Mary Travers, R.I.P.

Originally posted September 17, 2009

From today’s online edition of the New York Times:

Mary Travers, whose ringing, earnest vocals with the folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary made songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” enduring anthems of the 1960s protest movement, died on Wednesday at Danbury Hospital in Connecticut. She was 72 and lived in Redding, Conn.

The cause was complications from chemotherapy associated with a bone-marrow transplant she had several years ago after developing leukemia, said Heather Lylis, a spokeswoman.

Ms. Travers brought a powerful voice and an unfeigned urgency to music that resonated with mainstream listeners. With her straight blond hair and willowy figure and two bearded guitar players by her side, she looked exactly like what she was, a Greenwich Villager directly from the clubs and the coffeehouses that nourished the folk-music revival.

I recall vague bits and pieces of the career of Peter, Paul & Mary: The folk revival of the early 1960s, it’s always seemed to me, rested firmly on the shoulders of the trio brought together by manager Albert Grossman. That’s probably not entirely fair to groups like the Kingston Trio, the Highwaymen and a few others, but it’s not far off the mark to say that once PP&M came along, their visual and musical impact pushed the other folk performers of the day to no better than second place.

In personal terms, I can measure their impact by the simple fact that in 1963 or so, I knew who they were. I saw them on television at times, and I was aware – coming at the fact from the news end rather than the music end; as I’ve said before, I’ve always been a news junkie – that they were active in the Civil Rights movement: The trio performed “If I Had A Hammer” and Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” during the 1963 March on Washington.

I don’t think we ever had any of the group’s LPs in the house. For some reason, we had the sheet music to “Puff (The Magic Dragon)” in our pile of songbooks and songs; it was likely my sister’s. And I knew “Lemon Tree,” the song that brought Peter, Paul & Mary their first hit (No. 35 during the summer of 1962), but I knew it from the version by Trini Lopez. Still, their music was somehow part of the background as I grew up.

The last of their twelve Top 40 hits came along not long after radio and I became friends: “Leaving On A Jet Plane,” which had been on 1967’s Album 1700, went to No. 1 and was inescapable during the autumn and early winter of 1969. (Their other Top Ten hits were “If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song),” “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” all in 1963, and the winking “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” in 1967.) And I remember all of those, even if I wasn’t paying much attention for a large part of the time.

Beyond the music, the trio had a cultural impact, too: The sight of the mustaches and goatees on Peter Yarrow and Noel Paul Stookey and of Travers’ long and straight blonde hair brought to the mainstream a safe version of the style of the bohemian folk and beat movements of the 1950s. Though some in the folk movement criticized Peter, Paul & Mary for, essentially, having sold out, their style bridged a gap and made folk music palatable and accessible to a broader audience.

And one gets the impression that the message in the music was the important point, at least most of the time. Along with a couple of other tracks on Album 1700, “I Dig Rock and Roll Music” was fairly inconsequential with its sly lyrical and aural references to the Mamas and the Papas. (There’s an interesting linkage there, as the Mamas and the Papas were also seen by some as having sold out, performing radio-friendly folk-pop while wearing hippie fashions.) But most of the trio’s music was thoughtful as well as listenable.

Perhaps the last word here about the importance of the message in the music should go to Travers herself. In its online edition today, the New York Daily News quoted Travers from an undated interview:

“I’m not sure I want to be singing ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ when I’m 75 . . . But I know I’ll still be singing ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’”

A Six-Pack of Peter, Paul & Mary
“If I Had A Hammer” from Peter, Paul & Mary [1962]
“500 Miles” from Peter, Paul & Mary [1962]
“Hush-A-Bye” from In The Wind [1963]
“No Other Name” from Album 1700 [1967]
“The Song Is Love” from Album 1700 [1967]
“All My Trials” from In The Wind [1963]

Dragons (And Music) Live Forever

It was eight years ago today that the Texas Gal and I took my mother to see Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary. I posted this piece two days later.

“If you ask me who I am,” mused Peter Yarrow for a moment Sunday evening, “well . . .” And he paused as he looked out at the audience in St. Cloud’s Pioneer Place. “As I always have been, I’m the one who carries forward the tradition of Peter, Paul & Mary.”

And then, with his son Christopher playing a wash-tub bass and supplying vocal harmony, he launched himself into another song recorded by Peter, Paul & Mary. It might have been “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” or “Lemon Tree.” It could have been “All My Trials” or “Jesus Met The Woman.” It could have been the final pair of the evening: “If I Had A Hammer” and “Blowin’ In The Wind.”

I don’t remember which tune it was that followed Yarrow’s statement. I wasn’t taking notes. Rather, I was sitting in the front row, flanked by my mother and the Texas Gal. We were just to the right of center stage, as close as I’ve ever been for a performance by a legend. I watched Yarrow’s left hand play with his picks as he talked between songs. I saw his eyes get a little misty as he talked about his family – many of whom live in Willmar, Minnesota, just seventy miles away (and many of whom, along with other friends from that Central Minnesota city, were at the performance). I saw the slight tremors in his seventy-three-year-old legs as he moved to sit on a stool instead of stand several times during the performance.

But mostly, I just watched and listened as a giant of folk music worked the room and turned what I expected to be a concert into a three-hour sing-along. From the opening tune, “Music Speaks Louder Than Words” through the two closing songs mentioned above, Yarrow encouraged the two hundred or so folks at Pioneer Place to join in.

After all, he said, as he introduced his second tune – “Leaving On A Jet Plane,” performed in memory of his long-time friend and partner, Mary Travers, who passed on in 2009 – “You’ll sing along anyway, or at least mouth the words, so you may as well sing.” And sing we did, sometimes pretty confidently – as on the medley of “This Little Light Of Mine,” “Down By The Riverside” and “This Land Is Your Land” – and sometimes a little more tentatively, as in the case of “Stewball” and “Have You Been To Jail For Justice?”

And sometimes, we just listened, as we did when Yarrow sang his potent anti-war song “The Great Mandala.”

Yarrow remains unabashedly liberal and spoke a few times about the causes he supports. He mentioned his marching at Selma, Alabama, during the early 1960s civil rights movement and talked about the performance by Peter, Paul & Mary at the 1963 rally at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have A Dream” speech. Yarrow noted that he and his children – Christopher and Bethany – have visited and performed at several of the Occupy sites in the past year.

He also talked about his current project, Operation Respect, an educational program aimed at “creating compassionate, safe and respectful environments.” The theme song for Operation Respect is “Don’t Laugh At Me,” a song that first showed up on PP&M’s final studio album, 2003’s In These Times:

When Yarrow introduced the tune Sunday evening, he said, “You’ll all know some of the people in this song. You might have been some of them. And some of you will weep.” He was right. And the performance – during which, of course, we sang along on the chorus – earned Yarrow a mid-concert standing ovation.

I’ve listened to Yarrow’s music – the massive catalog of PP&M and his own, more slender catalog – for years, but I’ve never dug very deeply into the history and lore of the group and its three members, so I was intrigued to learn Sunday evening that Yarrow’s ex-wife, Mary Beth, was the niece of Eugene McCarthy, the late U.S. Senator from Minnesota. The two met during McCarthy’s 1968 campaign for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. And I was even more intrigued when Yarrow told us that not only was Noel Paul Stookey – “Paul” of PP&M – Yarrow’s best man when he and Mary Beth were married but that Stookey sang during the ceremony a song written specifically for the wedding.

It took a lot of talking, Yarrow said, to persuade Stookey to record and release “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” which turned out to be a No. 24 hit and was, Yarrow said, the No. 1 sheet music seller for ten years. And as Yarrow then sang “The Wedding Song (There Is Love),” the rest of us joined in on the choruses.

Yarrow’s most famous song is likely “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Addressing the myth of the song’s reference to drugs, Yarrow told us Sunday evening that he and co-writer Leonard Lipton never had any thought besides writing a song about the loss of childhood. And he called up to the stage the younger folks in the audience – which meant, Sunday evening, those under thirty-five – and those folks (many of whom, I presume, were friends and family from Willmar) helped Yarrow and the rest of us sing that great song.

As he led us through the song, there were a few changes: The line “A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys” is now “A dragon lives forever, but not so little girls and boys.” And the final chorus is now sung in present tense: “Puff the magic dragon lives by the sea and frolics in the autumn mist in a land called Hona-Lee.”

Puff lives forever. So will Yarrow’s music. Here’s “Puff” in its original 1963 form:

Edited slightly on reposting.

Saturday Single No. 653

As this month opened, we did here one of our exercises in Symmetry, matching the number of years in the past with a position on the Billboard Hot 100. In that particular case, we were in the year 1963, and we ended up listening to a dismal Al Martino ditty, “Painted Tainted Rose,” that topped off at No. 15 on the Hot 100 and No. 3 on the magazine’s Middle-Road Singles chart, the chart that these days is called Adult Contemporary.

It was a dissatisfying conclusion, as sometimes happens when blindly heading toward specific positions on specific charts. But as we seek a Saturday Single this morning, I thought we’d head back to the summer of 1963 and take a look at the top ten on the Billboard Middle-Road Singles chart during the second week or August.

That’s the kind of stuff that was playing on the radio stations we listened to on Kilian Boulevard at the time, when I was preparing for fifth grade and reading news stories in the Minneapolis Star that I didn’t entirely understand about places like Mississippi and Vietnam. I imagine I’ll recognize some of that top ten and find a tune suitable for an August morning fifty-six years later. So here we go:

“Blowin’ In The Wind” by Peter, Paul & Mary
“More” by Kai Winding
“Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport” by Rolf Harris
“Hopeless” by Andy Williams
“Abilene” by George Hamilton IV
“Green, Green” by the New Christy Minstrels
“Detroit City” by Bobby Bare
“Danke Schoen” by Wayne Newton
“My Whole World Is Falling Down” by Brenda Lee
“True Love Never Runs Smooth” by Gene Pitney

Well, I’m familiar with seven of those, and I’d say I remember four of them from that long-ago season. The three I’m not familiar with by title are those by Andy Williams, Brenda Lee and Gene Pitney; none of the three show up in the digital stacks. (I thought the Pitney might, as I seem to recall scavenging a Pitney anthology once upon a time.) Even after a trip to YouTube, I recall none of the three.

And then there are the three I know most likely from other times: “Danke Schoen,” “Abilene” and “Detroit City.” I know Newton’s single, and I’ve never liked it (just as I’ve never liked anything I’ve heard from Newton, probably because of his voice). I know the song “Abilene,” most likely from a different version, as I have no memory of Hamilton’s version, which was itself a cover of Bob Gibson’s 1957 recording. And I know Bare’s “Detroit City,” but only because I’ve come across it in the many years since. I doubt I knew any of those three back in the summer of 1963.

Then, there are four from that top ten that I generally recall hearing from the radio either at home or at friends’ homes or wherever: “Blowin’ In The Wind,” “More,” “Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport” and “Green, Green.” I recall the Rolf Harris single mostly because I didn’t understand that the word “me” in the title was a possessive; I wondered why the singer wanted to be tied down like a kangaroo.

The other three have been part of my musical environment since that summer, especially the Peter, Paul & Mary and New Christy Minstrels singles. In the case of “More,” I have no doubt recalled the song itself over the years more than the specific single; versions of “More” floated around the easy listening world in amazing numbers. (I once put up a post here that offered the original version of “More” from the film Mondo Cane and eighteen covers of the song.)

Still, when I plunged into music collecting online in early 2000 and came across Winding’s version of the song, I was pretty sure it was the version I recalled hearing when I was a sprout. Call it eighty percent certainty.

As to the other two singles, I’m not sure I need to say anything. I remember hearing them – and liking them – in 1963, and Peter, Paul & Mary have popped up here often enough to make my opinions of them obvious. I also recall assessing “Green, Green” here favorably.

So how to decide between the two records this morning? Well, I’ve featured “Green, Green” here before at least once, and as far as I recall (and I may be wrong), for as many times as I’ve written about the music of Peter, Paul & Mary, their cover of perhaps Bob Dylan’s greatest song has seemingly never been featured here. And it was omnipresent during the summer of 1963. It was No. 1 on the Middle-Road Singles chart for five weeks and went to No. 2 on the Hot 100. And the album from which it was pulled – In The Wind – was No. 1 on the Billboard 200 for five weeks.

So here’s Peter, Paul & Mary’s version of “Blowin’ In The Wind.” It’s today’s Saturday Single.

‘I’ve Seen Trouble . . .’

I’m finding it hard to lift my head and get anything done that’s not essential. Why? Most likely a combination of my revulsion at the turns our national life seems to be taking these days and the depressive effects of my own cyclical biochemistry, along with, no doubt, grief.

My goal in the midst of that this morning was to write a bit about the fortieth anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley, but I found little to say. So I let that go, and that’s okay, for as important as Elvis Presley was to the music that I love, I was never more than a casual fan. Others can testify far better than I.

Instead, I went looking for “sorrow” in the RealPlayer and found – among other titles – sixteen versions of the tune “Man of Constant Sorrow,” some with different titles. Wikipedia tells me that the first version of the song was published in 1913 “by Dick Burnett, a partially blind fiddler from Kentucky” under the title “Farewell Song.”

The first recorded version, according to Second Hand Songs, was a release on Vocalion by Emry Arthur in 1928. The website lists fifty-six additional versions of the tune, ranging from a 1951 cover by the Stanley Brothers with the Clinch Mountain Boys to a 2015 cover by Dwight Yoakam.

In the midst of that bit of digging, I ran a search in this blog’s archives and found that I’ve never featured any version of the tune and have mentioned it just once in passing, in a 2007 meditation on the definition of “folk music.”

So here are Peter, Paul & Mary with my favorite version of that oft-covered tune. It was titled simply “Sorrow” and was on their self-titled debut album in 1962.

‘And It Came To Pass . . .’

With a storm moving in for Christmas Day itself, we’ve advanced our plans by one day, making today one of preparation and tomorrow the day that the Texas Gal, my mother and I will go to celebrate the holiday at my sister’s home in the northwestern suburb of Maple Grove.

But before I head out for some final shopping, I wanted to stop by here. As long-time readers know, I don’t really do much Christmas music. But this season, we’ll expand this blog’s Christmas music playlist by one song and then wish all of you and all of yours a joyful and peaceful holiday tomorrow, however you mark the day.

Here’s “Christmas Dinner” by Peter, Paul & Mary. Written by Noel Paul Stookey, it was released on the 1969 album Peter, Paul & Mommy.

And it came to pass on a Christmas evening
While all the doors were shuttered tight
Outside standing, a lonely boy-child
Cold and shivering in the night

On the street every window
Save but one was gleaming bright
And to this window walked the boy-child
Peeking in, saw candlelight

Through other windows he had looked at turkeys
And ducks and geese and cherry pies
But through this window saw a gray-haired lady
Table bare and tears in her eyes

Into his coat reached the boy-child
Knowing well there was little there
He took from his pocket his own Christmas dinner
A bit of cheese, some bread to share

His outstretched hands held the food
And they trembled, as the door it opened wide
Said he “Would you share with me Christmas Dinner?”
And gently said she, “Come inside”

The gray-haired lady brought forth to the table
Glasses to their last drop of wine
Said she, “Here’s a toast to everyone’s Christmas
And especially yours and mine”

And it came to pass on that Christmas evening
While all the doors were shuttered tight
That in that town, the happiest Christmas
Was shared by candlelight

‘Hi Ho, Nobody Home . . .’

When our small band of church musicians looked ahead to Sunday’s scheduled celebration of the season and of holiday traditions from around the world, we dug into our songbooks and memories and our collections of LPs, CDs and mp3s for some inspiration.

And one of the tunes that my friend (and co-musician) Tom came up with was “A’Soalin’,” recorded in 1963 by Peter, Paul & Mary for their Moving album:

Tom told us (and will tell our fellowship members Sunday) that the song arises from the English Christmas tradition of handing out goodies on the day after Christmas. It’s far more likely that the song arose from the tradition of handing out what were called soul cakes on All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween) and that Peter, Paul & Mary turned it into a quasi-Christmas song by appending a verse from “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” to the ending. But never mind. It’s a good tune.

(But the spelling puzzles me: How did “soul” become “soal”? I suppose we’d have to ask the writers, who are Noel Paul Stookey, Elaina Mezzetti and Tracy Batteste for the song. I have no idea who Tracy Batteste is; the only time I seem to find her name online is in collection with “A’Soalin’.” Mezzetti, according to the official Peter, Paul & Mary website, is Peter Yarrow’s sister; Yarrow said she was given writing credit on “A’Soalin’” and some other PP&M tunes to provide her some income. So if anyone knows why the spelling changed, I imagine it’s Stookey. If I ever get the chance, I’ll ask him.)

Anyway, the odd thing about “A’Soalin’” was that when Tom introduced us to the song, I knew the first verse. Long ago, as I wrote about cover versions, I told the story of my dad’s gift to me in early 1965 of an album titled Ringo, featuring the spoken-word tale made famous by Lorne Greene. The 1964 album, however, was by a group called the Deputies, and that disappointed me. Still, I listened to the album, unhappily comparing the Deputies’ lame version of “Ringo” to the one I heard on the radio. But I also heard for the first time “Big Bad John” and versions of other songs in the public domain: “Shenandoah,” “Darling Nelly Gray,” “(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey” (offered as just “Bill Bailey”) and a few others.

And I heard an odd track with melancholy lyrics and a melody offered at points as a round and studded with abrupt ascending key changes. It got a trifle manic at points. The Deputies called it “Hi Ho.” And I liked it well enough.

It is, of course, the first verse of what PP&M had recorded in 1963 as “A’Soalin’.” I’d once considered digging the Deputies’ album from its place on my country shelf, but I’d been thinking at the time about their versions of “Big Bad John” and “Shenandoah.” I’d not thought about “Hi Ho” for years, until Tom shared the PP&M track with us.

So I listened to the Deputies again and realized it’s not as neat to me in 2015 as it was fifty years ago. And that’s okay.

‘You’re Never Too Old To Change The World . . .’

Pete Seeger passed away yesterday. His story is well told in today’s edition of the New York Times (and told in great detail at Wikipedia), and I thought that instead of trying (and failing) to tell the whole story this morning, I’d just share a few moments of Seeger’s musical life and heritage.

Seeger was a founding member of the Weavers, the early 1950s folk group that had a No. 1 hit with Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” and was blacklisted for its liberal leanings during the 1950s Red Scare. This is the Weavers’ 1950 recording of “If I Had A Hammer (The Hammer Song),” written by Seeger and fellow Weaver Lee Hayes.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Seeger was considered by many to be a dangerous man. As Wikipedia relates, “In 1960, the San Diego school board told him that he could not play a scheduled concert at a high school unless he signed an oath pledging that the concert would not be used to promote a communist agenda or an overthrow of the government. Seeger refused, and the American Civil Liberties Union obtained an injunction against the school district, allowing the concert to go on as scheduled. In February 2009, the San Diego School District officially extended an apology to Seeger for the actions of their predecessors.”

Seeger’s songs and music were without doubt popular and important far beyond the reach of radio and pop music. Still, in the 1960s, a few of his songs provided hits. “If I Had A Hammer” was a hit for both Trini Lopez (No. 3, 1963) and Peter, Paul & Mary (No. 10, 1962). (It’s likely, for what it may matter, that Lopez’ version of the song is the first Pete Seeger song I ever heard, as a copy of Lopez’ single came home with my sister one day in one of those record store grab bags of ten singles for a dollar. I still have the single, with “Unchain My Heart” on the flipside.) The Byrds (No. 1, 1965) and Judy Collins (No. 69, 1969) reached the charts with “Turn! Turn! Turn!” And “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” was a hit for the Kingston Trio (No. 21, 1962) and Johnny Rivers (No. 26, 1965), while a version by guitarist Wes Montgomery bubbled under the chart (No. 119, 1969).

Perhaps the greatest attention Seeger got in the 1960s was when he was scheduled to perform his Vietnam allegory, “Waist Deep In The Big Muddy” on the CBS television show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, in September 1967. Wikipedia notes, “Although the performance was cut from the September 1967 show, after wide publicity it was broadcast when Seeger appeared again on the Smothers’ Brothers show in the following January.” Here’s that January 1968 performance:

This morning, after I heard the news of Seeger’s passing, I dug around at YouTube for something different to post at Facebook. I came across a mini-documentary detailing how Seeger came to recite Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young” for the 2012 collection Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring 50 Years of Amnesty International. It’s a piece that tells as much about Seeger as it does about the recording he was invited to make. I was especially moved at the end of the piece when one of the Rivertown Kids, the Seeger-organized choir of young people involved in the recording, seemed to sum up Seeger’s life about as well as can be done: “You’re never too old the change the world.”

‘Stewball Was A Race Horse . . .’

Now, about the song “Stewball.” We offered in this spot yesterday the version of the song recorded in 1940 by Lead Belly and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet for the Victor label. Pretty much a work song, that was the second of several iterations of the folk song that arose in England in the late Eighteenth Century.

Second Hand Songs notes: “Skewball, born in 1741, was a racehorse bred by Francis, Second Earl of Goldolphin. The horse, a gelding, was purportedly the top earning racer in Ireland in 1752, when he was 11. The song apparently originated as a ballad about a high stakes race occurring in the Curragh in Kildare, Ireland, in March 1752, which Skewball won.” The website gives a date of 1784 for the song, noting that the date “is for the oldest broadside identified of the ballad . . . held by the Harding Collection of the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford.”

The webpage continues, “According to John and Alan Lomax in American Ballads and Folk Songs, the ballad was converted into a work song by slaves – which is supported by the version of the lyrics published in their book. ‘Skewball’ apparently became ‘Stewball’ after the song migrated to the United States.”

Beyond the work song version of “Stewball,” the original story-song continued to be recorded. A 1953 recording by Cisco Houston is the earliest listed in the on-going project at Second Hand Songs, but Woody Guthrie recorded the tale of the horse race in 1944 or 1945. His version was released in 1999 on Buffalo Skinners: The Asch Recordings, Vol. 4 on the Smithsonian Folkways label.

Then came along the Greenbriar Boys. A trio made up by 1960 of John Herald, Ralph Rinzler, and Bob Yellin, the group, says All Music Guide, was “[o]ne of the first urban bands to play bluegrass” and was “instrumental in transforming the sounds of the hill country from a Southern music to an international phenomenon.” The Greenbriar Boys released their first two albums of bluegrass tunes in 1962 and 1964, but of more import for us today is a tune that showed up on New Folks, a 1961 sampler on the Vanguard label. Herald, Rinzler and Yellin set the words of “Stewball” to a simple, folkish tune (written by Yellin, according to website Beatles Songwriting Academy) and recorded the song as their contribution to the album:

After that, covers of the new version followed: From Peter, Paul & Mary in 1963 (a single release went to No. 35 and is the only version to chart), from Joan Baez in 1964 and from the Hollies in 1966, according to Second Hand Songs. And I know there are many other covers. Most of those take on the Greenbriar’s Boys’ version (including one by Mason Proffit on its 1969 album Wanted), but there are other covers of the early folk version and the work song version as well. I didn’t go digging too deeply, though, because something else about the song grabbed my attention this week.

Now, I’ve heard the version of “Stewball” using the Greenbriar Boys’ melody several times over the years, notably the versions by Mason Proffit and Peter, Paul & Mary. Heck, I even sang it along with Peter Yarrow at a concert a year-and-a-half ago. But I’d never noticed or thought about the tune’s similarity to another famous song until this week.

Last Tuesday, I ran past Second Hand Songs while looking for an interesting cover of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s 1971 single “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”, and when the results came up that put the Lennon/Ono tune in the adaptation tree for “Stewball,” I did a mild double-take. And then I thought about it, running the two tunes through my head. And yeah, John (and Yoko, to whatever degree she was involved in the writing, listed as she is as a composer) lifted the melody and chord structure from the Greenbriar Boys’ version of “Stewball.” There were a few changes, notably a key change and the addition of the “War is over if you want it” chorus, but it was essentially the same song.

And I’m not at all sure why Herald, Rinzler and Yellin didn’t complain. Does anybody know?

Memorial Day, 2009

Originally posted May 25, 2009

It’s another Memorial Day, another day to reflect. We’ve been told that some of our soldiers will this year begin to come home. Let’s hope that’s true. We’ve also been told that more of our soldiers are required to fight elsewhere. Let’s hope that’s for a brief time. These are the same songs as last year and the year before; if that’s a disappointment, I’m sorry. These are the songs that remind me of those whom we are supposed to remember today.

“Requiem for the Masses” by the Association, Warner Bros. single 7074 [1967]

“I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” by Phil Ochs from Rehearsals For Retirement [1969]

“War” by Edwin Starr, Gordy single 7101 [1970]

“Where Have All The Flowers Gone” by Peter, Paul & Mary from Peter, Paul & Mary [1962]

“One Tin Soldier (The Legend of Billy Jack)” by Coven, Warner Bros. single 7509 [1971]

“Universal Soldier” by Buffy Sainte-Marie from It’s My Way! [1964]

“Masters of War” by Bob Dylan from Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan [1962]

“Give Peace A Chance” by the Plastic Ono Band (John Lennon), Apple single 1809 [1969]

“2+2=?” by the Bob Seger System from Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Man [1968]

“Handsome Johnny” by Richie Havens from Mixed Bag [1967]

“Bring The Boys Home” by Freda Payne, Invictus single 909 [1971]

“All The Young Women” by the Cuff Links from Tracy [1970]

“Bring ’Em Home” by Bruce Springsteen from We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (American Land Edition) [live, most likely in Detroit, 2006]

As I’ve noted the past two years, times have changed enough since Freda Payne, the Cuff Links and Peter, Paul & Mary recorded their songs that we now need to also bring the girls home, and we need to grieve as well with all the young men who have lost loved ones.

Saturday Single No. 341

It’s not something we planned, but there we were yesterday afternoon, the Texas Gal and I, walking through the house where I grew up on Kilian Boulevard.

We’d been looking for a garage sale just a few doors down, and when we’d seen nothing going on out front, we’d headed back up the alley. There was no sign of a sale, but at the very end of the alley, we saw the current owner of my old house sitting in a lawn chair, watching two of his children as they played on a trampoline.

He looked at us as I stopped the car. The Texas Gal whispered “What are you doing?” as I lowered the window on her side of the car and leaned over and asked, “You still have the piano in the dining room?” Surprised, he nodded. “Good,” I said. “That used to be my piano when I was a kid.”

“You lived here?”

I nodded, and he said, “You want to see the place?”

The Texas Gal started to say “No,” but I nodded again and said, “Let me pull around and park.” I put our 2007 Versa in the spot where my dad used to park his 1952 Ford, and we walked up the driveway.

Sadly, I don’t remember the man’s name. He and his wife have owned the house for a few years. The family that Mom sold it to in 2004 rented it out for a while when the economy went bad in 2008 or so, and then the current owners picked up the place. As we stood in the back yard, he asked me, “Are you the one who kept all those detailed notes? About when things were bought and where things came from?”

I laughed. “No,” I said, “That was my dad. I hope they’ve been handy.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said as we headed toward the house. He told us his wife – a nurse who works odd hours – was sleeping upstairs with the baby, so we couldn’t go up there, and he and their two other children led us into their home.

I showed him how the small mud room and the small pantry had been combined into a back porch when my folks remodeled the kitchen in 1960 or so, and he nodded. He asked if the linoleum – a pattern of blue and gold snowflakes on a flecked gold and white background – came from that time. I said yes, and the little girl told me, “Mom and Dad don’t really like it.”

I laughed. “It’s old-fashioned,” I said.

He asked about the woodwork, and I told him that when we moved in back in 1957, it had all been dark like the woodwork upstairs, that it was my folks who removed the varnish and dark stain from the wood downstairs and on the stairway. He led us down the hall and into the living room, where the floors were now bare, with the beautiful light wood showing. Someone else took up the carpet from the floors, he said, but he’d taken it off the steps, revealing that wood for the first time in nearly fifty years. He asked if there’d ever been a wood stove in the dining room, given that there’s an indentation near the corner where the chimney runs. I said we’d never had one there, but it was likely that there’d been one there when the house was built in 1917.

And then I stood at my piano. Given that the lady of the house was sleeping upstairs, I didn’t think about playing it, but I caressed its keys and the name of the manufacturer – Wegman – still clearly inscribed just above the keyboard. I looked at the little girl. When we’d been in the back yard, her dad had told me she played the piano. She was looking up at me, and I asked her, “Do you play every day?” She nodded. I leaned over and tousled her hair and then told her, “Play it well.” She smiled and nodded again.

I asked if I could see the basement, and the Texas Gal whispered “We should go.”

The man said, “No, this is wonderful. It’s kind of like one of those TV shows.”

So I headed down the basement stairs, and as I neared the spot where the low ceiling can clonk the unwary, the girl told me “Watch your head!” Her dad chuckled and said, “He’s walked down these stairs many times, honey.” He asked about the fruit cellar, and I told him it had been here when we moved in but that Dad had built the shelves. “Then he must have built the shelves in storage room on the other side of the basement,” he said.

Yes, I said, telling him that the further storage room had been a water cistern and that my folks had hired a man with a jackhammer to break through the basement wall into the cistern and then made another storage room. “We love it,” he said, and he began rummaging in a box on the cistern shelves. “And we love the fact that your dad kept bits and pieces here of what he’d done.” And he showed me a box with some leftover paneling pieces from when Dad built the basement rec room in 1968.

He opened a drawer in the laundry cabinet and pulled out a sheaf of owner’s manuals and warranty papers, evidence of the purchase of the washer, the dryer, the cabinets and more, many of them dated in either Mom’s handwriting or Dad’s. And then he pointed into the basement rafters, nudging with his index finger a curtain rod with a tag with Dad’s handwriting on it. The tag said the rod came from the living room window when new window treatments were installed in 1991.

“This is where I found the quarter-round for the living room, the dining room and the stairs,” he said, pointing at the basement rafters where the quarter-round had lain since 1960 or so. “It was all stored up here and all marked, so once I found it, it was easy to put back in place. I bless that man for taking such good care of this place for so many years.”

I nodded, and we headed back upstairs and toward the back door. By the time we got to the door, I could talk again, and we thanked the man for letting us into his home. We’d told him where we lived, and we said that he and his family should stop in if they should ever happen to see us outside. We walked across that familiar back yard to the driveway and down to the car, and as we drove off, I smiled, delighted that the house still has people living in it who love it, respect it and take care of it.

And although the meaning of the song isn’t quite the same as what I felt yesterday, I found myself drawn this morning into “The House Song” by Peter, Paul & Mary. It’s on Album 1700 from 1967, and it’s today’s Saturday Single.