Songs for Saturday: Woody and the Bastille

[mdlbear]

Y'know, I can't miss today's Songs for Saturday -- the combination of Woody's 100th birthday and Bastille Day is just too perfect.

Here's a link to NPR: At 100, Woody Guthrie Still Resonates. And here's the Wikipedia article on La Marseillaise.

Here is one of the only two surviving film clips of Woody performing: The Ranger's Command - 1945, and here's Woody singing This Land Is Your Land.

And here's Tear the fascist down "This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we dont give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, thats all we wanted to do."

And here's La Marseillaise in my favorite scene in Casablanca.

It makes me angry that this is all still so relevant.

Comments

This Land recording

[andyheninger.livejournal.com]

Good music links. Thanks.

Also, if you haven't seen it, the documentary Pete Seeger: The Power of Song is well worth a look. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1003116/

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

[starmalachite.livejournal.com]

It makes me angry that this is all still so relevant.

You're not alone there.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

Do I need to make a sign for my guitar, "this machine educates republicans"?

[mdlbear]

Yes. "This Land Is Your Land" has been proposed as a better anthem for the US, but it'll never fly.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

It's *sarcastic*; of course, it'll never fly.

Of course, "Acheron" is a *drinking song*... well, ok, it was about a drinking club with a poetry problem... :)

(For those looking at me funny, that's the tune Francis Scott Key's (also somewhat sarcastic) poem got set to...)

I dunno, maybe it is that if you're going to have a song for a *nation* (with armies and guns and bureaucrats and stupid laws about who can snuggle whom) it has to be hierarchical, patriarchal, and militaristic...

Songs about *community* can be lyrical, folky, and make for good singing-along arm-in-arm.

In case you can't tell, I'm not so much on the concept of nations anymore, other than the idea of beating some sense into them, or maybe making one of our own that's like Switzerland or Austria or something... free and neutral and not to be messed with because we'll take down your intertubes or somesuch...

Of course, one notes that the major record labels are no longer signing people like Pete Seeger and Mary Travers and Joan Baez...

That's ok. We have the Internet (http://taliskimberley.bandcamp.com/track/telling-canterbury-tales).

[septemberlilac.livejournal.com]

I've always thought it would be the perfect choice - if you don't sing it all the way through to the punch line, it's a joyous song, inclusive, and it has an actual melody that would lend itself to almost any style or arrangement from symphonic to rap and everything in between. But the problem starts with the title - the 1% would never countenance a national anthem that suggests this land might be ours and not just theirs. And then when you get past the first few verses, you *really* run into trouble. Yeah, never happen.

On the subject of songs that remain unfortunately relevant, "Jolly Banker" is another one that could have been written yesterday.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

The college radio station where I got my first training signed off each night with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir(!) singing "This Land Is Your Land" - only the "nice" verses, of course.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

"To Anacreon In Heaven (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Anacreon_in_Heaven)" (not "Acheron" - that's something different altogether) is marvelously pagan; my former High Priestess knows all the words (http://www.potw.org/archive/potw234.html) to it, with each verse exhorting the fine fellows of the Anacreontic Society to "...intwine/The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus' vine". Unfortunately, the tune is nearly unsingable with any words.

I agree with you that the concept of "nation" is probably toxic, and certainly becoming obsolete. (For a while I thought of myself as a "citizen of Earth"... and then I realized that even that's too parochial.) But I can still, on some level, empathize with the concept of "country". And this (http://youtu.be/ZelYGi5ZTPw) would be a good national anthem for our country.