There must be some intelligence in that little black wafer, for it transcends mere coincidence that Day Two of the Great British Election Campaign, the bedside iPod's sparrow's fart shuffled up a neat piece of déjà vu:
Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight -- You just walk in the door and take the first turn to the right. Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft, But we're taking down the names of everybody turning left.
Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society, Here to save our country from a communistic plot. Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks.
That's from the Chad Mitchell Trio's live album, At the Bitter End, all the way back in March, 1962. It's on YouTube, but as a text-only karaoke version.
The real rib-cracker in that lyric comes just before the final reprise:
Fighting for the right to fight the right fight for the Right.
Which, of course, here, there and anywhere is what really matters.
As always, in any political faction, your opponents are in front of you.
Your political enemies are behind him, marking your back for the sharpened stiletto.
View, if one must, the chain-jerkings of ConHome, and their internecine frotting over the last hemi-demi-semi-quavering of Tory policy on Europe, the less than enthusiastic noises of approval for "Dave", and the constant fear of back-sliding. Any mild dissent marks the accursed troll.
Anything short of a Tory landslide on Election Night (which simply ain't gonna happen) will open the floodgates of recrimination.
Fifty-one decapitated skeletons found in a burial pit in Dorset were those of Scandinavian Vikings, scientists say.
Mystery has surrounded the identity of the group since they were discovered at Ridgeway Hill, near Weymouth, in June.
Analysis of teeth from 10 of the men revealed they had grown up in countries with a colder climate than Britain's.
Archaeologists from Oxford believe the men were probably executed by local Anglo Saxons in front of an audience sometime between AD 910 and AD 1030.
The Anglo Saxons were increasingly falling victim to Viking raids and eventually the country was ruled by a Danish king.
The mass grave is one of the largest examples of executed foreigners buried in one spot.
Now that rings bells.
So Malcolm went back to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which reported local skirmishes with Danish invaders in:
A.D. 837. This year Alderman Wulfherd fought at Hamton with thirty-three pirates, and after great slaughter obtained the victory, but he died the same year. Alderman Ethelhelm also, with the men of Dorsetshire, fought with the Danish army in Portland-isle, and for a good while put them to flight; but in the end the Danes became masters of the field, and slew the alderman. A.D. 845. This year Alderman Eanwulf, with the men of Somersetshire, and Bishop Ealstan, and Alderman Osric, with the men of Dorsetshire, fought at the mouth of the Parret with the Danish army; and there, after making a great slaughter, obtained the victory.
Both those dates lie outside the predicted period in the story above. Then we have:
A.D. 982. In this year came up in Dorsetshire three ships of the pirates, and plundered in Portland. The same year London was burned. A.D. 998. This year coasted the army back eastward into the mouth of the Frome, and went up everywhere, as widely as they would, into Dorsetshire. Often was an army collected against them; but, as soon as they were about to come together, then were they ever through something or other put to flight, and their enemies always in the end had the victory. Another time they lay in the Isle of Wight, and fed themselves meanwhile from Hampshire and Sussex.
and finally:
A.D. 1015. This year was the great council at Oxford; whereAlderman Edric betrayed Sigferth and Morcar, the eldest thanes belonging to the Seven Towns... At the same time came King Knute to Sandwich, and went soon all about Kent into Wessex, until he came to the mouth of the Frome; and then plundered in Dorset, and in Wiltshire, and in Somerset. King Ethelred, meanwhile, lay sick at Corsham...
When it came out in about 1972, Malcolm acquired a copy of Karl Dallas's book of folk songs, The Cruel War [out of print: ISBN-13: 9780723404934; ISBN: 0723404933]. It's still there on Malcolm's shelves, and (like so much of his library) he wouldn't part from it this side of the crematorium.
The Cruel War includes a song Ruth Tongue, in her The Chime Child [out-of-print SBN: 0710029675/ ISBN-13: 9780710029676], claimed to have collected in 1918:
I had just finished a Folk Song Recital in London, and made my way back to sink exhausted into my dressing-room chair, when there came a hearty bang on my door which opened, and an elderly sea captain came in. He was smart, grey-haired, scarlet-faced, and as full of enthusiasm as a young westerly gale -- and he had a ballad for me. His family had been Porlock folk right back to Drake's time and before, and they had treasured and kept strictly to themselves this ancient ballad. Now having listened to that evening's Somerset wealth, he had decided regardless of family traditions that it must be brought to the free air of a singing world and that I was the one to do it. Before the force of this Severn Gale, I found my weariness blown clean away, and was soon singing too. He had a tremendous voice and it hit like hammer-blows into my memory. He sailed tomorrow he said, so I must learn it then and now. I did, every verse, and sang it back to him. He gave me a delighted smile, a hearty farewell and a handshake that clamped my fingers for the rest of the evening, and went away, forgetting to leave his name.
There are all kinds of suspicions about Ms Tongue's "accuracy", and her anecdote here seems as bit ... fishy.
However, hers is a good story. The ballad is Three Danish Galleys:
Three galleys come sailing to Porlock Side, And stole me away a new-wed bride, Who left my true love lying dead on the shore, Sailing out and away. I never shall see my dear home no more.
What makes that even more curious is a reference, again from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
A.D. 918. This year came a great naval armament over hither south from the [Breton-based pirates]; and two earls with it, Ohter and Rhoald. They went then west about, till they entered the mouth of the Severn; and plundered in North-Wales everywhere by the sea, where it then suited them; ... but the men of Hertford met them, and of Gloucester, and of the nighest towns; and fought with them, and put them to flight; and they slew the Earl Rhoald, and the brother of Ohter the other earl, and many of the army. And they drove them into a park; and beset them there without, until they gave them hostages, that they would depart from the realm of King Edward. And the king had contrived that a guard should be set against them on the south side of Severnmouth; west from Wales, eastward to the mouth of the Avon; so that they durst nowhere seek that land on that side. Nevertheless, they eluded them at night, by stealing up twice; at one time to the east of Watchet, and at another time at Porlock. There was a great slaughter each time; so that few of them came away, except those only who swam out to the ships...
Up early (Robbie the painter due before 8 a.m.) and on with the morning news.
We were expecting it; but it still shocked: the death of Mary. In the end, it seems, the leukemia didn't get her: it was the side-effects of the chemotherapy.
Perhaps, to aid the younger generation, the BBC now can be induced to dig out those original performances, and the documentary on the "folk revival":
Grossman's construct
The fourth original member of PP+M was Albert B. Grossman. Grossman saw the possibilities of commercializing "folk", opened up by the likes of Burl Ives, Harry Belafonte and the Kingston Trio.
This was the moment the baby-boomers hit town: college enrolments were booming -- a plurality of the white population in that key target age-group. This was their music. Joan Baez (another Grossman "asset") was already making a name. Bob Dylan (another one) was coming over the horizon. In creating PP+M Grossman inserted the tall, slender, photogenic blonde between two hirsute, but preppy, guitarists. Travis lived across Macdougal Street from Clarence Hood's Gaslight Cafe, a folk club where Noel [Paul] Stookey was the MC. Stookey, in his turn, had fallen in with the legendary Dave Van Ronk, the "Mayor of MacDougal Street", and traded in his electric guitar for an acoustic Martin. In another club, the Cafe Wha?, also on Macdougal Street, Grossman saw a singer-guitarist, Peter Yarrow, who had graduated from Cornell's psychology classes into a third-level course on English folksong and folklore (a.k.a. "Romp and Stomp"). Yarrow had adapted a lyric composed by Leonard Lipton, one his Cornell friends, and included it (and still does) in his regular songlists, a song everyone allegedly detested, a song no childhood should be without: Puff, the Magic Dragon.
Grossman now had his notion of a trio: an intellectual, a girl (to take the rôle patented by Ronnie Gilbert in The Weavers) and a humourist (as patented by Lou Gottlieb in The Limeliters). And then, after a successful preview when PP+M depped for solo Yarrow at Folk City, with supreme timing and placement, he launched them at the epicenter of cool that was Fred Weintraub's Bitter End in Greenwich Village.
On 29 January 1962, according to Billboard at the time, PP+M signed to the nascent Warner Bros (significantly not the "traditional folk music labels -- Vanguard or Folkways), for an advance of $30,000.
Grossman may have put together his idea of a pop-folk trio: what he bought were three hard-headed, highly-principled, committed liberals. The repertoire was collectively agreed: for example, when Stookey became a convinced Christian, Lemon Tree (their first single) was dropped. The first eponymous album [left] released on 1st March 1962, was the number 1 seller for seven weeks, and was in the charts for a total of 185 weeks. It has been calculated as the 36th top-seller of the all vinyl-mad 1960s.
Hammering out the message
If PP+M were meant to be a straight commercial act, they blew that with their follow-up single. The less-savvy college kids may not have noticed why: their elders certainly should have done.
Back in 1949 Pete Seeger and Lee Hays had come up with The Hammer Song for the "fellow-travelling" People's Songs. The target was the red-baiters, already developing into full MacCarthyites of the late 40s. It didn't help when the song was the cover for Sing Out! magazine's first edition [left]. Although the Weavers had recorded it, in 1949, for the minority Harmony label, it never appeared on any of the commercial recordings they did for Decca. Indeed, they were selective about when and where they performed it.
Largely because of PP+M, for whom it won a 1962 Grammy, If I Had a Hammer quickly became a musical cliché. Yet, as that Newport version above shows, PP+M made it, in live performance, a matter of anger and intent.
The March on Washington
Jumping over a fair bit of history, Blowin' in the Wind (apparently, PP+M's version remains the most commercially-successful of any Dylan song), Puff (which was quickly corrupted by the Vietnam War into one nick-name for a DC3 gunship), the 1963 Newport Festival, any of which could provide a blog entry, let's move on apace to the August, 1963, March on Washington, for which Yarrow was a co-organiser. The two songs the group sang were Hammer and Blowin' in the Wind. They would later also be alongside Martin Luther King at Selma; and remember him at the 1971 anti-war March:
Conclusion
This diatribe has gone on too long already.
A good woman, a true comrade has died. It would be gratifying, here, to throw in some palliative, to make a trite parallel between Garry Trudeau sending off Andy Lippincott to Pet Sounds:
and Mary Travis living to see a Black American President walk down the road, the white dove sleeping in the sand, the mountain washed to the sea ... all on just the spot they belted that song out in 1971 [see the YouTube video above].
And yet, she wouldn't see it that way. Her acerbic tongue (too long silenced on stage) would have snappily told us not to be ridiculous: this is just another cautious, underperforming President, failing to deliver on his mandate. Cue Noel Paul Stookey's tribute:
Witty, politically savvy, she was the master/mistress of the cutting exit line. Once I was attempting to defend Ronald Reagan's educational policy. She interrupted me with "Oh, for heaven's sake, do your homework", turned on her heel, and walked away. Need I say it turned out she was right?
Imagine a young Malcolm (most things are possible if one really tries), in his cold-water Ballsbridge flat, gentling the stylus into the groove of a borrowed LP, which is being spun on a dodgy Dansette.
The disk is the eponymous Peter, Paul and Mary. _________________________________________________
Then, when he was still -- if only just -- a "teenager", Malcolm needed not to be wholly embarrassed by those sleeve-notes:
... there seems to be something optimistic, something encouraging about this whole musical experience. Peter, Paul and Mary's first album is bright with enthusiasm. No gimmicks. There is just something GOOD about it all. Good in the sense of Virtue, that is. And the news that something this GOOD can be as popular as this is can fill you with a new kind of optimism. Maybe everything's going to be all right. Maybe mediocrity has had it. Maybe hysteria is on the way out. One thing for sure in any case: Honesty is back.
In reality, though, he knew he was being sold a commercial product.
PP&M were a confection by Albert Grossman: "a tall blonde (Mary Travers), a funny guy (Paul Stookey), and a good looking guy (Peter Yarrow)".
And yet ...
PP&M were earning their ticket. Notably, at the 1963 March on Washington for "jobs, justice and peace": an event consciously imitated during the recent Presidential Inauguration.
Today ...
Now Malcolm continues to rebuild his iTunes library following the aforementioned Great LaCie Terabyte Disaster -- a neat, elegant product, but it definitely doesn't bounce. So, this evening, just that album came up for reloading.
For the first time in many years, then, Malcolm heard it through, from beginning to end, with its curious admixture of nursery songs and stirring uplifts.
He realised why he was caught all those years ago: it probably came out of that -- now hackneyed -- If I Had a Hammer.
Pete Seeger and Lee Hays (both of the Weavers) had put it together as a political piece around 1948-49, in support of the Progressive Party. The younger element may need a prompt here: the Progressive Party nominated former Vice-president Henry Wallace for the 1948 Presidential Election. Wallace had the support of most on the Left, including (tacitly) the American Communist Party and the New York-based American Labor Party. The main lump of the Progressive vote (all 2½% of the national vote) came from New York State.
The song was the cover-piece of the very first issue of Sing Out! magazine. It was in the repertoire of The Weavers. There is a YouTube clip in which Lee Hays remembers how the song became a mainstream standard:
Malcolm refuses to consider how much of that success may have derived from Mary Travers' thrashing hair and dominatrix expression.
Sphere: Related Content
Friday, February 13, 2009
Some day soon The BBC Folk America series has been a lodestone for Malcolm's life the last couple of weekends.
Tonight he watched the second evening's concert from the Barbican. The first night (broadcast last week) had been Seasick Steve introducing a series of decent performers. Tonight was the second concert, with Billy Bragg linking. The theme was "Greenwich Village" recherché. The notion was to go back to Washington Square and environs in the early Sixties.
Fair enough.
Thanks to mortality, too many of the main actors were missing, though Bragg managed to connect a capella with the afterlife in I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night.
The natural termination of the hour was Judy Collins, the original Judy Blue Eyes. She did Both Sides Now, but for Malcolm that should for ever be the divine Jodi Mitchell: he still has the original LP in the attic, and hums along each time each comes into land from a westbound trans-Atlantic flight:
Just before the encore Judy Collins did Some Time Soon. So, switch onto reprise mode, go back half a century, and enjoy:
‘The Keir I Know’
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Politics can often feel like a contest between personalities. The loudest
voice. The sharpest soundbite. The quickest route…
The post ‘The Keir I Know’ a...
Ersatz Elgin
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The V&A has a superfluity of plaster casts of sculptures. I haste past them
as fast as crowds permit. The BM has a hall full of damaged carvings off
the bl...
Malcolm featured in the columns of "Trinity News", the student weekly of Trinity College, Dublin, in the early 1960s.
He worked in public education. He was a borough councillor and parliamentary candidate. He retired. He was bored. He blogged.
Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight --
