Singing for Peace by Ronald D Cohen Will Kaufman

Author:Ronald D Cohen, Will Kaufman [Ronald D Cohen, Will Kaufman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781612058085
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2015-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

1967

In mid-February 1967, Oscar Brand hosted a concert at Carnegie Hall with Len Chandler, John Hammond Jr., Tom Paxton, Jean Ritchie, and Woody Guthrie’s son, Arlo. While new songs were all the rage, Brand, Guthrie, and Chandler ended the night with “Passing Through,” the old peace standby that continued to move an audience. Meanwhile, Malvina Reynolds furthered her prodigious output with “Thirty-Three Dollars” in Broadside’s February–March 1967 fifth anniversary issue. The thirty-three dollar fure was the compensation devised by military actuaries for each adult Vietnamese civilian killed by US forces. As Reynolds sang, it was “Bargain day in the battle zone / Thirty-three dollars for a human soul.” The next issue of Broadside featured Seeger’s moving “My Name Is Lisa Kalvelage,” about a housewife in San Jose, California—a German immigrant from Nuremberg—who had protested to stop a shipment of napalm in 1966. Arlo Guthrie began publishing his satirical, antiwar story-song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” in Broadside, and a full version quickly appeared on his Columbia album Alice’s Restaurant. The song became a hit at the 1967 Newport Folk Festival in July; two years later Guthrie would star in the Arthur Penn film of the same name, acting out the song’s story. The LP recording received considerable air play, and Guthrie’s Reprise single, with the odd title “Alice’s Rock and Roll Restaurant,” crept into the charts for one week in late 1969.15

As the war escalated and the body bags continued to pile up, the demonstrations proliferated. On April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King gave his first antiwar speech before 3,000 crowded into the Riverside Church in New York. King, along with the mainstream civil rights leaders, had previously refrained from any criticisms of President Johnson, fearing to derail his domestic agenda and support for civil rights. Now King broke with this consensus, denouncing the bloodshed and the corrupt Saigon leaders, and he quickly felt the wrath of his colleagues and the mainstream media. The youthful leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had already come out against the war, however. King feared the war was undermining the war on poverty—Johnson’s pledge to deliver both guns and butter seemed utter nonsense—and he now turned to supporting the peace movement while crafting plans for a broadly based Poor People’s March on Washington.16

Matt Jones and Elaine Laron’s hard-hitting “Hell No!—I Ain’t Gonna Go” was featured in Broadside’s July issue, connecting the antiwar movement with the freedom struggle at home. The song was printed along with a clipping from the New York Times concerning a version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” then popular with the troops in Vietnam, although with altered lyrics, such as, “This land ain’t your land, this land ain’t my land, from the Mekong Delta to the Central Highlands, this land was made for Charlie, this land was for the V.C. This land was made to be free.” Jones had been active in the civil rights movement and a member of the Freedom Singers. “Hell No!” first appeared on a Relevant Records 45, then on Broadside Ballads Vol.

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