Light Flight

I first heard this song in 1970 or so, on the wonderful, and madly eclectic, WHFS-FM. That led me to buy the album, and that led me into one of the enduring loves, or at least likes, of my life: the English Electric Folky groups of the 60s and 70s.

Light Flight is not electric though, and it's not even all that folky, except for Jacqui McShee's soprano, and John Renbourn's guitar. It's more jazzy than anything else; but there's also Swingle-Singers-style scatting, and dreamy, hippy-dippy lyrics, and a mix of time signatures including 5/8, 7/8 and 6/4. (Or so says Wikipedia; I tried to figure out the time signatures myself, and couldn't.)

Wiki also says, oddly enough, that Light Flight was used as theme music for a 1969-71 BBC drama series, Take Three Girls, about three young ladies sharing a flat in Swinging London.

KLEM FM

linky

Marlene's German lyrics closely follow the very simple English ones. Test your German familiarity. I do like one distinction, however:

Wann wird man je verstehen, [When will they ever learn,]

Wann wird man je verstehen? [When will they ever learn?]

     I put the English version in brackets, not as a translation, but for comparison. My book-learned German says that wann wird man je verstehen should translate to "when will one ever understand."  But Google translate begs to differ and translates wann wird man je verstehen as "when will we ever learn." And that's just it -- Google has vastly improved the message and the meaning of the original song. It's the pronoun, you see.

     The original phrase "when will they ever learn" grates on me because it blames others for the human condition. In the context of the original song, it was very much an "us vs. them" mentality. According to Pete Seeger and a very eager postwar generation, war was what other people did. Nowadays, war is what the US does; "others" are freedom fighters. The German version is one step closer to the truth and Google is a full measure closer to the truth:

Not "when will they ever learn"; not "when will one ever learn"; but rather -- when will we ever learn?  It's the pronoun, you see.

      Pete Seeger is credited with writing most of the song, but a lesser-known songwriter named Joe Hickerson (who is still alive?) nearly perfected it by turning the song into a circle. Another example of such a circular song is Zager and Evans' "In The Year 2525." Can anyone think of others?

The song is also an example of a now rare artistic device called Ubi Sunt.

Sing Hosanna, Hallelujah!

This one is my mother's favorite.  I adore it too--what's not to like? The song features a banjo, that greatest of American instruments. It also has a complexity which many Christmas Carols lack.

The New Christy Minstrels spawned the likes of Barry McGuire* (Eve of Destruction), Gene Clark (The Byrds), Kim Carnes (Bette Davis Eyes), and the Kenny Rogers. The NCM belonged to that wonderful but brief period of American music between the death of Buddy Holly and the invasion of The Beatles.
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*His growling voice appears briefly at the 1 min 44 sec mark.

The Sinking Of The Reuben James

This post probably belongs below the fold in my last one about JFK-era American folk songs. This one is special for a couple reasons:

(1) The song is from 1961 and was released around the 20th anniversary of the sinking of the USS Reuben James. JFK had his own naval experience memorialized by Jimmy Dean around that time.

(2) The Reuben James sinking predated Pearl Harbor by a full 5 weeks and yet is largely forgotten. Imagine the outrage with today's news cycle.

(3) The song was written by Woody Guthrie at a time when both the political right and left could still unite against common enemies.

(4) Guthrie originally intended to include the names of every sailor lost in the sinking, but settled for "what were their names;"  The maker of this YouTube video admirably succeeds at Guthrie's original goal. I liken the effect to releasing the men's names from the blackened depths--like bubbles coming to the surface each time the song is played:

The Kingston Trio added their own flourish at the end:

Many years have passed since those brave men are gone,
Those cold icy waters they're still and they're calm,
Many years have passed and still I wonder why,
The worst of men must fight and the best of men must die.

A Brief Musical Tribute To The JFK Era

I don't remember JFK's death as I was only three. I do have memories of 1963 -- even earlier than November. My tonsillectomy occurred months before the assassination and I remember waking up in that hospital -- perhaps because it was the very first time I sensed being outside the protective cocoon of my family. But the Kennedy assassination?  Nada. What I do remember are some of the folk songs popular during the Kennedy era which I heard in subsequent years, mostly on my parents' vinyl LPs.

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is My Land

And people complained that Bob Dylan had a poor singing voice.