All Over This Land - "If I Had A Hammer" & The March On Washington

One of the elements 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 The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, USA Today, 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.

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!"

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."

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 Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and had been at #2 the week before.

"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.

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.

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.

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:



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.

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:



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:



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:



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.

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:



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.

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.
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Addendum - Same Day, A Few Hours Later

The Newport Folk Festival video of Peter, Paul and Mary performing the song was lifted from Murray Lerner's film Festival, 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:

Billy Edd Wheeler's "Jackson"

Billy Edd Wheeler 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 River of Earth (above) 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 HERE, you'll see a variety of other influences as well. Wheeler is a man of many parts. He has written great songs like "Coal Tattoo" 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.

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":

" 'Jackson' came to me when I read the script for Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (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 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.

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 "The Rev. Mr. Black," among other songs). As Wheeler relates:

"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."

Wheeler recorded the tune for his third LP, 1963's A New Bag of Songs. 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:



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 "Someday Soon" 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."

"Jackson" remained in the vaults for about four years following the KT version, until Johnny Cash came upon Wheeler's Bag of Songs in 1966 and decided to record the tune with his soon-to-be wife June Carter:



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:



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."

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:



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:



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:



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.

A Whimsical Woody Waltz: Guthrie &"Those Brown Eyes"

"Woody saw 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."
 - Bill Moyers

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 Woody Guthrie - 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 20 Grow Big Songs in 1992. All told, Guthrie wrote several score children's songs that we know of, most of which have the virtue, according to Allmusic'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:



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.

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 -



- and The Tarriers followed his general outline for their rendition a decade or so later:



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.

Jim and Jesse McReynolds also gave the song a respectful reading in the best tradition of classic American country music:.

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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.

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.

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:



The Kingston Trio picked up the song from The Tarriers, whose copyright they acknowledged in their 1963 rendition on the album Sunny Side:



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.

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:



Alvin included this one on his 2000 album Public Domain: Songs From The Wild Land, 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.

"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.

"Bimini Gal"

Folk music and drinking 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 The John B" 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.

"Bimini Gal" and its later adaptation "Bimini" are first cousins to "John B." Both are Bahamian in origin, with "John B" traceable to a real ship that sank in the harbor of Eleuthra Island about the year 1900 and "Bimini" (whose harbor is depicted above) 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

Oh, when I go down to Bimini
Never get a lickin' till I go down to Bimini.

Bimini gal is a rock in the harbor
Never get a lickin' till I go down to Bimini.

Pete Seeger identified it as "a descendant of a street dance from Nassau" and included it on his Folkways recording of Folksongs Of Four Continents from 1955. A sample of this version appears on the Smithsonian/Folkways page for the album HERE, and if you play the clip you'll hear Erik Darling on lead, three years before he replaced Seeger in The Weavers.

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 Allmusic'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-

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.

Lest you think Humphrey is exaggerating here, take a listen to Spence's mesmerizing delivery of the number:



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.

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:



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.

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 Sold Out.



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.

The current KT slows the tune down a bit and invests it with a bit more of a pop-calypso feeling:



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:


Finally, contemporary Caribbean artist Stevie S and the Calypsonians do a modern riff on the original "Bimini Gal" song:



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.

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 John B" 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.

RFK & The Poetry Of Memory: John Stewart's "Dreamers On The Rise"

Today, June 6th, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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":



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 Revenge of the Budgie 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:



Reynolds later said that this was his favorite of all the John Stewart songs he had heard and sung through the decades, remarking in The Kingston Trio On Record book that "When I first heard 'Dreamers On The Rise,' it just killed me. It was done so perfectly..."

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:



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.

Joel K. presents an interestingly different take on the song in 2011 at Swallow Hill in Denver:



The piano accompaniment and slower rhythm make for a very different emotional coloring to the tune.

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:



It is unfortunate that the video cuts off before the song ends; the thunder of the applause was a moment to remember.

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:



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.

Finally, Nevada's Steve Cottrell in 2007:



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.

"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.
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Appendix - July 2013

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:

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...

Dreamers on the Rise
Hot Dog... The Movie — MOVIECLIPS.com

From Sacred To Secular: "Love Comes Trickling Down"

Songs often take strange journeys 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.

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 Amazing Grace: The Story of America's Most Beloved Song when he wrote:

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.

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.

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 Jubilee and Plantation Songs, as sung by the Hampton Student Chorus (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:







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.

As noted above, I first heard "Love" on the Kingston Trio album Nick, Bob and John:



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.

Roughly a year later, former Limeliter Glenn Yarbrough used "Love Comes Trickling Down" as the opening track on his Come Share My Life album. Here is Glenn's version, from television's Hollywood A-Go-Go show in 1965:



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.

The Womenfolk enjoyed several years of relatively high-profile popularity, including appearances on television's Hootenanny and in major clubs like the Hungry i. They also had a Billboard 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:



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.

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:



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.

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:



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.

"Love Comes Trickling Down" bears rough comparison to the much higher-profile "Let's Get Together" 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 Allmusic.com 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.

Appendix
For both reference and nostalgia's sake - here are the three hit songs mentioned above:

The Eddie Hawkins Singers: "O Happy Day"



Cat Stevens: "Morning Has Broken"



Judy Collins: "Amazing Grace"