Sunday, June 1, 2014

A Missing Word in the Chorus, or Not

Song 201: Today's playlist song is Greenback Dollar by The Kingston Trio, written by Hoyt Axton. I mostly missed the folk boom of the late '50s and early '60s, with a couple of exceptions, mainly Green, Green (song 189) and the Peter Paul and Mary version of If I Had a Hammer (song 184), both of which hit the airwaves in the summer of 1963. I had heard of the Kingston Trio but didn't know much about them, and when I heard the song Tom Dooley in a grade school class, and we then sang the song, I wasn't that thrilled with it. Living in Berkeley in the early 1980s, though, I bought one or two old Kingston Trio LPs at a garage sale, and after listening to them, I started picking up more of them. The more I listened to the old KT records, the more I liked them, and the more I would get the next time around. A couple of years into this process, I mentioned to my friend Jeff Larson something about a Kingston Trio song, and that sparked a conversation where I learned that he had also started a major KT album collection. From then on, we would often share Trio songs during our musical get-togethers, and we also went to a KT show at the Concord Pavilion some time during that era. Today, hearing the YT video of this song at the link above, I noticed that it has the word damn in the chorus, unlike the LP version that I have, which is the only one I've listened to in the last 3 decades. On my album version, you hear the singers sing I don't give a ---- about a greenback dollar with a pause between a and about, which indicates that they're obviously leaving a word out. Hearing the YT video, it's clear that for the record I have, the engineer just dropped the word damn out of the vocal mix, though he also must have created a mix with the word left in. I think I was vaguely aware of the controversy about the word damn on this record at the time of its release, but only vaguely so. Growing up, my family would not have allowed me to listen to a record with the word damn in the lyrics of a song, so I well understand the wisdom of having two different mixes of the track, one with the word and one without. As an adult, though, I don't give a ---- about a singer using the word damn.

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