Davey Graham, Folk Pioneer, R.I.P.

Folk, Blues, and Beyond is one of those albums that changed the musical direction of a generation and is still cited today by anyone who really aspires to play the acoustic guitar. Most people find him, as I did, as a result of familiarity with the great Bert Jansch. Now I suppose the connection is at one more remove, but Bernard Butler, who worships Jansch, certainly knows him. And I suppose the proto-emo pissings of Neil Drake are where most younger people would have heard the influence of Davey Graham, even if they were unaware of it.

But everyone knows at least one tune of Graham's, Angi, as a result of its being covered by Paul Simon (who changed the spelling to Anji) and many others.

After the 60s Graham basically lost the next 30 years or more of his life to drugs, but he had returned to playing in recent years. A good job was done of issuing some of his old albums at the beginning of this century. They also issued "After Hours", recorded in a student's room at Hull University in 1967 after Graham's performance there the same evening. This is one of my favourite recordings by Graham. That's the sort of setting where you hear real music that no producer has sprinkled with so-called magic dust. Its release was a shot in the arm for anyone who's ever played a "concert" in someone's bedsit or student digs (I've spent some of the most enjoyable musical hours of my life in those settings).



Nowadays aspiring musicians make digital recordings on computers and upload them to MySpace. Graham belonged to that generation of musicians who paid their dues by busking their way around Europe (Ralph McTell is another guy who learned his trade this way, busking in subways or near cinema queues. McTell learned ragtime from a young American who'd studied with the legendary Gary Davies whom McTell met while busking on a freezing cold day on the Left Bank in Paris; you just don't get that sort of experience from the internet).

Graham's travels also took him to India, where he became one of the first British musicians to come under the spell of Ravi Shankar and Indian music generally (see under Harrison, George). Graham was one of the founders of British "folk baroque", which mixed American blues and English folk, renaissance and early classical music, plus what was not then, but is now called "world music." Thus we have lost not merely a fine musician, but a true pioneer.

At least we still have Bert Jansch, who now can quite properly be said to be the finest living British acoustic guitar player, a controversial claim while Graham was alive.

Loudon Wainwright III - Part 3: T-Shirt & Final Exam

After Unrequited, like its predecessor, failed to sell, Columbia dropped Loudon, who then moved to his third label, Arista Records. His first album for his new record company, T-Shirt, was released in 1976.

This was Loudon's best produced record to that point in his career, and for the first time he sounds wholly comfortable with a band behind him.

However, at first listen it seems a strangely impersonal (and therefore very un-Loudon-like) album. The Loudon we know and love (since Attempted Moustache anyway) writes songs that are personal almost to the point of solipsism (a point which his son Rufus passed a long time ago).

But what do we have here?

The album opens with Bicentennial, a moderately sarcastic song about the anniversary of American Independence. It's quite funny, but it's more the sort of thing you'd associate with Randy Newman, who would be more pointedly satirical; Loudon is just poking his tongue out at the national occasion.

At Both Ends is about a young guy who parties himself into an early grave, and Loudon rocks out pretty well; but you can't help feeling Warren Zevon does this sort of thing much better. Reciprocity, a song about a couple into bondage, but it's not much more successful (and less amusing) than the song about gay sex on Unrequited.

Prince Hal's Dirge is a song about future King Henry V, whose conflict with his father is dramatized so brilliantly in Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts One and Two. Then we have Summer's Almost Over, a classic end-of-summer-back-to-school song that is given a gorgeous light jazz arrangement, with tinkling piano and shimmering xylophone; a song about a dog, Hey Packy; a quirky talking blues (Talkin' Big Apple '75), and a strange song entitled Just Like President Thieu.

Almost the only sign of the old Loudon, it seems, is the perennial drinking song, Wine With Dinner and a few personal references in Hollywood Hopeful.

So where are those songs about growing older, never quite making the big time, broken relationships, and family feuds that we associate with Loudon Snowden Wainwright III?

Well, all is not as it seems with this record (and I admit it took me about 30 years to realize this).

Although it starts off with a song called Bicentennial, the real anniversary that is the theme of the record is Loudon's 30th birthday (this was the year he met the dreaded 3-0). The existential dilemma posed by the approach of middle age is for Loudon, as for many of us, whether it should mean a change in our behaviour. Summer's Almost Over is the perfect metaphor for this: "Adopt a brand new attitude... For all those lazy, hazy days you must atone" (wonderful line, that). This accounts for the atmosphere of almost unbearable nostalgia in the song, as Loudon is reluctant to say goodbye to those "crazy days."

"Hollywood Hopeful" continues the theme of maturity vs. youthful irresponsibility (and fame/failure, of course):

Never thought I'd see the age of 25
It's 29 years now I've been alive
The panic I feel can hardly be told
In a matter of months I'll be 30 years old.

"I am full-fledged grown up adult/Trying to make a dent, trying to get a result/I'm holed up in a Hollywood hotel suite/Tequilla to drink and avocado to eat." These are classic Loudon rueful lines on the elusiveness of fame and fortune.

Both Ends Burning is a cautionary tale of someone who never knew when to put away excess. That's what's in store for Loudon if he doesn't reform his ways now that he is on the cusp of middle age. But Prince Hal's Dirge is the key song.

As you know, according to Shakespeare (following the history chronicles), the future Henry V was a tearaway as a young man, mixing with low company, getting into tavern brawls, etc., much to the dismay of his father the king. But all the time the young Prince Hal remains confident that, at the right time, he will be able to shake off this unruly life and accept his responsibilities:

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Loudon transforms this into a well-constructed, two-paced song, that starts off slow and builds to a dramatic climax:

Give me a capon, and some roguish companions
A wench and a bottle of sack
Take me to the alehouse, take me to the whorehouse
If I vomit, keep me off of my back

And in view of the fact that Loiudon was himself the son of a dysfunctional father, the following lines is interesting:

My father thinks I'm good for nothing
And that I won't amount to much
But he's not aware of my secret weapon
I can count on myself in the clutch

Show me a breach, I'll once more unto it
I'll be ready for action any day
I'll straighten up, and I'll fly most righteous
In a fracas I'll be right in the fray

I can drink you under 25 tables
Fight and be any lady's man
But all this will change when I'm good and ready
To be king of this land!

Self-reliance is to be Loudon's secret weapon ("I can count on myself in the clutch"). The song builds to a tremendous climax, probably the "heaviest" Loudon has ever gotten musically, suggesting real tensions in the lifestyle choices with which the singer is faced. For the time being though, he is not yet ready to shake off his dissolute lifestyle. This is probably why the drinking song Wine With Dinner is reprised again at the end of the record. The party is to go on, even though the dreaded landmark of 30 years old has been reached... "

A few comments on the other songs:

Hey, Packy

This countrified ode to a faithful dog was written by George Gerdes, the actor, who put out a couple of interesting records in the seventies (one of them with the entire group of Nashville musicians who played on Dylan's Blonde on Blonde!) and who co-wrote a song with Loudon on Unrequited (Kings & Queens). It's one of Loudon's best recordings with a band.

Hollywood Hopeful

A song held over from Unrequited (an outtake of the song from the sessions for that album was released on the reissue). This version uses the tune from the traditional song "Little Sadie" and has some nice banjo. This is the most directly personal song on the album.

Wine With Dinner

One of Loudon's droll songs about drinking (See The Drinking Song on Album III and Down Drinking at the Bar on Attempted Moustache).

T-Shirt, then is a very fine album, Loudon's finest to that date, with a unifying concept that makes it greater than the sum of its parts, and, as stated before, better produced than any of its predecessors. It was a crying shame that it was not issued on CD for so long.


Loudon's second album on Arista was a more lightweight affair, although it is just as well produced as its predecessor.

Many of the songs tend to the lightweight and ephemeral, though, such as Golfin' Blues, Pen Pal Blues, the title track, and The Heckler. However, the record ends with some strong songs. Best of all are the two country songs, Heaven and Mud and Two-Song Set.

A guy I used to share a house with in the 90s said, thinking about his approaching 30th birthday (he was a year older than I): "I'll be sitting here in this armchair, and all of a sudden, the desire to listen to country music will come over me."

I don't think he ever did get into country, at least while I knew him, but I myself have got into country music in a big way since turning 30. It does seem the more mature person's music. This is because it is less about strutting one's stuff like rock 'n' roll, and more a vehicle for talking about family problems, alcoholism, and the other joys of maturity. It's a shame, therefore, that Loudon hasn't used the genre more extensively. The two country songs on Final Exam are a real treat.

Heaven and Mud is a song about falling off the wagon after being "high on life" for "14 boring days"! Certainly any hopes Loudon had of cleaning up his act on T-Shirt have been abandoned.

Two-Song Set is a real gem, very well arranged and produced, with a great singalong chorus. Note how much Loudon's singing with a band has improved since his earliest records. Lyrically, the song is full of aching regret over missed opportunity and nostalgia for the old days.

The waitress is polite to me, but it's just not the same thing now
A few years ago, Bobby, I was the cat's meow
You win some and you lose some, that's an attitude I can understand
And I know what they're saying, Bob, they're saying I was a flash in the pan.

Then there is Pretty Little Martha, one of Loudon's neat little banjo songs. Martha was then two years old.

Finally, as if to emphasize that his rocking days are over, is the parody song Watch Me Rock, I'm Over Thirty.

But it wasn't just Loudon's rocking days were over. Final Exam also marked the end of Loudon's days on a major label. The Dead Skunk era was well and truly dead. Creatively, however, Loudon's best work lay ahead of him....

Note: T-Shirt and Final Exam have never been available separately on CD, but in 2007 they were remastered released as a "two-fer" on the Acadia label of Evangeline Records Ltd.

Dinosaurs on A Diet - the late, great Phil Ochs

Phil Ochs took his own life 30 years ago today [this piece was written and posted on a messageboard 9th April, 2006].

In April 1976, he'd been kicked off the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan's traveling hootenanny of 60s folk stars, and that was the final straw; although in truth Phil had been in no fit state to tour. Having suffered for years from what would now be diagnosed as clinical depression or "bipolar disorder", he was further disillusioned by Watergate, by his own lack of commercial success, and by a physical attack (which he believed to have been organized by the FBI) in Africa that damaged his vocal cords. After his death, it was revealed that the FBI had a 410-page file on Ochs.

Although he flirted with Communism, Ochs was too much of an American patriot to embrace it entirely. His brother has described his work as "love songs to America"; his reaction to America's betrayal of her ideals is like that of a jilted lover. This can be illustrated in The Power and the Glory from his first album (All the News That's Fit To Sing), a kind of update of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land". Here is a video of Ochs performing the song live in 1974 (apparently with a broken arm), accompanied by his friend and mentor Jim Glover.



Ochs's first album also contains a direct tribute to Guthrie, taking its title from that of Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory. Guthrie had been hospitalized for the best part of 10 years, but his influence on a younger generation of folk singers remained immense. See how many Guthrie song titles you can spot!

But Ochs was more than about political anthems. His first album also contains a tender ballad for Cecilia Pomeroy, held in a Filipino jail and separated for 10 years from her American husband, and a spirited adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe poem The Bells.

His second album I Ain't Marching Anymore likewise contains an adaptation of a poem by Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman. It's a reading of great dramatic power, and one of my favourite recordings by anyone. Here is a remarkable video clip of Phil performing the song live:



The title track of Ochs's second album became one of his best known, and most covered, songs. As if realizing that I Ain't Marching Any More would become the anthem of draft dodgers, Ochs included Draft Dodger Rag on the album, which examines the motives and morals of some of the draft dodgers themselves. There is a serious point behind the humour: this particular draft dodger isn't like the young people who were openly burning their draft papers and risking jail to make a political point, but merely interested in saving his own skin.

Another song on the album is That Was the President, written shortly after John F. Kennedy's assassination two years earlier. In the liner notes, Phil wrote:

My Marxist friends can't understand why I wrote this song, and that's probably one of the reasons why I'm not a Marxist.

After JFK's assassination, Fidel Castro aptly pointed out that only fools could rejoice at such a tragedy, for systems, not men, are the enemy. Later Phil would write another, more surreal and poetic song about the Kennedy legacy, Crossroads.

The finest singing on Ochs's second album is definitely on his cover version of Ballad of the Carpenter, a song written by British songwriter and political firebrand Ewan McColl. Like Guthrie's "Jesus Christ", it's an attempt to turn Jesus into a left-wing hero.

And so to Ochs's third album, Phil Ochs in Concert,which was not entirely recorded live, despite the title (some songs were actually recorded in the studio). It was the last of his purely acoustic albums, after which he asked to be released from his Elektra contract, having failed to have the commercial impact that he wanted in order to spread his political message (although In Concert did brush the lower reaches of the Billboard charts). In truth, the world had moved on from simple protest songs: by the time of Ochs's Elektra debut, Dylan had already given up the genre, disillusioned by Kennedy's assassination and even more by the Left's attempt to turn him into their performing monkey. The Beatles-led British invasion and Dylan's own monumental Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde albumns had changed the face of popular music, and Ochs sounded dated.

Nevertheless, In Concert contains some of his best work, and definitely his best singing on record.

There But for Fortune is the best known song, having been a minor hit for Joan Baez (Phil jokes about her having written it for him). Here's a short clip of Phil singing it:



Canons of Christianity is a rather tender song lamenting the subversion of religion, sung (like 'There But for Fortune') with aching tenderness. By contrast, the spoken introduction shows his natural gift for comedy.

The Cops of the World, on the other hand, this is one of the most angry and sarcastic songs Ochs ever wrote. It portrays the U.S. Army as a strutting, macho bunch of thugs, imposing their will on the rest of the world by rape and brutality:

We're hairy and horny and ready to shack
We don't care if you're yellow or black
Just take off your clothes and lie down on your back!
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

The song builds to a bitter climax:

When we've butchered your sons, boys
When we've butchered your sons
Have a stick of our gum, boys
Have a stick of our buble-gum
We own half the world, "Oh say, can you see",
The name for our profits is democracy
So, like it or not, you will have to be free
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

For Vietnam, read Iraq.

With caustic wit, Ochs also excoriates those who describe themselves as liberal - until a black man moves in next door or they are asked to bus their children into segregated areas. Love Me, I'm A Liberal ends pointedly:

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
-- And that's why I'm turning you in!
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

In Concert also includes a rare, and astonishingly beautiful love song, Changes, which has one of the loveliest melodies ever written.

The final song on the album is a mournful reflection on death, When I'm Gone. When Ochs returned with a new label in 1967, he would be a different kind of creative artist, no longer relying on straightforward protest to get his message across, but rather using irony and Dylanesque surrealism and experimenting with musical form.




After failing to change the world or sell enough records to get his message heard to a wide audience, Ochs, as stated above, asked to be released from his Elektra contract. He went away for a while, and returned in November 1967 with a very different album from its precedessors, on the then new A&M label. Pleasures of the Harbor, while flawed, is Phil's masterpiece, and most of the songs still hold up well today.

More controversial are the arrangements. Rather than follow Dylan's lead into the new hybrid "folk rock" ("folk" music played with an electric guitar-led band), Ochs attempted a different kind of pop crossover, with arrangements drawing on classical, lounge, Dixieland jazz. rock and roll, and experimental synthesized music crossed with folk.

Further symbolizing the break with the past, the album was recorded not in New York City (centre of the U.S. folk scene in the early to mid sixties), but in Los Angeles, where Ochs had moved, and where psychedlia and "acid rock" was taking over from the folk-rock of Dylan, The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Mamas & The Papas (Dylan responded by going rural Americana, on his way to outright country).

Ochs' chief collaborators on the record were producer Larry Marks, arranger Ian Freebairn-Smith, and pianist Lincoln Mayorga, whose contribution to the albumn was outstanding. The achievements of the producer and arrangement are more debatable.

All these musical changes add texture and ironical counterpoint to the lyrics, which are the record's biggest departure. Gone are the somewhat simplistic finger-pointing songs of the early albums (perhaps Ochs had been stung by Dylan's unfair accusation that he was a journalist rather than a songwriter). The songs are still political, but Ochs is more of a social commentator than a rabble rouser this time round. The songs are longer, and the anger and bitterness of his early albumns is replaced by irony, satire, and pathos.

Passing over the somewhat overproduced opening song Cross My Heart, with its drums, harpsichord, flutes, strings, orchestral horns, and vocal overdubs, we come to the first really classic song on the album, Flower Lady - a deft piece of ironical social commentary wrapped in an achingly beautiful melody:

Soldiers, disillusioned, come home from the war
Sarcastic students tell them not to fight no more
And they argue through the night
Black is black and white is white
Walk away both knowing they are right.
But nobody's buying flowers from the flower lady.

All the people in the song are too wrapped up in their own little lives to indulge in simple pleasures like buying flowers. In the final verse, even the Flower Lady no longer knows what she is selling flowers for.

The Byrds apparently thought of covering this song, but unfortunately for Phil, they decided against it.


A different kind of self-absorption is depicted in the best-known song of the albumn, Outside of A Small Circle of Friends. The song was inspired by the brutal murder of a New York woman, Kitty Genovese, and the inaction of her neighbours. The story was sensationalized in an inaccurate and misleading New York Times report entitled "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police", and the case was cited as illustrating the supposed callousness of urban America. Ochs' song uses a Dixieland jazz backing (with Mayorga on tack piano) that remains almost manically jaunty and unconcerned despite the grim events narrated by Ochs in a splendid deadpan voice:

Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

And a later verse:

Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides we're much too high
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Unfortunately, the drugs reference in the above verse got the song banned from most radio stations, just when it was threatening to chart. An edited version later flopped.


Even more successful in marrying form and content is the albumn's masterpiece, and, in my one, one of the greatest songs ever written. The Party is an account of a high society party in which Ochs plays the part of a singing lounge pianist (although the piano is of course played by Mayorga, who is quite brilliant in his improvisations, quoting everything from Mozart, Bach and Schumann to lounge standards such as "As Time Goes By" and "Stardust"), who passes satirical comments on the guests as they arrive:

The fire breathing Rebels arrive at the party early,
Their khaki coats are hung in the closet near the fur.
Asking handouts from the ladies, while they criticize the lords.
Boasting of the murder of the very hands that pour.
And the victims learn to giggle, for at least they are not bored.
And my shoulders had to shrug
As I crawl beneath the rug
And retune my piano.

"Boasting of the murder of the very hands that pour" is a splendid line. My favourite verse is the following:

They travel to the table, the host is served for supper,
And they pass each other for salt and pepper.
And the conversation sparkles as their wits are dipped in wine,
Dinosaurs on a diet, on each other they will dine.
Then they pick their teeth and they squelch a belch saying:
"Darling you tasted divine."
And my shoulders had to shrug, etc.

"Dinosaurs on a diet, on each other they will dine" is a splendid line. What Ochs is actually saying to these aging, backbiting socialites who nibble on lettuce and light snacks and pass scandalous remarks about one another is that they are dying. Or perhaps he is saying, "Die, die, die!" The image might have come from Sheridan's School for Scandal.

In the final verse, the commentator does not spare himself, catching sight in the mirror of a "laughing maniac who was writing songs like this."

The song is the equal of Dylan's 12-minute opus "Desolation Row", to which it is indebted.

The title track, Pleasures of the Harbor, is a bittersweet story of sailors seeking escape on shore leave, possibly a metaphor for other sorts of escape.

In the room dark and dim
Touch of skin
He asks her of her name
She answers with no shame
And not a sense of sin.
Until the fingers draw the blinds
A sip of wine
The cigarette of doubt
The candle is blown out
The darkness is so kind.

Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor.

The album's final track, Crucifixion, is a surrealistic reflection on the death of John F. Kennedy, which moved Bobby Kennedy to tears when Ochs played it for him. Unfortunately, the song is lost in the eerie morass of loops, electric harpsichord, and washes of electric distortion arranged by Joseph Burd, leader of a late-60s experimental electronic rock group called The United States of America.

Clocking in at more than 50 minutes, Pleasures of the Harbor was an outrageously long album for 1967. This was Phil's most ambitious project ever, but it was not terribly successful commercially, peaking at #168 in the charts. While Ochs would not retreat to acoustic folk for his subsequent A&M LPs, and would continue to write songs as unusual (and often as lengthy) in construction throughout the rest of the 60s, he would never again employ textures as recklessly varied as those heard on Pleasures of the Harbor.

[The second part of this piece, dealing with Ochs's final three albums, was never completed].

Classic Cash: Ride This Train

Unlike the previous blogs in this series, this one has been almost entirely rewritten since it first appeared on a messageboard three years ago.

Johnny Cash is best known to younger folk today from the hit movie Walk the Line and from the brilliant series of albums he made towards the end of his life with Rick Rubin on the American Recordings label. His creative work between leaving Sun Records and his work with Rubin has been somewhat neglected of late.

The rock crowd may be surprised to know that the concept album was invented by a certain Mr. Frank Sinatra, who first realized the potential of the new long playing record and used it to create albums that were more than simple collections of singles, but had a cohesive identity that made them more than the sum of their parts.

Johnny Cash was swift to follow Sinatra's lead. His 1959 Columbia Records albums Hymns and Songs of Our Soil were loose collections around simple themes, but his 1960 album Ride This Train was altogether more ambitious.

Ride This Train is not an album of train songs. Rather it is a travelogue of a journey on board an imaginary train that travels across state borders and through time. It's also the first Americana album. It's a celebration of American values, but Cash does not forget to pay tribute to the American Indian, who would be the subject of one of his greatest albums in a few years' time (Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian).

It also reveals Cash's poetic talent. Each song begins with the sound of a steam locomotive and the words "Ride this train...", followed by a poetic monologue written by Cash in the persona of the character whom the following song is about.

The travelogue begins with a recital of the place-names of America, majestic in their artless poetry, and continues with the thundering names of the Indian tribes who lived there first. Then Johnny Cash boards the train, stopping first at a a small town in the mining country of Kentucky. He presents a brief sketch of a boy whose father is a miner - when he comes home "nothing is clean but the whites of his eyes" - and whose ambition is to follow that calling. This leads to the first song, Loading Coal, which was written by the great Merle Travis, who himself came from a mining family, and who wrote many classic songs as well as inventing the "Travis picking" style of guitar-playing. In the second selection, Cash travels to Mississippi and its levees and constant fight against flood waters. In this sequence Cash sings his own version of the traditional Going to Memphis, a song of the convict work gangs.

Ride This Train was the first of a series of Cash albums celebrating or exploring various aspects of America. Although he rarely makes explicit political comment or "protests" (though see again Bitter Tears), his concerns are the same as the protest crowd; but he documents rather than sloganizing or advocating. It is this aspect of Cash's great series of 1960s concept albums that makes them classics of the folk music genre as well as of country music.

Classic Cash: Bitter Tears

This is another excerpt from a thread about Johnny Cash I posted on a messageboard about three years ago.



June 1964. On the 9th, Dylan records Another Side of Bob Dylan in a single, all-night session fuelled by two bottles of Beaujolais. While on the 30th June and 1st July, Cash records the eight songs that make up Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.

It is an ironic twist of fate that in the same month that Dylan bade farewell to "protest songs" forever in songs like "My Back Pages" ("I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now), Cash should record his first protest album: although as we have seen, sympathy for the downtrodden and exploited and even the criminal was a characteristic of his songs from the start.

As we have seen in our survey of Ride This Train and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Cash's musical interests lay far beyond the confines of Nashville, and he was basically working in the same field as the hipster folkie crowd in Greenwich Village, New York, with the exception that he had sung traditional songs in the cotton fields rather than learning them from records. Cash is the bridge between country and folk. He was never as conservative as many of the Nashville crowd, and when he first heard Dylan's Freewheelin' , he recognized someone with the same sympathy for the underdog that characterized his own best work. He would play the record before and after his shows and eventually wrote to Dylan expressing his admiration. It was no surprise that in his reply Dylan stated that he had followed Cash's career since first hearing 'I Walk The Line'. In fact, Dylan can be heard talking about Johnny Cash (albeit none too complimentarily) in the very first circulating recording we have of Dylan (when he was just an 18-year-old Minnesota kid called Robert Zimmerman). Despite enjoying a huge pop hit with "Ring of Fire" in 1963, Cash was determined to make his own folk-protest album.

A few weeks after making that album, Cash and Dylan finally met (July 1964) . "When Bob Dylan first met Johnny Cash, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964," Kris Kristofferson said in Madison Square Garden in 1992, "they say that Dylan just looked up at him, like a big tree, and walked all the way around him and said, YEAH!" This would be the beginning of a friendship that would culminate in their recording together in Nashville in 1969. In the meantime, when the furore over Dylan's going electric erupted in 1965, Cash wrote a letter to Billboard Magazine, ending with the words: "Shut up and let him sing!"

Back to Bitter Tears. This is a very impressive album: a fine selection of songs brilliantly arranged and performed. Five of the eight songs were written by the American Indian folk singer Peter LaFarge.

Peter LaFarge, adopted son of Oliver LaFarge, first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature–the book was "Laughing Boy," a sympathetic treatment of the Navajo Indians. The F.B.I. took an interest in Peter and began hounding him when he organized FAIR (Federation for American Indian Rights). Several months before he died, the F.B.I. raided his New York apartment at midnight. They scattered and tore up his papers; they put handcuffs on him and dragged him to Bellevue in his pajamas [sic]. They put pressure on Bellevue to declare him insane, but Bellevue could find nothing wrong and turned him loose.

LaFarge died of a stroke just a few months after Cash's recording of Bitter Tears, although rumours persist that he committed suicide. His own recordings of his songs are still available on Folkways and Broadside recordings, but his name remains known largely through Johnny Cash, and Bitter Tears stands as an unintended tribute (the liner notes still talk about him in the present tense, so it is to be hoped that he lived long enough to hear the album).

It cannot be stressed too much that Cash was taking a big risk in releasing Bitter Tears. He needed commercial hits like "Ring of Fire" to enable him to persuade Columbia to allow him to continue producing his American musical histories such as the albums I have been focusing on (from Ride This Train onwards). But this political album risked alienating his core, basically conservative, country music audience. Cash actually took out full page ads in the music press, daring radio programmers to play "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", the single off the album, but to no avail. Although the single was a hit, radio stations refused to play it.

Dylan's song "With God on Our Side" is basically about the way history is taught in American schools. "Oh, my name it means nothing/My age it means less/The country I come from/Is called the Mid-West/I's taught and brought up there/The laws to abide/And that the land that I live in/Has God on its side." The rest of the song is a recital of the history lessons learned in school. (It owes a debt to Pete Seeger's "What did you learn in school today?") One of the verses is: "Oh, the history books tell it/They tell it so well/The cavalry's charged/The Indians fell/The cavalry's charged/The Indians died/For the country was young then/With God on its side."

But a new generation was beginning to question these history lessons. They were to find that Johnny Cash had already been there. The basically patriotic Ride This Train already pays tribute to the Indian contribution to American history and mourns the fate of the native Americans (as they were not then called!) evicted from their homes and slaughtered in great numbers as the white man moved westward, ever westward...

A tall, brooding man, Cash could pass for a native American himself; in fact, he did claim at this time to be a quarter Cherokee, although he later admitted this was untrue. A self-mythologising story, perhaps, but it does show the extent of his sympathy with his subject. And he took the songs back to the people who inspired them: there is remarkable footage in the BBC documentary "The Last American Hero" shown over Christmas that shows Johnny performing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" to a native American tribe.

So here is a rundown of all the tracks on Bitter Tears n its entirety. It's still in print, but has not yet been remastered.

As Long As the Grass Shall Grow (Peter LaFarge)

A brilliant performance by Johnny. Note especially the effectiveness of the spoken interjections at the end: "Are are you thirsty?... My brother, are you warm?" These never fail to bring a tear to my eyes. The lyrics tell the story of how the Seneca Indians were cheated of their land despite a treaty signed by Washington himself. After the American Revolution, the United States found itself very weak. To placate the American Indians (many of whom fought on the side of the British), the US government offered numerous peace treaties promising land "as long as the grass shall grow and the waters flow". US Courts later interpreted such phrases as pure metaphor, and denied claims to land that the treaties promised. LaFarge uses the example of the damming of Allegheny River, and the consequent dislocation of many Native Americans, near Pittsburgh as proof of these broken treaties. The damming of the river flooded the land of the Seneca Indians (of the Iroqois tribe):

The Iroquois Indians used to rule from Canada way south
But no one fears the Indians now and smiles the liar's mouth
The Senecas hired an expert to figure another site
But the great good army engineers said that he had no right
Although he showed them another plan and showed them another way
They laughed in his face and said no deal Kinuza dam is here to stay
Congress turned the Indians down brushed off the Indians plea
So the Senecas have renamed the dam: they call it "Lake Perfidy".

Apache Tears

One of only two self-penned songs on the record, a simple and effective ballad mourning the tragic fate of the Apache tribe. A couple of explanations: the lyrics mention "Mescalero death moans" - Mescalero is one of the divisions of the Apache.

Dead grass dry roots hunger crying in the night
Ghost of broken hearts and laws are here
And who saw the young squaw they judged by their whiskey law
Tortured till she died of pain and fear

In July 1832, Congress passed a law that totally banned alcohol in the Indian country.

Custer (Peter LaFarge)

A truly remarkable performance as Cash gets right into the persona of an Indian positively exulting in the death of General Custer. This must have been startling in 1964 and later to any white American who had learned only traditional American history: here that history is gleefully turned on its head or presented sarcastically.

Now I will tell you, buster, that I ain't a fan of Custer
And the General, he don't ride well any more!
To some he was a hero, but to me his score was zero
And the General, he don't ride well any more.
Now Custer done his fightin' without too much excitin'
And the General, he don't ride well any more
General Custer come in pumpin' when the men were out a huntin'
But the General he don't ride well any more
With victories he was swimmin', he killed children dogs and women
But the General he don't ride well any more
Crazy Horse sent out the call to Sitting Bull and Gall
And the General he don't ride well any more
Now Custer split his men - well he won't do that again!
'Cause the General, he don't ride well any more!
Twelve thousand warriors waited, they were unanticipated
And the General he don't ride well any more
It's not called an Indian victory, but a bloody massacre
And the General, he don't ride well any more
There might have been more enthusin', if us Indians had been losin'
But the General he don't ride well any more
General George A.Custer, oh, his yellow hair had lustre
But the General, he don't ride well any more!
For now the General's silent, he got barbered violent
And the General, he don't ride well any more
Oh, the General he don't ride well any more!

The Talking Leaves

The other self-penned song on the album, which tells its own story.

The Ballad of Ira Hayes (Peter LaFarge)

The single from the album, see above. Dylan later recorded this for his "New Morning" album, though it was eventually omitted, only to be released on Columbia's revenge album when Dylan left the label in 1973. The album was simply entitled Dylan and consists entirely of songs released against his wishes. It is no longer available in the U.S.A., although it was released in the nineties on CD in the United Kingdom under the title A Fool Such As I.

The song tells the story of a "simple Pima Indian", who, although he had fought for the United States in World War II and even taken part in the famous hoisting of the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima, was not given a decent pension and returned home to a life of poverty and alcoholism.

Drums (Peter LaFarge)

Another song about education - this one the attempted forcible assimilation of the remaining Indians, partly by teaching them history from the white man's point of view, even giving them "white" names. The chorus warns that Indian culture will not go away.

Well you may teach me this land's hist'ry but we taught it to you first
We broke your hearts and bent your journeys broken treaties left us cursed
Even now you have to cheat us even though you think us tame
In our losing we found proudness in your winning you found shame

And there are drums beyond the mountain Indian drums that you can't hear
There are drums beyond the mountain and they're getting mighty near....

White Girl

A song about the difficulties of interracial marriage, a very hot topic in America at the time.

The Vanishing Race

The final song was written by J. Horton, and is impossibly melancholy, as the singer mourns the death of his people.

And he gazed below with a heart of woe where the prairie schooners sail
A vision formed like a mortal storm in the dust of the wagon train
A vanishing race appeared in space and he sang his sad refrain
Ii Ii ou Ii Ii Ii ou Ii Ii ou....

Three years after I wrote the above piece, Cash's classic protest album has still not been remastered.