Last winter I drove to Providence, RI full of trepidation and sadness. My incredible Aunt Esther, my maternal grandfather’s sister, had pneumonia. I was going to see her to make sure I had the chance to say goodbye.
To everyone’s, including her own, surprise, she pulled through. “I saw the pearly gates—and they shut!” she said to us bemusedly. Thus we were able to have the pleasure of gathering together in Providence this summer to celebrate her 99th birthday and the start of her 100th year.
You can’t grow up in in the home of a political radical from the 1950s and 60s without hearing Peter, Paul and Mary. I’m very sad to hear of the death of Mary Travis. She raised the roof for freedom and justice her whole career. If there’s a heavenly place where great spirits celebrate together Mary is surely whooping it up with them now.
Sometimes I think I´m gonna lose my mind
But it don´t look like I ever do
I loved so many people everywhere I went
Some too much, others not enough
I don´t know, I may go down or up or anywhere
But I feel like this scribbling will stay
Maybe if I hadn’t seen so much hard feelings
I might not could have felt other people´s
So when you think of me, if and when you do,
Just say, well, another man’s done gone
Just say, well, another man´s done gone
This clip is from the fabulous documentary, Man in the Sand, about the making of Billy Bragg and Wilco’s Mermaid Avenue record. Mermaid Avenue is the first in what has become a small series of recordings by artists tapped by Woody Guthrie’s daughter Nora to set unrecorded Guthrie lyrics to music. After his death, it was discovered that Woody had left behind 1000 some lyrics that had never been recorded as songs with music.
I watched Man in the Sand last night on Netflix. I’ve loved Mermaid Avenue since it came out in 1998 but did not realize this documentary about the making of the record has been around nearly as long. It’s really, really good. It’s a like a diamond in the rough. So many sparkling, unpretentious moments of beauty. (Though it also grapples with the pretentiousness of Guthrie and of the artists who participated in the Mermaid Avenue recordings.)
The film worked on me emotionally on so many levels. The movie begins with Billie Bragg’s quest for Woody’s America, in an attempt to understand Woody well enough to approach the daunting responsibility of giving musical life to his unrecorded lyrics. These scenes and others throughout the film are deeply evocative of the times my father lived through and the left politics that shaped my family’s experience and world view.
Then there are all the approaches to Woody.
Bragg’s approach to Woody’s America, which I already mentioned.
Woody’s daughter Nora’s approach to her father—how she has used her work as her father’s archivist and as the midwife to the musical rebirthing of his songs to come to know him better and in ways that were not possible for her during his short lifetime; he was ill with Huntington’s disease most of the time she knew him and he died when she was 17. Inter-cut with scenes of Bragg and Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy and others recording Woody’s lyrics are scenes of Nora speaking intimately, often fighting back her tears, about her family life, both her childhood memories of it and what she has come to understand later as a historian.
Arlo Guthrie appears in just one brief sequence—to recount how he learned that This Land Is Your Land was by his father one day when it was taught to him at school. He recalls running home in tears because the other kids knew his own father’s song better than he did. Woody was already ill and not playing much music. But Woody, with physical difficulty, showed Arlo the chords and helped him learn to play it. So much of Woody’s tragic complexity is in this brief story, which Arlo caps with a slightly coy rendition of one of the now famously long suppressed verses of the song.
Another tragedy that the film is now echo for is the untimely death of Wilco’s Jay Bennett, who died very unexpectedly this past May at age 45. While there are many other evocative scenes from the film that I wish I could have found on YouTube, this one is lovely, with Tweedy’s vocal more spare and plaintive than on the Mermaid Avenue version, accompanied just by Bennett, whose lovely piano playing is out of frame until the camera tracks around to the position where you can see the both of them in frame.
In many of the scenes with Billy Bragg and Jeff Tweedy and the others from Wilco and with Natalie Merchant and Corey Harris, it looked to me like they, as well as others involved in the project, kept getting these jolts, as if they are repeatedly startled by beauty they are finding in Woody’s poetry and in the music it has inspired in them.
The film coveys the often painful contradictions among noble human values, the exultations of human creativity and the flawed humanity of the people who fight for equality and freedom and try to make enduring, beautiful things. It shows these many dimensions in Woody and in the people who came together to make more of his songs known and make him more knowable to us as an artist, as a social conscience and as a man.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 24, 2009 at 2:35 pm
This is very funny—and it is an absolutely brilliant bit of musical improvisation from Louis Armstrong and Danny Kaye. I think my favorite moment is when Louis says “but don’t forget Fats Waller” to rhyme off of Danny’s Gustav Mahler, and without missing abeat Danny replies “I wouldn’t do that” in what to my ear sounds like a Waller imitation. Genius stuff, this.
Long time readers of Hungry Blues will know that my love of Louis Armstrong began with his deep importance for my dad. I also grew up listening to and watching the movies of Danny Kaye, who was another of my dad’s artistic heroes.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on June 13, 2009 at 10:39 pm
You may have noticed that Hungry Blues has changed its look. After more than two and a half years with my heavily modified versions of Scott Wallick’s VeryPlainTxt theme, I’ve been feeling the urge to change up the look of my site. When I came across Lucian E. Marin’s Journalist theme a little over a year ago, I wanted to switch to it right away. When it was first released, however, it didn’t offer widgets for managing the sidebar, and I didn’t have the time to learn how to widgetize it myself. But the Journalist theme is now fully widgetized, so I’ve made the switch (and a few modifications).
In addition to changing the design, I’ve added the Disqus comment management system, I’ve pared down the sidebar, and I’ve added pages for my Opentape and for my other activitiy around the web (twitter, flickr, tumblr, last.fm, ma.gnolia, etc.) via friendfeed.
I made one other change, which, for me, was the biggest. When I launched this blog in 2004, the tagline was “Searching the life and times of my father, Paul Greenberg,” and that has remained the tagline until this redesign. Now the tagline is the much blander “Ben Greenberg’s weblog.” One reason for the change is that the original tagline has sometimes misled new visitors to site. I’ve received a good number of comments and emails addressing me as Paul. While it’s an honor to be mistaken for my dad, I’d rather avoid the confusion.
But the main reason for changing the tagline has to do with how other things have changed since I began this blog. When I started Hungry Blues I was figuring out, through my blogging, what my father’s history had to do with my present. That isn’t really a question anymore. I’ve made the connections, and it’s changed the course of my life. Around the time I moved this site from the hosted Typepad blogging service over to my own Wordpress setup, I wrote:
Starting this blog has led me to friendships and political activism with Movement veterans. It has taken me to Mississippi and Alabama. Hungry Blues has led to my current work as a journalist and in internet communications for a human rights organization.
The focus of Hungry Blues broadened, but most everything on the blog has been part of “searching the life and times of my father.” This is still the case, and it will continue to be explained on the About page.
Today is the fourth of Cheshvan on the Jewish calendar—my father’s eleventh yahrtzeit (anniversary of death). It just so happened that in 1997, the fourth of Cheshvan fell on Election Day. It was oddly apropos for my dad. He fought for voting rights in the South as one of Dr. King’s lieutenants, was an expert on proportional representation, designed and implemented the overhaul of New York City’s method of school board elections and was a director of and advisor to many electoral campaigns—perhaps most notably those of New York City Mayor John Lindsay.
Bob Adamenko, Paul Greenberg and John Lindsay in 1965 at Lindsay's first public appearance after becoming Mayor of NYC.
It’s sad that my father did not live to see this presidential election. He would be so thrilled with Barack Obama quite possibly on the threshold of becoming America’s first Black president—and with how Obama’s campaign has been so expansive and revitalizing for American politics. (I can also imagine the arguments he would get into about whether Obama is a progressive candidate; the main thing would be to argue, not to settle on a position.)
Thank you to the readers and commenters at Hungry Blues, to the people from my father’s past who have contacted me through this site, and to all of the new friends and contacts I’ve made through the work I started here.
—
(More information about the photo of my dad and John Lindsay is here.)
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on November 2, 2008 at 3:12 pm
Today The Kid turns 5, and we’re having a party. We have a number of activities planned for the kids that will be occurring at different stations in the space where we’re celebrating. One of the stations will be for music and dancing. When I asked him what music, he quickly replied: Matt Ward, Pete Seeger and the Beatles. I’ve got all of Matt Ward’s recordings on my iPod, and Pete Seeger’s Children’s Concert and 1963 Carnegie Hall concert have long been on the iPod as favorites on car rides, but most of our Beatles are on LPs and CDs around the house. We’re not bringing LPs, of course, but The Kid insisted we collect all of our Beatles CDs for the party: Let It Be, Let It Be … Naked, The White Album, Yellow Submarine, Revolver and Help! And then The Kid said, “will you post Eleanor Rigby on your blog? The one from Yellow Submarine…”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 3, 2008 at 10:22 am
The Beatles were my first musical obsession. When I became a fan of the Beatles in middle school, I collected every recording, poured over every liner note, read biographies, studied the lyrics, listened to the solo projects . . .
It was the first time I’d gotten into music like this. I think it was around my sophomore year in high school that I hit my saturation point with the Beatles. I never stopped liking them, but I moved on. In high school and college, I found Neil Young, Frank Zappa, King Crimson, Steely Dan, Greatful Dead, Talking Heads, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorious, Parliament/Funkadelic, Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus—to name just some, at random . . .
After my dad passed away in 1997, I took it to a new level with Frankie Newton. I compensated for the fact that he only has about 50 recorded songs by collecting recordings by everyone he associated with. For several years, I immersed myself in Newton’s musical milieu, high art, pre-Bop Jazz of the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the earlier stuff from the 1920s, the foundations.
After a while, the Jazz obsession mellowed. Maybe around 2000, I started actively listening again to music from the second half of the 20th century and to current 21st century stuff.
But, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s all come back around to the Beatles. With the help of YouTube, my 4-year-old has been doing with the Beatels what I did starting in around 5th grade. The favorite record for some time has been Let It Be. I am sure we have watched each song played on the rooftop of Apple Records at least 100 times. It’s a good thing the Beatles are so damn good, cause otherwise I’d be going out of mind.
Anyway, I’m telling you all of this to try to explain what it was like to hear this John Lennon outtake from 1968. I love the rooftop performance of “I’ve Got a Feeling.” And I’ve always thought that John makes the song with the song fragment he weaves into Paul’s bluesy love song. What I didn’t know until earlier tonight was that John had recorded “Everyone” separately. From what I could read online, there are a couple of versions out there. So far, I’ve just found this one. It’s rough around the edges, the Julia-like guitar part doesn’t seem totally worked out—and it is beautiful. John really gets me at the end. After the circular lyrics, delivered over repetitive guitar picking, he trails off with that “everybody got the wrong time, everybody got the wrong time . . .”
DVD Maniacs has posted a nice review and overview of the new DVD release of my cousin Alan’s fantastic film, Land of Look Behind. Here’s reviewer Ian Miller’s discussion of the film:
Alan Greenberg is an interesting character. It would seem that his life is made up of random encounters and friendships with some serious heavy hitters (Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Mick Jagger), but he has also worked behind the scenes on such divergent productions like MANDINGO and Bertolucci’s 1900, and most importantly has had a thirty-two year creative partnership with German auteur/madman Werner Herzog (GRIZZLY MAN, EVEN DWARVES STARTED SMALL). While the exact nature of what it exactly is that he does in that partnership is hazy at best (Greenberg jokingly refers to himself as Herzog’s “typist”, referring to the fact that he banged Werner’s story notes for FITZCARRALDO and COBRA VERDE into workable scripts), Werner’s fearlessness in the face of nature and highly dangerous individuals obviously rubbed off on Alan enough for him to take on the formidable task of making LAND OF LOOK BEHIND, a film ostensibly documenting the funeral of reggae superstar/shaman Bob Marley that turns out to be much more.
After showing a map of the island of Jamaica (focusing on the area called “land of look behind”), we see a man with a machete and giant spleef chopping down fruit stalks to gather miniscule toads that live inside them for the length of their lives. He then goes on to explain (in a very musical patois) that we are in the shanty town of Quickstep, at the edge of the nasty Land Of Look Behind badlands/forest, ominously named by the locals as “Me-no-send-you-no-come”. He then proclaims to the wilderness his desire for some industry to come and build factories so he and his townspeople could have some work, instead of collecting toads for some biologist. Soon we are in the presence of Jammy Galloway, a rasta who explains his devotion to Jah and his purpose for “eating” herb before leading a group of devotees through some chanting and drumming, then we’re off to the procession of the recently deceased Bob Marley’s casket through Kingston, where seemingly all day-to-day business has stopped in order for all and sundry to pay respects (the shot of families sitting atop a parked Esso fuel truck is an arresting one). We see the funeral itself, with what had to be the largest open gathering of Rastafarians in the history of the outlaw religion (all inside are covering their dreads, but not so much outside, where one serious young man declares that “When a prophet dies, twenty thousand lions are born”, while a non-dread exclaims that “Bob Marley smoked one hundred spleefs a day! One hundred spleefs a day!!”). Other scenes include performance clips from Lui Lepki and Gregory Isaacs (who is also interviewed), a visit with poet Mutabaruka, and a riveting sequence where a young man named Hansel drags on a spleef until it’s gone and sings along to Bob and The Wailers’ “Crazy Bald Head” in total reverie, and the viewer sees exactly what director Greenberg intends: a sense of dignity and devotion to self and the serving a higher purpose that tears away at the squalor and oppression of one’s daily life.
For a film that had no actual distributor, LAND OF LOOK BEHIND has gone on to be considered one of the greatest documentaries of it’s decade, if not ever, and it’s easy to see why: there is no pompous narration, no cloying sense of sympathy for the subjects, nor is it outwardly trying to manipulate the viewer’s emotions. Plain and simple, it just drops you into an area and lets the pictures and people tell the story. Taking Herzog cinematographer Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein along because of his intrepid nature as well as his masterful eye, Greenberg does a fine job of catching some really memorable images and scenes (the Rasta jail, audience members dancing in total ecstasy), and manages to edit all of it into a cohesive whole that never drags. While those coming in looking for an out-and-out tribute to Marley the artist will be disappointed, they will be rewarded by a touching overview of what he represented to the people of his homeland, a much more fitting homage indeed.
Read the rest to learn about some of the special features of the DVD package.
While his Bubbe was here visiting this weekend, my 4 year old took her on a tour through his favorite YouTube videos—Pete Seeger, M. Ward, the Beatles (“the rooftop concert, Daddy…”). Next, I’ll post the favorite from Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest (“the one where she sings!”), but first you’ve got to see this one we came across last night. Sister Rosetta Tharp is just amazing…
[youtube]PnIJR3PWTT8[/youtube]
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on February 5, 2007 at 8:45 pm
When I was thirteen, my dad took me to the Film Forum, just outside the West Vilage in NYC. My cousin Alan’s first film was being shown there, a film called Land of Look Behind, a documentary about Jamaica just after Bob Marley’s death. At the time I did not know Bob Marley’s music and I knew nothing about Rastafarians or Jamaica.
All I really knew was that when I was five Alan lived with us in our house in Teaneck, NJ. He and my dad used to take photographs together and process them in my dad’s darkroom. We converted our attic into a bedroom for him. Alan photographed me there. He somehow limited the available light to a shaft coming in from a single window.
He left us to go to Europe, where he studied with Roman Polanski, worked with Bernardo Bertolucci, and began his lifelong association and sometime partnership with Werner Herzog.
On the screen were astounding images of poverty in Jamaica, Bob Marley’s funeral, Rastafarian reveries, live reggae performances, prisons and military police, incredible landscapes, marijuana smoking, and English made strange by unfamiliar accents that often seemed hypnotic. It was a ninety minute cinematic poem, a dream that has stayed with me for almost twenty-five years.
A few years ago, I found a VHS copy of the film at my parents house and brought it back here to Boston, excited to finally see Alan’s film again. But I don’t own a TV or VCR and somehow I never managed to arrange to watch the film at a friend’s house as I’d planned.
It is therefore that much more exciting to have Alan inform me that Land of Look Behind has been digitally remastered and will be released on DVD next month, complete with special features—commentary by Werner Herzog and Alan, a digital photo album with never-before published images, and a soundtrack CD. You can pre-orderLand of Look Behind now.
New York Times film critic Robert Palmer was also at one of those Film Forum screenings of Alan’s film in December, 1982. Palmer wrote:
Land of Look Behind began as an exploration of Bob Marley’s contributions to Jamaican pop music and Jamaican life. But somewhere along the way it became something different, a kind of meditation on the island’s music and religion, its traditions and its pride, the feel of its inhabitants’ everyday activities and some of their hopes for the future. Land of Look Behind won’t satisfy viewers who like having things spelled out for them, whether by a voice-over or a mundane, predictable plot. It has neither, and that is both its minor weakness and its distinguishing strength.
More recently, Jim Jarmusch has said:
Formally the film flows easily, seemingly growing from the climate, the music, the speech patterns, and the gentle landscape itself. Footage of Marley’s coffin being driven in the back of a pickup along the dusty roadways lined with throngs of devastated admirers does serve as a visual centerpiece. But the heart of the film inhabits its details. For me, specific images seem to recur in my memory (I’ve seen the film several times): the way that, in the opening sequence, a backwoods countryman carefully locates and presents a small indigenous tree toad to the camera; a shot of Gregory Isaacs from behind as he exits a ground floor office and walks into Kingston’s hard sunlight; and the haunting closing sequence involving a young Rasta in the hills undulating to Marley’s voice and rhythms floating from a tape player, as though the music contains the secret code to a deep spiritual mystery. And in fact, it does.
The trailer is up on YouTube.
A few clips from the film are also on YouTube. Check out this segment with Gergory Isaacs.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 30, 2006 at 2:15 am
3. Jewish religion cannot be divorced from Jewish culture.
To do so yields the current demographic and spiritual crisis now facing the American Jewish community.
Jewish philanthropists like Michael Steinhardt want to revive the non-Orthodox Jewish community by replacing “victimhood” with “joy.” (See his Jerusalem Post opinion piece in February of this year.) I think we all know that you can read “Europe” for victimhood and “Israel” for joy. Didn’t that attitude get us in this mess? Turn a shul into a temple, a khazn into a cantor and Jewish music into Debbie Friedman — well, you better lock the doors cuz the inmates will be breaking out. Witness our so-called youth crisis. American Jewish culture has turned Camembert into CheezWhiz: It is boring and every young Jew knows it.
Real Jewish Culture is the product of hundreds, thousands of years of joy and pain; it’s the expression of the realities of halokhe [Jewish law] lived in a hostile world. It’s the result of every Jew’s struggle between tradition and modernity. Most importantly, Real Jewish Culture is our connection to those who came before us, and without access to it, well, that bagel in your hand is not a symbol of anything, just a bunch of empty calories masquerading as breakfast.
4. I am not an Israeli.
About two thousand American Jews make aliyah [emmigrate to Israel] every year. Out of a total Jewish population of 5,200,000, this comes out to about .04% of American Jews each year who will choose to live in Israel. I am an American and, like 99.96 percent of my fellow American Jews, I will never become an Israeli. I care deeply about the State of Israel, most of all because my fate is linked to that of every other Jew. But where does the spirit of klal yisroel end and the unquestioning acceptance of Zionism begin?
Open a magazine like Moment and you’d think every Jew in America had already put down a security deposit on an apartment in Jerusalem. Moment bills itself as “Jewish culture, politics, and religion.” Three of four cover stories in a recent issue were Israel-related, with more inside — and this was the music issue! Now, I would understand if this were a newspaper for a small Jewish community somewhere in the world. I doubt that the Jewish community of Honduras has enough news to fill twelve issues of a monthly magazine. But we don’t live in Honduras. We live in the other Jewish state, a country with a Jewish population roughly equal to that of the Jewish state. And let me tell you, we’ve got enough news here to fill up every single Jewish newspaper, magazine, newsletter, leaflet and ’zine.
Mark Rubin, who alerted me to Rokhl’s manifesto, doesn’t think non-Jews need read it, that it’s more for us Jews to talk about amongst ourselves. While the subject matter is an internal conversation, I encourage everyone to read the whole thing. My own experience is that most non-Jews don’t know much about American Jewish cultural issues and experiences, beyond the stereotypes and the canned, Jewish institutional PR.
I would just add to Rokhl’s assertions about secular and religious Jewish culture(s), that a secular Jewish world-view can also include not just knowledge but practice of Judaism. While Jewish law excludes those who profess belief in Christian or polytheistic religions from Jewish religious participation, there is no requirement that one demonstrate a positive belief in God. It’s been my experience that many practicing Jews have changeable ideas and beliefs about theology while remaining consistent participants in the religious community. I don’t know how many would go as far as I do to say their world view is closest to secular and agnostic while maintaining a somewhat traditional Jewish religious practice—though I know my mother would as would my great-uncle, my maternal grandfather’s brother, who, at age 95, is the minyan facilitator for the daily services at his synagogue in Florida. You have not heard leyning (chanting) from the Torah until you’ve heard him.
The summer of 2002, my first cousin, who is an Orthodox Jew, invited me to lead the davenning (praying) for his auf ruf, an east European Jewish celebration at morning prayer services in the week before one’s wedding. This was a particularly special occasion because my cousin decided to have the auf ruf in my maternal grandfather’s synagogue, Young Israel on East Broadway, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.* The Young Israel on East Broadway is a very traditional, Orthodox synagogue, which my grandparents were members of from around time it was founded, until they died six weeks apart, in November and December 2002, respectively, both at age ninety-nine.
I was a little nervous to accept the honor, since I don’t regularly attend services in such Orthodox congregations, where the ritual life is very tightly choreographed and fast paced, without a lot of time spent explaining and instructing. Still, there was no way to say no, especially knowing my grandfather would be there (my grandmother was not well enough to attend).
At one point, during the breakfast that followed services (bagels, lox, herring, fruit, etc.), my uncle, whose son was getting married, pulled me aside to report that during services my grandfather turned to him and said, “who would have thought that Paul Greenberg’s son could daven like this.”
My father, a founder of New Jewish Agenda, who identified not as a Zionist but as a Jewish nationalist supporter of Jewish and Palestinian self-determination in the middle east, was a secular radical in the Jewish socialist tradition, for the first half of his life. As he reached his 40s, he started to become increasingly religious in his outlook, though he never learned to read Hebrew or the ritual skills he and my mother decided I should learn in my eight years of Jewish parochial school.
Notes
*If you click on the Young Israel link, above, you can also see an arial shot of the apartment buildings where my grandparents lived through all the years that I was alive to know them. They lived at 383 Grand Street, in what are known as the Seward Park Cooperatives. In the area marked “Seward Park,” between Essex and Clinton, there are two buildings. 383 Grand Street is the one closer to Essex and to Grand.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 15, 2005 at 6:15 pm
Twenty-five years ago today (12/9), I was eleven years old, going on twelve. I swear I knew every Beatles song by heart, knew every published detail of the band’s history. And John was my favorite. He was the coolest one. His songs were the best ones. HIs solo work was the strongest. He had real politics.
I was eating a bowl of cereal for breakfast. My mother was making my lunch for school. My dad still smoked then, and he was out on the front porch in his bathrobe, having a cigarette in the cold because he wasn’t allowed to smoke in the house.
He came inside with the morning paper, the Albany Times Union, and the terrible headline. I don’t remember what the wording was, but I remember pouring over the article, reading it again and again, trying to understand how it could have happened, how that man could have done something like this. I remember the heat in my face, not quite crying but tears blurring my eyes.
These were the suburbs, the middle class life my father had striven for. When we moved there it was part of my parents’ decision, half conscious, half not, that I would grow up insulated from politics and violence.
It took a long time for me to lose the innocence cultivated in the Albany suburbs. This violence was senseless, without political valence. But it was the first chink, the first time I felt loss, December 9, 1980.
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on December 10, 2005 at 2:05 am
Pete Seeger continues to be a big favorite for my toddler. Standing in the chair in front of our 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, until we relented. 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 we saw him do this with was Sweet Potatoes, on We Shall Overcome: The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert (1963). Our little boy figured out how to press the track advance button three times to get to track 3 on disc 2. What really blew our minds, 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 Marian 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 Marian 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
My wife recalls reading in Rise Up Singing that Marian Hicks was an African American friend of Pete Seeger’s family and that he learned to sing the song from her. I don’t actually have copy of RUS, but I’ll check this out as soon as I can.
CORRECTION
Second stanza of Little Birdie corrected from “dreaming” and “dreamin’” to “grieving” and “grievin’.”
§ Posted by Benjamin T. Greenberg on August 22, 2005 at 10:23 am
Folks I've got them hungry blues
And nothin' in this to lose
People tellin' me to choose
Between dyin' and lyin' and
keep on cryin'
Tired of them hungry blues
Listen ain't you heard the news
There's another thing to choose
A brand new world
clean and fine
Where nobody's hungry
And there's no color line
A thing like that's worth
anybody dyin'
I ain't got a thing to lose
But them doggone hungry blues
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