May Day Is A-Comin' In...
Mood:  chillin'
Now Playing: Some remastered trad blues on Starbucks sound system
Topic: Music Reviews and Links

Okay, folks...enough chat from the previous post.  I want to get some song links up before I leave town on Friday.  I will be bringing my laptop with me, of course; but I'll be visiting my Mom in Crossville, TN for a couple of weeks.  No special reason; she just invited me to visit sometime in the spring.  She figures the weather in spring is a bit nicer than the wild stuff we're faced with during the Christmas holidays.  Winter in east Tennessee is crazy: in the 20's one day; and literally the next day, it goes up into the low 60's, and one can find one's area under a tornado watch, just like that.  Anyway...

  

The Bells of Rhymney by Pete Seeger (lyrics by Idris Davies; music by Pete Seeger): This is one of the first songs I ever heard by Pete Seeger, in the late 70's, on a weekend folk radio program, when I was 13 years old. It both struck and moved me deeply, and made me realize what a great and powerful singer Pete was--much more than just a tall, skinny labor-union agitator with a banjo (though this, too, is a perfectly honorable role to play). A lot of people associate this song with the 1966 coal slag disaster in Aberfan, Wales, though Davies' poem was originally published in 1938. This song seems as if it could capture the hollow-hearted shock, grief and rage of any major disaster, now or in the future, natural or industrial. Listen closely.

 

The Band Played Waltzing Matilda: This song has been circling the planet for at least 40 years, since it was first written and composed by Scottish-Australian folksinger Eric Bogle; but this version by Priscilla Herdman from what I think is her debut album, The Water Lily is the first I ever heard, not long after it was first released. This is another song that bowled me over at a young age, roughly the same time that I first heard "The Bells of Rhymney." I was 13, and just starting to teach myself guitar, with some essential early guidance from my aunt, Sharon Engstrom, who has taught guitar to both kids and adults for many years. This song, aside from its strong antiwar message, gave me insights into the massive possibilities that a person can conjure up when they write their own songs. I began trying my hand at both poetry and songwriting not long afterwards. Of course, most of my output from that early period was total crap; but that's part of the learning process. Songwriting is a trial-and-error skill that must develop gradually over time, regardless of how much total crap you crank out in the early days. At any rate, my favorite version of this song has always been Liam Clancy's live version; but this is a very strong rendition as well.

 

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall by Joan Baez (words and music by Bob Dylan): This is one of the first recorded songs I ever heard by folk icon Joan Baez, during that idyllic summer of '78 when I was first learning guitar, while spending several weeks hanging out at my aunt Sharon's Black Angus ranch in Richland, Washington. It was my aunt's copy of the album, which she personally considered one of Baez's worst to date (I disagreed, though I usually trusted Sharon's judgment implicitly back then). When Sharon was at work during that period, I was rifling through her folk record collection pretty intensively, when I wasn't practicing chords on my nylon-string Hernandiz guitar; and this song with its apocalyptic metaphors and wordplay certainly made an impression on my youthful, folk-obsessed mind. I made sure to copy the lyrics down in a spiral notebook before I headed home to Maryland and the beginning of 9th grade. Many years later, I discovered the French rewrite of the song, "Le Ciel est Noir" (literally, The Sky is Black), as performed and recorded by Nana Mouskouri, which cranks up the feeling of impending doom and bleakness even more than the original, even if one doesn't know a word of French. I'm still deciding which version I like better...