From John Stewart & John Phillips: "Oh, Miss Mary"

(L-R - John Stewart, Barry McGuire, Scott McKenzie, and Michelle Phillips sing at the memorial for John Phillips - Los Angeles, 2001)

When John Phillips died 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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The song that so excited Stewart was "California Dreaming."

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 College Concert album that rose to  #3 on the Billboard 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:


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:


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:


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.
Barry McGuire may be in the chorus there, but his 1963 "solo" record The Barry McGuire Album 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:



We'll close our selection of versions with a fine one by Bill Mumy from his album Thank You Kindly. Now, you already know Bill Mumy, who as a child actor starred in Lost In Space 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 The Twilight Zone 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:



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 Father Knows Best. 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.

Remembering John Stewart #2 - "Chilly Winds"

For a look back at last year's article on "July, You're A Woman," click HERE.
John Stewart (Sept. 5, 1939 - Jan. 19, 2008) spent more than fifty years writing his own epitaph, and he did so in about 600 different segments - because what remains of him as legacy nearly three years after his death are the songs that he wrote and his performances of them, both in recordings and in the living memories of those of us lucky enough to have seen him with the Kingston Trio, or solo, or luckiest of all, both.

Stewart was possessed of an idiosyncratic creativity throughout his life, a creativity that manifested itself in sometimes surprising and new ways. He discovered at some point in middle age that he had real talent in drawing and painting, and he developed that talent with the same kind of unique vision that characterizes his songs. He was a gifted mimic and could imitate voices with uncanny accuracy when he was telling tales in concerts or conversations. He loved computers and technology and what you could do with them fully as much as he loved a well-made acoustic guitar.

Yet it is as a songwriter with a unique vision of America and the individual's place in it that is probably his single most important legacy. Some of his songs are still heard widely, even by people who have no idea that Stewart wrote them. "Daydream Believer" possesses an independent life of its own - it keeps coming back in different forms, year after year, most recently in TV commercials for eBay and on the recent CD by Susan Boyle. Work out in a gym often enough and long enough and you will eventually hear his top 5 hit "Gold" piped in over the muzak at some point or other. "Survivors" and "Mother Country" seem to pop up from time to time on satellite radio and elsewhere. Performers like Dave Alvin and Bill Staines continue to perform his compositions.

More importantly to his fans - there are forty plus CDs/albums with several hundred originals on them, a veritable treasure trove of gems undiscovered by the public at large but regarded as precious by those who know them. I recall a post on a message board recently that wondered at the fulsome praise heaped on Stewart's songwriting - the poster remarked that he thought that Stewart may have written about ten or fifteen good songs and that was about it.

Well, you can't disagree with a personal opinion, so I won't. But I will relate an interesting little tidbit. The 17th century English poet John Donne - he of "for whom the bell tolls" and "no man is an island" and "death, be not proud" fame - was almost completely forgotten for three hundred years after his death because his style fell out of fashion and because his work was more subtle and intricate than most poetry fans could apprehend. Then in the 1920s, T.S. Eliot used his considerable weight as a poet and a critic to rescue Donne in a single essay in which Eliot clearly and simply elucidated those qualities of Donne that we so easily recognize today - and today, Donne is universally recognized as the poet of his age, behind only Shakespeare himself and John Milton.

So may it be with Stewart, though I hope it doesn't take three hundred years. But as a lifelong aficionado of both poetry and songwriting, I would assert that those 40 CDs include dozens, perhaps scores, of absolute treasures of songwriting - the very genesis of Americana music and the singer/songwriter movement, and the real successor to Woody Guthrie's vision of America. John Stewart was writing songs about common people that were recorded and selling hundreds of thousands of copies while Bob Dylan was still in high school dreaming of being Little Richard.

Even given the quality of his work with his first professional group, the Cumberland Three, it is with his ascension into the Kingston Trio fifty years ago in 1961 - at a point when the KT was the top pop music group in the country - that Stewart's real impact begins, and immediately so with a number of fine arrangements and compositions on the first Trio album on which he appeared that year, Close Up. But it was on the next album, I believe, where Stewart's songwriting began to take its ultimate Americana direction with one of his greatest songwriting efforts (with John Phillips, later of The Mamas and the Papas), "Chilly Winds."

Stewart had a close association with Phillips, even being one of a select few musicians invited to perform at Phillips' 2001 memorial service - and of course he sang "Chilly Winds." There were rumors, never either confirmed nor completely squelched, that Stewart considered leaving the KT to join Phillips in "The New Journeymen," the second iteration of Phillips' own folk trio, perhaps because of Stewart's status as an employee of the Kingston Trio rather than as a partner in it and because of slights from manager Frank Werber when Stewart made suggestions about song selection and arrangements.

Part of the story of the composition of "Chilly Winds" is fairly well-known. Stewart and Phillips supposedly visited KT member Nick Reynolds at his houseboat in Sausalito, CA on San Francisco Bay and took a dinghy out onto the bay for a couple of hours. They came back with the first draft of "Chilly Winds" that according to Stewart had scores of verses that they narrowed down to five. Stewart and Phillips played it for Reynolds, who was as immediately enthusiastic about the number as was third KTer Bob Shane, and the group recorded the song at their UCLA concert in late '61 and included the tune on the live album that grew out of the show. It became a Trio staple and in one informal poll in the 1990s was voted the #1 all-time favorite Kingston song by several hundred participating fans.

The other part of the story, the one less familiar, is where Stewart and Phillips got the ideas for the song. In the best folk tradition, the Stewart/Phillips composition could fairly be described as "assembled" from earlier folk songs as much as it was "written." The very title and the signature line - "I'm goin' where those chilly winds don't blow" - originated in a 19th century Appalachian clawhammer banjo number that later morphed into both a blues number and then a jazz standard. One whole verse - the favorite one of many fans, including me, about the "headlight on a westbound train" - was lifted in toto from a 1930s Jimmy Noone recording called "Blues Jumped The Rabbit" - and from several old published versions of "I Know You Rider." (I'm guessing that some of the lifting was courtesy of Phillips, who seemed to have a fair knowledge of country blues and mountain music.) And the "Leavin' in the springtime/Won't be back til fall" trope also appears in a number of older folk songs.

No matter, though - that's how folk music works, and "Chilly Winds" stands on its own as one of the best of the art-folk original songs of the revival period. Its roots in older songs are actually one of its strengths, and few if any other songs of the era articulate the melancholy of a dying romance so well. Stewart recorded the song at least a dozen times in different arrangements, though likely the two most familiar are combined in this video medley created by Tom Salter of Stonewall Studios in Niagara, ONT. The first half of the video is the original Kingston Trio College Concert recording (the concert was in December of '61 with the album released in 1962 - thanks to Tom Lamb!), and the second version (my own favorite) is Stewart's 1973 re-imagined performance from the wonderful Cannons in the Rain album:


Stewart dedicates the number in the liner notes to Shane and Reynolds. I might add that this video was a personal gift to me from Tom Salter, which is why the second part is replete with pictures of my own group, named in honor of this song.

I always loved the ways that John Stewart re-thought his performances of "Chilly Winds," and here is one of his better later performances, captured by friend and partner Paul Rybolt in Dalry, Scotland in 2003:



My favorite re-imagined version of the tune comes from 1984, when Stewart recorded an EP with his former Kingston Trio bandmate Nick Reynolds, who sang on the original 1962 recording:



One critic described Stewart's style here as "reminiscent of [1980s band] A Flock Of Seagulls, but infinitely more subtle and tuneful."

Several other professional groups also recorded the song, including Jay and the Americans:



It works nicely with the soft pop/folk/rock treatment and Jay Black's really sweet vocals here.

The Cumberland Trio (from the University of Tennessee and Hootenanny! and not to be confused with Stewart's original group) does a bang-up version of the song, here from their 2001 reunion concert:



The CT is using the basic KT arrangement but with the addition of a Cannons in the Rain-like slide guitar - a near-perfect hybrid, I'd say.

The different vocal tonalities of today's Kingston Trio lends a rather different sound to the song as well:



This is one of hundreds of Trio Fantasy Camp videos shot by our dear friend Bo Wennstam of Mallorca, who is battling cancer now - and whom we miss and love.

There are scores of amateur performances of the song on YouTube, many of them quite fine. I wanted to close with this one from Kevin Dorsey, who recorded his own multi-tracked version with a video dedicated to his late father on what would have been his dad's 60th birthday (my age....) last November:



Dorsey's video is for me the perfect evocation of the profoundly bittersweet melancholy of this wonderful song. It deserves to be sung and sung again and again, both for its own merits and for the way it expresses this most universal of human emotions. And by singing it, we both memorialize John Stewart and renew the continued existence of his songwriting legacy.

"The Streets of Laredo"

Like baseball, jazz, the personal computer, and about a million other things, the cowboy ballad is a strictly American invention. Of course, as we'll see shortly, many of them are based on older songs of everything from work to murder, but the peculiar alchemy of the American experience has distilled those earlier tunes into a very distinctive folk form, one that reflects the hard life that engendered the songs in an underlying melancholy and an often mordant and biting (if very dark) humor. While my personal favorite cowboy song has always been "Get Along Little Dogies" - probably because that is one of the first songs I remember ever hearing in my life - my own number two would be what is by common consent the best-known and quite possibly the best of the real traditional tunes, "The Streets of Laredo." The very name conjures up a host of images - the paintings of Remington and Russell, a book and TV miniseries, and a scene or two from just about every Western film ever made. The real Laredo, Texas is a border town in the southwestern part of the state - not exactly prime cattle country and far off of the beaten trails of the great cattle drives that started in the center of the Lone Star state and ended in the truly wild and lawless prairie railhead destinations of Wichita, Dodge City, and Abilene. "The Streets of Laredo" has about as fine a pedigree as you could ask for in a folk song. Most sources will tell you that it appears to be descended from a 17th century English folk number called "The Dying Rake" - that last word meaning, of course, what our generation would have called a playboy and what the young 'uns today call a player. But we who are blessed to be of Irish extraction know better. Sure, the dying young man lyric might indeed come from the Brits - but the tune is note for note a derivation of the great Irish lament "The Bard of Armagh," composed by the very real if mysterious Phelim Brady. But that song (video below) is written in a straight 4/4 time signature, which means that it's just a regular da-da-da-da beat, if a bit slow. In an exceptionally odd transformation, the American Laredo version takes the melody and converts it to 3/4 time - DA-da-da - which is a tempo most commonly associated with the romantic waltz and not really what you'd expect from a dying cowboy. See note above about a mordant sense of humor. So out first performance here is of the Irish ancestor of the Laredo song, performed by one of the great folk singers of the last century, Tommy Makem, whose signature song this was and who himself hailed from Keady in Armagh and hence was himself called through his life "The Bard of Armagh": Makem's best version this is not, IMHO. That was at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, where Tommy was accompanied only by the supremely tasteful Bruce Langhorne, who realized that the point of a guitar accompaniment is to support the vocal, not overwhelm or upstage it. And whoever is playing guitar here (definitely neither Makem nor Liam Clancy, who in a score of lifetimes would never play this way) is distorting the melody with a bunch of major and minor seventh chords that just don't fit here. Sadly, as of now, this is the only Makem performance of the number on YouTube. An offshoot version of this song, one that incorporates the dying youth motif from the British version, is a well-known blues/jazz standard from New Orleans called "The St. James Infirmary." The melody is only vaguely similar to "Laredo/Armagh" but the kinship of the lyric is clear. Doc Watson here does an Appalachian version called "St. James Hospital": For "The Streets of Laredo" - why not start with maybe the best of all cowboy singers, Marty Robbins: All Robbins ever needed to turn in a sublime performance was that impossibly small guitar he often played. But his studio version of the song has other virtues, including some secondary orchestration that includes a brushed snare drum that emphasizes the waltz tempo even more clearly than Marty's strumming does above: Johnny Cash recorded several versions throughout his long career, never more effectively than in this moving rendition on his American Recordings series from the years just before his death. Cash includes the reference to the "dance hall maidens" in the unexpurgated lyric. The "Rake" song makes it clear that the British youth is dying of syphilis, but that indelicate fact is masked in the American version by the fatal gunshot wound. The great Chet Atkins uses "Laredo" as the second half of a medley with "Greensleeves" to wonderful effect: Atkins plays the "Laredo" melody with a harmony a third under the melody and gives it just a bit of a flamenco-like lilt, which I believe is a tip of his guitar to the Mexico border town origin of the song. Finally, we come to what I have regarded since the first time I heard it as a major disappointment and a massively missed opportunity, as the Kingston Trio turns the song into a one-shot joke: The live audience clearly enjoyed it, and I suppose that the fact that every folk/western/country singer had given the song a try made it ripe for satire. But no one else even thought to create the arrangement that Shane, Reynolds, and Stewart did. Note that all of the "Laredo" arrangements above are roughly similar, based as they are on a mostly two chord accompaniment, often in the key of D. The chord progression there is then mostly a I - V7, or just a D to an A7. But the Trio infers the tragedy of the lyric and comes up with two radical changes. First, the second chord in the pattern is an A minor 7th, which lends a real sense of drama to the accompaniment, a dark shading perfectly consonant with the bleak tale of the lyric. Second, though they preserve the basic 3/4 timing, they hurry the accompaniment with Nick Reynolds' intense and almost-flamenco-sounding speed strumming that supports what I have called the "quiet urgency" of so many vocals of the Guard era Trio and almost never invoked in the Stewart years. The stage is set for a classic Kingston Trio non-traditional but brilliantly re-imagined folk song. And then the deflation - a joke that I didn't find funny the first time and never have since. I remember being tremendously disappointed and chagrined. One big problem with the joke is just that it is way too self-referential. From "Zombie Jamboree" through the Seven-Up commercials through concert patter, Nick Reynolds was the butt of much of the group's onstage humor. The concert audience knew this - the Kingstons were the most popular act in the U.S. at the time, and it's a safe bet that most of the people knew of the ad campaign and the other NR jokes. But without that frame of reference, the joke becomes as flat as a week-old open can of soda. Most folks who didn't know the internal group dynamic would not have found it funny in the first place, and literally no one for whom I've played the cut today even cracks a smile. But each to his own. "The Streets of Laredo" is such a great song, so evocative, so American that I still feel bad that we missed out on hearing what would have been the best recorded version of the song - which is why I invariably stop this last video at 1:08.

Urban Legends And "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?"

You would think perhaps that after very close to fifty years there would be relatively little left to say about a song that is as familiar and as much of a standard as "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" is. The simple timelessness and beauty of the song are self-evident, and most folk fans know at least the general outline of the history of its composition. It has been put to excellent use in countless ways and has been sung in churches and at rallies and around campfires for two generations.

In the last three years, however, a minor controversy regarding the song, based on an old canard and an even older prejudice, has re-surfaced and threatens to enshrine itself as historical despite its utter lack of veracity.

First and briefly, a recap - WHATFG was written by Pete Seeger. According to Seeger, he had been reading the epic novel And Quiet Flows The Don by classic Russian author Mikhail Sholokov, whose 1965 Nobel prize for Literature can be attributed in significant part to the critical respect accorded to this work, when he came across a passage that included a fragment of a Ukrainian folk song that, like the passage from the biblical Book of Ecclesiastes that became Seeger's "Turn! Turn! Turn!," Seeger appropriated nearly verbatim and set to music. Seeger wrote the first three verses only; Joe Hickerson added the last two, with Seeger's approval.

There's another urban myth trying to gain traction about the song - that Pete adapted the melody from the old Irish American railroad song "Drill Ye Tarriers," familiar to many of us from the Weavers or the Chad Mitchell Trio or - The Tarriers, who - yes - did take their name from the song. But you judge. Here's a MIDI of the "Tarriers" song:

Drill Ye Tarriers

And just so the formats are the same, a MIDI for "Flowers":

Where Have All The Flowers Gone?

There is no structural or melodic similarities between the songs whatsoever.

I'm hoping that the source for this is not Seeger himself, especially if it's from an interview in the last several years. Pete has already made a statement in good faith about the song that is, however, patently untrue - the canard I referred to above. In the 2008 book How Can I Keep From Singing? The Ballad of Pete Seeger, author David King Dunaway reiterates the assertion made by Seeger on camera in the 2006 documentary about the KT 50 Years Of Having Fun that the Kingston Trio, thinking the song to be traditional, originally tried to claim copyright credit for the song until Seeger called Dave Guard and got the group amicably to correct its error.

Nice story, but impossible. The KT that heard "Flowers" in 1961 from the then-unknown Peter, Paul and Mary at Boston's Storyville did not include Guard, who had left the group in June of that year, was about to move with his family to Australia (Seeger later stayed at Guard's Australian home while on tour there), and had been replaced by John Stewart, who was on the recording. All of Capitol's pressings of both the single hit record and the album on which it appeared attribute the copyright to Seeger. Seeger at a distance of 45 years may well have been confusing the "Flowers" song with any of a number of other Kingston Trio songs on which Guard and his bandmates claimed composition credits but which were actually under copyright to someone else, including a few that had been recorded by Seeger's The Weavers - but "Flowers" was not one of these.

Aside from this unfortunate mis-recollection by Pete himself, the credence that the story has gained to reputable historian Dunaway and through him to Wikipedia, which - like it or not, folks - has become the de facto source of choice for a huge percentage of the population under forty, is disturbing. Hence my reference to an "older prejudice" - the one against the Kingston Trio as being popularizing lightweights and not musical innovators and trendsetters.

I've contacted the redoubtable Allan Shaw about this, because we need a sourced reference to edit the falsehood out of Wikipedia, and it's important that we do so. I watched 50 Years Of Having Fun at FC7 with Allan, PC Fields, Zach Kaplan, and a couple of other folks, and we all caught the error. Allan said that he'd contact his friends at Capitol and Joe Hickerson to see if he can help establish the truth.

But this is, of course, a comparative videos post - and leaving the controversy aside, there are of course many, many splendid versions of the song. We start with the Billboard #21 hit:



One of the remarkable facets of this group was how faithfully they were able to reproduce studio sound in their live performances when they chose to - and this song is an excellent example.

The first actual recording of the composition, though, made even before the Trio rushed into a studio (fearing heavyweight Harry Belafonte's rumored recording, not that of fledgling unknowns PP&M) was by none other than the inimitable Marlene Dietrich - in French and then German and English. Here's a 1965 TV performance from late in the life of this great chanteuse:



Of all the fine versions available from Peter, Paul and Mary - this one is one of the best from their later years:



And talk about a great chanteuse - Joan Baez singing the song for Pete Seeger at the Kennedy Center Honors for him in 1994:



A characteristically gentle interpretation from the Brothers Four:



And finally from Pete himself - in 1994 at Wolf Trap with grandson Tao Rodriguez, at a mere 76 years of age:



I was tempted to add a comment to to Ken's post below about the death of Michael Jackson, the old Latin phrase Sic transit gloria mundi - "Thus (or so) passes the world's glory" - that is unless, perhaps, you've done what Pete Seeger has done, and that is write a song that you know in the twilight of your years will outlive you by generations.

Addendum - 11/19/13
Here is an undated video of Marlene Dietrich introducing the song in French and singing it in her native German, which was how she sang it in her international hit rendition - as "Wo die Blumen sind?"

Hedy West's "500 Miles"

Back when I was a brash rip of a young lad with a Silvertone guitar playing at high school parties and small coffee houses, I had a mental list of about ten or fifteen songs that I dreaded having people request and pretended if I could not to hear the queries. The list included, Lord have mercy on us, a goodly number of Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary songs - not because the songs themselves weren't good, but rather because I had just gotten tired of playing them again and again and again. "Blowin' In The Wind" and "Puff The Magic Dragon" and "Tom Dooley" were all worthy pieces that had simply developed a bit too much tread wear for me when I was fifteen or sixteen. Heading that list, I am now sad in retrospect to report, was "500 Miles."
The Journeymen

It wasn't that I wasn't into melancholy, loneliness, or lost love, either. I am, after all, of primarily Irish descent, and all of the above plus a marked tendency to the love of a good drop of the craythur, as they say ("creature," meaning grain alcohol and by extension any distilled beverage for all the non-Hibernians out there) plus a hot temper, love of poetry and song, and a mouth that for some reason just won't stop chattering are all part of the genetic inheritance of our breed.

No, it was because this simple, four chord song had really, really been done to death by about 1964 or 1965, and what is at the heart of the ultimate charm of the song - its very simplicity and at its core its honest recitation of some very nearly universal emotions - just didn't allow for a whole lot of variation in presentation or arrangement.

Now that I am (considerably) older and perhaps a tad wiser - and at a distance of forty-five or more years - I can see the splendidly if subtly individual ways that the genuinely stunning array of artists below interpreted this truly beautiful composition.

"500 Miles" was written or co-written and copyrighted by the late folksinger Hedy West, whom I would describe as to some degree the female equivalent of Bob Gibson - a truly remarkable and profoundly influential folk artist now all but forgotten. West was an Appalachian girl (born in the mountains of Georgia in 1938, died of cancer in 2003), a frailing five string banjo player good enough to appear frequently with Pete Seeger, and with Carolyn Hester and before Joan Baez, the darling among the young women who performed in the Greenwich Village coffee houses in the late 50s and early 60s. Some have suggested that her composition of "500 Miles" was influenced by the traditional folk song "900 Miles," and perhaps so in a very limited way. (Trio fans would know "900 Miles" as the original uptempo tune that Lord Burgess turned into my favorite Nick Reynolds' solo, "The Wanderer" from Here We Go Again.) There is a slight similarity in the melody and both involve missing a loved one - and trains. Beyond that, "500 Miles" is all Hedy West (and possibly her grandmother, who is alleged to have taught her a now-lost root version of it).

West's own version* of the song stands in distinct contrast to the smooth, mellow, harmonized versions of the pop-folk groups below. Accompanying herself with a five-string banjo only (whose ringing tone is screaming "Vega Pete Seeger longneck banjo with the company's famous Tubaphone tone ring" at us), West's voice, accent, and almost laconic delivery keep the song squarely in the Appalachian tradition from which it sprang:



The first recording of the song that gained attention - meaning that virtually every other version below was derived from it - was by the fabulous Journeymen - Dick Weissman, Scott MacKenzie (of "San Francisco" fame) and soon-to-be Papa John Phillips, who in the best Dave Guard-Jane Bowers tradition claimed a co-copyright for a song that he amended slightly but did not actually write. Here are the Journeymen from 1961:



Apparently the friendship between John Stewart and John Phillips enabled the KT to get the second version of the song out on vinyl - as we know, from College Concert in a fine, understated performance with a great, lonely train-whistle vocal by Stewart:



I think that many people associate the song most with Peter, Paul and Mary, and if you haven't heard them do this one in a while - great vocals:



This is the original studio track from their first eponymous album.

Country legend Bobby Bare had the charting single version of the song (#10 in 1963) with a lyric that he completely re-wrote and copyrighted:



For a really lonesome wailing version, no one beats Hoyt Axton (of "Greenback Dollar" fame):



Roseanne Cash creates a stunning amalgam of Hedy West's original and Bobby Bare's rewrite - haunting and beautifully accompanied:



Every damned female "contestant" on that non-musical cesspool called American Idol should be tied to a chair to listen to the great ladies of 60s folk, Judy Collins, Joni Mitchell - and Joan Baez:


That, children, is what singing is supposed to sound like.

Finally, two slightly rock-ish versions - Peter and Gordon and 80s folk-rock group The Hooters (named after a slang term for a concertina):






* West's version added courtesy of Gary M., who comments below.

A Terrible Beauty Is Born: "Roddy McCorley"

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

- W.B. Yeats
One of the now-vanished delights of Trio Fantasy Camp was the Q&A session on Thursday night conducted from 2000 til 2005 by Nick Reynolds and John Stewart (with Bob Shane joining the party in 2006 and 2007). The guys would answer campers’ questions and regale the assemblage for up to an hour and a half with tales of the road, odd memories that would occur spontaneously, stories behind some of their song acquisitions, and memories of people and places long gone.

Nick and John were especially warm in their memories of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem – John’s tale of a party in Theodore Bikel’s Greenwhich Village apartment where an over-earnest Bikel kept trying to sing some quiet and intense folk number, only to be interrupted at every start by a tipsy Tommy Clancy bellowing the opening notes to the brothers’ raucous version of “Haul Away Joe” [see appendix below] – Nick speaking feelingly of his close friendship with Paddy Clancy’s widow following the eldest Clancy’s 1998 passing - both recalling the drinking party in a Chicago hotel where Bob Shane taught the Clancys the pleasures of drinking rum.

At one FC after such reminiscences, Nick asserted with some asperity, “People criticized us for not doing enough protest songs. What the heck did they know? You want to hear a protest song? Listen to the Clancy Brothers sing ‘Roddy McCorley!’"

I had always loved Nick Reynolds for his humor and warmth, but at that moment I was ready to canonize him for his citing of what I had always regarded, years before I heard the Kingston Trio do it, as the very best of the hundreds of Irish songs of rebellion, a song finely crafted and demonstrating the touch of a genuine poet.

Though Roddy McCorley himself is a shadowy figure from the Great Wexford Rising of 1798 (more below), the song’s origins are clear. Poet Ethna Carberry  (the pen name for Anna Johnston) wrote the words in the late 1800s, nearly a century removed from the uprising; they were later set with her blessing to a fragment of an old air.

The original poem is rather longer than the four verses commonly sung today; the modern adaptation, which rearranges parts of some verses and leaves out others altogether, was done by Paddy Clancy, the eldest of the famous brothers, apparently with an eye to the standard length of the folk-type songs being sung in the U.S. at the time. The text of the complete poem is HERE.

For reasons that I cannot figure out, the song – though ragingly popular in Ireland since its creation – never caught on in the U.S. when other Irish rebel songs did, like “Kevin Barry” and “The Rising Of The Moon” and “Bold Fenian Men,” all of which were well-known in American Irish communities as long ago as the time of my own parents’ childhoods in the 1920s. All three of those and many more made their way into American movies, often as incidental or background music in John Ford’s westerns.

It was not surprisingly the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem who brought this wonderful piece into the heart of the American folk revival – and from them it was picked up by the Kingston Trio, whose massive commercial punch, even as relatively late as 1962, propelled it into the subconscious of two generations of Irish Americans and folk fans in general.

But first, back to Roddy himself. In the Rebellion of 1798, known by many names including The Year of the French (because of revolutionary France’s attempt to aid the rebels) and as noted The Great Wexford Rising (though there were more than a dozen counties involved in the coordinated attacks on the English military), local leaders became overnight heroes – and almost universally martyrs as well. We know little of McCorley except that he was a member of the group United Irishmen, founded by angry Protestant Presbyterians like himself (yes – Roddy was not Catholic!) who were infuriated by the British exploitation that in forty years would lead to the Potato Famine that killed two million and sent another two million packing, through the melancholy port cities of Waterford and Cork and Liverpool, to the foreign shores from which they never returned. (Thus did the Stevenses, Conways, Flahertys, and a Moran come to Chicago and combine to be my ancestors.)

McCorley was the leader of a sadly under-armed squadron in the town of Toombridge, County Antrim – pitchforks, no less - against a regiment of redcoat infantry. The rebels were cut to pieces with a few including McCorley escaping for a time. Roddy was later captured, convicted by a drumhead court martial – apparently with no defense attorney – and summarily executed by hanging from the ruined bridge in the town of Toomebridge. His body was dismembered by our British cousins and buried at different points along the road to Ballymena, though later his remaining friends exhumed the fragments and re-buried them secretly in a proper grave that was unmarked and unknown to this day. His descendants remain in Ireland, some actively involved in politics, and there is an active Republican “Roddy McCorley Society” linked below.

And now for the music. Instead of my usual practice of starting with the KT version, I’m starting with the first recorded version I heard, courtesy of Grandma Moran, around 1959 – from the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem’s first album on Tradition records (Paddy Clancy’s label – the records were at first recorded in the kitchen of his Greenwich Village apartment) to identify them as a group. This remains and will always be my favorite version of the song – just Liam on guitar, singing his heart out with Tom, Paddy, and Tommy Makem.

Since that audio-only piece was yanked for copyright, hers a similar performance from a live TV show in Chicago from 1962.)



It's clear that the KT took their cue from the Clancy's rousing performance. Here, familiar to us all, is the Trio from College Concert.



It took me a while to like this - I thought the drum stuff that frames the song was an unnecessary artifice, as if the guys didn't trust the inherent power of the words and their own fierce energy to carry the import of the number. I also thought that John S's banjo strum here was just wrong for the number - too syncopated and "Little Light"-ish for a song that should by to the 4/4 martial beat of boots tramping on sacred ground.

I heard it with new ears, though, when my young YouTube Irish friend Daragh, newly entranced with the KT, pronounced it the best version he had heard - and when he posted it, his Irish commenters universally loved it. And the Trio undeniably brings its signature, unmatchable energy to its performance.

County Antrim is in the ancient kingdom of Ulster, as is Keady town, birthplace of Tommy Makem. I have no evidence, but I believe that he brought this song to the group - the southern Tipperary-born Clancys had not included it on their Rising of the Moon album of Irish songs of rebellion prior to Tommy's joining the group, and it's certainly now one of the best-known of all the songs of that genre. Here is the authentic real deal - Tommy Makem solo toward the end of his life - a GREAT rendition:



And here's a fine performance that has another curious KT connection. The Wolfe Tones (a really popular and prominent folk group in Ireland associated with radical IRA politics and named for the most famous leader of the 1798 rising, James Wolfe Tone) perform "Sean South of "Garryowen." The tune is clearly the same as "McCorley" - but Sean South (pronounced 'Soot' or 'Sowt') was the other teenager killed in an abortive IRA attack on a British military barracks in 1957 that went awry when the IRA explosives failed to detonate. The first teen to be mortally wounded was Fergal O'Hanlon - referenced in "The Patriot Game."



In any form, it's a great song. Just as you don't have to be a Texan to love "Remember The Alamo," you don't need to be Irish to love what the KT and the others do with this one.


Appendix
Here's some extra stuff:

1) The website of the Roddy McCorley Society:
Official Roddy McCorley Web Page
2) 1962 video kinescope of the Clancys doing the posted version:



3) One of John Stewart's great hidden talents was as a mimic. I mentioned in the main post that John told a story about Tom Clancy interrupting Theo Bikel - well, here's how the Clancys sounded doing "Haul Away Joe" - and JS could do a stunning imitation of Tom Clancy, who sings this lead:



4) Finally - especially for Pa Mick Coates Down Under - the Dubliners' version, with Barney McKenna - as Mick says, the greatest tenor banjo player that ever was - if you don't believe so, just lsiten:

Generic Uptempo Folk Song: "This Little Light Of Mine"

One of the delights of the Hassilev-Daugherty-Zorn incarnation of the Limeliters (as on 2002's This Land Is Your Land PBS special) is their "Generic Uptempo Folksong," which manages simultaneously to satirize the genre, deliver an excellent example of it, and credit its most successful exponents ("the one we stole from the Kingston Trio"). [In the unlikely event that someone hasn't seen/heard this, I'm including it in an appendix below.]

As effectively as the Trio could deliver a ballad or quieter number (see the "Shenandoah/Across The Wide Missouri" discussion below - and "Flowers" of course, and many more), they set themselves apart from their host of imitators with their nearly inimitable delivery of strong, usually banjo-based fast songs with an energy approached IMHO only by the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem (in their distinctive style) and maybe CMT and PP&M on some numbers. But the Kingston's 50,000 watt performances just embodied the old saw of "often imitated, never duplicated."

Oddly, that golden Capitol T-996 that Bert mentions below does not open with one of these - "Three Jolly Coachmen" isn't "Hard Ain't It Hard" (which we know became their concert-opening staple) or "Little Maggie" on that same album. Most - but not all - of their subsequent albums, however, do open with a toe-tapper, if not always with a banjo number.

Now while At The Hungry i is often listed as the Trio's top-selling album (with no hit single but opening with generic UTFS "Tic Tic Tic") [KTOR lists [The Best of the Kingston Trio, there is no doubt that for many fans, College Concert is at or near the top of the list for either favorite album or favorite live performance album. And it, of course, opens with the Trio's stirring rendition of "This Little Light Of Mine," presented here as our benchmark for comparison:



The Trio always seemed both comfortable with spirituals, and after "When The Saint Go Marching In " (whose arrangement down to lyrics, pauses, and inflections is borrowed directly from The Weavers) had an interesting and original way with them - think about the key shifts in "Good News," or the modulations of volume in "Round About The Mountain" or the antiphony in "To Be Redeemed." They also stayed within themselves, to use the sports phrase, and didn't try to be something they weren't - like a gospel choir. For that - the roots version, I guess you could say, sounding probably a little bit closer to the way that the song actually was sung in the 19th century - here is the Sydney Ellis Gospel Quartet:



It's hard to say at this distance in time where the Trio got the idea for doing "Little Light," but certainly one of the highlight performances of the number pre-CC was by Bob Gibson as the Bob Gibson Trio (with master guitarist Dick Rosmini, whom our own Mr. Roadie knew, and legendary jazz bassist Herb Brown) at the Newport Folk Festival of 1960, the two Vanguard albums of which are personal treasures of mine. Gibson was the best damned folksinger that you may have never heard and had three albums of popped-up folk songs including a Carnegie Hall concert before the Trio hit Capitol Studio B.

No video of Bob is currently available - but Australia's Seekers are definitely doing Bob's arrangement in both lyrics and chord structure here:



For an interesting alternative take, here is Leontyne Price, one of the great American operatic sopranos of the last century:



I suppose I have to acknowledge that Bruce Springsteen did a creditable job with the song during the 2006 Seeger Sessions recording and tour - here he is in Italy closing his show with the Trio's opener:



If you do a YouTube search for the song, you will find literally scores, including many from European gospel choirs, clearly singing in a language and idiom not familiar to them in some cases.

As the Trio's version of this classic shows - they created their own idiom and performed brilliantly with in it.

Appendix

The Limeliters "Generic Uptempo Folk Song":

(Yanked for CopyVio - so here are The Limeliters Who Never Were - current Lime Gaylan Taylor in the center flanked by former Limes Bill Zorn (L) and Rick Daugherty (R), currently in the Kingston Trio. Though all three had been Limeliters, they never played together until 8/10 at the KT Fantasy Camp. This one is not copyvio - this is just three guys playing a song):



And finally - I used to say that YouTube was over-populated by teenage girls lip-syncing and undulating in their rooms to various pop songs (leaving one to wonder about parental monitoring of online activity....another question).

I'm not a fan of that so this last may seem odd - but a) the girls aren't teens, b) they're in the driveway, c) the sound is surprisingly good, and d) they do a bang-up job. Here are Jenny and Kathy: