Salon Saturday July 15: Music – Folk Traditions

This segment of Salon Saturday radio show (KIVA 1600AM) was broken out as a separate topic for those interested in music. I know Eddy and I certainly are, so I hope you like the new format.

One could go back to the time of the traveling troubadour for some of the oldest folk music. Many of these musicians were also song writers, recording the events of their day or the legends of past times. Some only played music, but most also sung what they wrote. The early stringed instruments were light enough to carry on one’s back. Add script to record what strikes the traveler, a loaf of bread, some cheese and a change of clothes and we have everything we need to be miserable on the road and record all those thoughts in song.

When I began playing guitar, this was the music that resonated with me. I picked up songbooks of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Gordon Lightfoot, Peter, Paul and Mary, Kingston Trio, Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkel. These were the artists of the golden age of folk music. This list covers the most important folk songs of the 1940s to 1980s.

• “This Land Is Your Land” – Woody Guthrie; When Guthrie was tired of hearing Kate Smith sing “God Bless America” on the radio in the late 1930s, he sarcastically called his song “God Blessed America for Me” before renaming it “This Land Is Your Land,” when he recorded it in 1940.
• “Blowin’ in the Wind” – Bob Dylan; American singer-songwriter. Generally regarded as one of the greatest songwriters ever, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture over his 60 year career. His actual name: Robert Allen Zimmerman.
• “City of New Orleans” – Steve Goodman; So now you know it was about a train.
  • Good morning America how are you?
    Don’t you know me i’m your native son,
    I’m the train they call the city of new orleans,
    I’ll be gone five hundred miles when the day is done.
• “If I Had a Hammer” – Pete Seeger; was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notably its recording of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene”, which topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950.
• “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” – The Kingston Trio; Pete Seeger’s lyrics show how war and suffering can by cyclical in nature: girls pick flowers, men pick girls, men go to war and fill graves with their dead which get covered with flowers. Yes it’s a sad song.
• “Early Morning Rain” – Gordon Lightfoot; I can emphasize with Gordon about “this old airport’s got me down.” Few things are more depressing than flight delayed or flight cancelled.
• “We Shall Overcome” – Pete Seeger; the lead song for many protest marches.
• “Four Strong Winds” – Ian and Sylvia; Ian Tyson recalled in 1962 at a Greenwich Village bar, “This kind of little grubby kid in there”…said: ‘I got this new song’: it was Bobby Dylan – he sang me ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, he’d just wrote it. And I thought: I can do that”…He wrote ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and the next day I wrote ‘Four Strong Winds’.”
• “Tom Dooley” – The Kingston Trio (Trad) If you ever felt like hanging down your head and crying, this song won’t help.
• “Both Sides Now” – Joni Mitchell
• “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” – Bob Dylan
  Dylan wrote this after his girlfriend Suze Rotolo went off to Italy to study at the University of Perugia and left him in New York. Dylan re-imagined their separation here as him leaving her.
• “Sounds of Silence” – Simon & Garfunkel: Garfunkel, introducing the song at a live performance (with Simon) in Harlem, June 1966, summed up the song’s meaning as “the inability of people to communicate with each other, not particularly intentionally but especially emotionally, so what you see around you are people unable to love each other.”
• “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” – Gordon Lightfoot; one of Lightfoot’s Canadian history songs. It was written in 1976 by Lightfoot to commemorate the sinking of the bulk carrier SS Edmund Fitzgerald on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975.
• “Turn, Turn, Turn!” – The Byrds; written by Pete Seeger in 1959. The lyrics are taken almost verbatim from the book of Ecclesiastes, as found in the King James Version (1611) of the Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:1-8) though the sequence of the words was rearranged for the song. Also known as “To Everything There Is a Season.”
• “Puff the Magic Dragon” – Peter, Paul and Mary: In Hanalei Bay, Kauai the figure of a sleeping dragon can be discerned on the northern banks of the bay. And you don’t have to be stoned to see it, but it helps.
• “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” – The Band (Robbie Robertson); The song’s opening stanza refers to one of George Stoneman’s raids behind Confederate lines attacking the railroads of Danville, Virginia, at the end of the Civil War in 1865.
• “Canadian Railroad Trilogy” – Gordon Lightfoot
• “Like a Rolling Stone” – Bob Dylan
• “Bridge Over Troubled Water” – Simon & Garfunkel; this was the fifth and final studio album by Simon & Garfunkel, released in January 1970. Ironically, the duo split up with Garfunkel pursuing an acting career while Simon kept on writing.
  Back in the 90s I attended a concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre with Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. We were a ways from the stage and still had a good view through a marijuana haze.
• “House of the Rising Sun” – The Animals; recorded in 1964 by the British rock band was a number one hit on the UK Singles Chart and in the US and Canada. As a traditional folk song recorded by an electric rock band, it has been described as the “first folk rock hit”. The song was first collected in Appalachia in the 1930s.

One wonders what they would protest now in a world rocked by so many evils and wrapped in so much chaos and hate. Where would they begin?