My friend Dick, the same one with whom I did chemistry experiments, introduced me to the world of folk music during my teenage years. Actually I had some previous experience with the Weavers' hit "Goodnight, Irene" and the Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley," but until my friend and I started spending afternoons together listening to his latest 78s of Joan Baez, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, etc. I really had not thought of "folk music" as a genre. They were just popular songs to me. However once I discovered folk, I was hooked. The songs brought up some important social issues, like the developing war in Vietnam and the struggle for Civil Rights toward the end of the 1950s and into the late 1970s. Soon I was listening to The Limelighters, Theodore Bikel, The Brothers Four, Odetta, Pete Seeger and Mariam Makeba. When I watched Martin Luther King's march on Washington on the grainy black and white TV my father had bought, I heard a call that was anchored in "We Shall Overcome," an old union song.
My friend taught himself to play the banjo and would often accompany the recordings, but I was never that musically inclined, except for listening. Many folk songs hit like a ton of bricks - "Follow the Drinking Gourd" (I remember another friend and me singing this song around a campfire on a very dark night in the Rincon Mountains above Tucson), ""Hangman," "Blowing in the Wind," "If I Had a Hammer," "If I were Free to Speak my Mind," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," "Donna, Donna," "Die Gedanken Sind Frei" (of course banned in Hitler's Germany)--all of these were hard hitting and spoke of the sorrows of life, not just the surgery sweet view of much of the popular music of the time. They seemed more authentic and somehow more optimistic in the acknowledgement that life can be cruel and sometimes the good has to be fought for, non-violently, by marching and picketing. However I was subject to the Vietnam War draft and was a bit scared to actually join some demonstration, like the First Moratorium. By some chance I was never drafted, but I was changed, like many young people of the period, by what I heard and saw. It made me very critical of the rush to war and my Quaker and Buddhist leanings (both of which allowed me to be an agnostic as far as God and the soul were concerned) later made me largely a pacifist. However I am not entirely against war. I would have had to have fought in both the Civil War and World War II. There was too much at stake in both to have sat them out. Sometimes war, as evil as it is, is the lesser evil. Folk music took these contradictions in to account. Life is not always easy and poses difficult choices, and I think that one cannot speak for others, but only for oneself in such cases.
Of course, being a teenage boy, I had crushes on several of the female folk singers, especially Joan Baez and Mary Travers. They were safe subjects of fantasy because I would never met them. To this day I love hearing their voices. I identified with the Kingston Trio and with Peter and Paul of Peter, Paul and Mary, and later with Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Much later I discovered Arlo Guthrie (and his father Woody) and the British group Steeleye Span and really liked their often gritty mix of folk, pop and rock. And Maddy Prior has such a distinctive voice that one cannot miss it. Only Steeleye Span could have a hit song sung entirely in Latin! And of course there was Dylan! He is in a class by himself. They were all pretty subversive at times, even the seemingly innocent Kingston Trio, who did Pete Seeger's "Blowin in the Wind" and of course "Patriot Game." Joan Baez did a version of that called "With God on Our Side."
I have recently been watching and listening to several of these groups on videos on You Tube and found them just as cutting as they were back then. A few are still around. Pete Seeger is about 95 and his voice is shot, but he did perform at Obama's first inaugural. Mary Travers died a while back. She was still going to protests almost up to the day she died.
I have just one question and maybe somebody out there can enlighten me. Why don't conservative have good songs? Or is it that the worship of the almighty dollar and power trips just do not ring true!
This is almost certainly my last personal diary. You all probably know enough about me to decide whether I make any sense and I am tired of the subject. Back to Women in Science and natural history!