I have been listening to a replay of “The 50 Essential Tracks” of Canadian popular music on the CBC lately. This is a program from last spring which they are running again due to the lock-out. Note about the link: the Canadian edition is further down the page.
I disagree with a fair number of songs on the list, and especially “The Hockey Song” by Stompin’ Tom Conners, which is something like #13. Novelty songs do not belong on “Top 50” lists. They belong on juke-boxes in run-down restaurants in small northern Ontario towns.
I like “Four Strong Winds”– it’s a great song– but not quite enough to justify a listing in the top 15. It’s straining under the weight of that kind of honorific.
I liked seeing “Echo Beach” up there, along with “The Weight” (both of which should have been higher).
Yesterday, Gordon Lightfoot’s “Sundown” came in somewhere in the top 20. Here are some of the lyrics:
I can see her lying back in her satin dress
In a room where yah do what yah don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you’ve been creeping ’round my back stairs
and
I can see her lookin’ fast in her faded jeans
She’s a hard-lovin’ woman got me feelin’ mean
And then he warns her again to stay away from his back stairs and his porch and his Juno awards.
Does this belong in anyone’s top 25? How exactly do you look “fast” in your faded jeans?
I think I understand what happens to the career of a singer-songwriter. You start out trying to write the best damn songs you can, about real people you know, and real experiences you had, and you strive to say something fresh and original. So Gordon Lightfoot writes five or six genuinely interesting outstanding songs (“Early Morning Rain”, “Sit Down, Young Stranger”, “Whispers of the North”, and “That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me”) and a dozen or so pretty good songs. And then…
Then you become successful and famous. Everyone tells you you are great songwriter. And it’s time for some new material. And you’re strumming around on your guitar and you come up with a little riff and the word “Sundown” comes into your mind and you make it a chorus and then you add a few aimless verses and your producer adds some background instrumentation and vocals and presto, another hit.
Does Gordon Lightfoot actually know any “hard-lovin’ ” women who wear satin dresses and creep around his back stairs? I’ll bet he doesn’t. (Actually, he does– sort of: the song is allegedly about Cathy Smith, infamous for helping John Belushi leave this world. Look it up. I would offer that this does not remedy the use of cliché or the essential hypocrisy of the song: condemning a woman for her morals after sleeping with her. )
(I’ll bet he also had no intention of slipping away on that “endless highway” either.)
And what exactly does “hard-lovin'” mean? That she makes him pay up front?
This is the same woman The Guess Who ran into back in 1970:
Don’t you start coming around my door
Don’t want to see your shadow no more…
Come to think of it– this woman probably moved on to Malibu where she ended up at party with Bob Dylan:
There’s a woman on my lap, and she’s drinking champagne
She’s got white skin and assassin’s eyes
Yes Bob: a “hard-lovin'” woman.
Bizarrely… Nana Mouskouri recorded a French language version of the song.
Update: 2014-08-19
Here’s what Gordy himself has
to say about the inspiration
for Sundown (>From Reddit, August 22, 2014:)
:
Well, I had this girlfriend one time, and I was at home working, at my
desk, working at my songwriting which I had been doing all week since I was on a roll, and my girlfriend was somewhere drinking, drinking somewhere. So I was hoping that no one else would get their hands on her, because she was pretty good lookin’! And that’s how I wrote the song “Sundown,” and as a matter of fact, it was written just *around* Sundown, just as the sun was setting, behind the farm I had rented to use as a place to write the album.
But that is not what the song is about at all.