Month: May 2023

True Yarns: songs inspired by real events and people Vol. 19

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TY19

Spitfire [Kinky Friedman] “Up ahead, Tuck spotted the problem: he was flying directly toward electrical wires. With lightning reflexes, he pulled up on his controls. The lithe and agile Spitfire responded instantly, and Tuck narrowly avoided the death trap. The RAF pilot then regained his composure, throttled up his powerful Rolls Royce PV-12 engine—known as the Merlin—and zoomed back on the tail of the Bf 110. He pulled the trigger and sent a short burst from his eight .303 Browning Mk II machineguns into the German fighter, causing it to crash.”  Kinky sings a sad story of a woman recalling her lover, a Spitfire pilot shot down over the English Channel during the Battle of Britain.

My Boy Elvis [Janis Martin] An early fan tribute to one Elvis Presley, a long forgotten rockabilly singer from Memphis.  So influential was this Presley guy some people referred to him as The King. Other names were a little less regal: Fire Eyes; Alan; Memphis Flash and on and on. 

End Of The Line (Jim Bakker) [The Mavericks] A cautionary tale for all grifters, scam freaks, hot air baboons (a.k.a. tele-evangelists) and all round hypocrites,  the End of the Line goes out to that g(r)ift(er) that never stops giving, Jim Bakker.  Other than the opportunity this number presents to sob (or laugh) at one of the icons of American entertainment culture, it is commended for the utterly thrilling lead guitar of Eddie Perez!

They Call That Religion [The Devil Makes Three] Staying in the same lane, here is a rowdy TDM3 cover of the old ‘I-can-see-through-your-pious-bullshit’ song He Calls That Religion. Originally recorded by The Mississippi Sheikhs in 1932 we are introduced in the song to the Jim Bakker of that era, Deacon Jones.

The Ballad of Casey Deiss [Shawn Phillips] All time classic of psych-folk from that genre’s High Priest. Shawn Phillips tells the tale of a dear friend who was struck dead by the very hand of God as he was chopping wood.

Casey had a mark of simple value
He had a star between his eyes
In his hands he held an axe blade
The Greek symbol of thunder and fire
On a night when the heavens were crying
He went out and took his blade
Chopping wood to warm his hearthside
The lightning came and my brother died

Pride (In the Name of Love) [U2] The Irish lads first American numero uno.  An interesting back story can be found here.

Ma Rainey [Memphis Minnie] Often called the “Mother of the Blues,” Ma Rainey was known for her deep-throated voice and mesmerizing stage presence that drew packed audiences and sold hit records in the early twentieth century. Also, a songwriter, her lyrics and melodies reflected her experiences as an independent, openly bisexual African-American woman.  Ma Rainey was born Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett in Columbus, Georgia on April 26, 1886. Her parents, Thomas and Ella (Allen) Pridgett, were minstrel performers. Rainey displayed a talent for singing at a young age and began performing as a teenager. She made her debut with the Bunch of Blackberries revue at the Springer Opera House in Columbus. She then began singing with traveling vaudeville acts in tent shows, honky-tonks, and carnivals.” 

Zelensky: The Man with the Iron Balls [Les Claypool & friends] Obviously, Mr. Z is the man of the hour as far as most enemies of Russia are concerned. A Jewish supposed Nazi who started in stand up and then, in a stupendous case of ‘beware of what you ask more, you might actually get it’, is now the President of Ukraine.  Check out this clip from one of his pre-presidential movies.

Young Abe Lincoln [Johnny Horton] The question remains: will Zelensky be remembered 200 years after his time on earth as is America’s favorite President (sorry DJT).  And what will the myths be that are taught piously to the children of Ukraine ca. 2224?   And what of the singer of this piece of musical patriotism? “To the outside world, Horton seemed have it all: good looks, charm, a great singing voice and incredible athletic talent. Twenty-six colleges had offered him basketball scholarships after his graduation from high school. He played briefly for Lon Morris Junior College and Baylor University. During lean times in the music business, Horton could make as much as $200 a day playing pinball. His appeared to be a charmed life. But…”

Leonard [Merle Haggard] A moving tribute to Bakersfield country legend Tommy Collins who was born Leonard Sipes in Bethany, Oklahoma.  “He garnered early entertainment experience as a radio performer in Oklahoma City. Following a brief stint in the Marines, Collins settled in California. He broke through as an artist with a series of self-penned, clever, upbeat novelty songs in the early 1950s. One of his earliest classics was “If You Ain’t Lovin’ (You Ain’t Livin’),” recorded by Faron Young in 1955. George Strait sang a hugely popular revival of this song in 1988, scoring a #1 country hit.  For Haggard, he penned one of my particular favourites, The Roots of My Raising.”

Hello Vietnam [The Lonesome Valley Singers] More patriotism from a more naïve age. 

We must fight Communism in that land

Our freedoms are slipping through our hands

We must save freedom now, at any cost

Or someday our own freedom will be lost

A Black Man’s Dream [Adolphus Bell] As he says in the intro, Bell is a one-man band and this song is dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I had a dream the other night

As I was sitting in my livin’ room

Thinkin’ about how I was going pay some bills

And I dozed off to sleep ‘n I started dreaming

I dreamed I walked into a place

And there were 5 different races of men sitting on  a large table

Talkin’ to each other

There was brown, yellow, red, white and black

The black man stood up and started talkin’. He said,

“I came to America, without a passport,”

He said, “Ever since then, I’ve been treated like a dog.”

He said, “My hair is nothing but woollen like a lamb, feet like grass

Eyes like fire.

But I’m still a man, and Lord knows it’s true.”

 He said, “America,  if you don’t change your way of doin’,

I’m gonna show you too.”

He said, “You thought because I was born in Alabama that I was a fool,

You said Mississippi and Georgia were never earn the Golden Rule.

Sure, I came from Alabama, went north, east, west.

But now, I stay in Alabama, Birmingham’s gonna be the best.

America, you said this would never be. Took a long time coming.

And now everybody can see.

All through the war. Vietnam. WWII. Iraq on far away battlefields

Died, killed for America an’ still you don’t think I’m real.

I worked in your fields from sun up to sun down.

Plant cotton, chop cotton, pick cotton

an’ still you don’t think I’m real

Change America change! Don’t be a Big Ding a Ling.

If you don’t put an end to this once n’ for all,

I’m afraid everybody in America gonna fall

Change America change!

Change America.

America, if you don’t change your way of doin’

America, you are going straight to Hell! Hell! Hell!

Until you are dead!

Bourgeois Blues [Leadbelly]  “The Bourgeois Blues is a blues song by Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly. It tells of the racial discrimination that he faced in a 1937 trip to Washington, D.C. to record with folklorist Alan Lomax. In traveling about town seeking a place to dine, their racially mixed group was unable to be seated at any of the segregated restaurants. Mr. Lomax described things years later in a PBS interview.”

Please Mr. Nixon [Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown] A blues appeal to Nixon and the useless  VP, Spiro Agnew to address the life of the poor in America.  While Nixon is remembered for many things it’s interesting to note that he was a proponent for safe injecting rooms to combat the heroin problem and a Universal Basic Income….way back in 1970!  Surely, nothing illustrates just how far the political center has shifted in Amurka over the last half century then those two factoids. Read more of Mr Nixon’s approach to ‘welfare reform’.

Tennessee [Hank Williams Jr.] Written by Waylon and probably the truth for so many great outlaw country singers. 

I tried so long to sell my songs
But Nashville wasn’t the place
All I got for the trouble was fightin’ mad
And the door slammed in my face

“Country music, as a genre, was managed by a committee in the ’60s, with record label brass deciding what sound was appealing, handing out assignments to artists, and attempting to dictate their appearance and public image,” says Jacob Shelton in an wee article on why the outlaws like Williams Jr. had to rebel against Nashville.   But even the Nashville sound which drove them to Luckenbach and Austin, was at one time considered pretty ‘rebellious’.  If country music in all its glory and contradictions interests you then let me recommend these articles.

Rednecks, White Socks, and Piña Coladas? Country Music Ain’t What It Used to Be… And It Really Never Was (J. Cobb 1999)

Narrative, vocal staging and masculinity in the ‘Outlaw’ country music of Waylon Jennings (Travis Stimeling 2013)

A “Dove with Claws”? Johnny Cash as Radical (Jonathan Silverman 2007)

The Battle of New Orleans [Johnny Cash & Terry Gordon] Johnny Cash and Johnny Horton were good mates.  Here one of the original outlaws of country music sings his friend’s most famous hit.  In the Battle of New Orleans, “future President Andrew Jackson and a motley assortment of militia fighters, frontiersmen, slaves, Native Americans and even pirates weathered a frontal assault in January 1815 by a superior British force, inflicting devastating casualties along the way. The previous month, Great Britain and the United States signed a treaty in Ghent, Belgium, that effectively ended the War of 1812. But news was slow to cross the pond, and in January the two sides met in what is remembered as one of the conflict’s biggest and most decisive engagements. The victory vaulted Jackson to national stardom, and foiled British plans for an invasion of the American frontier.”  The song itself was written as a teacher’s aid to make history more interesting to bored kids. Leave it to Cash to try to make the song his own.

City of Gold [Sipho Gumede] Johannesburg, “the metropolis with the country’s tallest skyscrapers, was once just veld (bush), dotted with rocky outcrops, scrubby bush and a network of streams. Today it is a cosmopolitan city of more than four million people, one of the few of its size in the world that is not located on a river or at the sea. It is located in Gauteng, the smallest of the country’s nine provinces, which contributes around 40% to South Africa’s GDP. Johannesburg has seen waves of different peoples occupying the area that is now the city: Stone Age ancestors dating back 500 000 years; Bushmen from 1 000 years ago; 500-year-old Iron Age furnaces belonging to Tswana people, and Boer farmhouses dating from the 1860s. But the city really started in 1886 when gold was discovered by Australian gold prospector George Harrison.”

Spies [The Scramblers] Not sure if this fits in this volume but it is a nice little rouser.

Song for the Women’s March, January 21, 2017 [The Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band] Given the recent decision in the Carroll case  this topical song about the march that took place in Washington DC as Trump was insisting his inauguration crowd was the largest of all time, is worth listening to again.  “On January 21, 2017, the day after the presidential inauguration, women came out to demonstrate. Angered by the language of the 2016 presidential campaign and worried about a political culture that was misogynistic and attacked equality for people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community, hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets in the nation’s capital. Millions more joined in sister marches across the country and around the world. They hoped to revitalize the women’s movement and send the message that women would continue to fight for social justice. Women of color who felt marginalized since the suffrage movement took this opportunity to remake feminist activism in their own images.”

Sundown [Gordon Lightfoot] the song is about his stormy relationship with Cathy Smith, who was later sent to prison for delivering a lethal dose of heroin to John Belushi. 

When They Raised The U.N. Flag In Korea [Hank Harral & His Palomino Cowhands] Remember when the USA was the proud sponsor of the UN? No? Other than M.A.S.H, it seems we’ve pretty much erased the Korean War—the war that made the world safe for Gangnam Style—from our collective cortexes.  Here’s a quaint reminder.

I Wanna Be David Cassidy [Ken Sharp] One of the many blessings of growing up in India was not having to listen to the Partridge Family.  David Cassidy who’s smiling visage gets cover honours this volume had a fucked up life that led to his rather young death in 2017.