MUSIC AND HISTORY
Mounting evidence suggests that human beings are hard-wired to appreciate music. What researchers want to know now is why our distant ancestors evolved music in the first place.
Bruce Springsteen,
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
(Columbia Records, 2006)
For more than six weeks Bruce Springsteen’s retro-folk album, a tribute to the dean of American folksingers, Pete Seeger, has stayed way up in the Billboard charts of best-selling American records. Of course, the Boss—as Springsteen’s fans call him—has been one of America’s most acclaimed and dynamic rock-and-rollers. His legendary concerts with the E Street Band have filled the largest arenas night after night, and the man who made “Born in the USA” one of the most notable rock anthems in American musical history is used to holding the position at the top of the charts. When he started decades ago at the since-demolished Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, a young writer, later to become Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, wrote that he had “seen the future of rock-and-roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
But the Boss’s fans could not have been ready for this latest release. There is not an electric guitar in sight. Like Eric Clapton some years back, the rocker has gone unplugged. Springsteen presides over a down-home, back-porch get-together recorded in his farmhouse living room in just three days without any rehearsals. He plays an acoustic Gibson guitar and a harmonica, surrounded by the sounds of a five-string banjo, country fiddles, an accordion, an upright acoustic bass, and a horn and rhythm section composed of a tuba, saxophone, trumpet, trombone and drums. This ensemble allows Springsteen to broaden the concept of folk music to show its intersection with traditional jazz and gospel music. And what irony: Folk purists and leftists, not least Pete Seeger himself, went ballistic when Bob Dylan “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, trading in topical songs for introspective rock. It was a long road from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Now the Boss has moved in exactly the opposite direction, from rock to old folk, and we have come full circle.
Not since the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Seeger’s own group the Weavers hit the top of what was then called “The Hit Parade” with songs like “Goodnight Irene”, “On Top of Old Smokey”, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” and “Wimoweh” (later to become a hit by the Tokens and be featured in The Lion King)—not since then has traditional folk music had such a wide audience. The early Sixties saw the start of what became “the great folk revival”, when “Seeger’s children”, as those who learned his music at left-wing summer camps in Chicago, California and New York were called, formed their own groups when they got to college. At the same time, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Tarriers and others managed to bust the charts with number one hits. In those years, ABC aired a weekly series called Hootenanny, in which many of these groups were featured (although Seeger himself, still suffering from the residue of the 1950s blacklist, was not allowed to appear).
Pete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948Getty Images
Pete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948Getty ImagesPete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948 [© Getty Images]Springsteen started playing guitar after watching this program. He quickly made the switch to rock and roll and electric guitar just as rock washed the folk revival out of sight and mostly off the airwaves. Folk thrived on a smaller scale, with a growing number of venues around the country near big cities—places like the Mainpoint in suburban Philadelphia and the Cellar Door in Washington, DC. A new generation of folk-influenced singer-songwriters honed their craft, built up a small but solid audience and actually managed to make a modest living with their music.
In the ensuing years, folk transmogrified into the short-lived folk-rock movement, when groups like the Byrds and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band revved up the sound using folk standards played in a new way, combining electric and acoustic instruments in a manner that made the music more accessible and danceable. They also integrated the sound of the bluegrass-inspired five-string banjo into their repertoire, and folk-rock acquired a country twang with bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers, a Byrds’ offshoot of the early 1970s. The country influence helped lead many to discover Appalachian mountain music on their own.
At about the same time, bluegrass music itself, an up-tempo transformation of Appalachian music pioneered by mandolinist Bill Monroe and banjo player Earl Scruggs, began to punch into the musical mainstream thanks in part to Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys playing the theme song to the blockbuster 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Today, bluegrass is mainstream, its popularity soaring with giant audiences for Alison Krauss and Union Station and the success of the Coen Brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and its live concert spin-off—as well as the successful “Down From the Mountain” tour and CD, spotlighting the artists whose music was featured in the movie.
But not until the arrival of Springsteen’s hit compact disc and sold-out tour have the old folk songs been featured and performed for mass audiences, not only in America, but throughout the world. Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions Band has traveled through Europe singing these old folk standards to audiences who have never heard—or heard of—Pete Seeger. Sometimes the Boss’ audiences are serenaded into a state of shock. In Washington many in the crowd shouted “sing the good stuff” and seemed put off that they weren’t at the usual Springsteen rock show. In Los Angeles, as staff writer Ann Powers reported in the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood’s elite seemed reluctant to join in singing with the Boss as they surely would have done at an E Street Band concert. “Pathetic”, Bruce joked, commenting on their attempt to sing along with “Old Dan Tucker.”
But Powers caught perfectly what was so new and dazzling about Springsteen’s show, and what was different from the way the old folk songs have been previously performed. The music, she realized, “made room for everything from Preservation Hall-style jazz to Western swing, zydeco, Southern gospel, jump blues, country blues, conjunto, classic country and boogie-woogie. . . . It was a history lesson you could dance to.” The music, reminiscent of the various intertwined traditions of American roots music, similar in style much of the time to that offered by The Band in the 1970s and early 1980s (indeed, Bruce has added Levon Helm’s “Rag, Mama, Rag” to the touring show), captures the universality and Americanness of the songs Pete Seeger has been singing and playing since the 1930s.
Seeger began his career with a forthright political agenda. An old-style Stalinist and card-carrying member of the American Communist Party, he argued from the start that “music is a weapon”, a theme immortalized by the words written on the guitar of his pal and singing partner Woody Guthrie: “This machine kills Fascists.” In groups like the Almanac Singers, Seeger sang at union halls and antiwar rallies (including those run by Communist Party fronts during the era of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact), and came into his own as a featured antiwar activist and singer during the Vietnam War years. But Seeger’s other side emphasized the story of America told by old traditional folksingers like Bascom Lamar Lunsford—a banjo picker whose politics and view of the world were 180 degrees out from anything Seeger believed, and whose music and life reflected the Appalachian culture he was born to.
When Seeger sang songs like “Old Dan Tucker”, an 1840s fiddle tune written by Dan Emmett, he stood alone and plucked simply on his banjo. When he played “John Henry”, the classic folk ballad about the attempt of workmen to beat the steam drill while building the first American railroads, it was a simple, solo affair. Seeger realized himself that he needed a bit more for performances. “Pay Me My Money Down”, which Springsteen covers, was a sea chanty sung with a calypso beat by black stevedores in Georgia and South Carolina, commenting upon the scheme of some captains to ship out of harbor without having paid their old crew. Seeger sang it with the Weavers, who commercialized it by adding a guitar solo by Fred Hellerman and a steady beat. Springsteen’s cover is a majestic wall-of-sound, all-acoustic rendition that is more powerful still, with a zydeco-New Orleans sound replete with horns and banjos. It stirs up the music juices but good.
But is it activism, as well? Some of the press have referred to the Springsteen album as a new protest album in the old Seeger mode, tying its success to widespread disenchantment with the Bush Administration. Certainly, Springsteen is an unabashed old-fashioned left-liberal. He campaigned with and for John Kerry and has hardly made his disdain for George W. Bush a secret. We Shall Overcome includes “Mrs. McGrath”, a ballad popular during the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland (but which actually dates from 1815). The lyrics capture the pain of war and the sad familiar response of a mother when she sees her son home from battle and hardly recognizes him because of his injuries. It is a timeless song that could be sung during any war, as families come to appreciate the sacrifice their sons and daughters have made for their country. The grieving mother wails a universal lament: “All foreign wars I do proclaim live as blood and a mother’s pain/ I’d rather have my son as he used to be.”
Perhaps realizing that the song hardly says “U.S. out of Iraq”, which is how many have portrayed its message, Springsteen has added to his tour Seeger’s old anti-Vietnam War song, “Bring ’Em Home”, in which he sings, “If you love your Uncle Sam, bring ’em home, bring ’em home/ bring them home from abroad” (Seeger had sung “from Vietnam”). Springsteen is entitled to his views, and he has made them clear. But do his audiences really believe that the United States should pull its troops out of Iraq immediately? Do they believe, as Seeger used to, that the singing of left-wing and antiwar songs has the power to change American foreign policy? For those who are antiwar (and certainly at least a minority of Springsteen’s audience is), the song works as catharsis. But as before, even in the political folk heyday of the Vietnam War, most of the audience shows for the music; the performers, meanwhile, show up to make it—and to sell records.
There’s nothing wrong with that. We Shall Overcome succeeds in giving us a portrait of America as it grew and matured. Once again Jesse James robs the Glendale train and mule drivers haul barges down the Erie Canal. The black gospel choir helps us once more climb Jacob’s Ladder, and wails and soars in Springsteen’s powerful version of “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”, which the Boss sang in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The audience roared with raw emotion at the verse, “Brothers and sisters don’t you cry/ There’ll be good times by and by”, when they realized it was sung especially for them. We relive the plight of Okie migrants during the 1930s Dust Bowl, as Springsteen sings Sis Cunningham’s Guthrie-esque story of how her old home “blowed away.” And the kids can laugh with the famed 16th-century Scottish ballad “Froggie Went A Courtin’”, just as some of their parents and grandparents heard it from Burl Ives in the 1940s, Seeger in the 1950s, or the incomparable Doc Watson in the 1960s.
The success of the Seeger Sessions album and Springsteen’s summer tour does not, of course, mean that the folk revival as such is returning in a new phase. American music has become too mixed up and amorphous for that to happen again, and much too commercialized for authenticity to conquer our ersatz-loving marketplace. Far more people will buy the CD of this year’s winner of American Idol than will listen to the Seeger Sessions band. Alas, there really is no accounting for taste. But by going back to the roots of American music, rediscovering what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America”, Bruce Springsteen will surely lead many—Americans and others all over the world—back to the glorious basics, to sounds and sentiments so old, pure and completely, eclectically American that their power is truly timeless. It’s an order from the Boss.
HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED SINCE 9/11/01
After the calamity that glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 — five short years ago, five long years ago — a single source of solace emerged amid the dread and grief: a great upwelling of simple solidarity. Here in New York, and in similarly bereaved Washington, that solidarity took homely forms. Strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance. In certain regions of the country, New York had been regarded (and resented) as somehow not quite part of America; that conceit, not shared by the terrorists, vanished in the fire and dust of the Twin Towers. The reconciliation was mutual. In SoHo and the Upper West Side, in the Village and the Bronx, sidewalk crowds cheered every flag-bedecked fire engine, and the Stars and Stripes sprouted from apartment windows all over town. New York, always suspect as the nation’s polyglot-plutocratic portal, was now its battered, bloody shield.
The wider counterpart to our traumatized togetherness at home was an astonishing burst abroad of what can only be called pro-Americanism. Messages of solidarity and indignation came from Libya and Syria as well as from Germany and Israel; flowers and funeral wreaths piled up in front of American Embassies from London to Beijing; flags flew at half-staff across Europe; in Iran, a candlelight vigil expressed sympathy. “Any remnants of neutrality thinking, of our traditional balancing act, have gone out of the window now,” a Swedish political scientist told Reuters. “There has not been the faintest shadow of doubt, not a trace of hesitation of where we stand, nowhere in Sweden.” Le Monde’s front-page editorial was headlined NOUS SOMMES TOUS AMÉRICAINS, and Italy’s Corriere della Sera echoed, “We are all Americans. The distance from the United States no longer exists because we, our values, are also in the crosshairs of evil minds.” In Brussels, the ambassadors of the nineteen members of NATO invoked, for the first time in the alliance’s fifty-two-year history, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, affirming that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and pledging action, “including the use of armed force.”
No one realistically expected that the mood of fellow-feeling and coöperation would long persist in the extraordinarily powerful form it took in the immediate wake of September 11th. The normal divisions of American politics and society were bound to make themselves felt again, and whatever the United States did in response to the attacks would provoke the tensions and misunderstandings that inevitably accompany the actions of a superpower in distress, no matter how deft its diplomacy or thorough its consultations. But it was natural to hope that domestic divisions would prove less rancorous in the face of the common danger, and that international frictions could be minimized in a struggle against what almost every responsible leader in the world recognized, or claimed to recognize, as an assault on civilization itself.
What few expected was how comprehensively that initial spirit would be ruined by the policies and the behavior of our government, culminating in, though hardly limited to, the disastrous occupation of Iraq. This shouldn’t have been so surprising. George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” one who recognized that government was not the enemy, praised bipartisanship, proclaimed his intention to “change the tone in Washington,” and advocated a foreign policy of humility and respect. None of that happened. Nine months into his Presidency, an economic policy of transferring the budget surplus to the wealthy, a social policy hewing to the demands of the Christianist far right, and a foreign policy marked by contempt for international instruments (the Kyoto protocol, the anti-ballistic-missile treaty) and the abandonment of diplomatic responsibilities (the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear activities, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate) had pushed Bush’s job ratings lower than those of any of his predecessors at a like point in their tenures. September 11th offered him a chance for a new beginning, and at first he seemed willing to seize it. Although the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was not as widely backed at first as is often assumed (particularly among many on the European left and some on the American), it is now almost universally supported in the Western world, with some forty countries involved and NATO troops carrying an increasing share of the military burden. But then came a reversion to form, and Iraq.
In “America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked,” based on ninety-one thousand interviews conducted in fifty nations from 2002 to 2005 by the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes write that while “the first hints that the world was becoming troubled by America came soon after the election of George W. Bush,” and that “whatever global goodwill the United States had in the wake of the September 11 attacks appears to have quickly dissipated,” after the Iraq invasion “favorable opinions had more than slipped. They had plummeted.” It’s grown worse since May, when the book was published. The most recent Pew findings show that “favorable opinions of the U.S.” have gone from eighty-three per cent in 2000 to fifty-six per cent in 2006 in Britain, seventy-eight to thirty-seven in Germany, and sixty-two to thirty-nine in France. The majorities saying that the Iraq war has made the world more dangerous are equally impressive: sixty per cent in Britain, sixty-six in Germany, and seventy-six in France. On this point, the United States is catching up. The most recent CNN poll, taken in late August, found fifty-five per cent of Americans saying that the Iraq war has made them less safe from terrorism.
Last week, the Administration launched a new public-relations campaign aimed at marketing the war in Iraq as the indispensable key to the struggle against terrorism. The Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense gave speeches attacking the war’s opponents (a category that includes, if that same CNN poll is to be believed, sixty-one per cent of the American public) as the contemporary counterparts of the appeasers of Nazism. President Bush, as one of his contributions to the P.R. campaign, granted an interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. As the two men, shirtsleeved in the sun, strolled together down a bleak New Orleans street, Williams wondered if the President shouldn’t “have asked for some sort of sacrifice after 9/11.” Bush’s reply:
Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.
And so we have. Not by paying “a lot of taxes,” of course; we pay less of those than we did before, and the very, very richest among us pay much, much less. But we have sacrificed, God knows. “The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits,” John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, wrote in the Washington Post a couple of days after Bush’s interview. “This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.” That’s a sacrifice. And here’s another: our country’s reputation. — Hendrik Hertzberg
The last of the 6 percenters. The future of real estate.
MOVIES
At the Toronto Film Fest, I am going to see
Babel
Wind that Shook the Barley
Volver
Penelope
Grbaztica
A Good Year
Little Children
Rescue Dawn
and
Mounting evidence suggests that human beings are hard-wired to appreciate music. What researchers want to know now is why our distant ancestors evolved music in the first place.
Bruce Springsteen,
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
(Columbia Records, 2006)
For more than six weeks Bruce Springsteen’s retro-folk album, a tribute to the dean of American folksingers, Pete Seeger, has stayed way up in the Billboard charts of best-selling American records. Of course, the Boss—as Springsteen’s fans call him—has been one of America’s most acclaimed and dynamic rock-and-rollers. His legendary concerts with the E Street Band have filled the largest arenas night after night, and the man who made “Born in the USA” one of the most notable rock anthems in American musical history is used to holding the position at the top of the charts. When he started decades ago at the since-demolished Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, a young writer, later to become Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, wrote that he had “seen the future of rock-and-roll, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.”
But the Boss’s fans could not have been ready for this latest release. There is not an electric guitar in sight. Like Eric Clapton some years back, the rocker has gone unplugged. Springsteen presides over a down-home, back-porch get-together recorded in his farmhouse living room in just three days without any rehearsals. He plays an acoustic Gibson guitar and a harmonica, surrounded by the sounds of a five-string banjo, country fiddles, an accordion, an upright acoustic bass, and a horn and rhythm section composed of a tuba, saxophone, trumpet, trombone and drums. This ensemble allows Springsteen to broaden the concept of folk music to show its intersection with traditional jazz and gospel music. And what irony: Folk purists and leftists, not least Pete Seeger himself, went ballistic when Bob Dylan “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, trading in topical songs for introspective rock. It was a long road from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Now the Boss has moved in exactly the opposite direction, from rock to old folk, and we have come full circle.
Not since the late 1940s and early 1950s, when Seeger’s own group the Weavers hit the top of what was then called “The Hit Parade” with songs like “Goodnight Irene”, “On Top of Old Smokey”, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” and “Wimoweh” (later to become a hit by the Tokens and be featured in The Lion King)—not since then has traditional folk music had such a wide audience. The early Sixties saw the start of what became “the great folk revival”, when “Seeger’s children”, as those who learned his music at left-wing summer camps in Chicago, California and New York were called, formed their own groups when they got to college. At the same time, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul & Mary, the Tarriers and others managed to bust the charts with number one hits. In those years, ABC aired a weekly series called Hootenanny, in which many of these groups were featured (although Seeger himself, still suffering from the residue of the 1950s blacklist, was not allowed to appear).
Pete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948Getty Images
Pete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948Getty ImagesPete Seeger (on the banjo) and the Weavers in 1948 [© Getty Images]Springsteen started playing guitar after watching this program. He quickly made the switch to rock and roll and electric guitar just as rock washed the folk revival out of sight and mostly off the airwaves. Folk thrived on a smaller scale, with a growing number of venues around the country near big cities—places like the Mainpoint in suburban Philadelphia and the Cellar Door in Washington, DC. A new generation of folk-influenced singer-songwriters honed their craft, built up a small but solid audience and actually managed to make a modest living with their music.
In the ensuing years, folk transmogrified into the short-lived folk-rock movement, when groups like the Byrds and the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band revved up the sound using folk standards played in a new way, combining electric and acoustic instruments in a manner that made the music more accessible and danceable. They also integrated the sound of the bluegrass-inspired five-string banjo into their repertoire, and folk-rock acquired a country twang with bands like the Flying Burrito Brothers, a Byrds’ offshoot of the early 1970s. The country influence helped lead many to discover Appalachian mountain music on their own.
At about the same time, bluegrass music itself, an up-tempo transformation of Appalachian music pioneered by mandolinist Bill Monroe and banjo player Earl Scruggs, began to punch into the musical mainstream thanks in part to Flatt & Scruggs’ Foggy Mountain Boys playing the theme song to the blockbuster 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde. Today, bluegrass is mainstream, its popularity soaring with giant audiences for Alison Krauss and Union Station and the success of the Coen Brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? and its live concert spin-off—as well as the successful “Down From the Mountain” tour and CD, spotlighting the artists whose music was featured in the movie.
But not until the arrival of Springsteen’s hit compact disc and sold-out tour have the old folk songs been featured and performed for mass audiences, not only in America, but throughout the world. Springsteen’s Seeger Sessions Band has traveled through Europe singing these old folk standards to audiences who have never heard—or heard of—Pete Seeger. Sometimes the Boss’ audiences are serenaded into a state of shock. In Washington many in the crowd shouted “sing the good stuff” and seemed put off that they weren’t at the usual Springsteen rock show. In Los Angeles, as staff writer Ann Powers reported in the Los Angeles Times, Hollywood’s elite seemed reluctant to join in singing with the Boss as they surely would have done at an E Street Band concert. “Pathetic”, Bruce joked, commenting on their attempt to sing along with “Old Dan Tucker.”
But Powers caught perfectly what was so new and dazzling about Springsteen’s show, and what was different from the way the old folk songs have been previously performed. The music, she realized, “made room for everything from Preservation Hall-style jazz to Western swing, zydeco, Southern gospel, jump blues, country blues, conjunto, classic country and boogie-woogie. . . . It was a history lesson you could dance to.” The music, reminiscent of the various intertwined traditions of American roots music, similar in style much of the time to that offered by The Band in the 1970s and early 1980s (indeed, Bruce has added Levon Helm’s “Rag, Mama, Rag” to the touring show), captures the universality and Americanness of the songs Pete Seeger has been singing and playing since the 1930s.
Seeger began his career with a forthright political agenda. An old-style Stalinist and card-carrying member of the American Communist Party, he argued from the start that “music is a weapon”, a theme immortalized by the words written on the guitar of his pal and singing partner Woody Guthrie: “This machine kills Fascists.” In groups like the Almanac Singers, Seeger sang at union halls and antiwar rallies (including those run by Communist Party fronts during the era of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact), and came into his own as a featured antiwar activist and singer during the Vietnam War years. But Seeger’s other side emphasized the story of America told by old traditional folksingers like Bascom Lamar Lunsford—a banjo picker whose politics and view of the world were 180 degrees out from anything Seeger believed, and whose music and life reflected the Appalachian culture he was born to.
When Seeger sang songs like “Old Dan Tucker”, an 1840s fiddle tune written by Dan Emmett, he stood alone and plucked simply on his banjo. When he played “John Henry”, the classic folk ballad about the attempt of workmen to beat the steam drill while building the first American railroads, it was a simple, solo affair. Seeger realized himself that he needed a bit more for performances. “Pay Me My Money Down”, which Springsteen covers, was a sea chanty sung with a calypso beat by black stevedores in Georgia and South Carolina, commenting upon the scheme of some captains to ship out of harbor without having paid their old crew. Seeger sang it with the Weavers, who commercialized it by adding a guitar solo by Fred Hellerman and a steady beat. Springsteen’s cover is a majestic wall-of-sound, all-acoustic rendition that is more powerful still, with a zydeco-New Orleans sound replete with horns and banjos. It stirs up the music juices but good.
But is it activism, as well? Some of the press have referred to the Springsteen album as a new protest album in the old Seeger mode, tying its success to widespread disenchantment with the Bush Administration. Certainly, Springsteen is an unabashed old-fashioned left-liberal. He campaigned with and for John Kerry and has hardly made his disdain for George W. Bush a secret. We Shall Overcome includes “Mrs. McGrath”, a ballad popular during the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland (but which actually dates from 1815). The lyrics capture the pain of war and the sad familiar response of a mother when she sees her son home from battle and hardly recognizes him because of his injuries. It is a timeless song that could be sung during any war, as families come to appreciate the sacrifice their sons and daughters have made for their country. The grieving mother wails a universal lament: “All foreign wars I do proclaim live as blood and a mother’s pain/ I’d rather have my son as he used to be.”
Perhaps realizing that the song hardly says “U.S. out of Iraq”, which is how many have portrayed its message, Springsteen has added to his tour Seeger’s old anti-Vietnam War song, “Bring ’Em Home”, in which he sings, “If you love your Uncle Sam, bring ’em home, bring ’em home/ bring them home from abroad” (Seeger had sung “from Vietnam”). Springsteen is entitled to his views, and he has made them clear. But do his audiences really believe that the United States should pull its troops out of Iraq immediately? Do they believe, as Seeger used to, that the singing of left-wing and antiwar songs has the power to change American foreign policy? For those who are antiwar (and certainly at least a minority of Springsteen’s audience is), the song works as catharsis. But as before, even in the political folk heyday of the Vietnam War, most of the audience shows for the music; the performers, meanwhile, show up to make it—and to sell records.
There’s nothing wrong with that. We Shall Overcome succeeds in giving us a portrait of America as it grew and matured. Once again Jesse James robs the Glendale train and mule drivers haul barges down the Erie Canal. The black gospel choir helps us once more climb Jacob’s Ladder, and wails and soars in Springsteen’s powerful version of “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”, which the Boss sang in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The audience roared with raw emotion at the verse, “Brothers and sisters don’t you cry/ There’ll be good times by and by”, when they realized it was sung especially for them. We relive the plight of Okie migrants during the 1930s Dust Bowl, as Springsteen sings Sis Cunningham’s Guthrie-esque story of how her old home “blowed away.” And the kids can laugh with the famed 16th-century Scottish ballad “Froggie Went A Courtin’”, just as some of their parents and grandparents heard it from Burl Ives in the 1940s, Seeger in the 1950s, or the incomparable Doc Watson in the 1960s.
The success of the Seeger Sessions album and Springsteen’s summer tour does not, of course, mean that the folk revival as such is returning in a new phase. American music has become too mixed up and amorphous for that to happen again, and much too commercialized for authenticity to conquer our ersatz-loving marketplace. Far more people will buy the CD of this year’s winner of American Idol than will listen to the Seeger Sessions band. Alas, there really is no accounting for taste. But by going back to the roots of American music, rediscovering what the critic Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America”, Bruce Springsteen will surely lead many—Americans and others all over the world—back to the glorious basics, to sounds and sentiments so old, pure and completely, eclectically American that their power is truly timeless. It’s an order from the Boss.
HOW THINGS HAVE CHANGED SINCE 9/11/01
After the calamity that glided down upon us out of a clear blue sky on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001 — five short years ago, five long years ago — a single source of solace emerged amid the dread and grief: a great upwelling of simple solidarity. Here in New York, and in similarly bereaved Washington, that solidarity took homely forms. Strangers connected as friends; volunteers appeared from everywhere; political and civic leaders of all parties and persuasions stood together, united in sorrow and defiance. In certain regions of the country, New York had been regarded (and resented) as somehow not quite part of America; that conceit, not shared by the terrorists, vanished in the fire and dust of the Twin Towers. The reconciliation was mutual. In SoHo and the Upper West Side, in the Village and the Bronx, sidewalk crowds cheered every flag-bedecked fire engine, and the Stars and Stripes sprouted from apartment windows all over town. New York, always suspect as the nation’s polyglot-plutocratic portal, was now its battered, bloody shield.
The wider counterpart to our traumatized togetherness at home was an astonishing burst abroad of what can only be called pro-Americanism. Messages of solidarity and indignation came from Libya and Syria as well as from Germany and Israel; flowers and funeral wreaths piled up in front of American Embassies from London to Beijing; flags flew at half-staff across Europe; in Iran, a candlelight vigil expressed sympathy. “Any remnants of neutrality thinking, of our traditional balancing act, have gone out of the window now,” a Swedish political scientist told Reuters. “There has not been the faintest shadow of doubt, not a trace of hesitation of where we stand, nowhere in Sweden.” Le Monde’s front-page editorial was headlined NOUS SOMMES TOUS AMÉRICAINS, and Italy’s Corriere della Sera echoed, “We are all Americans. The distance from the United States no longer exists because we, our values, are also in the crosshairs of evil minds.” In Brussels, the ambassadors of the nineteen members of NATO invoked, for the first time in the alliance’s fifty-two-year history, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, affirming that “an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and pledging action, “including the use of armed force.”
No one realistically expected that the mood of fellow-feeling and coöperation would long persist in the extraordinarily powerful form it took in the immediate wake of September 11th. The normal divisions of American politics and society were bound to make themselves felt again, and whatever the United States did in response to the attacks would provoke the tensions and misunderstandings that inevitably accompany the actions of a superpower in distress, no matter how deft its diplomacy or thorough its consultations. But it was natural to hope that domestic divisions would prove less rancorous in the face of the common danger, and that international frictions could be minimized in a struggle against what almost every responsible leader in the world recognized, or claimed to recognize, as an assault on civilization itself.
What few expected was how comprehensively that initial spirit would be ruined by the policies and the behavior of our government, culminating in, though hardly limited to, the disastrous occupation of Iraq. This shouldn’t have been so surprising. George W. Bush campaigned in 2000 as a “compassionate conservative,” one who recognized that government was not the enemy, praised bipartisanship, proclaimed his intention to “change the tone in Washington,” and advocated a foreign policy of humility and respect. None of that happened. Nine months into his Presidency, an economic policy of transferring the budget surplus to the wealthy, a social policy hewing to the demands of the Christianist far right, and a foreign policy marked by contempt for international instruments (the Kyoto protocol, the anti-ballistic-missile treaty) and the abandonment of diplomatic responsibilities (the negotiations over North Korea’s nuclear activities, the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate) had pushed Bush’s job ratings lower than those of any of his predecessors at a like point in their tenures. September 11th offered him a chance for a new beginning, and at first he seemed willing to seize it. Although the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan was not as widely backed at first as is often assumed (particularly among many on the European left and some on the American), it is now almost universally supported in the Western world, with some forty countries involved and NATO troops carrying an increasing share of the military burden. But then came a reversion to form, and Iraq.
In “America Against the World: How We Are Different and Why We Are Disliked,” based on ninety-one thousand interviews conducted in fifty nations from 2002 to 2005 by the Pew Research Center, Andrew Kohut and Bruce Stokes write that while “the first hints that the world was becoming troubled by America came soon after the election of George W. Bush,” and that “whatever global goodwill the United States had in the wake of the September 11 attacks appears to have quickly dissipated,” after the Iraq invasion “favorable opinions had more than slipped. They had plummeted.” It’s grown worse since May, when the book was published. The most recent Pew findings show that “favorable opinions of the U.S.” have gone from eighty-three per cent in 2000 to fifty-six per cent in 2006 in Britain, seventy-eight to thirty-seven in Germany, and sixty-two to thirty-nine in France. The majorities saying that the Iraq war has made the world more dangerous are equally impressive: sixty per cent in Britain, sixty-six in Germany, and seventy-six in France. On this point, the United States is catching up. The most recent CNN poll, taken in late August, found fifty-five per cent of Americans saying that the Iraq war has made them less safe from terrorism.
Last week, the Administration launched a new public-relations campaign aimed at marketing the war in Iraq as the indispensable key to the struggle against terrorism. The Vice-President and the Secretary of Defense gave speeches attacking the war’s opponents (a category that includes, if that same CNN poll is to be believed, sixty-one per cent of the American public) as the contemporary counterparts of the appeasers of Nazism. President Bush, as one of his contributions to the P.R. campaign, granted an interview to Brian Williams, of NBC. As the two men, shirtsleeved in the sun, strolled together down a bleak New Orleans street, Williams wondered if the President shouldn’t “have asked for some sort of sacrifice after 9/11.” Bush’s reply:
Americans are sacrificing. I mean, we are. You know, we pay a lot of taxes. America sacrificed when they, you know, when the economy went into the tank. Americans sacrificed when, you know, air travel was disrupted. American taxpayers have paid a lot to help this nation recover. I think Americans have sacrificed.
And so we have. Not by paying “a lot of taxes,” of course; we pay less of those than we did before, and the very, very richest among us pay much, much less. But we have sacrificed, God knows. “The military occupation in Iraq is consuming practically the entire defense budget and stretching the Army to its operational limits,” John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan Administration and a member of the 9/11 Commission, wrote in the Washington Post a couple of days after Bush’s interview. “This is understood quite clearly by both our friends and our enemies, and as a result, our ability to deter enemies around the world is disintegrating.” That’s a sacrifice. And here’s another: our country’s reputation. — Hendrik Hertzberg
The last of the 6 percenters. The future of real estate.
MOVIES
At the Toronto Film Fest, I am going to see
Babel
Wind that Shook the Barley
Volver
Penelope
Grbaztica
A Good Year
Little Children
Rescue Dawn
and
posted by D @ 9:49 AM
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