Heavy Work

Song 371: This week’s playlist track is Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford, written by Merle Travis, and you can find the YouTube video of it here. It seems appropriate, in honor of Labor Day, to post a work song, and I learned this golden oldie at quite a young age, though when I first heard it, on a TV show in the early 1960s, it had already been around for a few years. It also appeared among my Ohio relatives' extensive country collection, so during our even-numbered-year summer visits there in that decade, I would usually include this record as part of my listening fun, with my aunt and uncle letting me choose the discs I wanted to spin. While my father didn’t work in a coal mine, what he got from his full-time job was also another day older and deeper in debt, which is a line that came from a letter written to the songwriter by his brother. It was their father, a coal miner, who said to them, "I can’t afford to die. I owe my soul to the company store." All too often in our history, a group of wealthy greed-heads have succeeded in dividing and conquering the working class, through techniques such as segregation, racism and xenophobia, to keep the workers from uniting in large-enough numbers to demand and receive a living wage. Until laborers get beyond such divisions, most of them will continue to owe their souls to the company store.

Flowers in Full Bloom

Song 370: This week the playlist comes around to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers In Your Hair) by Scott McKenzie, written by John Phillips. When this song came along in the late spring 50 years ago, I was already a big fan of Papa John's songwriting, having gotten hooked a year earlier on the music of The Mamas and The Papas, but I had no idea about the community that had gravitated to the Haight-Ashbury district, so I really liked the record the first time I heard it, but it took a while for me to get the message. Growing up in a conservative and fundamentalist religious home, I didn't necessarily connect with the hippie counterculture, as much as I did with the music, but by 3 years later, having lived nearly a year outside of the family circle after graduating HS, I had fully plugged in with hippiedom and the peace bohemians. This year, on the 50th anniversary of the Summer of Love, one of those peace types defused and ultimately entirely deflated a scheduled neo-Nazi rally in San Francisco. The gathering was due to happen yesterday, August 26, but, unlike Charlottesville, where antifas met nNs with serious signs and protests, and serious injury and death ensued, in SF, an artist named Tuffy Tuffington created a Facebook event page that recommended greeting the nN assembly with flowers for their hair, and a carpet of dog poop. Tuffy’s inspired hilarity quickly galvanized an opposition force that included clowns, kayakers and kids, and the Flowers Against Fascism actually succeeded in getting the alt-righters to cancel their gig. Kudos to Mr. Tuffington for putting the Turd Reich into context, using humor to defuse the fascist absurdity, which is, I think, the best and most effective way to face neo-Nazis.

Can’t Turn Around

Song 369: This week on the playlist you will find It's a Little Too Late by Tanya Tucker, written by Roger Murrah and Pat Terry. (For the YouTube video, click on the title.) After last week's post in honor of Glen Campbell, who recently died, Tanya seemed like an appropriate follow-up, in light of their famous love affair. For the first 2 decades of her career, I knew very little about TT, aside from her dalliance with Campbell, so when this record came rocking along in 1992 courtesy of country radio, it surprised me, and immediately got my attention. In addition to the clever lyrics about romantic entanglement, I also really liked the drummer's wild and frenzied accompaniment, which perfectly compliments the words Tanya sings. Having been more than once in that same spot where I was too far gone to turn this heart around, I'd say that Tucker and her backup players nailed it. On a side note, this track is a final sly reference to the second verse of my own song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, which ends with the line but after what Holly Dunn (my 5/28/17 post) you should have Tanya Tucker up. Appropriately enough, the late Mr. Haggard was also someone who had hooked up with TT, and you can find the video for my tribute to him by clicking on the title.

Pleasant Memories

Song 368: This week’s playlist track is Gentle on My Mind by Glen Campbell, written by John Hartford, and I offer the post as a tribute to a very talented singer and guitarist who died last Tuesday after an extended struggle with Alzheimer's disease. I thought this 45 sounded really good when I first starting hearing it in the early summer of 1967, and when I saw Glen perform it on TV, I thought it sounded even better. I liked the way he included a banjo in the mix, which didn't happen much at the time. The character sketched in the lyrics here helped to shape the image that I outlined in The Wanderer when I wrote that a couple of year later, in the fall of 1969, and then the following summer, as I was seeking to define my own original artistic and musical persona, I decided to learn to play and sing this tune. In so doing, I made a melodic mistake that inspired a new piece which I called Country Highway when I completed it a few days later. While I thought highly of Glen during the era when he did this record and a bunch of other memorable cuts, only in recent years did I learn of his earlier career when he performed as Brian Wilson's stand-in on a Beach Boys tour, and also recorded guitar parts for Pet Sounds and other BB discs, which increased my respect for his artistry. While GC has left the land of the living, the magic moments he created will without a doubt keep him in the backroads by the rivers of my memory, and maybe yours too.

Conveying a Disturbing Message

Song 367: This week on the playlist you can hear The Cruel Lullaby by Carol Denney, who also wrote the song. As usual, seven weeks after my previous personal friend song post which featured Bob Nichols comes one by Carol. Bob, Carol and I were all members of a Berkeley songwriting circle back in the 1980s, but sadly, Bob died in November of 2005. Checking out Carol's website today, I noticed that she has a short story inspired by Bob's generosity to the Berkeley homeless, which you can find here. This cut is the title track from Carol's second CD, which she released in 2002, and a few years ago she performed it live at Viracocha in San Francisco, in front of a video camera. Her performance begins with an entertaining explanation of the song's inspiration, which evidently occurred when she found herself at a Berkeley potluck seated between 2 Buddhists who discussed their views on life after death. Following that experience, Carol crafted a lullaby meant to convey to a young child the cruel reality of life and death that she sees, cutting through the sort of comforting fantasies that she heard at the potluck, and giving a youngster the real story, which is one a child might not want to hear. The audience at Viracocha most certainly did enjoy hearing this lullaby, though, and their laughter throughout the performance makes that quite clear.

A Well-known Location

Song 366: This week the playlist comes around to La Grange by ZZ Top, written by Billy Gibbons, Dusty Hill and Frank Beard. To quote one of the lines from last week’s track, “We’d put on ZZ Top and turn ’em up real loud" and now here we are, visiting a place that would be memorialized in the late 1970s by a Broadway play called The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Around the time that this hit reached its peak in the summer of 1974, I read a Larry King article in Playboy about the place, and realized the connection to this recording, though Billy, Dusty and Frank had to have a prior source for their info, since the cut appears on the Tres Hombres LP that the trio released a year earlier. I liked it from the first time I heard it, but I also thought that it borrowed heavily from a Canned Heat groove. Actually, the boogie blues rhythm that it rides evidently owes its inspiration to much older sides by John Lee Hooker and Slim Harpo, with a failed lawsuit concluding that the rhythm was in public domain by the time ZZ Top put it down. One of my musician friends remarked that the singer on this mix doesn’t really sing, to which I replied that I thought he handled the vocal just fine, and I didn’t feel the need to nitpick technicalities when listening to it. In fact, I hear it’s fine if you got the time.

Explosive Ride

Song 365: This week on the playlist you can hear Metal Firecracker by Lucinda Williams, who also wrote the song. One of my songwriter friends, John Sonntag (who appears on my Spotify playlist Me and My Songwriter Friends), had introduced me to the music of Lucinda Williams back in 1991, so when the Car Wheels on a Gravel Road ride came along in 1998, I hopped on. The CD quickly found a place in my collection, and, unlike some others, it became one that I would always listen to from the beginning to the end. This track paints a very clear picture of a moving relationship, and it's a scene that I easily recognize, having ridden in more than one Metal Firecracker myself. I might not have a clue about the secrets Lucinda told her former lover, but I certainly understand her plea, since I’ve picked up a few juicy tidbits over the years, and while I can’t speak for her old flame, I can assure my own past sweethearts that I won't tell anybody the secrets. I will confide, though, that I share LW's enjoyment of a certain RnR band that she mentions in this cut, and her lyrics provide a clue as to the feature artist for next week's playlist pick.