Tag: Ian Tyson

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Joan Baez’s Weird Homage to Slavery

Way back in 1971, Joan Baez released a double album called “Blessed Are”, which, in retrospect, may be one of the weirdest album releases of all time.

Blessed Are... (Joan Baez album - cover art).jpg

Joan Baez, in case you don’t remember or weren’t born yet, was a famous folk singer who became a prominent anti-war, anti-racism protest leader during the 1960’s, and an interpreter of Bob Dylan’s songs.  As a result, unsurprisingly, she pissed off a lot of patriotic war-loving Americans who regarded her, along with Jane Fonda, as treasonous dupes of the radical left.  They may not have liked John Lennon; they may have regarded Dylan with hostile indifference; they may have ignored Pete Seeger; but they hated Baez and Fonda with a toxic rage.

“Blessed Are” appears to be a peace offering of some kind, to southerners, patriots, farmers, and, perhaps, country music fans.    It featured a hit for Baez, “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down”, by Robbie Robertson of The Band (and subject of a bitter dispute between him and The Band’s drummer Levon Helm).

Levon Helm says in his autobiography:

“I remember taking him [Robertson] to the library so he could research the history and geography of the era and make General Robert E. Lee come out with all due respect.”

Helm was so bitterly annoyed by Baez’s version of “The Night They Drove old Dixie Down” that he refused afterwards to sing it in concert.  I wonder if he was more annoyed by her politics than anything else.  What musician gets upset when another artist makes a signature song more popular?

Anyway, to make General Lee come out with “all due respect”– all the respect due to a slave-owning General who led the war effort to preserve the institution of slavery– may strike some as a dubious cause.

Look at the lyrics:

Like my father before me, I’m a working man
I’m like my brother before me, I took a rebel stand
Well, he was just eighteen, proud and brave
When a Yankee laid him in his grave
I swear by the blood below my feet,
You can’t raise a Cain back up with it’s in defeat

Some claim that the song is sympathetic to the Lost Cause ideology and defends slavery.  I think it does neither.  The fact that it was written by a Canadian should clue listeners in: this is an observational song, not propaganda for either side.  In fact, its observational qualities are acute and beautiful and tragic.

The album also has a song by Jagger and Richards, a paean to the “hard-working” average joe who always gets the short end of the stick.  And a tribute to a southern farmer friend with “the slowest drawl I’d ever heard” showing the narrator and friend around his beautiful farm.  There’s an intriguing song about apocalypse: Three Horses.

But let’s move on to “Lincoln Freed Me Today”.  If “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” seems ambiguous, “Lincoln Freed Me Today” is decidedly revisionist.

Been a slave most all my life
So’s my kids and so’s my wife
I been working on the Colonel’s farm
Aint been mistreated, aint done no harm…
The Colonel’s been right good to me
He’s taken care of my family

The Colonel rode his buggy in from town
Hitched his horse and called us all around
Said he couldn’t keep us here no more
I saw a tear as he walked toward the door

Wow!

I’m sure Baez did not have in mind the idea of rescuing slavery from the dustbin of history, or, giving us the positive side of antebellum culture.  I’m sure she thought, well, it’s a true picture of some slave-owners, and some slaves.  And one must be fair by presenting both sides of the issue.   But the “I saw a tear” is kind of repulsive.  That’s the image we’re supposed to take away from this kindly old slaveholder?

You see how convoluted we become.

The songwriter is variously credited as David Paton, David Patten, and David Paton.  It’s likely David Patton.  There’s very little information out there about him.

 

 

Ian and Sylvia do a just peachy version of this song.

 

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Ian and Sylvia

I was reading about the folk scene in New York City in the early 1960’s once and came across what I thought was an extraordinary comment. This was time of incredible intellectual and cultural ferment, and Greenwich Village was rich with young talents like Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, Phil Ochs, Tim Hardin, Peter, Paul, & Mary, Tom Rush, Tom Paxton, the Roches, and so on.

The comment was something like this: many aspiring folk singers envied the talents of any number of song-writers and performers, but if you asked anyone who they would most like to be– if they could be someone else– the answer was usually Ian Tyson or Sylvia Fricker.

Ian & Sylvia were not among the most successful of those performers– though, for a time, they were quite successful– nor among the most prolific or talented. But they were very talented, moderately successful, and, perhaps more than anything else, beautiful. They were beautiful in that magical, transcendent mode that radiates class and intelligence and sophistication. Even this album cover conveyed this: they are not posing. They exist in a sort of conscious state of distinguished self-contemplation, with neither ego nor false humility. They have momentarily paused for the image, not caring if we are impressed or not, because they know what they look like and they know what they are.

One of my brothers owned the album “Lovin’ Sound”, pictured above, which was released in 1967. As an adolescent, the cover picture of Sylvia with the low-cut top– that elegant cleavage– stirred me for obvious reasons. I wasn’t yet a huge fan of their music — now I realize it was probably too authentic and complex for my tastes at the time. When I listen to the song “Lovin’ Sound” today, I am far more impressed with it. Restraint and taste are the last things an adolescent learns to appreciate. But the album cover stayed in my mind for decades. A few years ago, I started searching the internet for it and, surprisingly, had great difficulty locating a copy. Just recently, I finally succeeded.

Listen to “The Lovin’ Sound”. It’s trendy– songs about universal love and peace were hot for a while there in the late 1960’s — but a little richer than something like, say, “Come on people now/smile on your brother/ everybody get together/ start to love one another right now”.

Your world is crying now my friend
But give it Love
And it will mend
And, teach you All
The music to the Lovin Sound
Oh, the Lovin Sound

Well, okay. So maybe it isn’t that much more sophisticated. But it’s a fine song, a bit marred by a somewhat jarring attempt to meld folk and rock styles that reminds me of “The Sound of Silence”.

They had a tv show. They struggled through a few more albums that never seemed to go anywhere.

Then they split. Ian went out west to become a cowboy and sing cowboy songs and run his ranch in Alberta, and Sylvia worked for the CBC. Maybe he cheated on her. Maybe she cheated on him. We don’t know– that’s part of what gave them class: no public drama. Peter Gzowski of the CBC, in narration over some documentary on ’60’s folk groups, says they had “artistic and personal differences”.

But they remain iconic to me, the definition of grace and class, the essence of intelligent, cultured expression, and I can’t think of a single other ensemble that comes close to them in their prime in that regard.