From the Archives…

Since there are those among us that have enjoyed the folk music review portion of this blog I have decided to post last year’s folk music review in its entirety. This review was originally published in my bimonthly newsletter on August 15th 2004. Since I did not charge for the newsletter and readership had remained flat for years I was constantly running in the red from postage costs and decided to discontinue the newsletter about the time I began blogging.

2004 Annual Folk Music Review!

Hello all. I trust everyone is enjoying their summer. Recently I spent a week hiking in the mountains of Banff National Park. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Being surrounded by clear mountain streams and practically no people is surely awesome, at least for brief periods of time.

While on my trip I often thought of Banff as paradise. That is why, this year, I have decided to review the song “Paradise” written by John Prine © 1971. This song was written long before the impending chaos of the Y2K scare of the late 1990s, and you can really tell that when you listen to it. For one thing, when I typed the lyrics into my word processor, it indicated there were some sentence fragments. I am the first to admit that people still use sentence fragments in music, but they don’t use them with the care free whimsy they used to. In the music industry today, there is a real sense that if you don’t finish each and every sentence, the listeners don’t know whether you are a patriot or a supporter of the terrorists. Mr. Prine had a freedom of expression that can only be appreciated through this unique historical frame of reference. It’s enough to make you weep just reading the lyrics, which is all you’re going to get to do here. Let’s begin as we always do with the first few lines of the song and remember fondly the catchy melody that goes along with them.

“When I was a child, my family would travel,
To western Kentucky, where my parents were born.
And there's a backwards old town that's often remembered.
So many times that my memories are worn.”

Catchy and beautiful, isn’t it. The first two lines are poetic and perhaps a bit nostalgic, but lines three and four demonstrate the author’s ignorance and disregard for the feelings of others. First, he refers to a Kentucky town as “backwards.” I have no doubt they are used to it by now, but that still doesn’t make it OK. He goes on to say that he has remembered the place so often that his memories are worn, as in “worn out” like a ten year old pair of blue jeans that you wear when you paint the house or when you want to look destitute. Modern science has shown that the human brain works in exactly the opposite way. The more often one recalls something the more vivid the memory. This was not unknown in 1971, so I can only assume that the author didn’t bother to check the facts before he just willy, nilly wrote down what ever popped into his head. Four lines in and we already know this guy’s parents are from Kentucky and he is not exactly a scholar.

Then the chorus:

“And Daddy won't you take me back to Muhlenberg county,
Down by the Green River, where Paradise lay.
’Well I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in askin'.
Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.’"

What a whiner! This chorus was obviously a dialogue between the author and his father. Among other things it’s a case study in how pronouns prohibit clear communication. First of all we have established that the author is an adult because he was fondly remembering his childhood in the first line of the song. Yet he still expects his father to haul him around where ever he wants to go, in this case Muhlenberg County! The father, and in my opinion rightly so, tells his son he won’t be party to his delusional fantasies where he has somehow been relegated to the position of being the author’s chauffeur. However, he does perpetuate the problem by making up a lame excuse about how the whole county has been hauled away in a coal train. Mr. Peabody is apparently very wealthy, and has nothing better to do than to than drive his train around and have entire counties loaded into it, and then haul them away. Line three of the chorus clearly points out that the author is a procrastinator, along with being lazy and demanding.

Verse 2, I’m going to take this verse one line at a time:

“Well, sometimes we'd travel right down the Green River,”

In what would they travel a boat, a canoe, or a raft? Was there a motor? Talk about being ambiguous! I’m trying to form a picture in my mind and I don’t even know how he traveled down the river.

”To the abandoned old prison down by Aidrie Hill.”

Who cares? This is totally a throw away line if I ever saw one.

”Where the air smelled like snakes: we'd shoot with our pistols,”

What does snake air smell like, and what kind of a parent gives a pistol to a child? I see now why he mentioned the prison in the previous line. His parents gave him a pistol and he started holding up liquor stores for extra spending cash as a child. It’s called “foreshadowing” and I learned all about it in composition class in school. This will obviously be the sad story of a child whose parents did not establish clear boundaries for him in his formative years, which led to his delinquency later in life. We may never know how much havoc he caused with that pistol.

”But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.”

Now I have a bit of egg on my face here. My earlier comment about the author’s delinquency was apparently all wrong. The only havoc reeked was a number of pop bottles broken, likely into many small pieces. This is not about the impending delinquency of a minor at all. This is about the author’s resentment for the soda bottling companies which cause millions of tons of trash to be created every year, while they get rich supplying liquid candy to an unsuspecting public who will one day see their teeth rot right out of their mouths. It’s ironic really since by shooting the pop bottles he was actually littering right in the middle of his “paradise.”

Then he goes right back to whining about wanting to go somewhere in the chorus, again. Then there is an instrumental break, then verse three.

“Then the coal company came, with the world's largest shovel,
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land.
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken.
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.”

The first line of this verse mentions the world’s largest shovel. I would have preferred that the next three lines of this verse were shovel stats. He is making a pretty outrageous claim here and then he does nothing to back it up. Rather than focus on this shovel, which is certainly the coolest part of the song to this point, he just moves on to other things going on in Muhlenberg County. It is in this verse that we find out that there is a reason for Mr. Peabody to haul away the entire Muhlenberg County. There was coal there! He was just trying to make a living. If you are against a man earning an honest living, then you must be against America. If you are against America you must hate mom and apple pie too. Well, that’s just stupid. Apple pie is good stuff! I especially like it when it’s made with that top crust that looks like a checker board. Mmmmmm! Well, we do love apple pie. We love mom and America too. So by definition we have to love Mr. Peabody and all that he stands for. What I see here is a small business man, who is burdened by an unfair system, which taxes people more just because they’re willing to work harder than the average Joe. He is hemmed in on one side by the IRS, another side by OSHA, his employees are likely unrelenting in their demand for higher wages and safe working conditions, and a fickle public who loves their coal in the winter when it warms their homes doesn’t want to hear about how it got there. Poor, poor Mr. Peabody, I feel your pain.

Then we have the chorus again with the whining from the son and the excuses from the father. It’s sad because this is the kind of learned behavior that will be passed from one generation to the next, and the next, and the next. Then verse four…

"When I die, let my ashes float down the Green River.
Let my soul roll on up to the Rochester dam.
I'll be halfway to Heaven with Paradise waitin',
Just five miles away from wherever I am."

Who’s he talking to here, his dad? His dad will die of shame for having such a loser son long before he ever kicks the bucket. If it’s not his father, then it’s obvious that he just expects people to do things for him whenever he opens his mouth. We have already established his slothful character so this option seems most plausible. Finally here at the end of the song, just for good measure, we find the author’s grasp of geography lacking. The world doesn’t revolve around you buddy. Stuff isn’t just a certain distance away from you because you say it is.

Then cue the whiny boy chorus one last time and we’re done.

This song has found a special place in my heart in spite of the fact that it’s about a delusional, procrastinating slacker, with no real ambition in life. Maybe it’s because I can identify so much with him. I love it. It’s folksy and songsy all wrapped into one. I’ll give it four stars, what ever that means, and bid you adieu.

This issue’s prediction is that by Labor Day 2005 we will start seeing gasoline for more than $3 a gallon in some places across the country.

Annual Truth Perceived Folk Music Review!

This year I will review “Charlie on the M.T.A.” also known as “The M.T.A. Protest Song” or just “The M.T.A. Song.” Jacqueline Steiner, and Bess Lomax-Hawes, I am told, originally penned the tune. As I understand it The Kingston Trio released it in 1959 with the lyrics I am familiar with. The song is wonderfully upbeat and peppy. It drew me in immediately. The first phrase of the lyrics indicate that one is about to be told a story about a man whose name is Charlie. This is in fact the case. At the end of the song one has heard a dizzying account of the man named Charlie.

My first experience with the song was at the house of a man named Dave. He was singing and playing his guitar and one of the songs he sang was “The M.T.A. Protest Song.” At first I thought it was an impromptu song about his son, whose name is Charlie. If you ever meet Dave, and hear him play the guitar, you might arrive at the same conclusion. That is, Dave is fully capable of making up a song on the fly and having it sound much like it must be a well-known folk song. I don’t know if he has ever done this, but just look at him, he looks like that kind of guy. He looks to have that mix of musical prodigy, wit, English language fluency and historical knowledge that creating brilliant impromptu folk songs would require. I remark about this at length only to demonstrate that my original thought was not stupid.

The song begins with the first verse (as you might guess):

“Let me tell you the story
of a man named Charlie
on a tragic and fateful day
He put ten cents in his pocket,
Kissed his wife and family
Went to ride on the MTA”

So what do we know so far? Good tune, and it’s a song about Charlie. Some people want more from their folk music. It turns out that this song was originally written for the mayoral campaign of Walter A O’Brian. He was a member of the Progressive Party. Some people connect the Progressive Party with communism, (especially during the McCarthy Era) but there is no evidence that O’Brian was a communist. I disagree and believe the evidence is in the song. Charlie had only ten cents, so obviously he didn’t approve of money, otherwise he would have more. If you need more proof of these socialist tendencies you need only turn to the fact that he was going to ride “public transportation.” Lest we vote commie too soon lets move on to the next stanza, or what ever this is in song lingo.

“Charlie handed in his dime
At the Kendall Square Station
And he changed for Jamaica Plain
When he got there the conductor told him,
‘One more nickel’
Charlie could not get off that train.”

Then we have the chorus:

“Did he ever return?
No he never returned,
And his fate is still unlearned.
He may ride forever
‘neath the streets of Boston
He’s the man who never returned.”

So now we know that Charlie is “the man who never returned” which you might think would ruin the end of the song. It’s hard to have a twist ending if you already know he is not going home. For me, though, I don’t think the lack of mystique hurts the song one bit. So I continued to listen even though this Charlie guy is incapable of doing anything for himself, like jump out a window, beg for spare change from other passengers, or sell things like his shoes. Sounds like a communist to me.

The song continues:

“Now all night long
Charlie rides through the tunnels
Saying, ‘What will become of me?
How can I afford to see
My sister in Chelsea
or my cousin in Roxbury?’”

Later the word “tunnels” was changed to “station” and “Saying” was changed to “Crying.” So the guy is not afraid to cry, very progressive even for the “Progressive Party” at that time. Also, why do they leave these trains running all night long? It’s 1949 how late do people stay up in Boston, and why don’t they call it the B.T.A. I also hope, for Charlie’s sake, there is a restroom on this train.

Wait till you read the next verse though, this one really shows the song’s true colors.

“Charlie’s wife goes down
to the Scollay Square Station
every day at quarter past two
and through the open window
she hands Charlie a sandwich
as the train comes rumblin’ through.”

Now we know that while Charlie is chatting it up with the other passengers all day, his wife is making and delivering sandwiches. I am not sure I have ever seen a song so clearly advocating the welfare system. Charlie’s wife, who doesn’t even rate having her name mentioned, is caring for children and providing sandwiches at 2:15 every day. She is obviously on welfare, and these are taxpayer-funded sandwiches. This points to futility of welfare and all socialist policies in general. If the state would give her a nickel to throw through that window the whole family could get off the public doll. Instead they give her a book of food stamps every month and perpetuate the problem. Yet another example of O’Brian’s communist leanings.

“As his train rolled on
underneath Greater Boston
Charlie looked around and sighed:
‘Well, I’m sore and disgusted
and I’m absolutely busted;
I guess this is my last long ride.’”

A banjo solo replaced this verse. So I have never heard it. It also makes me wonder if Dave was perhaps playing a banjo when I first heard this song. I don’t remember.

“Now you citizens of Boston
don’t you think it’s a scandal
that the people have to pay and pay.
Vote for Walter A O’Brian
and fight the fare increase.
Get poor Charlie off the MTA.”

Later when the song was released the phrase “Vote for Walter A O’Brian and fight the fare increase.” Was changed to “Fight the fare increase. Vote for George O’Brian!” The change was made during the McCarthy Era when the name Walter A. O’Brian conjured up images of the communists and one could get killed or worse for such things. Now we live in much more accepting times when people can make any sort of political statement and not fear reprisal.

While the song obviously plays to a liberal base intending to perpetuate the common individual’s reliance on government services, I give it high marks. I recommend it as a good listen any time you get the chance. If you play guitar or banjo and don’t know the song I suggest learning it. Good times.