Oh What A Beautiful City

Pete Seeger continues to be a big favorite for my toddler. Standing in the chair in front of the stereo, he pulls the Pete Seeger CD of choice out of the stack, gets the disc out of the case, opens the CD player drawer, places the disc in, closes the drawer—and finds his favorite songs by himself.

This all started with him simply calling out the names of songs or artists he wanted to hear and repeating the name with great insistence. Then he started asking for CDs to put into the player himself. And now, most recently, he's been cuing up the desired songs without help.

The first song he did this with was Sweet Potatoes, on We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert (1963). He figured out how to press the track advance button three times to get to track 3 on disc 2. What was mind blowing, though, was when he figured out how to get to track 18 on the Children's Concert At Town Hall (Abiyoyo). I'm pretty sure that at 2 1/2 he hasn't learned to count to 18 but rather has learned to recognize what the track number for Abiyoyo looks like in the CD player display. Still, it's pretty darn cool . . .

It's a good thing I like Pete Seeger so much. Instead of getting sick of the recordings, I've been finding new pleasures in songs I hadn't paid as much attention to when I was younger. The first song that struck me this way was Pete's rendition of the the John Lair song, Little Birdie. The liner notes say Pete learned the song in the 1940s from one the Coon Creek Girls, who were Lair's proteges. Pete's mountain-style banjo on this track is hypnotic, and the lyrics are beautiful. When I tried to find a transcription of them online, there were many versions of the song, but none with words that Pete sings on this recording—which makes me think that it was Pete himself who came up with this most deeply poetic and mysterious version of the song that I've come to love so well:

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes you fly so high?
It's because I am a true little bird
And I do not fare to die?

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your wings so blue?
It's because I've been a grieving
Grievin' after you.

Little birdie, little birdie,
What makes your head so red?
Well after all that I've been through
It's a wonder I ain't dead.

Little birdie, little birdie,
Come sing to me a song.
I've a short while to be here,
And a long time to be gone.

In the middle two verses, the movement between the images and the states of mind and emotion they signify reminds me of reading William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Exprience (of all things). Maybe that's just the ballad tradition bubbling up through both the 19th and 20th centuries, but I can't really say.

Now to the song that got me writing this post in the first place: Oh What A Beautiful City, as performed on We Shall Overcome. You can read the lyrics of a different version here, but first just sit back and listen.

The credits say Pete's version is as adapted and arranged by Marion Hicks. There is almost nothing about her on the internet, and there do not seem to be any recordings to her name. In looking around, I discovered a noted arrangement by Edward Boatner, who seems like an interesting figure in Black musical history whom I hadn't heard of before.

I really want to know about Marion Hicks. If any readers can tell me more about her, or if anyone knows good recordings of Oh What A Beautiful City by African American gospel artists, or any other interesting recordings, or anything else about the song's history, please let me know in the comments.

UPDATE

Via Guy Carawan, Rise Up Singing notes that "Marion Hicks was a cook in Brooklyn who taught this traditional song to the Seeger family." She is credited with new words and adaptation of words and
music.