Finally, a commenter has noted that the entire album is available for listening and downloading online.

Enjoy.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

There was also a Leon Bibb/Ronnie Gilbert album called It Could Be a Wonderful World that included many (or all…I have more research to do) of these Zaret/Singer tunes. Subtitled Little Songs on Big Subjects (look at the album cover’s upper left corner), it was released in the ’50s, but it is barely mentioned on the Internet.

I now have the album. Sent to me recently by Dan Horowitz, it has all the Jesters’ tunes, plus three more by Zaret and Singer which I had never before heard:

‘Round the World Polka
I Want to Live in a Friendly World
We’re Building a Happier World

Bibb and Gilbert (she, one of the original Weavers) have beautiful voices, but I still prefer the Jesters’ versions. These are songs for kids…and the Jesters’ arrangements are more kid-friendly.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I recently learned that in addition to the Jesters’ very successful 1948 album, Little Songs on Big Subjects (described by me here and here), there was an almost identical album released on Vox Records by the Bachelors. I have not yet determined which album came out first.

The Bachelors album was also entitled Little Songs on Big Subjects and included all the songs on the Jesters’ album, plus one additional Zaret/Singer tune, The Poor Old World (see below for the lyrics). Other than that one tune, the lyrics are the same on both albums; the arrangements are quite different.

Listen and compare:

Traveling Broadens One by the Bachelors

Traveling Broadens One by the Jesters

Which do you prefer?

A bit of the history behind these songs is included in the Bachelors album liner notes:

I had never heard any of the Bachelors’ versions. There is nothing about them on the Internet. Please comment if their arrangements are the ones you remember.

© 1947 Argosy Music Corp.

*     *     *     *     *

Thanks to the Judaica Sound Archives
at Florida Atlantic University
for research assistance.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Commonly—and erroneously.

The internet offers near-instant access to information. It is ironic that in some cases this easy of access decreases accuracy.

Wikipedia explains the term clearly and correctly:

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a “blue moon.” Different definitions place the “extra” moon at different times.

• In calculating the dates for Lent and Easter, the Clergy identify the Lent Moon. It is thought that historically when the moon’s timing was too early, they named an earlier moon as a “betrayer moon” (belewe moon), thus the Lent moon came at its expected time.

• Folklore gave each moon a name according to its time of year. A moon which came too early had no folk name – and was called a blue moon – bringing the correct seasonal timings for future moons.

• The Farmers’ Almanac defined blue moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season; one season was normally three full moons. If a season had four full moons, then the third full moon was named a blue moon.

But in its March 1946 issue, Sky & Telescope magazine unintentionally set the record wrong, misinterpreting previous definitions and stating that a blue moon was the term given to the second full moon in a single calendar month. The new-and-wrong definition caught on, and even thought the magazine eventually corrected its error (in its May 1999 issue and again in a good-hearted, self-effacing press release two days ago), over that half-century, the new, easier-to explain definition had almost completely supplanted the old.

That’s the way of language; it changes.

It’s me replaces It’s I.

I’m  like… replaces I said…

Blue moon gets a new definition.

So on New Year’s Eve, this wrong new definition shone around the world.

Singapore’s Straits Times got it right: “The original meaning of ‘blue moon’ was the third full moon in a season with four instead of the usual three.”

The Jerusalem Post wrote: “But a real blue moon – not a reference to the moon’s tint but designating its appearance a second time in a single calendar month – was visible Thursday night where there were no clouds – along with a partial lunar eclipse that could be sighted throughout the Middle East.”

The Times of India noted correctly, “It is basically a calendar event and has no astronomical importance as such.”

Some of this New Year’s references to blue moon were benign, even charming:

A segment on Omaha’s WOWT-TV included, “It happens once roughly every two and a half years. Thirteen moons in a twelve month period—when two fall in the same calendar month, it’s called a blue moon. And the saying “once in a blue moon” refers to a rarity—something that doesn’t happen very often….And just before midnight a wedding.”

Some were educative.

Richard Brill, writing in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, noted correctly that “A full moon on New Year’s Eve is rare, but when it happens it is always a ‘blue moon.’”

Others were simply inaccurate, misleading, or both.

The Christian Science Monitor mis-cited the initial Sky & Telescope article: “But in 1943 [sic], Sky and Telescope Magazine erroneously wrote that the second full moon in any calendar month was called a blue moon. The label stuck and is still used today.”

China View got the definition entirely wrong. In a caption to this photo, it wrote: “The sunset is reflected on the wing of a commercial airliner as the full moon rises over clouds in the horizon over Athens December 31, 2009. For only the second time in nearly two decades [sic], Earth is illuminated by a “Blue Moon,” the name given to the second full moon appearing in a single month.”

NASA, as should be expected, referenced the Sky & Telescope error-and-restatement correctly, but blundered when it stepped down from its ethereal bailiwick into song lyrics: “In music, [blue moon is] often a symbol of melancholy. According to one Elvis tune, it means “without a love of my own.” On the bright side, he croons in another song, a simple kiss can turn a Blue Moon pure gold.”

A quick search will show that those two musical interpretations occur in the same immensely popular Rodgers & Hart song (Blue Moon), recorded variously by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and scores of others, but made most popular by the Marcels’ in their #1 do-wop version (1961).

Do the research. More frequently than once in a blue moon, the internet will be wrong.

But if the tune is good…sing along!

-

-

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Photo credits: Blue moon---canyonhiker (who admits to PhotoShopping it blue); Jetliner---Xinhua/Reuters Photo

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The album, recalled with great nostalgia by many, was recorded in the late-40s. It is long out of print and almost completely unavailable. The album was widely played on radio and was used in cartoons shown on early regional television. Here are the lyrics to one of the “little songs, “Ol’ Commodore Gray, and below, a link to its musical cartoon produced by the Anti-Defamation League in 1953:

Ol’ Commodore Gray had a dog and a cat
With a big bow-wow and a little meow.
They all lived together with never a spat.
How in the world did they ever do that?
With a big bow-wow and a little meow-meow
Bow-wow, meow, bow-wow, meow.

The cat and the dog had a barrel of fun
With a big bow-wow and a little meow.
Although they were different, they fooled everyone.
Commodore Gray proved a lot can be done
With a big bow-wow and a little meow-meow
Bow-wow, meow, bow-wow, meow.

Ol’ Commodore Gray often said to the crew,
With a big bow-wow and a little meow-meow,
Though each man among us is different it’s true
My cat and dog get along. So can you
With a big bow-wow and a little meow-meow
Bow-wow, meow, bow-wow, meow.

A big bow-wow and a little meow-meow.

Words: Hy Zaret
Music : Lou Singer
© 1947 Oliver Music & Argosy Music (ASCAP)

The YouTube video, by request, will not embed in this post. Here is the Anti-Defamation League’s link to their cartoon.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Earlier this year Buffy Sainte-Marie released her 18th album, Running for the Drum.

Her first album, It’s My Way, for which she was awarded Billboard‘s Best New Artist in 1964, included Universal Soldier, which has become an anthem for peace. Her song, Until It’s Time for You to Go, was a huge popular success and has been covered by many artists, including Elvis Presley, Barbra Streisand, and Cher.

Effectively blacklisted during the Johnson and Nixon administrations because of her outspoken politics, she was a regular on Sesame Street for five years beginning in 1975. And in 1982, She won an Oscar for Up Where We Belong from the film An Officer and a Gentleman.

Nonetheless, many have forgotten her.

I’m reminding.

Listen to My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying from the album Little Wheel Spin And Spin (1966) to truly grasp her from-the-heart lamentation for Native American peoples.

Here is Buffy Sainte-Marie singing on Pete Seeger’s little-seen Rainbow Quest UHF New York TV show from 1966. The words from that performance are below. They are slightly different from the lyrics published on her official website (© Gypsy Music, Inc.).

Now that your big eyes are finally opened,
Now that you’re wondering how must they feel,
Meaning them that you’ve chased across America’s movie screens.
Now that you’re wondering how can it be real
That the ones you’ve called colorful, noble, and proud
In your school propaganda
They starve in their splendor
You’ve asked for my comment I simply will render:

My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying.

Now that the longhouses breed superstition
You force us to send our toddlers away
To your schools where they’re taught to despise their traditions.
Forbid them their languages, then further say
That American history really began
When Columbus set sail out of Europe, and stress
That the nation of leeches that conquered this land
Are the biggest and bravest and boldest and best.
And yet where in your history books is the tale
Of the genocide basic to this country’s birth,
Of the preachers who lied,
How the Bill of Rights failed,
How a nation of patriots returned to their earth?
And where will it tell of the Liberty Bell
As it rang with a thud
O’er Kinzua mud,
And of brave Uncle Sam in Alaska this year?

My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying.

Hear how the bargain was made for the West:
With her shivering children in zero degrees,
Blankets for your land, so the treaties attest,
Oh well, blankets for land is a bargain indeed,
And the blankets were those Uncle Sam had collected
From smallpox-diseased dying soldiers that day.
And the tribes were wiped out and the history books censored,
A hundred years of your statesmen have felt it’s better this way.
And yet a few of the conquered have somehow survived,
Their blood runs the redder though genes have been paled.
From the Grand Canyon’s caverns to craven sad hills
The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tale.
From Los Angeles County to upstate New York,
The white nation fattens while others grow lean;
Ah, the tricked and evicted they know what I mean.

My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying.

The past it just crumbled, the future just threatens;
Our life blood shut up in your chemical tanks.
And now here you come, bill of sale in your hands
And surprise in your eyes that we’re lacking in thanks
For the blessings of civilization you’ve brought us,
The lessons you’ve taught us, the ruin you’ve wrought us –
Oh see what our trust in America’s bought us.

My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying.

Now that the pride of the sires receives charity,
Now that we’re harmless and safe behind laws,
Now that my life’s to be known as your “heritage,”
Now that even the graves have been robbed,
Now that our own chosen way is a novelty,
Hands on our hearts we salute you your victory.
Choke on your blue, white, and scarlet hypocrisy,
Pitying the blindness for you’ve never seen
That the eagles of war whose wings lent you glory,
They were never no more than carrion crows.
Pushed the wrens from their nest, stole their eggs, changed their story.
The mockingbird sings it; it’s all that he knows.
“Ah, what can I do?” say a powerless few
With a lump in your throat and a tear in your eye.
Can’t you see that their poverty’s profiting you.

My country ’tis of thy people you’re dying.

She has been singing true stories for almost 50 years. Buffy Sainte-Marie is a national treasure.

*     *     *     *     *

“Kinzua,” a well-known 60′s reference, is now a thin memory. It refers to the Army Corps of Engineers dam in Pennsylvania that flooded about ten thousand acres of Seneca Indian land, forcing the relocation of a third of the tribe and many graves. The dam was a unilateral repudiation of The Canandaigua Treaty of 1794 which said in part “…the United States acknowledge all the land…to be the property of the Seneca Nation; and the United States will never claim the same, nor disturb the Seneca Nation…in the free use and enjoyment thereof; but it shall remain theirs, until they choose to sell the same, to the people of the United States, who have the right to purchase.”

The Seneca land was seized despite vigorous protest.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

We played the LP until the grooves wore out.

Little Songs on Big Subjects was a big hit. In 1949, The New Yorker, in a Talk of the Town piece about Zaret and Singer’s new project—songs about the just-born U.N.—noted that an executive of WNEW, a NYC-based radio station, estimated that tunes from Little Songs on Big Subjects had been broadcast (I’m guessing he meant nationwide) “almost half a million times to date.”

Little Songs on Big Subjects is long out of production. Searches on the web currently yield no copies for sale.

Lou Singer & Hy Zaret (c. 1948)

There were 11 songs:  “What Makes a Good American,” “Brown-Skinned Cow,” “Columbus Said, “Si, Si, Signor”,” “I’m Proud to Be Me,” “Close Your Eyes and Point Your Finger,” “Ol’ Commodore Gray,” “Traveling Broadens One,” “It Could Be a Wonderful World,” “There Were Thirteen Colonies,” “I’ve Got a Church, You’ve Got a Church,” and “American Hymn.”

A couple of tunes (“I’m Proud to Be Me” and “It Could Be a Wonderful World”) have been covered by others, but my favorite, “Close Your Eyes and Point Your Finger,” one of the first tunes I ever memorized, is MIA.

Here are the lyrics accompanied by the original Soglow illustration from the record:

Close your eyes and point your finger,
On the map just let it linger —
Any place you point your finger to,
There’s someone with the same type blood as you!

England, China or Alaska,
Mexico or Madagascar,
Indonesia, Ireland or Peru —
There’s someone with the same type blood as you!

No type of blood is better,
No type of blood is best,
Each type of blood is just as good —
No better than the rest!

Close your eyes and point your finger,
On the map just let it linger —
Any place you point your finger to,
There’s someone with the same type blood as you!

In the mountains or in the valleys,
Rich hotels or slum-like alleys —
Any place you point your finger to,
There’s someone with the same type blood as you!

Plumbers, bankers, men of science,
Clerks or teachers, dwarfs or giants —
Makes no difference what they are or do,
There’s someone with the same type blood as you!

It may be “A” or “AB”,
It may be “B” or “O”,
Whatever type it may be, sir,
There’s one thing you should know:

Nature has no fav’rite nation,
Color, creed, or occupation —
Any place you point your finger to,
There’s someone with the same type blood as you!

Someday you may be in danger;
Then along will come a stranger
With a bit of blood to pull you through…
A stranger’s blood may save your life for you!

Close your eyes and point your finger,
On the map just let it linger —
Any place you point your finger to,
There’s someone with the same type blood as you!

[These lyrics were copied from the original record sleeve.]
Words: Hy Zaret
Music : Lou Singer
© 1947 Oliver Music & Argosy Music (ASCAP)

*     *     *     *     *

Full disclosure: Singing under the name Pobba, I recorded “I’m Proud to Be Me” and “It Could Be a Wonderful World” on my CD “My ‘Magination.”

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I owned the soundtrack early and played the cassette until it was lost. Almost 35 years later, I bought the CD as a present for my wife. She played the entire CD five times in succession, dancing through the house.

There isn’t a bad song on the album. The second cut, “Draw Your Brakes” by Scotty (Jamaican David Scott), begins with a shout-out in Jamaican Patwa (patois).

For years I’ve wondered what the opening lines mean. But an internet lyric search yielded only an untranslated transliteration:

Forward and fiaca
Menacle and den gosaca

Prof. Peter Patrick

I found my way to Peter L. Patrick, Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Essex in Colchester, England. He, an expert in the structure and use of Jamaican Creole, as linguists call Jamaican Patwa, contacted another expert, Kenneth Bilby, at the time a research associate in the Smithsonian Institution’s department of anthropology. Bilby wrote to Patrick who passed the following to me:

It just so happens that I have some info on this, and it’s most likely reliable. (I had long wondered about it myself.) Last year I interviewed Bunny Brown, a good friend of the late Scotty.  He and Scotty sang together as members of The Chosen Few in the 60s. I asked him about this part of the lyrics in “Draw Your Brakes,” and he explained it as follows:

“Forward and payaaka, manhangle (manhandle) and den go saaka.”

In the “youth man slang” of the time, “payaaka” was a verb, meaning “to take away another man’s woman/girlfriend.” In this “slang,” “saaka” meant “to fuck.” So the song’s intro meant, “go and take away a next man’s girl, grab her and then go have sex with her.”

Ken Bilby (R) in Jamaica, 1982

The original meaning of “payaaka” in Jamaican Creole was “hawk” (sometimes a particular species of “chickenhawk”); it still has this meaning in some rural areas. By extension it came to mean “greedy, covetous (person).” According to Bunny Brown, urban youth in the 60s further extended the sense to mean “taking away another man’s woman.”

Much of email is spam, and much of the internet is tripe and dung. But dig deeply and scholars like Patrick and Bilby show you emeralds.

I recommend the CD unequivocally. I do not recommend the film; except for the music, it is amateurishly unwatchable.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I stood on the bottom coast of Florida, with the Gulf offshore, mangrove and grassy everglades in every other direction, two hours to Miami, but times away from big town currency and gloss. There are no big boxes, chain motels, or fast food franchises in Everglades City. It doesn’t look like Interstate Everyplace, USA. It looks like what it is: a tiny (pop. 513 in 2004), off-the-trail village that lives on fishing and just enough tourism.

I was standing just 5 feet away...

Everglades City School (pre-K to 12) has 149 students, and I sang for Grade 4 down: about 40 children, only one African-American. The school, a handsome, well-equipped Collier County offering, is very near the Barron River. (The largest landowner in these parts when the county was formed? Barron Collier, natch.)

In the morning, in the narrow margin between school and river were two immobile, big-bellied men in a pickup, a surprisingly unconcerned conclave of buzzards on a dumpster, and the Triad Café, recommended as the best breakfast in town by our motel clerk, whose daughter, we learned at checkout, would be at my afternoon concert.

mmmm...beer!

Zero stars!

Route 29, Everglades City’s only exit to the rest of the world, leads in from the north. We had some time before my concert, so we drove a few miles south to its terminus on Chokoloskee Island (chuck-uh-LUS-key), a 400-person suburb and the home of the Smallwood Store Museum, an antique, barn-red longhouse raised five feet above the ground. Like a woman hiking up her skirt to cross a puddle, almost every building in these parts perches on supports to avoid what must be too-frequent flooding.

The Smallwood Store is a rustic reminder of yesterday’s products (like Brylcreem and BAB-O Cleanser), equipment (like a hand-cranked sausage machine), and local legends (like the cane farmer who avoided paying his itinerant fieldworkers by murdering them and tossing their bodies to the gators). From the enthusiasm shown us by the third-generation owner, we were probably the day’s only visitors. She seemed prepared to expound on every curio, but I had a show to do, and her son, we learned at while buying postcards for grandkids, would be in my audience.

Like most schools, ECS required a sign-in for visitors. While waiting for my escort, I was engaged by an articulate, fast-talking second grader with a heavily bandaged index finger.

“I caught it in a door and it ripped off my whole nail and the end of my finger, and it bled a lot. The bandage was unwrapping, so I’m here, that’s why. It doesn’t hurt so much now, but at the hospital my mother had to go into another room and put her fingers in her ears because when they gave me a shot with a needle right in my finger, I screamed so loud that she could hear me even from that far away. What are you singing today? My mother doesn’t like to hug me or kiss me. She says she loves me, but she says she doesn’t always have to show it so much. She works here at school, and she’ll probably be at your concert.”

I’ve done nearly a hundred Pobba shows. These kids were as enthusiastic and fun-loving as any.  Except for some of the ol’ boys, there is no southern accent here. To a Californian, almost no accent at all.

Afterwards, I got into a discussion with a warm and pleasant reading teacher…and she volunteered that she thinks global warming is a hoax. I gently presented several scientific arguments, including my whiteboarding the “hockey stick” graph of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels showing the rapid increase.

She countered with her firmly held belief that:

• the earth is only 8,000 years old (first I’d ever heard that particular number)
• the Great Flood created the fossil record, and
• since Genesis mentions a race of giants, that explains the dinosaurs.

I hope she teaches reading well.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Dow Jones Industrial Average

The market churns; the market bubbles.
Mideast explodes, and I got troubles.
Hussein? Who’s crazy? If Bush gets sore,
Brokers be marchin’ off to war.
Iran around, Iraq my brain,
Kuwait for a while, but I Saudi gain.
So maybe I get some oil and gold,
But my courage drops, and my luck turns cold.

Recession’s coming; times’ll get rough.
Will you be ready, steady, and tough?
Will you trade the OEXs as one of your schemes?
It really never works, ‘cept in your dreams.
So short those flyers; sell those calls.
You gotta have courage when the market falls.
‘Cause if you think trees grow to the sky,
Then bend way over and kiss your ass goodbye!

CHORUS:
So the Bear is here; the Bear is back.
I feel his breath comin’ up my back.
The Bear is here. I hear him growl.
You’d best be in cash when he’s on the prowl.

(…followed by 12 more verses)

Sigh. Over 17 years later…nothing has changed.

©2012 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.