I think he’s lived through most of these wars.

Pete Seeger turned 94 yesterday and he probably sang at his own party.

In this video he is a mere 45, singing a medley of war songs that were popular throughout American history.

There is a little humor in this, as Pete normally sings anti-war songs, but he hopes you’ll not be too literal and appreciate the irony.

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Ecuador: Valentine’s Day in Salcedo

[pre-scheduled blog post]

In Ecuador it’s called “el día de San Valentín”  and often “el día del amor y de la amistad” (the day of love and friendship).  There’s usually some kind of recognition among the team-members, and often something with our Ecuadorian hosts.  

This video has a good example of folk music, or música folklórica, around here, and the scenes of fiesta and people in the streets are pretty typical of a celebration day in a small city like Salcedo in the Ecuadorian highlands.  Some of the lyrics say about Salcedo, “for it’s the land of love.”  We shall see.

I don’t know if there will be any kind of extravaganza going on while we’re here, but if so this would be pretty typical.  Although I have never seen any bullfighting.

[Live update:  I had forgotten that it would be Carnaval time when we got here, and we arrived on the day itself, called Mardi Gras or Fat Tuesday elsewhere.  People were partying in the streets, music blaring, kids shooting people with shaving cream cannisters (I got sprayed as did many of the others) and water guns and throwing water balloons.  All in good fun.  Yesterday wa Ash Wednesday and more subdued.  A lot of the patients had a cross of ash on the forehead.]

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Fourth Sunday of Advent: Loreena McKennitt this time

Canadian singer Loreena McKennitt sings God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen like none other.  You’ll notice that David Grisman and Jerry Garcia weren’t singing in last Sunday’s post; it’s because they’d be embarrassed after hearing this week’s.

Really sorry there’s only a slide show to accompany this.  She’s really amazing to watch when she performs.

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Third Sunday of Advent: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, by Grateful Dawg

[Note:  I scheduled this before the school shooting on Friday.  I don't think I'll have anything to say about that in a blog post other than to remind us to pray.]

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Merry gentlemen indeed.

These guys are good.  I tried to post this one last year, but YouTube pulled it down (oh, what is it with the copyright police, anyway?).  It’s back again, so listen while you can.

God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen is one of my wife Jeri’s favorite Christmas songs, I think because it’s so well-suited to jazz.  Here we have David (Dawg) Grisman on mandolin, and the late Jerry Garcia before he was… uh… dead, on acoustic guitar—both doing what they love.

Music is for celebrating.

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Second Sunday of Advent: Gaudete! –with an accent.

This is how Latin might have been pronounced on the British Isles way back in… oh… early twenty-first century or so.  The English folk-rock band Steeleye Span sings “Gaudete” a cappella.  Great fun.

Gaudete, gaudete!
Christus est natus
Ex Maria virgine,
Gaudete!

Rejoice, rejoice!
Christ is born
Of the Virgin Mary,
Rejoice!”

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First Sunday of Advent: Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring — on Pete’s Banjo

After scouring YouTube for a version of O Come, O Come Emmanuel that I haven’t already posted (English or  Latin) I settled on J. S. Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring played on an unlikely instrument.  Not only do I think Bach would approve I think Jesus would too.

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Joni Mitchell: raised on robbery

Time for a birthday party now that the election foolishness is over.

Joni Mitchell sings “Raised on Robbery” in this on-stage performance, probably about 1979.

The song was released on her Court and Spark album in 1974.

Happy birthday, Joni!  Ageless and timeless.  Come and sing at the Islesford Neighborhood House sometime.  I’ll save out some lobsters.

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So many roads: Jerry Garcia

Jerry Garcia would have been 70 years old today if he had behaved himself.

And in a coincidental matter, another musician whom I’ve been tripping over a lot lately was born 50 years to the day after Jerry. Today is his 20th birthday.  Behave yourself, Danny.

While I was growing up, the Grateful Dead largely escaped me, and I don’t really know why except that top-40 radio wouldn’t touch the stuff.  Songs by the Dead were too long, a little more for an older crowd perhaps.  But anyone who enjoyed the Beatles, or the Who, or Crosby Stills & Nash (Neil Young optional) would have appreciated the Dead as well; and the others all got aired on commercial radio.  So I blame the system.

The Dead never suffered for want of a following, though.  A friend of mine said that she went to 19 Grateful Dead concerts as well as Woodstock (still has her ticket, because with thousands of people showing up the gates were overwhelmed).

When Jerry died in 1995, I pulled my boat into the Co-Op that afternoon to weigh up my lobsters, and the guy who passed me the crates said, “Man, there’s gonna be a lot of people wandering around with nothing to do.”

And so, because this kind of music deserves never to go away, I’m uploading another YouTube video.  This is from the last Grateful Dead concert,  in Chicago, July 1995, a month before Jerry died.

So many roads I tell you, New York to San Francisco.  All I want is one to take me home.

So many roads to ease my soul.

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It is well with my soul

Today in church we sang one of the great 19th-century hymns, and one of my favorites:  “It Is Well With My Soul” (lyrics by Horatio Spafford; tune by Philip Bliss).  Not to poke fun at anything (that’ll be coincidental) but here is a bit of satire that I’ve been hoarding from Sacred Sandwich—something like “Great moments in hymn writing” as might be seen on David Letterman:

Now, this may not mean a thing to you without knowing the third stanza, so I’ll post it here, and the full lyrics below.  Sorry no YouTube clip, but the quality ranged from rock-bottom to CCM to worse.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

In the first line of that stanza, Horatio Spafford takes a thought-break, very much like the apostle Paul who said in Romans chapter 5, “ For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  This “parenthetical thought” has amused or perplexed readers for centuries, and Spafford (oh, the bliss of this glorious thought) continued the tradition.  Even his words echoed the Romans passage.

A couple of things interest me about the hymn, aside from the fact that I really love the music and the lyrics:

Firstly, that Horatio Spafford wrote it after suffering a series of Job-like tragedies.  His four-year-old son died; then he lost his fortune in the Chicago fire; then his four daughters drowned in a shipwreck during a trans-Atlantic crossing with his wife.  She survived, and while Spafford was on his way to Europe to join her he was inspired to write the lyrics near the spot where their daughters had died.

Secondly, that the lyrics represent a prevailing viewpoint of that period and of earlier periods, that “the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend” and without mention of anyone disappearing from airplanes.

Did I blindside you with that one?

Of course nobody disappeared from airplanes.  They hadn’t been invented yet; Jenkins and LaHaye hadn’t been born; and neither was there any mention of driverless cars.  I bring this up, seemingly off-topic, because the current pop-theology prescribes that believers be removed from the earth in a “rapture” before the second coming of the Lord.  However, as hymns from ancient times through the nineteenth century attest, Christ simply comes back.  It was never perfectly agreed whether he’ll come before or after a millennial period (whether pre- or post-millennial) but there was never any question of us disappearing.

Until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the Irish import “Pre-millennial Dispensationalism” began to capture Americans’ imaginations.  The annotations in the Scofield Reference Bible carried it away, reinforced later by a great deal of popular literature such as Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and later still Jenkins’ and LaHaye’s Left Behind series; and by now this sort of thing is gospel.

Except that it’s not.  It’s merely a theology.  And a rather convoluted one.

Horatio Spafford had it right, as did millions of Christians over hundreds of generations:  the trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend.  Maybe we’ll disappear, our shoes and tooth-fillings left behind for the infidels to collect.

But I don’t think so.  And at any rate, that’s not the gospel.  That’s another gospel, and Paul warns against chasing after that sort of thing in the Epistle to the Galatians.

When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Refrain:
It is well, (it is well),
With my soul, (with my soul)
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pang shall be mine, for in death as in life,
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.

But Lord, ’tis for Thee, for Thy coming we wait,
The sky, not the grave, is our goal;
Oh, trump of the angel! Oh, voice of the Lord!
Blessed hope, blessed rest of my soul.

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

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Eric Bogle: No Man’s Land

Eric Bogle (left) and John Munro

This is what Memorial Day is all about:  Eric Bogle singing songs of World War I (Click the link for another from two years ago).

I met Eric Bogle in Northport, Maine a few years ago, and his buddy John Munro, while they toured the US singing bawdy songs of Australia and sobering ones of war.  One of the most memorable concerts ever, in a small wooden building called the Blue Goose.  His songs No Man’s Land (also called The Green Fields of France) and his more dangerous And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda capture the spirit of war, or at least its bottom line.

Play the video of a performance of No Man’s Land below.

Well, how do you do, Private William McBride,
D’you mind if I sit here down by your graveside?
I’ll rest for awhile in the warm summer sun,
Been walking all day, Lord, and I’m nearly done.
I can see by your gravestone you were only nineteen
When you joined the glorious fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean, Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?

Did they beat the drum slowly, did they sound the fife lowly?
Did the rifles fire o’er ye as they lowered ye down?
Did the bugles sing “The Last Post” in chorus?
Did the pipes play the “Flowers O’ The Forest”?

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She may have been singing this back to Bob

Bob Dylan is 71 years old today.  May his music live forever. 

I used to think that only he and Joan Baez were capable of singing his songs, but there have been so many good covers of his work in recent years, from artists who have broken away from his style, that I’ve revised that thought. 

But Joan Baez is still the best at it. 

Here is Joan in 1965 singing “It Ain’t Me, Babe”, which Dylan had released the previous year on Another Side of Bob Dylan.  She may have been thinking about their broken romance as she was singing this.

 

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An exercise in irony

This folk song by Sydney Carter (1915-2004) has been making its way around the web lately, thanks in part to that ‘Sixties rebel N.T. Wright (see my post of May 12th).

I won’t play the video of Bishop Wright singing it (there comes a time when, as one realizes that YouTube is half one’s act, one should lighten up on the videos).

Andrea Mantegna, Calvary 1457-59

These lyrics to “Friday Morning” by Sydney Carter tell the story from Luke 23 of one of the thieves on the cross, the one who didn’t insult Jesus for getting strung up there with them. Maybe next year on Good Friday I’ll post the video. It does work better with music.

 

It was on a Friday morning that they took me from the cell
and I saw they had a carpenter to crucify as well.
You can blame it on to Pilate; you can blame it on the Jews.
You can blame it on the Devil, but it’s God that I accuse.
“It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree.

You can blame it on to Adam; you can blame it on to Eve.
You can blame it on the apple, but that I can’t believe.
It was God that made the Devil, and the woman and the man.
And there wouldn’t be an apple if it wasn’t in the plan.
“It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree.

Now Barabbas was a killer, and they let Barabbas go.
But you are being crucified for nothing that I know.
And your God is up in Heaven and He doesn’t do a thing
With a million angels watching, and they never move a wing.
”It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree.

“To hell with Jehovah,” to the carpenter I said;
“I wish that a carpenter had made the world instead.
Goodbye and good luck to you; our ways will soon divide.
Remember me in heaven, the man you hung beside.
”It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me,”
I said to the carpenter, a-hanging on the tree.

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N.T. Wright sings Dylan

This works a whole lot better if you know who N.T. Wright is.  Anglican bishop, author, speaker, New Testament scholar, theologian.  “N.T.” stands for New Testament, or Nicholas Thomas, take your pick.  

Some people don’t care for Tom Wright, but those people aren’t the sort who like Bob Dylan either, so it’s a wash. Here Tom sings “The Hour that the Ship Comes In”, one of Dylan’s great eschatological hymns. 

This is another in the “you’ll either get this or you won’t” department.  And excuse the British accent. 

 

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The Nobel committee just doesn’t get it…

I keep saying that Peter Seeger should win the Nobel Peace Prize.  Is anybody out there listening?   

At 93 years old he’s still going, and his music will keep on after he’s gone to graveyards and become a verse in one of his own songs.

Here’s a video of Pete in his natural habitat, before a crowd singing “Bring ‘em Home”, a song still good today.  For a brief bio, and my last year’s commentary, click here. 

Happy birthday, Pete.  You’re one of the last of the American patriots.   

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RMS Titanic, 100 years later

It’s well-known that as the Titanic was sinking, the popular hymn “Nearer my God to Thee” was being sung and played by those still aboard. 

I’ll post below from the movie “Titanic” the scene  that illustrates this.  No voices, only a string quartet, but it’s nicely done.

If you like stringed music, and want to see live footage of the Titanic 100 years ago, click here for last year’s post.  It’s Pachelbel’s Canon in D.

Here are the lyrics by Sarah F. Adams:

Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!
E’en though it be a cross that raiseth me;
Still all my song would be nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Though like the wanderer, the sun gone down,
Darkness be over me, my rest a stone;
Yet in my dreams I’d be nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

There let the way appear steps unto heav’n;
All that Thou sendest me in mercy giv’n;
Angels to beckon me nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

The with my waking thoughts bright with Thy praise,
Out of my stony griefs Bethel I’ll raise;
So by my woes to be nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

Or if on joyful wing, cleaving the sky,
Sun, moon, and stars forgot, upwards I fly,
Still all my song shall be, nearer, my God, to Thee,
Nearer, my God, to Thee, nearer to Thee!

 

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