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.