Salut! Live

It’s been a voyage of discovery. The two most beautiful songs were new to me.

(This is, of course, nowhere near a complete list so feel free to add your own. Preferably ones without “war” in the title.)

 Saigon Bride, co-written by Joan Baez and Nina Dushek and featured on her 1967 album Joan, is flawless. I’ve listened to it over and over.

The same can be said of the country-tinged Travelin’ Soldier, written and recorded in 1996 by Bruce Robison. A C&W antiwar song? Why not? The Chicks (formerly The Dixie Chicks) who in the past had been controversially outspoken about then-president George Bush’s warmongering in Iraq, had a hit with this in 2003. Their concert renditions are stunning but I think Robison’s simpler treatment suits Travelin’ Soldier better.

One of the most prolific antiwar songwriters was Phil Ochs, a gifted artist but apt sometimes to be a bit wrong-headed. The liner notes of his 1966 In Concert album consisted of eight poems by Mao Zedong with the comment, “Could this be the enemy?”

Ask the tens of millions of people whose deaths lay at Chairman Mao’s door and the answer would have to be, “Yes, it could.” Still, never let it be said that Ochs was afraid to wear his heart on his sleeve.

Draft Dodger Rag resonates with me as a Canadian because I can never meet a male American of a certain age in Canada without wondering if back in the 1960s or ’70s he’d fled north, as so many did, to avoid being called up and sent to fight. To our credit, we simply accepted them as immigrants.

Not everything, of course, is entirely related to Vietnam. The musical Mata Hari was set during World War I. But it was written in 1967 (book by Jerome Coopersmith, music by Edward Thomas and lyrics by Martin Charnin) and widely seen as an anti-Vietnam statement.

A very bad one, by all accounts. The reviews were scathing and its intended Broadway run was cancelled before it began. All the same, one of its songs, Maman, performed here by George Bellamy, is worthy of note.

(As an aside, I can’t find a reference to anyone else of the same name so I’m wondering if this could be the Sunderland-born George Bellamy, a singer and songwriter who became rhythm guitarist for The Tornadoes, of Telstar fame.)

I’ve chosen two songs by Pete Seeger. Waist-Deep in the Big Muddy has a 1942, World War II scenario, but was written in 1967 with contemporary political overtones.

Seeger wrote Last Train to Nuremberg in 1970 as a response to the My Lai massacre two years earlier of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians by American troops.

On, inevitably, to the apocalypse…

I only knew Donovan’s version of Bert Jansch’s Do You Hear Me Now. It’s good but having finally heard the intensity of Jansch’s original, that’s the one I prefer.

There are lots of interpretations of Come Away Melinda, written by Fred Hellerman – who, with Pete Seeger, Lee Hays and Ronnie Gilbert formed the legendary American folk group The Weavers – and Fran Minkoff.

It was first recorded in 1963, both by Harry Belafonte (better known as a calypso singer, though his repertoire was wide-ranging) and The Big 3, which featured Cass Elliot in her pre-Mamas and Papas days.

Other artists who took it on include Judy Collins, Bobbie Ode to Billie Joe Gentry and Tim Rose. But I’m going with the most incongruous: a terrific performance by hard-rockers Uriah Heep. Not at all what you might expect.

Tim Rose’s name crops up again in connection with (Walk Me Out in the) Morning Dew.

Rose’s 1967 recording may be the most widely known. He reportedly also claimed credit for the lyrics and it took a court case to shoot this down. The song was written and first performed in 1961 at the inaugural Mariposa Folk Festival in Orillia, Ontario, by Canadian – Torontonian, to be exact – singer/songwriter Bonnie Dobson. She lives in the UK now.

Her website – https://www.bonniedobson.net/  – notes that there are at least 50 versions of the song, including by the Grateful Dead, Robert Plant (minus Led Zeppelin) and, believe it or not, Lulu.

Dobson also sang her song with Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs at Gerde’s Folk City in New York, one of the hotspots of the Greenwich Village folk revival, and featured it on her 1962 album Bonnie Dobson at Folk City.

Here she is, right there, right then, probably the first recording of Morning Dew.

Saving the best – or at least best-known – until last? Not sure I’d go that far but Steeleye Span’s Fighting for Strangers, from their 1976 album Rocket Cottage, has always been a favourite of mine.

The Mainly Norfolk: English Folk and Other Good Music website (https://www.mainlynorfolk.info/folk/) calls it “a tragic military montage of three songs segued together against layers of percussive over-dubbing. The results were both experimental and exciting.”

No argument from me. Antiwar creativity at its best.

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We’ve also put these songs, along with Tom Paxton’s Talkin’ Vietnam Potluck Blues, featured recently on our Facebook group’s Artist of the Week slot, into a short Spotify playlist.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2LtSCcOl8ls2oTLiFj6Klr?si=rZszmkggQxOTeiN05nf-Cw&pi=e-5Eqwy1H5Roy2