Singing Along With a Hit Song

Song 189: Today I added Green, Green by The New Christy Minstrels (written by Barry McGuire and Randy Sparks) to my Favorite Songs Playlist. As a rule, my family didn't listen to the radio much during my younger years, and so in the era before the Beatles came along, I mainly heard songs from the radio in public places, or on visits to friends. Once in a while they did turn the radio on in the car going somewhere, though, and I think that's how I first heard this song, when it came along in the summer of 1963, and it then suddenly became a reason for me to try to get them to put the radio on. I had heard and learned a few other folk and country songs over the previous year, but this was the first hit song that I really, really learned. After only hearing it a few times, I had the words memorized and I would sing along with it, much to the amusement of my parents and grandparents. They must have truly enjoyed hearing their primary-school-age son deliver lines like I told my mama on the day I was born, "Don't you cry when you see I'm gone." I even tried to imitate Barry McGuire's rough-edged voice, but I couldn't really get it down. About 6 months later, the Beatles would open up a whole new world for me, and a new-found adoration of rock-and-roll, which I thought they and the other English bands had invented. That would so overshadow my previous enjoyment of a handful of folk songs that when Eve of Destruction blasted out of a transistor radio only 2 years after Green, Green, I didn't even recognize the singer. At the time that Green, Green came along, though, I quickly learned every word he was singing, and I tried to sound like him when I sang along, though I really couldn't sound like him, no matter how hard I tried. That summer, though, it was a lot of fun hearing that song and singing along in the family car on the way to somewhere, which would not happen when the English Invasion came along the following winter.