhere in those days: consistently at the top of the album charts, making frequent forays into the <i>Billboard</i> Hot 100 Top Ten singles chart as well, including four #1 records, a frequent guest host on Johnny Carson's <i>Tonight Show</i>, host of his own series of highly-rated network television specials that stretched well into the 1980s, in a starring role in a major Hollywood film with legend George Burns, in addition to a few other dramatic roles, as primary host of the Grammys five times, in nature specials and guest spots on popular variety programs - you could scarcely turn on the radio or TV for a few years then without bumping into JD's earnest voice and toothy grin. By most measures, no single artist in the world sold more records during those three years than did John Denver, the mop-haired and granny-glassed self-proclaimed "country boy" from Roswell, New Mexico who became a poet laureate of the state of Colorado and co-composer of one of the most popular songs in West Virginia - and one of American pop culture's first true multi-media stars. <br />
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In the best music business tradition, Denver's handlers (with the perhaps naive cooperation of Denver himself) promoted him so ruthlessly and exploited his popularity so thoroughly that a kind of JD exhaustion set in perhaps rather earlier than it needed to; after 1976, he never had another album or single record hit the top twenty on the primary charts, and though his albums have continued to register in the catalog sales reports to this day, his brief stint at the top of everything gradually faded, leaving him with a much-reduced but extremely loyal fan base in the 1980s and 90s. Too bad, really, because Denver continued to write beautiful and moving songs during those years, and as his live performances attested (see his 1995 <i>Wildlife Concert </i>video), he was singing much better at the time of his death than he ever did when his name was a household word and he was an international celebrity.<br />
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There was another unintended consequence of Denver's brief time as a superstar. Popular media saturation helped turn a genuinely talented performer and songwriter into an object of satire and derision. He was mocked with regularity everywhere from the <i>Doonesbury</i> comic strip to <i>Saturday Night Live</i> to anywhere else that a comedian could don a wig, a flowered shirt, and a pair of wire-rimmed glasses. The very earnestness and unabashed sentimentality of his songs that had helped make him a cultural phenomenon was turned against him: he became a symbol of what some regarded as the post-hippie self-absorption of the early and mid-1970s. The fact the Denver consistently devoted a very large chunk of his very considerable fortune and huge amounts of time to advance the causes in which he believed - the environment, world peace, an end to world hunger among others - earned him no consideration from an increasingly cynical popular press in America. The ultimate indignity may well have been that Denver, who for more than a decade had been working with and donating to a number of foundations trying to end hunger, was not invited to sing on the "We Are The World" recording that was created to raise money to alleviate the effects of the devastating famine in Ethiopia and other parts of East Africa in the early 80s. Most of the four dozen or so singers who did participate had never had any involvement at all with that particular cause, and the "commitment" of many of them ended when they walked out of the studio. That was never what John Denver was about.<br />
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The final casualty of the overexposure and the multi-platform popularity was that they have obscured for a time just how fine a writer and performer Denver was. The overt emotion and euphoria over nature in many of his songs might not be to everyone's taste, but the craftsmanship of melodic structure, instrumental accompaniment, and poetry of lyric in dozens of his tunes are undeniable. Denver's most popular numbers did not share the introspective angst of the compositions of most of his singer-songwriter contemporaries, and in the wake of his death in a light plane crash on October 12, 1997, the obituaries tended to focus on his popularity rather than on his musicianship - or on the likelihood that a goodly number of his tunes like "Annie's Song" and "Follow Me" and "Rocky Mountain High" among many others will almost certainly outlive him by decades.<br />
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Chief among these may well be JD's first hit record, "Take Me Home, Country Roads," known almost equally as "West Virginia." The song came apparently out of nowhere to dominate the airwaves for weeks in the spring and summer of 1971, rising as high as #2 on the singles charts and selling a million units by autumn. Denver was listed as co-composer in the copyright: he had become friends with Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert (a duo known at the time as "Fat City"), the act that opened for him at The Cellar Door folk club in Washington, DC. Danoff and Nivert had written the first verse and part of the chorus of the song, and knowing that Denver had authored a #1 single (Peter, Paul and Mary's rendition of "Leaving On A Jet Plane"), as well as many of the songs on his first three LPs for RCA Records, they asked him to help them complete the number. Denver obliged, helping to write the second verse and composing by himself the distinctive and highly effective bridge to the last choruses. Appropriately then, our first version of the song is a performance on Australian television by Danoff, Nivert, and Denver:<br />
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No lip-syncing here, no auto-tune - two guitars and three voices only in live performance, an endangered species in pop music today. And in support of fans' contention that Denver's voice improved dramatically over the decades after his peak, here he is in the aforementioned <i>Wildlife Concert</i> in 1995, two years before his death:<br />
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Denver's voice had deepened, and there were darker shadings in it as well as better breath control and less of the occasional reediness of his early years.<br />
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JD's allusion to Olivia Newton-John's hit with the song in the Land Down Under makes her version the next logical choice:<br />
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Newton-John, of course, was another international phenom at the same time as Denver, and the two collaborated on a number of hit tunes. Her version here is rather more straight-up than many of her own popular songs, which often tended to be ornate and over-produced.<br />
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"Country Roads" has been covered hundreds of times, and the folk-ish simplicity of the melody lends itself to a wide range of interpretations - as Ray Charles demonstrates here:<br />
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Charles retains the slightly uptempo rhythm of the original while stamping it with his own inimitable blues styling.<br />
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The tune is quite naturally adaptable to country and bluegrass genres. Next, Grand Ole Opry legend Roy Acuff reminds us of what country music actually sounds like:<br />
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...and Nashville studio/sessions legend Charlie McCoy renders unto country the things that are country's in this outstanding instrumental version:<br />
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McCoy is playing harmonica, guitar, and bass here. Both Acuff's and McCoy's tracks leave me shaking my head and wondering what the hell has gone wrong in Nashville over the last few years - they're not producing music there any more that sounds anything like this or is remotely as good.<br />
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Next, classic bluegrass harmonies from the Osborne Brothers:<br />
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A reggae arrangement from Toots and the Maytals, here from 2011:<br />
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Also fairly recently, Holland's Hermes House Band had a huge international hit in 2001 in the UK and on the Continent with this rock/reggae/bossa nova arrangement:<br />
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Finally - I always like to include amateur performances in these posts when I can find worthy ones, and I think that this one by Wingrass, a group from Japan that covers American folk and country tunes, has much to recommend it:<br />
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The vocals are competent and the instrumentation good, but what I really like about this Wingrass version is that the band slowed the tune down and added the almost mournful fiddle line, bringing out the melancholy and wistfulness in the lyrics that even Denver himself seemed to overlook at times.<br />
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I am a little surprised at myself by how little of John Denver has actually appeared in the almost two hundred posts on this blog. Denver was if nothing else a gifted performer and showman, and a fine interpreter of the work of other writers as well, as his performance of <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/05/where-walker-runs-down-steve-gillettes.html">Steve Gilette's "Darcy Farrow"</a> so clearly indicates. I like quite a few of his songs, including many that were just tracks on his albums and never singles or hits, songs like "Eclipse" and "Rocky Mountain Suite" and "Whispering Jesse" and many more. That oversight is sure to be rectified in the coming months, even given my predilection for looking at traditional songs in these articles. And the pop world seems to have turned a corner in its evaluation of Denver's music. Independent record label Red House Records released what I thought was a first-rate tribute album called <i>Take Me Home</i> in 2000 that featured reinterpretations of JD songs by indie artists like Bonnie Prince Billy and The Red House Painters. This year, ATO Records put out an album called <i>The Music Is You</i> with major artists like Lucinda Williams, Dave Matthews, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Emmylou Harris contributing.<br />
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Even more - also this year, a group of opera stars headed by Denver collaborator (in 1983 with <i>Perhaps Love</i>) Placido Domingo released a very well-reviewed CD called <i>Great Voices Sing John Denver</i>. The disc was the brainchild of music business legend Milt Okun, producer and musical director for the likes of Denver, Domingo, Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, and The Chad Mitchell Trio. It was Okun who mentored Denver into big time show biz when JD replaced Chad Mitchell in that group, and Okun supervised many of Denver's solo albums as well. The classically-trained Okun loved Denver's compositions, and that is saying quite a bit in and of itself. I recall that a week or so after Denver's death, the <i>Los Angeles Times</i>' respected rock critic Robert Hilburn published a retrospective on JD that essentially damned the singer with faint praise, mustering no better compliment than "soothing" for Denver's music and highlighting many of the rough spots in Denver's personal life. In a remarkable, moving, and very well-written response published in the same paper, Milt Okun took polite but strong exception to Hilburn's remarks. "I will bet," wrote Okun, "that in 25 years the artists and groups whose work Hilburn now finds so compelling will either be forgotten or remembered only in the <i>Billboard</i> lists of big sellers, while Denver's songs will continue to be sung in schools, at concerts and around campfires and will have become part of the cultural bloodstream of America." Time has indeed seemed to have borne out Okun's prediction, but for me the highlight of the response was the way that Okun closed it, and it is a fitting closing for this post as well:<br />
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"John's songs deserve serious consideration, serious critiques. He really represents the best of what the American popular musical community has accomplished. I hope that in time and with the consideration of serious critics like Hilburn, John will be accepted in the company of great American creators such as Stephen Foster, Charles Ives, Scott Joplin, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein.<br />
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I knew John Denver. I know his music. He was no lightweight."<br />
<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-74472973334781599162013-08-30T17:28:00.000-07:002020-05-22T15:05:13.669-07:00"Railroad Bill"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<i><span style="font-size: large;"><b>One of the darker aspects</b></span> of American culture as it has evolved to this point has been our collective penchant to make folk heroes out of some really bad people, most notably high-profile criminals and sociopaths - Billy the Kid, John Wesley Harding, Wild Bill Hickock, Al Capone, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, and more.</i><br />
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It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to quote oneself at the beginning of a new article, and though I have never been found wanting in that admirable quality, I have a better reason than mere self-promotion for doing so. Over the 190 posts on this blog, a number of thematic connections have emerged from among the articles, exactly what you would expect in a folk song site because those patterns are embedded in the aggregate of this country's traditional music. There are probably ten or more posts each on spirituals, sea chanteys, calypsos - and maybe half a dozen or so on bad guys. The passage above opens my discussion in 2009 of <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/10/who-lives-by-sword-ballad-of-jesse.html">"The Ballad of Jesse James"</a>, and that post includes an extended reflection on Americans and our love of outlaws. There are also posts on <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/07/john-hardygetaway-john.html">"John Hardy"</a>, <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2008/07/some-thoughts-on-tom-dooley.html">"Tom Dooley"</a>, and several others.<br />
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"Railroad Bill" is a fine candidate to join our American folk song cavalcade of infamy. Though a dwindling number of scholars maintain that the tune's namesake is entirely fictitious, you'll never get a decent meal in south Alabama or northwest Florida if you say so out loud because of the actual documentary evidence (including the photo above of Bill and Constable Leonard McGowan, who shot him) that established his very real identity. After Mr. Bill robbed several trains and shot and killed two sheriffs in separate pursuits, warrants were issued for him under the name of Morris Slater, a convict who had run off from a work camp in Bluff Springs, Florida. Slater evaded capture for more than a year after the initial murders, often with an almost unbelievable ability to escape when surrounded, making him a kind of folk hero to the region's African-Americans, suffering at the time under the Jim Crow segregation laws. Slater was reputed to be a "hoodoo man," possessed of supernatural powers that allowed him to disappear at will and thus evade the minions of justice - until, that is, McGowan tracked Slater down and found him in Tidmore and Ward's General Store in Atmore, Alabama on March 7, 1896.<br />
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How Slater came to be dead in that store is still debated, with McGowan maintaining that there was a shootout but some black witnesses asserting that McGowan simply walked into the store, shot Slater in the chest as Slater was lunching on cheese and crackers, and then peppered Slater's prone body with a half dozen more bullets. For about a week following, Slater's body was carted around various towns in both Alabama and Florida, as an object lesson, no doubt. Admission to see the body was 25 cents, and if you came up with four bits you could even have your photograph taken with the moldering remains. When this charming road show found its way to Brewton, AL, a number of residents claimed that the man's real name had been Bill McCoy, native son of Brewton - and if true, that might well explain why Slater himself claimed the moniker of "Railroad Bill."<br />
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No one is quite sure when the song came into being, but it's a safe bet that it had been around for a couple of decades at least before its first publication and recording in the middle and late 1920s. "Railroad Bill" appears then and into the 1930s in songbooks by the Lomaxes (who believed him to be a myth), Carl Sandburg, and Dorothy Scarborough, among others. The tune exists in both black and white country blues traditions, and both black and white artists recorded the song from about 1925 and on. The musical Bill is always a good shot and a slippery character, but in some versions he is the murderous criminal of real life while in others he is a badly misunderstood black man, driven to violence by white persecution.<br />
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"Guitar Frank" Hovington provides us with the best straight acoustic blues version I could find on YouTube - I'm guessing that the earliest versions of the tune sounded a lot like this:<br />
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Hovington recorded this two years before his 1982 death, and you can hear in his version an immediate similarity in both the chord structure and the walking bass to Elizabeth Cotten's "Freight Train," with which "Bill" is often performed as a medley. And if it's really old-time acoustic blues that you like, it's hard to top this version by John Cephas on guitar and vocals and Phil Wiggins on harmonica:<br />
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Gotta love the way Cephas hammers out the accompaniment at the end, slowing like a train coming into a station, as Wiggins' harmonica transforms itself into a train whistle<br />
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Cephas was an exponent of the so-called Piedmont blues style of guitar - as was Frank Hutchison decades before. Hutchison was a white coal miner from West Virginia, and this 1929 recording is one of the earliest waxed of the tune:<br />
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Now for a couple of more contemporary takes on the song. First, the irrepressible skiffle pioneer Lonnie Donegan brings his signature style to "Bill":<br />
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This was recoded at a performance in Belfast in 1998, and that is of course Donegan disciple Van Morrison on high harmony and the second verse. <br />
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<a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/12/remembering-dave-guard.html">Dave Guard</a> left the Kingston Trio in 1961 at the height of its phenomenal popularity in a bitter dispute with his bandmates over both finances and the group's musical direction. Almost immediately, he formed Dave Guard & The Whiskeyhill Singers with Cyrus Faryar, a Punahou schoolmate from Hawaii, KT bassist and jazz musician <i>par excellence</i> David "Buck" Wheat, and emerging folk star Judy Henske. Guard maintained in an interview in the mid-1980s that he was compelled to do so by contractual obligations with Capitol Records, who insisted that he owed them another record album, Trio member or not. The Whiskeyhill Singers made a valiant effort to create the kind of sound and repertoire that Guard felt that the Trio had moved away from, but by the 80s he had come to regard the effort as a failure, artistically as well as commercially. The group recorded but one released album and several tracks for another, and the whole experiment lasted a mere six months, leaving Guard with $10,000 of debt and a one-way ticket to Australia for himself and his growing family. The group did play a set at a major event at the Hollywood Bowl before disbanding, and Guard chose "Railroad Bill" as the opener:<br />
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Henske had left the group before this show, and Liz Seneff is the female voice here. Many of Guard's fans have always felt that he was being unduly harsh on the quality of what the WHS had created, and that had the group had more time to jell, it might have become something special. Their version of the song suggests that such might well have been the case - it has the signature energy, inventive banjo instrumentation, and creative harmonies of the earliest Kingston Trio recordings.<br />
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Finally, contemporary roots star Gillian Welch and her longtime collaborator David Rawlings have re-imagined "Railroad Bill" into something very different - beautiful harmonizing here:<br />
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Welch and Rawlings turn Bill into a sympathetic character, and the slower rhythm is reminiscent of some early versions of "Jesse James," the modified pace of both creating a mournful aura unusual for the tunes.<br />
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Following the "get your picture taken with a corpse" travesty after Bill's death, the body was finally interred in an unmarked grave, location unknown. But folk hero or simple murderer, Raillroad Bill aka Morris Slater aka Bill McCoy has no need of a tombstone. His immortality is guaranteed by the fact that people have been singing his song for nearly a century, and there is no sign that that will change any time soon.<br />
<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-60198111043421609262013-08-28T15:04:00.001-07:002021-06-05T10:53:27.841-07:00All Over This Land - "If I Had A Hammer" & The March On Washington<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnwp9Q84XpWibAiuZRILPmIBPmTadpePRm2gQ5FaIepU2paD3to7YaDyz6GzJa6K9aZYoZeHwDdx5uQzijGrVvw-uNoFWXkVBCRxrCkV1MMzng353IJvWi-nSoantLIHX_P0UBxqjK2tc/s1600/PPMwash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjnwp9Q84XpWibAiuZRILPmIBPmTadpePRm2gQ5FaIepU2paD3to7YaDyz6GzJa6K9aZYoZeHwDdx5uQzijGrVvw-uNoFWXkVBCRxrCkV1MMzng353IJvWi-nSoantLIHX_P0UBxqjK2tc/s400/PPMwash.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>One of the elements </b></span>of the August 28, 1963 March On Washington that is getting a fair amount of attention today on the 50th anniversary of this transformational moment in American history is the fact that music - folk music, in fact - was at the very center of the event and after Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech (which has a definite folk music connection, as we shall see) provided the most electrifying moments of the program that day. Publications like <i>The Los Angeles Times</i>, <i>The New Yorker</i>, <i>USA Today</i>, and many more have all run thoughtful pieces on the music and the performers, though with degrees of accuracy that seem to me to vary in direct and inverse proportion to the ages of the writers. Younger critics seem to focus on Bob Dylan's presence on stage there, though anyone who watched the event unfold as it happened will tell you that the skinny kid with the scratchy voice was a "complete unknown" that day, dramatically overshadowed by musical giants both young like folk superstars Joan Baez and Peter, Paul and Mary and old like Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson.<br />
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It was gospel singing all-time great Jackson, in fact, who prompted the most memorable event of the day - and one of the greatest moments in U.S. history. Jackson had sung the metaphorical spiritual "How I Got Over" at King's specific request, and she was still on the dais when King began his speech, which while rich and thoughtful was not moving the crowd in the way the King was accustomed to do. According to Harry Belafonte, also on the platform and the man responsible for the musical line-up that day, when King paused briefly after speaking for about ten minutes, Jackson, perhaps sensing that the moment called for more than King was at that point delivering, called out, "Tell them about the dream, Martin!" In response, King abandoned the rest of his notes and extemporized the only part of his remarks that today anyone remembers, the sermon-like section that begins with "I have a dream today" and concludes with "Free at last, free at least - thank God Almighty I'm free at last!"<br />
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Belafonte had selected and scheduled the performers with great care. In defiance of strong sentiment on the part of some organizers that only African-American musicians should be included, Belafonte insisted on featuring white artists as well. And it was Belafonte who pushed hard for having Dylan as part of the program because Harry B. recognized the power of the Minnesotan's lyrics, even though Robert was yet to attain any fame at all as a performer. The climax was to be and proved to be Joan Baez, only 22 at the time and still possessed of that perfect, clear soprano, leading the other performers and the crowd of a quarter of a million in singing "We Shall Overcome."<br />
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That performance was probably co-equal with Jackson's hymn as the musical highlight of the day - but a close second was Peter, Paul and Mary's stirring rendition of the Pete Seeger/Lee Hays "If I Had A Hammer." The song was never specifically a civil rights anthem and started its life as something quite different - but the relevance of its call for justice and love "all over this land" made it a perfectly apt selection, one that inspired a large part of the crowd to sing and clap along. It also allowed the trio to move smoothly into the quieter, more reflective "Blowin' In The Wind," which unbelievably that week was #4 on The <i>Billboard Hot 100</i> singles chart and had been at #2 the week before.<br />
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"The Hammer Song," as Seeger and Hays had originally titled it, was one of the tunes that grew out of the pair's membership in The Almanac Singers, that early 1940s aggregation of political radicals (including Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston at times, as well as Bess Lomax Hawes of "MTA" fame) whose sole purpose was to sing at union and socialist rallies. The group had dissolved spontaneously after Seeger and Guthrie joined the armed forces during World War II, and when Hays and Seeger reconnected in 1949 to form The Weavers with Hays' friends Ronnie Gilbert and Fred Hellerman, a very different kind of group was born.<br />
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The Weavers were the first pop folk act in U.S. musical history, or at least the first such troupe whose music transcended regional repertoires and became truly national and international in its scope. The Weavers were originally not at all political in the sense that the Almanacs had been. Their concert set lists for the most part included traditional American folk songs with a healthy dose of world music featured as well. It was not as if Seeger and Hays had abandoned politics at all; rather, the Weavers' family-friendly approach reflected Seeger's articulated belief that people would act together if they could sing together, and there were far more subtle political undertones in the Weavers' shows than had been the case in Almanacs' concerts. Seeger and Hays and the group sang of universal brotherhood and the glories of freedom and the power of working cooperatively - themes that implied but usually did not specifically promote the political agenda of the Almanacs or the unions or the socialists. In fact, when the Red Scare headsman's axe fell and the group was blacklisted in 1952, it was not for what The Weavers had been doing, popular concert and television and radio act that they were; it was for what the Almanacs had done and for Seeger's and Hays' associations with the Communist Party, USA.<br />
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While Seeger was likely never a formal party member and Hays was only briefly (he had as strong an anti-authoritarian streak as did Guthrie, another figure who just could not abide the stratified and hierarchical structure of the Communist Party), the first public performance of "The Hammer Song" was by Seeger and Hays in 1949, shortly after the song was composed. The event - a rally for the upper echelon of leadership of the Party, who were on trial in federal court at the time for sedition. Critics went so far as to suggest that the hammer of the title was a reference to the hammer and sickle on the Soviet flag - but there is neither a bell nor a song on the flag, and that supposition was patently ridiculous. Seeger was and remains a walking encyclopedia of American folk music, and he derived the hammer reference from an old spiritual called "Hammering Judgment," an antiphonal call-out spiritual in which the lead voice would intone a line like "God's a-talking to Moses" and the group voices would shout out "Hammering!" The song climaxes with "Tell ol' Pharaoh to loose my people" with the "Hammering!" response again.<br />
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The song was lyrically strong enough but at the same time generic and safe enough for The Weavers to record and release it, and the first version went like this:<br />
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This version - its rhythm, its pace, its harmony - is the one that all these decades later remains most beloved of a number of my older friends to this day, people who learned the song before Peter, Paul and Mary re-imagined it.<br />
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Seeger had known Mary Travers since her teenage years - she was a Greenwich Village child whose parents had worked with Seeger in a number of political causes - and it was she who brought the song into her own group's repertoire. Seeger related genially in a video now gone from YouTube that he thought that PP&M's version, which was considerably faster and more spirited than the original, actually improved the song:<br />
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One of Travers' improvements was changing the second-to-last line of the chorus from the original "all of my brothers" to "my brothers and my sisters," a decision whose inclusiveness was more in keeping with the spirit of the song anyway. The performance above, which I think is the best of several PP&M live videos of the tune, came on July 30, 1963 at the Newport Folk Festival, a mere four weeks before this performance on the national mall during the March:<br />
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Those two moments - Newport and Washington - firmly planted "The Hammer Song" both in the nation's consciousness and in the folk and pop songbag of the U.S. for decades afterward. Cover versions are too numerous to list, but there are a couple that I believe merit special attention. The first is by major early 1960s pop star Trini López:<br />
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López was one of the true crossover pioneers. Hard as it may be to imagine today, pop music in the country in the 50s was almost as fully segregated as public transport, and except for the brief flicker of popularity enjoyed by Ritchie Valens (Richard Valenzuela, actually) before his death at 17, mainstream American awareness of Latino music was confined largely to the output of a relatively small number of big bands. López began to change that; his "Hammer" here is unselfconsciously infused with every bit of Latin soul that he can muster, and though it creates an unusually cheery feeling for the song, it was a major national hit, reaching #3 on Billboard's singles chart, also in '63. <br />
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Finally - "The Hammer Song" has legs, as the Broadway wags often say, and it is still popping up as an expression of both challenge and of hope. Just this past June, original Beach Boy and folk fan Al Jardine lent his name and prestige to a group called Agit8, which has been recording and promoting protest songs as a means to fight "extreme poverty" and a host of other social ills. Jardine's choice of a tune to record? "The Hammer Song," here with Richard Barone and others:<br />
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I like the gusto and enthusiasm of this video - as if "Hammer" were a newly-composed anthem intended to address the issues of our times, rather than a nearly 65-year-old artifact from another century targeting other, earlier, even forgotten conflicts and issues. <br />
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I am not at all sure what future, if any, that folk and protest music have in the America of today. I see the grainy videos above with very different eyes than most all of the half of the U.S. population born after 1970 would see them. The 50 years that have elapsed between that day in August 1963 and this moment as I write seem to have evanesced like a dream, and when I hear the song and see videos of the King speech, the emotions of the moment come back to me with a powerful immediacy that belies the passage of time and reminds me of the utter truth of William Faulkner's observation that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." And a finely-crafted, intelligent, and uplifting song like "If I Had A Hammer," perpetually relevant as it is, has a lot to do with why that is so for me.<br />
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<b>Addendum - Same Day, A Few Hours Later</b> <br />
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The Newport Folk Festival video of Peter, Paul and Mary performing the song was lifted from Murray Lerner's film <i>Festival</i>, which chronicled some of the performances from Newport from 1963 to 1967. An incomplete version of that performance was also included in a documentary on Pete Seeger, during which Seeger talks at greater length about how the song came to be. In the snippet below from that documentary, Seeger credits PP&M with improving his tune:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9UEMx2fVp92w5l13ZKP82UJjgrqaYgJdjvkBYDvF3dxnXoMWywYk2FKGfqTPHoCoBC9pcs-0x7qKvNpnK2kMMQkgXR_rIOGxZJ-KmTuoT4e3dQSfvgVuNxXRkjoEGVGaMhYk93x5VW1k/s1600/smallvandykeparks_img10_hires.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh9UEMx2fVp92w5l13ZKP82UJjgrqaYgJdjvkBYDvF3dxnXoMWywYk2FKGfqTPHoCoBC9pcs-0x7qKvNpnK2kMMQkgXR_rIOGxZJ-KmTuoT4e3dQSfvgVuNxXRkjoEGVGaMhYk93x5VW1k/s400/smallvandykeparks_img10_hires.jpg" width="440" /></a></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Billy Edd Wheeler</b></span> has had a wonderful career that has taken him from the hardscrabble hills of the West Virginia of his birth in 1932 to the rarefied academic air of the Ivy League to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Along the way, Wheeler has written songs that have topped a number of different music industry charts, twelve plays that are still performed across the country today, and several well-regarded books of poetry and humor. In his latter years ("the back nine of life," as he refers to it), Wheeler has turned to painting, with perhaps surprising success given his late start in the field. As his <i>River of Earth</i> (<span style="font-size: small;">above</span>) <span style="font-size: normal;">shows, his style is reminiscent of what you'd get if Vincent Van Gogh and Thomas Hart Benton were cloned into a single artist, and if you peruse the collection of images of his work on his own website <a href="http://www.billyeddwheeler.com/paintings2.htm">HERE</a>, you'll see a variety of other influences as well. Wheeler is a man of many parts. He has written great songs like <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2010/05/1964-billy-edd-wheeler-and-coal-tattoo.html">"Coal Tattoo"</a> out of the difficulties of his own upbringing and at other times collaborated to create hits with some of the great pop songwriters of the last century - and those songs have earned him gold records through the performances of the likes of Elvis Presley, Neil Young, Judy Collins, Johnny Cash, Kathy Mattea, and many more, with more than 57 million recordings sold worldwide of tunes that he composed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;">By his own account, Wheeler was in graduate school at Yale studying playwriting when the idea came to him for what is undoubtedly his highest profile tune, "Jackson":</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;">" <i>'Jackson' came to me when I read the script for Edward Albee's <b>Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?</b> (I was too broke to see the play on Broadway)...The way that couple dig at each other becomes mean spirited and nasty, even tragic, in Albee’s play. But it’s natural for couples, married or not, to spar good-naturedly. Otherwise, life would be boring. In “Jackson,” the couple fusses back and forth, but there are subtle touches that let you know they are still in love.</i>"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;">I wonder if anyone else sees a bit of an anomaly here - that one of the biggest country-styled hits of the 1960s, a number still widely performed today, had its genesis in an Ivy League grad student's apartment in Connecticut and drew its theme from one of the great, dark classics of American literary theater. That fact is, I think, a testament of sorts to an unusual kind of genius, perhaps not surprising from an artist like Wheeler who could pen everything from goofball novelty tunes like "Humperdink, the Coon-Hunting Monkey" to achingly romantic torch songs like "The Coming of the Roads." That's some kind of genius indeed.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;">Wheeler's original concept for "Jackson" was to tell the story as a sequential narrative, but that idea was squelched by Wheeler's friend, associate, and sometime writing partner Jerry Leiber of Leiber and Stoller fame (who also helped Wheeler with <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2009/10/lonesome-valleythe-reverend-mr-black.html">"The Rev. Mr. Black,"</a> among other songs). As Wheeler relates:</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><i>"When I played it for Jerry , he said 'Your first verses suck,' or words to that effect. 'Throw them away and start the song with your last verse, "We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout."' When I protested to Jerry that I couldn't start the song with the climax, he said, 'Oh, yes you can.' So I rewrote the song and thanks to Jerry's editing and help, it worked.</i></span><span style="font-size: normal;"><i>"</i></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;">Wheeler recorded the tune for his third LP, 1963's <i>A New Bag of Songs</i>. However, before the record was released, Wheeler sent the song west to the Kingston Trio, who had just scored a huge hit early in the year with "Mr. Black," and that group became the first to release the number in July of that year:</span><br />
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From the first, Wheeler had intended "Jackson" to be a male/female duet, and that quite naturally created a problem for the Trio. The group had bent genders a couple of times before, notably by turning the girl narrating her own story in Ian Tyson's <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2008/11/that-damned-old-rodeo-ian-tysons.html">"Someday Soon"</a> into the young man of the lyric, but "Jackson" presented a different problem entirely. The solution was to create an antiphony between the young man's part (sung by John Stewart) and an adult authority figure, possibly the father, sung in the harmony responses by Nick Reynolds and Bob Shane. It works OK until the end of the last verse - you have to wonder what dad is doing behind a "japan fan."<br />
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"Jackson" remained in the vaults for about four years following the KT version, until Johnny Cash came upon Wheeler's <i>Bag of Songs</i> in 1966 and decided to record the tune with his soon-to-be wife June Carter: <br />
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The song, of course, became one of the biggest hits of Cash's long career and one of the three or four most identifiable duets performed by the Carter-Cash act. Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood were working on their own rendition when the Johnny and June collaboration came out, and Sinatra/Hazelwood were beaten to the punch by a matter of months:<br />
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Sinatra and Hazelwood are rather more laid back in their presentation than Carter and Cash, and that brings up an interesting point. One of the reasons that I prefer to look at traditional songs in these posts as opposed to songwriter tunes like this one is that trad tunes tend to have more variations in arrangements and performances. However, even a copyrighted number like "Jackson" can engender a pretty fair number of different approaches to it, as these first three videos demonstrate. Wheeler addressed that when discussing a lyric change from his original in the Carter-Cash version: "Songs often get changed as different artists do them, often for the better. I don’t mind minor changes. I like it when artists make the song their own."<br />
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Cases in point now follow. Jerry Lee Lewis and Linda Gail Lewis give "Jackson" that old time rock 'n' roll feeling in their 1969 release, complete with Jerry Lee's boogie-tinged piano accompaniment:<br />
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In the late 70s, an aging Carl Perkins teamed with Johnny Cash's daughter Roseanne at the beginning of her career for their duet on the song. Perkins, of course, was one of the pioneers of the rockabilly style that helped propel both Cash senior and Elvis Presley to fame and fortune, so it's rockabilly we get in this rendition:<br />
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Finally, the Carolina Chocolate Drops are one of the best contemporary folk and roots groups, rather more accomplished instrumentally and vocally than many of their higher-profile competitors. The clawhammer banjo and mountain fiddle in their version here makes an interesting match-up with the blues-inflected vocals - a stunning performance, in my judgment:<br />
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Billy Edd Wheeler seems to be enjoying the slower pace of his ninth decade with his painting and poetry, but this highly successful and widely honored star of the Nashville songwriting firmament has had some choice words of late for the current state of country music. Wheeler has said that he always liked story songs, songs that often took a while to unfold. But in an interview a year ago with NPR's Laurin Penland, Wheeler said that he's been shut out completely of today's country music world. "It's natural that not many of those young writers in their late teens, early 20s, even in their 30s — they don't want to write songs with a 79-year-old man. They don't even want to hear an idea. So it's tough. A good story and a well-sung song is not enough anymore. You've got to really honk it up. I mean, it's rock 'n' roll. If you can't rock, just stay in bed..." Given the third-rate drivel that is most of what Nashville is releasing today, we can all be thankful that Billy Edd Wheeler showed up there a half a century ago to write the kinds of songs like "Jackson" that once upon a time made country music - well, country music.<br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;"><br /></span>Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-24817991103070713662013-08-17T02:23:00.000-07:002014-03-17T22:42:51.364-07:00A Whimsical Woody Waltz: Guthrie &"Those Brown Eyes"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilaY7wyBM8PrgOqEPY8n0zOIDiHprehYLZJZ_z10WZR8y1s59uk-hrGDDVCzZ1WxslKu8DbKVYQE-cym_CqzYqe1-YNNnnu6qsqo7qGuPl-VvhUJ4EcA2SnQrP_UuoU7ezL6eER2UJb7U/s1600/Woody_Guthrie.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilaY7wyBM8PrgOqEPY8n0zOIDiHprehYLZJZ_z10WZR8y1s59uk-hrGDDVCzZ1WxslKu8DbKVYQE-cym_CqzYqe1-YNNnnu6qsqo7qGuPl-VvhUJ4EcA2SnQrP_UuoU7ezL6eER2UJb7U/s400/Woody_Guthrie.jpg" /></a></div>
"<i><b>Woody saw</b> the ravages of the Dust Bowl and the Depression firsthand...and he wrote tough yet lyrical stories about the men and women who struggled to survive, enduring the indignity of living life at the bone, with nothing to eat and no place to sleep. He traveled from town to town, hitchhiking and stealing rides in railroad boxcars, singing his songs for spare change or a ham sandwich...his eye was clear, unclouded, and unobstructed by sentimentality</i>."<br />
- Bill Moyers<br />
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Moyers is writing here primarily about "This Land Is Your Land," and he does a fine job in a few sentences of summarizing what public memory celebrates about <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2012/07/we-are-all-woodys-children-guthrie-at.html">Woody Guthrie</a> - the populism, the passion, and the politics, for the most part. Yet I would take minor exception to his final sentence, since Guthrie was indeed possessed of a strong sentimental streak, especially for children, and if that sentimentality never quite clouded his vision, it did remain a significant element in much of his songwriting. Throughout his career but especially toward its premature end, as his own brood of youngsters was expanding and growing, he wrote more and more children's songs. In fact, 25 years after Woody's 1967 death, a librarian at Sarah Lawrence College discovered a manuscript of such tunes written in Guthrie's hand, some of which were annotated as co-composed by his wife Marjorie. Guthrie sons Arlo and Joady and daughter Nora reconstructed the melodies both from memory and from some surviving tapes and with their own children recorded and released <i>20 Grow Big Songs</i> in 1992. All told, Guthrie wrote several score children's songs that we know of, most of which have the virtue, according to <i>Allmusic</i>'s Bob Hinkle, of "an unusually strong identification with actually being a child, in all
its simplicity and charm..." I would guess that most folk and roots music fans have at least heard this one:<br />
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This is the perfectly charming Woody Guthrie, the memory of which has been largely obscured by his more familiar image as a firebrand and activist as articulated by Moyers above.<br />
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Another facet of Guthrie's writing and performing that is less remembered today than it should be was his romantic side, both in his selection of traditional and popular songs to record, like "Red River Valley" and "Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot?," and in songs that he wrote or significantly re-arranged, like "Those Brown Eyes." This last one is one of those really delightful folk mysteries as to its origin. The version usually sung today has a copyright assigned to "Guthrie/Arkin/Carey/Darling," the last three of course being The Tarriers, who re-arranged Woody's version slightly when they recorded it in the late 1950s. Guthrie added a bit more instrumentation than he normally employed in this mid 1940s recording - <br />
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- and The Tarriers followed his general outline for their rendition a decade or so later:<br />
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Interestingly, the Guthrie recording cuts the story off at the point where the singer sees the beloved with another man, whereas The Tarriers include the older version - that the fellow was her brother and not a rival for her romantic affections.<br />
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Jim and Jesse McReynolds also gave the song a respectful reading in the best tradition of classic American country music:.<br />
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Guthrie's copyright tends to underscore the general supposition that WG wrote "Those Brown Eyes," especially since Guthrie was usually direct and upfront about songs that he thought were traditional when he recorded them. Yet an earlier version of the number, nearly identical in the lyric though somewhat different in the melody, had been recorded as "Those Dark Eyes" in 1929 by Jack Copeland Mathis, who released records at different times under the names of Blind Jack, Jack Mathis and Cowboy Jack. According to his daughter, Mathis was born in Kentucky but spent most of his life in Texas, recording, performing, and hosting a popular radio show. However, the year before Mathis's record, a certain Fay and the JayWalkers waxed yet another version of "Those Dark Eyes," again with the same basic story and lyrics but again with a different tune. Fay and the JayWalkers may have a copyright as well - evidence of it seems lost - but it appears as if even they were basing the number on a now-forgotten nineteenth century pop song.<br />
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What lends additional weight to that last possibility are several aspects of "Those Brown (or Dark) Eyes" that do not conform to the normal and expected parameters of most traditional American folk tunes. First, the song is written in a 3/4 waltz-like tempo, which while not at all unheard of in the country's folk catalog ("I Never Will Marry," "Streets Of Laredo," and the "Pretty Little Foot" mentioned above, to name three) is far, far less common than straightforward 4/4 time signatures. Further, the mistaken identity/lost love nature of the lyric sounds rather more like a cheesy 1800s melodrama or a Victorian morality tale than it does an Anglo-American or Scotch-Irish traditional ballad.<br />
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In any case, the song's popularity has persisted for decades, interestingly most especially in Ireland, where half a dozen major singing stars have recorded versions of the song, notably Johnny McEvoy, and rather more melodramatically here bySean O'Farrell:<br />
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The Kingston Trio picked up the song from The Tarriers, whose copyright they acknowledged in their 1963 rendition on the album <i>Sunny Side</i>:<br />
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This version is noteworthy only for the dependably excellent lead vocal by Bob Shane and the addition to the instrumentation of a fine supporting guitar line by session musician John Staubard.<br />
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For something with a more interestingly contemporary take on the tune, California's great Dave Alvin goes back to the 1929 Mathis lyrics, which echo an 1865 "Those Dark Eyes" published version attributed only to "Armand." Mathis seems to borrow some of the colorful descriptions of the first two verses from that one, and Alvin gives the tune a full-on modern country/roots treatment:<br />
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Alvin included this one on his 2000 album <i>Public Domain: Songs From The Wild Land</i>, which features Alvin's arrangements of traditional songs. While Jack Copeland Mathis's daughter does not seem to be interested in enforcing any copyright claims, I wonder idly whether or not some descendant of Fay and the JayWalkers might not be knocking on Dave Alvin's door at some point.<br />
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"Those Brown Eyes" is a slight if pleasant song, and I have always wondered at its durability since it keeps popping up somewhere or other, decade after decade. The very nearly mawkish sentimentality of the lyric's idea - the departed and possibly misunderstood lover looking down from heaven on her now-regretful suitor - and the fact that this appealed enough to the otherwise generally tough-minded Woody Guthrie that he chose to record it is certainly indicative of the fact that there was more to WG than anthems and angry protests. A definite streak of sentimentality manifests itself in Woody's recording, so - QED, as we used to say in geometry class.<br />
<br />Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-79045501047896855702013-08-09T18:28:00.000-07:002013-08-19T21:49:26.752-07:00"Bimini Gal"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Folk music and drinking </b></span>seem to have a natural affinity for each other, and there is no wonder in that given the really large number of traditional songs that celebrate the imbibing of alcohol in all its forms. Some of those numbers are sprightly tunes that depict dancing and fellowship and good times and the virtues of spirituous liquors, others rather darker in nature as they recount hangovers, fights, violence, and disasters begotten of alcoholism. Not surprisingly, the Irish seem to lead the pack in the sheer quantity of songs of both kinds about alcohol - but the Caribbean balladeers really aren't very far behind them, and our island friends seem to be even better than the Irish at blending the two themes into a single song. Think of some of the highest-profile island songs and you'll see what I mean. "The Banana Boat Song" as we know it today is about backbreaking labor on the graveyard shift, the reward for which is "work all night for a drink of rum." Perhaps the most internationally famous song from the area, "The Wreck of<i> The John B</i>" as Carl Sandburg titled the first published version, is generally performed with a happy, somewhat uptempo rhythm - this despite the fact that the lyric is about as dark as drinking lyrics come. Recall that singer, grandfather, and crew all get so plastered that they end up in a confrontation with each other violent enough to trash the ship and force the local police to intervene and (by implication) haul them off to the slammer, from which the singer (sounding as if he is still drunk) "want to go home" because "this is the worst trip/Since I've been born." Not your garden variety good times and brews tune, however much that everyone from Blind Blake Higgs to The Beach Boys seems to perform it that way.<br />
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"Bimini Gal" and its later adaptation "Bimini" are first cousins to <i>"John B</i><i>."</i> Both are Bahamian in origin, with <i>"John B"</i> traceable to a real ship that sank in the harbor of Eleuthra Island about the year 1900 and "Bimini" (<span style="font-size: small;"><i>whose harbor is depicted above</i></span>) arriving some decades later from the eponymous pair of islands a mere 80 miles due east of Miami.The oldest version of "Bimini Gal" seems to exist only as a fragment, perhaps the chorus of a sea chantey-like work song for repetitive labor. Its sole lyrics were<br />
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<i>Oh, when I go down to Bimini<br />Never get a lickin' till I go down to Bimini.<br /><br />Bimini gal is a rock in the harbor<br />Never get a lickin' till I go down to Bimini.</i><br />
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Pete Seeger identified it as "a descendant of a street dance from Nassau" and included it on his Folkways recording of <i>Folksongs Of Four Continents </i>from 1955. A sample of this version appears on the Smithsonian/Folkways page for the album <a href="http://www.folkways.si.edu/the-song-swappers-and-pete-seeger/folk-songs-of-four-continents/american-folk-world/music/album/smithsonian">HERE</a>, and if you play the clip you'll hear Erik Darling on lead, three years before he replaced Seeger in The Weavers.<br />
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The most unusual rendition of this version - and oddly, perhaps the most influential - was recorded by legendary Bahamian guitarist and singer Joseph Spence (1910-1984), a unique musical artist if ever there was one. As <i>Allmusic</i>'s Mark A. Humphrey has written, "Spence created an idiosyncratic (and inimitable) guitar style rife with
percussive and improvisatory vamps....He was a folk
guitarist's Thelonious Monk, and his growling vocal counterpoint and
surprising inventions are one of folk music's great delights." And further-<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;">The combination of Spence's voice and guitar is one of music's most
unforgettable. It is a low, rumbling voice that is sometimes simply
moaning and mumbling, as if this was a Glenn Gould voice track. As for
lyrics, clearly enunciating two words out of a line is a good average
for this man, and the results should make many other vocalists think
about following suit. His vocal style could be appreciated simply for
being bizarre and unorthodox, true, but the same could never be said for
his guitar playing. He often uses a drop-D tuning, which means his bass
string is lower than usual. This in turn creates many variations in
harmony as he plays, combining very nicely with the hard, percussively
snapping feel of his picking.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: normal;">Lest you think Humphrey is exaggerating here, take a listen to Spence's mesmerizing delivery of the number: </span><br />
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Inimitable to be sure, and if Spence's vocals aren't to everyone's taste, you still have to stand in awe of what the man is doing with his guitar. Fleetwood Mac's Lindsey Buckingham once told John Stewart that a good song should sound "repetitive and hypnotic," and I think that is a perfect description of what Spence is doing here.<br />
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Bruce Molsky is a folk artist whose work I have learned of only in recent years, mainly from research for this blog. He is talented and tasteful, and he presents a more conventional instrumental of Spence's "Bimini Gal" here:<br />
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Like Spence, Molsky is using a dropped D tuning, though he is using finger picks as opposed to Spence's hammering flatpicking. Without exactly imitating Spence, Molsky retains the "percussive snapping" effect that the Bahamian achieves in his rendition.<br />
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The original lyric that Spence growls out is suggestive of the later "Bimini" song. The "Bimini gal is a rock in the harbor," which sounds a bit odd until you realize that a rock in a harbor is likely to sink a ship, which for our singer is getting that licking that he had never experienced before. There were other Bahamian songs recounting bar fights over girls, with some expressly citing Bimini Bay or Bimini Harbor as the locale for the ruckus, so it wasn't much of a leap for songwriters Bill Olofson and Mark McIntyre to fuse "Bimini Gal" with one of those other tunes and come up with "Bimini" (in much the same way that Seeger combined another Bahamian fragment, "When The Whale Gets Strike" with the old Anglo-Irish "Greenland Whale Fisheries" to come up with the most familar modern folk version of the song, sung in that manner by Theodore Bikel, Judy Collins, Peter, Paul and Mary, and The Weavers). The Kingston Trio included the new combined song on its fourth studio album, 1960's <i>Sold Out</i>.<br />
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The album cover in the video is, of course, a picture of the wrong edition of the Trio, but the track retains its appealing energy a half century after it was recorded. The aforementioned fusion creates an oddity - a song with two choruses, the "Never get a licking" from "Bimini Gal" and the "Send my bail down to Bimini" of the more modern tune. The cut also underscores one of the strengths of the first configuration of the Kingston group, that being the marvelous sense of rhythm that each of the originals possessed - Bob Shane on guitar, Nick Reynolds on bongos, and Dave Guard on banjo.<br />
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The current KT slows the tune down a bit and invests it with a bit more of a pop-calypso feeling:<br />
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The Olofson-McIntyre version has also remained a favorite of amateurs - here, Chicago-based band "A Bunch of Coconuts," one of several versions currently on YouTube:
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Finally, contemporary Caribbean artist Stevie S and the Calypsonians do a modern riff on the original "Bimini Gal" song:<br />
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Stevie seems to be going for repetitive and hypnotic, as he melds calypso and ska rhythms with a dash of reggae - and if you listened long enough, a touch of bluegrass as well.<br />
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There is a good-natured, good-humored element in both these songs. Our local lady may be a dangerous rock, but that doesn't seem to keep the ships away, impending licking or no. And while she may be the proximate cause of a "Sloop <i>John B</i>" kind of alcohol-fueled disaster, it's pretty clear that once that bail arrives, our boys will be out and about and after her again. Warm breezes, tropical women, and a bit too much rum can do that to a guy.
Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-11512419041126204992013-06-06T12:33:00.001-07:002022-09-05T21:30:51.599-07:00RFK & The Poetry Of Memory: John Stewart's "Dreamers On The Rise"<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLCzdEzWJ02MXv9bmkFhLIL2ONs8qwupe_a48JOlBscjzYbJOP_1mFkDpcFTN8_nUCCjaCAOOCFe_qIMNWG5EDDz5XKApaNDODpJfcPNWi8rZnBzl3141FzjGVD7gViD7zJEIYa50RfDQyOuopY_7d33r9vAH1AKsNysqfcWeKDF2YAUlqsphqwEfZ/s500/rfk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="353" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLCzdEzWJ02MXv9bmkFhLIL2ONs8qwupe_a48JOlBscjzYbJOP_1mFkDpcFTN8_nUCCjaCAOOCFe_qIMNWG5EDDz5XKApaNDODpJfcPNWi8rZnBzl3141FzjGVD7gViD7zJEIYa50RfDQyOuopY_7d33r9vAH1AKsNysqfcWeKDF2YAUlqsphqwEfZ/s320/rfk.jpg" width="226" /></a></div><b>Today, June 6th</b>, is the 45th anniversary of the death of Robert Kennedy, shot down here in Los Angeles in the early morning hours of June 5th, mere minutes after winning the California Democratic presidential primary which solidified his status as the frontrunner for his party's nomination - and, as an opponent of the highly unpopular Lyndon Johnson and his even more unpopular war, a formidable adversary for Republican Richard Nixon. It is a melancholy anniversary on several levels. For those of us who remember that night, it seems impossible that so many years have passed since then, as time seems to speed by with increasing velocity as we move deeper into our decades. Kennedy's death was the next - but not the last - in a series of cataclysmic shocks that rocked the nation in 1968: the late January Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which though a major tactical loss for the insurgents was a public relations disaster for Johnson's administration; Johnson's subsequent announcement at the end of March that he would not seek re-election, though he was constitutionally able to do so; the assassination of Martin Luther King a few days later in April - and the violence and bloodshed at the Democratic Convention in August that was yet to come. It was a terrible year, judged by some historians the most pivotal in the nation's history since the Civil War, or perhaps even farther back to 1848.<br />
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Political murders are sadly not as rare in American history as we might wish or like to think they are, and happily those of us younger than 40 - more than half of our population - have no living memory of such acts. To them I would say that it matters not whether the public figure cut down thus was of your party or persuasion; the shock, the anger, and the outrage that we feel at political assassinations arise from their intrinsic evil and from the way that they tear at the fabric of American political life and institutions. You didn't have to like Kennedy at all to be appalled by his murder, or to be moved by the sight of his brood of now-fatherless children. Violence may play well in the cinema or in a video game, but in real life - it's a horror.<br />
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I am not at all sure at this distant remove how different the subsequent decades would have been had RFK lived. He might have been able if elected to end the war in Vietnam prior to its worst and bloodiest years - or not. "My fellow citizens," said Abraham Lincoln, "we cannot escape history," as both of our last two presidents have found to their dismay, and our chief executive has almost always been a prisoner of events beyond his control fully as much as he has been the architect of the nation's path and destiny. RFK did not have the ego, the natural leadership, and the personal charisma of his older brother, nor was he capable of the same soaring flights of oratory; he may have had some of LBJ's ruthless singlemindedness, but he lacked the Texan's intimate knowledge of the legislative process and Johnson's remarkable adroitness at manipulating it to his own ends.<br />
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However, Robert Kennedy had other qualities, not the least of which were the capacity to grow - out from under the shadow of his two more accomplished and more self-possessed older brothers, among other areas - and more importantly, the quality of a far deeper and more genuine compassion for the suffering and the dispossessed than most other politicians of his or any other generation ever truly felt or knew. This was especially clear in his interactions with children - which you would expect from a father of eleven - but more surprisingly so in his support of the causes of the California farm workers and of the African-Americans and their civil rights movement, neither of which were natural constituencies for a rich kid from Boston. And much of the energy that propelled his doomed presidential campaign forward emanated from those two groups; RFK was the last white politician to be able to reach across the nation's racial divide and to attract a kind of devotion from them until at least the time of Bill Clinton.<br />
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I was not in the RFK camp in '68 - I was a charter member of and card-carrying, button-wearing, neighborhood-canvassing recruit in Eugene McCarthy's derisively-named "children's crusade" of college students in support of the first senator (with Republican Mark Hatfield of Oregon) to come out and actively oppose Johnson's war. McCarthy's Middle Western directness, his poetry, his love of the People's game of baseball - these appealed to my younger self far more than what seemed to me to be RFK's carpetbagging opportunism, as he got himself elected to the Senate from a state in which he had never lived and as he waited to declare his own candidacy for the presidency until after McCarthy had proven LBJ's electoral vulnerability in New Hampshire and elsewhere. McCarthy seemed a white knight to Kennedy's soiled pol - silly to have thought so, perhaps, but the world always seems a clearer and more black-and-white place when we are young.<br />
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What I saw in McCarthy, though, was what singer-songwriter John Stewart saw in RFK. Stewart was a show biz veteran with serious credentials as a former member of the Kingston Trio during some of the years in which it was the top vocal group in the U.S. and as the composer of "Daydream Believer," a #1 hit for The Monkees in 1967 and an enduring pop-rock standard - but he was also 28 years old when he joined the RFK campaign as the troubadour who warmed up the crowds before Kennedy spoke, especially on the senator's whistle-stop tour through California. Stewart was young enough still to be captivated by RFK's idealistic vision of all that America could be, especially an America rid of the crushing weight and costs of a war that seemed to have neither a clear objective nor a foreseeable end. Kennedy's apparent natural diffidence also matched Stewart's own, and the two developed a close and personal bond, with Stewart remaining close to the senator's children for decades afterward.<br />
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Kennedy's murder had a profound impact on Stewart. Where RFK's compassion for the forgotten intensified Stewart's own and contributed to the deep emotional underpinning of wonderful Stewart songs like "Botswana" and "Reason To Rise," among many others, the assassination itself seemed to haunt Stewart for years and years, shaping songs like "The Last Campaign," "I Remember America," "The Last Hurrah" - and "Dreamers On The Rise." This last was composed and released in 1984, sixteen years after the last campaign in which Stewart would involve himself and when he was well into his forties. It is the reflection of a man in middle age looking back on the idealism of his younger years, and at the end, wishing that the time could come alive again. "Dreamers" is a simple song lyrically; its evocative power arises from Stewart's almost stream-of-consciousness imagery and from the poignant longing that the middle-aged often have for youthful ideals that have been abraded away by the harshness of life in the real world, both of which enable Stewart's song to escape from mere topicality. The song was first released on Stewart's aptly-named album "The Last Campaign":<br />
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It is that "turning back our lives" in the third verse in which Stewart most clearly expresses a kind of late-night feeling many of us get from time to time. You can't call it nostalgia, exactly; it is closer to regret for deeds undone, opportunities missed, words unsaid. Yet only a year after this recording, Stewart did turn his life back to a degree by recording an EP called <i>Revenge of the Budgie</i> with his former Kingston Trio bandmate Nick Reynolds, and one of the best cuts on the recording is the duet on "Dreamers" with Reynolds on high harmony:<br />
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<br />
Reynolds later said that this was his favorite of all the John Stewart songs he had heard and sung through the decades, remarking in <i>The Kingston Trio On Record</i> book that "When I first heard 'Dreamers On The Rise,' it just killed me. It was done so perfectly..."<br />
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Stewart performed the song throughout the remainder of his career, and there are fortunately a few videos of him doing so. This one is from 2002:<br />
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As JS mentions, he is accompanied by his bassist of 25 years, Dave Batti, who continues to perform with other Stewart sidemen as The John Stewart Band.<br />
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Joel K. presents an interestingly different take on the song in 2011 at Swallow Hill in Denver:<br />
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The piano accompaniment and slower rhythm make for a very different emotional coloring to the tune.<br />
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A few months after Stewart's passing, his widow Buffy Ford Stewart, herself an accomplished professional musician, and long-time Stewart collaborator Chuck McDermott presented a duet backed by the rest of the Stewart band at a tribute concert:<br />
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It is unfortunate that the video cuts off before the song ends; the thunder of the applause was a moment to remember.<br />
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We have several other high quality performances on YouTube done by people who knew Stewart to varying degrees. First, southern California singer-songwriter Tim Dismang, who frequently includes Stewart compositions in his own performances:<br />
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This is from 2003, and Stewart, who was in the audience and was captivated by Tim's rendition, can be seen congratulating Tim at the end of the video.<br />
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Finally, Nevada's Steve Cottrell in 2007:<br />
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As he usually does, Steve puts his own distinctive spin on the number, altering the speed, rhythm, and even the melody a bit to suit his own reflective take on the song.<br />
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"Dreamers On The Rise" is yet another John Stewart song that should be better known than it is. The tune has been virtually unheard by the public at large and has been buried, as Joel K. notes above, in the soundtrack of a minor and long-forgotten movie from the 80s. Yet it remains as one of the most articulate and heartfelt of the tributes to Robert Francis Kennedy yet written; it comes closer to capturing the spirit of Kennedy's campaign than works far better known. Like RFK himself perhaps, "Dreamers On The Rise" deserves a much better fate than time and national memory have dealt it thus far.<br />
___________________________________________<br />
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<b>Appendix - July 2013</b><br />
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Courtesy of Chuck McDermott, a collaborator of John Stewart's for many years, we have an embeddable clip of that performance from the "minor and long-forgotten movie" mentioned above. Chuck explains in his FaceBook Posting:<br />
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<p></p><h5 class="uiStreamMessage userContentWrapper" data-ft="{"type":1,"tn":"K"}">
<span class="messageBody" data-ft="{"type":3}"><span class="userContent">This
is hilarious. In 1984, a rather unremarkable film came out called "Hot
Dog" which was a teen romance meets ski movie kinda thing. The producer
was a John Stewart fan and the script called for the male lead to sing
and play guitar a few times in the film. Two of John's songs were
selected, and I got tapped to sing them since the actor was NOT himself a
singer. When the film came out, John and I were on the road and were
two of maybe 5 people in the theater for a matinee screening. When this
nice young man opened his mouth and began singing, we literally fell out
of our seats in laughter. Confused the hell out of the other 3 people
in the theater...
<div class="movieclips-player" style="-moz-border-radius: 7px; -webkit-border-radius: 7px; background: rgb(0, 0, 0) none repeat scroll 0% 0%; border-radius: 7px; margin: 0px; padding: 7px 0px; width: 560px;">
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<embed allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" height="304" src="http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=QV6Y5" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="560" wmode="transparent"></embed>
</object>
<br />
<div style="color: #666666; display: block; font: 11px / 11px Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; height: 27px; margin: 7px 0px 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; width: 560px;">
<a href="http://movieclips.com/QV6Y5-hot-dog-the-movie-movie-dreamers-on-the-rise/" style="background: rgb(0, 0, 0) none repeat scroll 0% 0%; color: #00aeff; display: inline; font-size: 12px; line-height: 1.23em; text-decoration: none;">
Dreamers on the Rise
</a>
<br />
<a href="http://movieclips.com/WCoQ-hot-dog-the-movie-movie-videos/" style="background: rgb(0, 0, 0) none repeat scroll 0% 0%; color: #888888; display: inline; text-decoration: none;">
Hot Dog... The Movie
</a>
— MOVIECLIPS.com
</div>
</div>
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</span></span></h5>
Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-24846710683512497762013-06-01T13:34:00.000-07:002017-08-17T22:12:05.795-07:00From Sacred To Secular: "Love Comes Trickling Down"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Songs often take strange journeys</b></span> in their lives, changing sometimes in lyric and melody and meaning, often morphing into very different creations than they started their existences as. This is a fortunate fact, as far as I am concerned, because it is one of the aspects of folk music that has driven my lifelong love of the genre and, in fact, given rise to this site and its 184 articles. A few weeks back I took yet another look at what has come to be termed "the folk process" in ruminating about how a labor protest song by Uncle Dave Macon could be transformed into a pop-folk traveling tune and thence into an electro-pop folk-rock number - which employed Uncle Dave's original chorus. Far stranger stories appear in these posts - "Over The Hills And Far Away," in its various incarnations for example, "Hobo's Lullaby" emerging from a Civil War lament, murder ballad "Pretty Polly" turning into the protest "Pastures of Plenty," and many, many more.<br />
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Perhaps the most arresting of these transformations occurs when a secular song becomes a religious one (and the prototype for this process is Henry VIII's "Greensleeves" being adapted to the Christmas hymn "What Child Is This?") or vice versa - when a song that at its creation was intended for the often narrow confines of church use breaks out into the pop mainstream and becomes a commercial hit number. This has happened with more frequency in recent decades than you might at first think. Elvis Presley's gospel albums outsold most of his rock LPs, and the last 40 or so years have produced international hits like The Eddie Hawkins Singers' "Oh Happy Day" in 1969 at the height of political turmoil and division in the U.S., Cat Stevens' gentle "Morning Has Broken" in 1971, and Judy Collins' high-charting rendition of "Amazing Grace" also in 1971, among many others. This phenomenon is no doubt due in part to a kind of secularized Christianity that pervades much of American culture - but that same American culture also made a hit of John Lennon's aggressively irreligious "Imagine" and George Harrison's Eastern mysticism in "My Sweet Lord," so that's not the whole story. A good spiritual or gospel number often seems to speak to something that transcends doctrine or belief per se. Steven Turner said as much in his <i>Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song </i>when he wrote:<br />
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<span style="font-size: 90%;">Somehow, "Amazing Grace" expressed core American values without ever
sounding triumphant or jingoistic. It was a song that could be sung by
young and old, Republican and Democrat, Southern Baptist and Roman
Catholic, African American and Native American, high-ranking military
officer and anticapitalist campaigner.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;">Those core American values, of course, include the dream of a millennial universal peace and justice, and a redemption from our sins personal and societal, religious and secular - an absolution from our many failings as people and as a nation. And it doesn't hurt, of course, that the songs enumerated above were just plain old ripping good tunes performed by the artists with consummate professionalism. Redeemed or not, Americans have always loved ripping good tunes.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: 100%;">That prologue brings us to "Love Comes Trickling Down," a song which enjoyed a brief flurry of recordings in the 1960s by some pretty heavy-duty folk acts. I first heard it on a 1964 Kingston Trio album, attributed to one Jonathan Harris, and I assumed from the sound of the number and the arrangement that it was a relatively contemporary gospel number of the kind that the group had dabbled with before. Not so at all, it turns out. Whoever Mr. Harris was, he simply re-arranged a very old spiritual that likely pre-dates the Civil War and that first appeared in print in 1887 in a book titled </span><i>Jubilee and Plantation Songs, as sung by the Hampton Student Chorus</i> (pictured above). Hampton University, of course, with Howard and Fisk (whose students also performed with the Hampton chorus) was one of the country's first black colleges, founded in the old South where higher education was denied to former slaves and their children. The musical setting for "Love" appears like this in the original publication:<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDlDTfOLxrS_U09lOHyKrV6a92vG9mUSXfQP_zQufaH60fSr5eHLHiYdE2gGFpFNN7_-BXUSI83903DXHcwZlsHwLDXVeOAyfwEebaDLQl51fW99k9ziDTYOnJX9GXV0u6ln3sIgIFkNw/s1600/Seek1_zpsa1bdd6ef.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="375" data-original-width="629" height="190" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDlDTfOLxrS_U09lOHyKrV6a92vG9mUSXfQP_zQufaH60fSr5eHLHiYdE2gGFpFNN7_-BXUSI83903DXHcwZlsHwLDXVeOAyfwEebaDLQl51fW99k9ziDTYOnJX9GXV0u6ln3sIgIFkNw/s320/Seek1_zpsa1bdd6ef.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcEr8xyM-2xSsNsv-hQzBqdvbB02sN6oL0oJUqMmdV_4Y22JpqXux-jeW570E1ev_mZujMYq2o6QEqRNvvGto06IQ17U3sEkNsNgmP0fsLcO1VsM0D3HdnPShddfHgN2FXfhbNlaL8jWE/s1600/Seek2_zpsc63edc87.JPG" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="372" data-original-width="647" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcEr8xyM-2xSsNsv-hQzBqdvbB02sN6oL0oJUqMmdV_4Y22JpqXux-jeW570E1ev_mZujMYq2o6QEqRNvvGto06IQ17U3sEkNsNgmP0fsLcO1VsM0D3HdnPShddfHgN2FXfhbNlaL8jWE/s320/Seek2_zpsc63edc87.JPG" width="320" /></a><br />
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This first published version reveals two significant aspects of the song. First, the melody is roughly the same as the versions we will hear below, but not quite exactly; the chorus comes pretty close, but the verses are rather different. Second, the lyrics in many post-1900 hymnals cite the last line of the chorus as "love comes a-tumbling down," and there have been some heated discussions on a folk website or two as to whether "trickling" or "tumbling" is appropriate. The publication of the Hampton arrangement above pretty much settles that, at least insofar as the original intent goes.<br />
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As noted above, I first heard "Love" on the Kingston Trio album <i>Nick, Bob and John</i>:<br />
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Lead vocal and 12 string guitar here is by John Stewart. The chord structure in this arrangement is mostly why I mistook the song for more contemporary than it is. This track is in the key of A, and the guitar introduction moves from the A chord to an A with an added 9th (and a random G# thrown in by the second guitar)- not typical of 19th century folk tunes, even the often complex spirituals. Also, the third line of the chorus (repeated in the verse) hits a C#minor chord - again, atypical and not part of the harmonic structure of the Hampton arrangement above. This was a KT touch, one that makes up in part for the poor quality of the original recording as the Trio had moved from the excellent facilities of Capitol Records and its gifted production personnel (producer Voyle Gilmore, engineer Pete Abbott, and remixing engineer Rex Uptegraft) to Decca Records, which allowed the group to record in its own Columbus Tower studio in San Francisco. Abbot came north from Los Angeles to try to help out, but even he could not save the album from sounding flat and dimensionless. Fortunately, the track above is a fairly recent digital remastering of the original tape, and it sounds rather more like it might have sounded had Capitol recorded it.<br />
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Roughly a year later, former Limeliter Glenn Yarbrough used "Love Comes Trickling Down" as the opening track on his <i>Come Share My Life</i> album. Here is Glenn's version, from television's <i>Hollywood A-Go-Go</i> show in 1965:<br />
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Two points become clear here. First, Yarbrough was making a career move away from pop-folk to pop-rock - and just pop in general, as this sprightly, cheerful rendition demonstrates. Second, Glenn is at it again - rewriting the lyrics of a public domain song to suit his own interest and style, much as he had taken the spiritual "All My Trials" and turned it into a love ballad, "All My Sorrows," several years before. Yarbrough essentially secularizes this religious song, the chorus of which is adapted from the Biblical Sermon on the Mount. Glenn turns it into a kind of non-spiritual spiritual, making love itself the center of the lyric instead of the original reference to grace.<br />
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The Womenfolk enjoyed several years of relatively high-profile popularity, including appearances on television's <i>Hootenanny</i> and in major clubs like the Hungry i. They also had a <i>Billboard</i> Hot 100 single with their version of Malvina Reynolds' "Little Boxes" - at 1:06 running time, this track has the odd distinction of being the shortest recording ever to crack the Hot 100. "Love Comes A-Trickling Down" was the B side of that 1964 single:<br />
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The ladies give the song a pleasant, almost country-ish swing. The group attributes the copyright, visible on the record in the video, to L.Kahn and B.Kahn - a pair equally as mysterious as Jonathan Harris and likely just some folks who understood the lucrative nature of copyrighting an arrangement of a public domain tune. <br />
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For a more recent version, we turn to Gary Blanchard, whose YouTube channel features his performances of a wide range of folk songs, including several folk spirituals. Blanchard makes it clear in his introduction that he has done yet another rewrite of the tune:<br />
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In this entertaining, Pete-Seeger-ish performance from 2010, Blanchard - like Yarbrough - adds his own lyrics that again transform the number from the specifically religious to the generically inspirational. John Lennon would have loved it.<br />
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Finally, contemporary gospel group King David's Harp returns the song to its Christian roots in this performance from just short of a year ago:<br />
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The quartet is clearly using the song as the unifying element in a sermon and story. Like Blanchard above, King David's Harp sings the tune without minor chords, more in keeping with the original Hampton version. The Harp's chorus, in fact, is closer to the printed music than any of the other versions here.<br />
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"Love Comes Trickling Down" bears rough comparison to the much higher-profile <a href="http://compvid101.blogspot.com/2013/03/chet-powers-lets-get-together.html">"Let's Get Together"</a> in that both are undergirded by orthodox Christian beliefs, but in their recorded transformations become something quite different. However, "Get Together" became folk-rockified and remains a pop standard from the era, and "Love" fades off into near-obscurity. But it doesn't quite disappear. Major folk and rock critic Bruce Eder of <i>Allmusic.com</i> remarked about the Kingstons' recording that " 'Love Comes a Trickling Down' is the great lost single (among several candidates) from this LP, a gorgeous gospel-flavored piece with a melody that, in the most beautiful way possible, never quite resolves itself..." High praise indeed for a track and a song that few today remember, and to which I can only add an "Amen." A secular one.<br />
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<b>Appendix</b>
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For both reference and nostalgia's sake - here are the three hit songs mentioned above:<br />
<br />
<b>The Eddie Hawkins Singers: "O Happy Day</b>"<br />
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<b>Cat Stevens: "Morning Has Broken"</b><br />
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<b>Judy Collins: "Amazing Grace"</b>
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<span style="font-size: 100%;"><br /></span>Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1875980412212682099.post-56092191996354060552013-05-24T13:56:00.000-07:002015-05-08T09:42:15.126-07:00Bob Dylan's "Mama, You've Been On My Mind"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b>Bob Dylan turns 72</b></span> today, a fairly unremarkable fact, certainly not on the order of wonderment of, say, the notoriously self-abusive Keith Richards looking forward to birthday #70 in a few months following yet another extensive and strenuous Rolling Stones concert tour, or Pete Seeger's continuing vitality in his twin roles of musician and activist at the age of 94 - and as the godfather of American folk and roots music through most of the 20th century. Dylan remains simply Dylan, soldiering on doing his Dylan things, writing, touring, and performing, and now reaping accolade after accolade and award after award as cultural institutions around the world trip over each other in a mad rush to acknowledge his genius while he is still around. To any real Dylan fan, and I would guess to Bob himself, the recognition is fine, but it belabors the obvious - that in the words of the special 2008 Pulitzer citation he has had a "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." <i>Time Magazine</i> included Dylan in its controversial and typically idiosyncratic list of the most important people of the 20th century, and there is an international coalition of college professors who have organized and mounted a campaign to have Dylan named as a Nobel Laureate in literature.<br />
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That last may be a bit of a stretch - or not, depending on what you think literature and poetry are, just as one's reaction to the "singer" part of Dylan's role as a singer-songwriter depends very much on what one values in singing. A polished pop vocalist like Frank Sinatra (a towering figure in 20th century popular music, every bit as significant as BD in overall impact) he is not, but it is beyond serious question that his evolving vocal styles have shaped the sound of rock music throughout the world, and a recording in that genre that does not demonstrate Dylan's influence is as rare a bird as a pop vocal that does not have Sinatra's fingerprints all over it. <br />
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I have almost from the start enjoyed Dylan's vocals - almost, since on his first album he was affecting a kind of Woody-Guthrie-reheated singing style that just didn't come close to matching the easy, homespun sincerity of Guthrie's own. Traces of that remained in some of the performances on the second album pictured above, but the fact that <i>The Freewheelin'</i> featured mostly original compositions, including several that became folk/rock standards like "Blowin' In The Wind" and "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," overshadowed the actual renditions themselves as the quality of the lyrics essentially proclaimed the arrival of a new and very accomplished writer of folk-styled music. Still, the vocals here are merely a foreshadowing of the explosively original approach that Dylan seemed to perfect in the landmark 1965 recordings for <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i>, especially "Like A Rollin' Stone."<br />
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Of course, not everyone is as enamored of Dylan's vocals as most folks seem to be of his writing. Alec Macpherson, for example - a younger music reviewer for Britain's <i>The Guardian </i>- took a sledgehammer to the icon's singing in his review of Dylan's 2012 album <i>The Tempest</i> (a recording I thoroughly enjoyed, by the way). Macpherson commented that<br />
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<i>For all the reverence Bob Dylan attracts in certain circles, it's been surprisingly easy to live life,
as first an obsessive music fan and then a professional music critic,
thoroughly untroubled by him. A sole ill-fated attempt to get into him....ended two-and-a-half songs into a best-of compilation with me
flinging the CD out of the window, outraged that anyone could have the
temerity to sing like that and call it art.</i><br />
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And further -<br />
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<i>Dylan's lyrics don't come to life because he doesn't bring them to life.
His voice is famously divisive – but, as horrible a rasp as it is, the
problem is more about what he fails to do with it. He colours between
the lines performatively, almost wilfully avoiding any element of
spontaneity or surprise....lyrics in pop, rock and rap are not poetry: they're performance. The
best exist not in a dry textual vacuum but are inextricably connected to
the nuanced vocal inflections, the rush of notes, the tempo shift. A
line that appears banal on paper can be – not seem, be – profound in the
mouth of a talented vocalist. Words that look like nonsense can sound
intensely meaningful if delivered as though there's something important
at stake. And music can breathe vitality into cliches...</i><br />
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...which Macpherson maintains that Dylan never quite achieves, even when the words demonstrate the sublime lyricism for which Dylan has become so celebrated.<br />
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While I salute Macpherson's apt and usually-overlooked distinction between poetry and song lyrics, I can't quite go along with so total a diss on Mr. Zimmerman's melodizing, and my Exhibit #1 for the defense is Dylan's work on one of his best love songs, 1964's "Mama, You've Been On My Mind," a studio recording that inexplicably was never released as an official Columbia track until 1991, though bootlegs of it and of live performances had been circulating almost since it was written. The song is said to be about the break-up of Dylan's relationship with the late Suze Rotolo (the young woman pictured above, of course), and the June 9, 1964 recording is a classic of the kind of folk simplicity that Dylan was soon to abandon.<br />
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At his best in his early years, Dylan's singing could express both rage (as in many of the political songs) and pain, as here. "Spontaneity and surprise"? Maybe not - but both or either would be utterly out of keeping with the nature of the lyrics, and the fact that Dylan avoids them is a credit both to the performance and to his understanding of the nuances of his own verses.<br />
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Joan Baez provided Dylan with the biggest early boost to his career (along with Peter, Paul and Mary) - Baez was already a folk superstar and the subject of a <i>Time Magazine</i> cover story before Dylan even arrived in New York City. Her formal studio recording (as "Daddy, You've Been On My Mind" to make the lyric gender-appropriate) appeared in 1965, almost a year after she began performing the song live, often with Dylan in tow as an opening act who would join her on this number.<br />
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The purity of the young Baez's soprano and the more conventionally-understood excellence of her singing puts a different spin on the tune - and makes it rather more commercially palatable than BD's rendition above.<br />
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Johnny Cash's signature rockabilly-influenced sound also lent itself to an interestingly different take on the song:<br />
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Note that in deference to censors and the standards of the more conservative country radio stations which at first gave Cash his greatest airplay, he tames the lyric a bit in the third verse from the original "I don't even mind who you'll be waking with tomorrow" to "It don't matter to me where you'll be waking up tomorrow..." Cash, of course, helped to bring Dylan's writing to country audiences as much as Baez did to the folkies.<br />
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Beatle George Harrison also loved Dylan's whole musical approach - the band's 1967 <i>Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band</i> was directly influenced by BD, and Harrison covered a number of Dylan's songs in live performance. This is a studio recording from Harrison's <i>Living In The Material World</i> album from 1973:<br />
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I find it interesting that on this track Harrison is affecting a Dylanesque tenor to his singing, unusual because in most of his solo work George H. had a quite distinctive and pleasing vocal style all his own, one that sounded nothing like this. Think "My Sweet Lord" or "Give Me Love."<br />
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The Kingston Trio came a bit late to the Dylan party, likely because their chief competitors at the top of the pop-folk heap were Peter, Paul and Mary, who had scored two top 15 singles hits with Dylan tunes before the Trio had recorded even one and who seemed to have a lock on the reputation as interpreters of BD. The KT had been used to setting trends in folk, not following them, though the group eventually recorded a number of BD songs toward the end of its first cycle. This rendition (as "Babe, You've Been On My Mind") was not released until 1969, two years after the group broke up and a bit before KT's Bob Shane re-formed the band with different partners as The New Kingston Trio.<br />
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The lead vocal and 12-string guitar work here are by John Stewart, who was shortly to embark on his own career as a singer-songwriter. Stewart's voice has the perfect tinge of loneliness and longing appropriate to the lyric, though it's worth noting as well the as-always supremely tasteful and understated harmonies provided by Nick Reynolds on the latter verses.<br />
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There have been scores of covers of the song over the decades, and it has continued to find its way into the repertoires of younger artists to this day. One of the better recent versions is from the Swedish duo Mando Diao, here from a live performance from 2005:<br />
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Sounds to me as if the guys had been listening to Johnny Cash and Simon&Garfunkel and fused their styles into this track.<br />
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Lastly, Jack Johnson has been a favorite of my high school and college students for over a decade now, and he has a distinctive approach to the songs he covers - here, slowing the tune to a more reflective pace:<br />
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Johnson uses a range of musical tools here, including bringing in more instruments as the recording builds to its climax. Good stuff.<br />
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Not surprisingly for a blog about folk music such as this one is, Bob Dylan's name crops up scores of times in the more than 180 articles here. How could it not? Though I have issues with the mawkish adoration and hagiography that have become attached to a very real person and artist, and though a realistic and balanced understanding of both the extent of his achievement and its very nature is likely decades and perhaps generations away, I do like a remark made by critic J. Hoberman in <i>The Village Voice</i> a few years back because it gets at the essence of Dylan at the same time that it expresses the problematic nature of his relationship with folk music. Hoberman says "Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then — having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning — vanish into a folk tradition of his own making." It can't be summarized better than that.<br />
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So a happy birthday to Robert Zimmerman, wherever you may be. Long may you run.<br />
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<b>Addendum</b><br />
<br />
I can't believe that this version did not appear in my YouTube search - or rather, I do believe it, since the YT search protocols reek and are a disgrace to its corporate master Google. In any event, Linda Ronstadt was one of the great singers of the era, and this version - ferreted out of YT obscurity by my longtime friend from back in the day Mike Peterson, to whom I tip my cap and pull my forelock - has the distinct folk rock sound she helped popularize, with more than a bit of the Stone Poneys<i>[sic]</i> sound, the band she had just left to record the solo album this is from.<br />
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Jim Moranhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14198555155411979643noreply@blogger.com1