Roots Uncovered -Three Tune Tuesday
Where have all the flowers gone?
As a kid I heard about the Weavers as the group Pete Seeger played with, but I never knew they were so funny. My dad had a few Pete Seeger albums and one of the Weaver's Albums. I think I also heard them play on the Midnight Special with Studs Terkel. I miss that guy, but that's another story.
We are going backwards in history. Usually I choose some songs from the artist's youth first and later end up with one of the last performances. This time I'm starting with the Weaver's reunion concert and ending with one of Pete Seeger's earlier television appearances.
Get up and Go
When he was laid off in the 80s, my dad would turn off the lights and listen to this song again and again with "What did you learn in School today" and "Henry my Son". It was his time of inner reflection, but for me as a small boy it was curiosity. How can this silly music help him feel better?
As i got older and listened I found that these old folk songs are not silly songs. They all have a message if you listen carefully. They had to be careful or the censors would catch them.
According to history.com the weavers were banned from NBC television. I remembered them as cute old people that sang, but they were a lot more than that. This was a hilarious reunion concert at Carnegie Hall according to the Washington Post.
Little Boxes
Oh my how a kids song can be so accurate.
And the people in the houses all went to the university
and they all got put in boxes, little boxes all the same
Why does this song make me cry? So many years this cycle of boxes and being put in boxes has continued it's cycle and spread to all the nations of the earth.
Maybe it's a reaction to my son's test scores in school. I looked over the test papers and the questions were all screwed up to make sure the kids got low scores. Only a select few will get a chance to go to universities in the capital so the teachers need to know who they will help and who they will ignore.
My son showed me the group chat of his classmates and they are GIFs and MEMEs of suicide. They spend a lot of time and money in private institutes to prepare for the tests but the school makes sure they can't answer the test questions. I think it is counterproductive teaching, but it is the only way for the school to receive funding. When they get a top student to enter a top university they are funded well and stay in business. But when they help students to learn it's considered a blow off school and they are on their own.
The song is not so much about education as the industrial world molding people into positions that compromise their humanity for a fake world of houses, golf courses, martinis, summer camps universities and little boxes.
The Peaunuts character of Linus really hits the point about the purpose of life here.
The Ranger’s Command and Hard Travelin' - Woody Guthrie
From 1955-1962 Peter Seger was blacklisted by the FBI for not discussing his political affiliations before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Woody Guthrie was also blacklisted for contempt from 1957-1962 as part of the Red Scare.
These folk singers were anything but UnAmerican. They loved the country and knew the heart of the people.
Pete Seeger introduces Woody by singing one of his songs, "Hard Travelin'. Pete can sing it, but he couldn't have written it. Woodie was the Troubadour and the tributary of folk music. He was the one that sat in box cars and played guitars and roamed and rambled across America.
In the video, Woody is singing "The Ranger's Command". It was a song to be courageous. He was courageous and fighting Huntington disease.
I guess what I'm saying with these three is
remember where you came from
and
don't be afraid.
The pictures and story are my own @mineopoly. I checked references and they are linked in the text. These songs are presented for Three Tune Tuesday by @ablaze.
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Now that is some crazy shit!
I liked your houses / uni /boxes comments #truth
Thanks for commenting @tengolotodo,
Now I know there are other people in the world who can hear my thoughts. That's the cool part about a blog with Hive. Somebody will say something.
I'm just hoping you get some sunshine out there. The system is broken and too old to fix. The sad part is for the immediate future there aren't that many ways. Maybe my younger son will do some kind of home school for high school, but this is difficult too. There is a price we pay for going out of the box.
It's really so sad what you said about schooling there and your son showing you those gifs about suicide. I'm sure they were only joking but of course pressure like this really impacts kids mental health. I can see the parellel with the Seeger song. That song always affected me as a kid too and I think of it time to time, those little boxes made of ticky tacky on the hillside all the same.
I love Woody Guthrie. I think I referenced him a couple of weeks ago with Dylan's song to Woody. I used to have an album of his on vinyl.
I noticed that and maybe that's what got my mind on that track of thinking. My algorithm on Youtube is trying to feed me Tina Turner songs, but I'm not ready for that just right now. I wanted a minute to go back in Folk history
I don't recall seeing any Woody Guthrie Albums. The cover of "Library of Congress" looks familiar but I don't think it was in my dad's collection.
As for the school system, it's been broken. Here it's a little worse, but India and China are more messed up. The more I think of it the more I realize I shouldn't think about it. There is no real solution but going through the system.
I guess that's tough, when you want to change things but don't have the power to, and the only thing you can do is just shut up and put up with it, and teach you kids some emotional resilience.
I used to teach kids from mainland China, amongst other countries, and they have told me stories about what it's like. For some even parental pressure is enormous - the talented creatives pushed into medicine or business.
Wow, you hit some really poignant thoughts, here. I have kids in school - who have struggled with school - for similar reasons. School - and exams - should not be designed to make children double guess themselves. Hell, they shouldn't even be designed to test a child's retention of knowledge; they should be designed to test the child's ability to put that knowledge into action.
I could go on. And on. And on. I fought a losing battle - tooth and nail - to encourage my oldest son to focus on music instead of "grades" during high school. The end result is that he barely graduated and is now directionless. It kills me. I wish I had the wherewithal at the time to just pull him out of school and home school him. School knowledge hasn't done him a bit of good.
Little boxes is right, society seems to want to put us all in little boxes or occupations or roles doesn't it. It's so sad to hear about the gifs and memes about suicide in your son's group chat. It would make you worry for the world when young people could even contemplate such things, but for all the light there is, there is much darkness too.
Really interesting song choices anyway and the conversation that went with them
Haha.
Thanks for keeping "Three Tunes Tuesday" alive @ablaze with your comments and update each week. The last couple of Tuesdays were weird. Last week was an emergency tests for bombs and this week was a satellite falling from the sky. Generally weird vibes and that reflects in the music that comes to mind last week and this week. !LOL
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