Category Archives: The Byrds

So Hush Little Baby, Don’t You Cry

12 Sunday Aug 2012

Posted by in 4th of July, Autumn, climate, Drought, DuBose Heyward, Fall, George Gershwin, Ice Age, Ira Gershwin, Meteorology, Mythology, Porgy & Bess, Seasons, Spring, Summer, The Byrds, Weather, Winter

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The scene is the annual 4th of July Celebration, coming to you live from the National Mall in Washington DC, or from Downtown St. Louis, or Chicago, or Los Angeles–it hardly matters where. The singer is introduced, and she takes the stage. She is white, or black, she is young, or old, she is a seasoned Broadway star, an acclaimed coloratura soprano, a newly-minted pop star–again, it hardly matters. She picks up the microphone, seems to grow misty; the orchestra strikes a somber A-minor chord, the singer draws a breath and sings:

Suuuuuummertiiiime . . . and the livin’ is easy . . .

Yes, again. Just like the singer at this event last year, and the year before, and the year before. As if there is only one song in the entire God-forsaken Great American Songbook with the word ‘summer’ in it. Oh sure, it’s a pretty song: it’s Gershwin, after all, music by George, lyrics by Ira, with supplemental lyrics by Dubose Heyward. That may explain why the lyrics to many of the songs in Porgy & Bess, the opera the song comes from, rise above the usual too-clever-by-half smarminess that characterizes so much of Ira Gershwin’s output. I can only imagine if Ira had written the words by himself. We’d get something more like:

It’s summer in this clime, and though I’m in my prime, I believe that I’m
hearing someone cry . . .

Summertime is a nice song, but couldn’t we just once in a while sing something different? I think singers perform it out of laziness; they want something classic and appropriate, and most human beings have heard this song often enough that they could sing it in their sleep. It’s like singing Amazing Grace at funerals: why bother learning a new hymn? I already know this one.

Yeah, I’ve been in a bad mood for much of this summer, and so have a lot of people around me. It has been a horrendously hot and rainless season. We will all be happy to see it gone. But here’s the thing: it’s still August.

I’ve been browsing other blogs related to nature and to the seasons. I find one person after another rhapsodizing about the coming autumn, about sitting by the fire, about autumn leaves, about donning the warm fuzzies and warming the spiced cider. Come on guys. Where I live, some of the worst dog days of summer come in the first half of September. I’ve seen temperatures in the nineties in October–especially lately, given the global warming that’s not happening.

This hurrying of the autumn season I account to a few factors. First, if you ask people to name a favorite season, autumn is the most popular. Spring runs a close second, but we humans, warm-blooded mammals who developed as a modern species in the Ice Age, feel most at home in the transition from hot to cool weather. Second, we want to see this summer gone. Some people are saying that the summer seems to have just flown by. Where did it go? The answer is nowhere, it’s still right here, still grilling your gardens and melting your sidewalks, and the observation that the summer has somehow magically passed in a trice is pure wishful thinking. Summer is the longest season, averaging over 93 days. Don’t count it out quite yet.

It’s also a bit of wishful thinking that ‘the livin’ is easy’ in summertime. Sure, food is abundant in summer, clothing is light, shelter is minimal. Recent studies have shown that we humans are even more amorously inclined in summer than at other times of the year. But for millions of householders, summer adds a whole new slate of lawn care activities, not the least of which is cutting the grass: an extremely unpleasant task when the temperature is in the nineties and the humidity is high. And when summer temperatures are regularly killing people in our major cities, you know that’s just too much summer. The weather front that has camped out over the entire midsection of the United States for the past eight weeks or so needs to move on.

But of course it’s the sentiment in those first lines that makes the song resonate with listeners. Like there’s some easy-going, not-too-hot season with a plate of catfish in front of us, a rich dad and a pretty mom, and all we have to do is kick back and enjoy it. Yeah, that’s nice, even if it’s not true. Even if it’s really part of the myth making that surrounds the seasons. Like the springtime of young love, or the not too cold winter covered in deep, not too slippery snow, the kind that doesn’t stop our gift-laden horse-drawn sleigh from pulling up in front of Grandma’s house, all redolent of cinnamon and peppermint and Frazer fir.

Maybe next summer won’t be as hot, as rainless. I’ll feel better about all of this nostalgia, readier to accept simple musings about the seasons, my mind uncluttered by realities, or at least more able to set them aside for a moment. I may enjoy simple things like the annual 4th of July Celebration on the National Mall, and no matter what rude beast currently slouches towards Washington–whether it’s Sondra Radvanovsky or Ke$ha–to offer one more rendition of Summertime, I’ll be ready to sit back and let the sentiment wash over me.

Turn Turn Turn to Something Else

29 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Ecclesiastes, Folk Music, Joshua, Mythology, Peace, Pete Seeger, Religion, Seasons, The Byrds, War

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Often when I tell people that I am writing about the seasons, they mention the famous lines from Ecclesiastes, which were transcribed into a song by Pete Seeger and made famous by the Byrds. Sometimes they begin humming the tune or even singing the song. Despite these lines being just about the most well-known seasonal reference there is, at least among my generation, I have not written about them in the book, for a number of reasons.

Ecclesiastes is one of the Wisdom books of the Old Testament, which many believe arose from the court of King David (along with Psalms, Proverbs and Song of Solomon). By tradition, this book is attributed to Solomon; the writer introduces himself as a ‘son of King David,’ but in the ancient diction in which it is composed, that phrase could plausibly just mean ‘a descendant of King David.’ Many scholars believe there are two voices in Ecclesiastes, the narrator, who provides autobiographical material and framing narrative, and the actual teacher or preacher implied in the title. In general, the preacher discourses at length about the futility and weariness of life on earth, before reconciling all in the book’s final two verses, which insist that loving God and keeping his commandments is our sole duty.

The verses in question are of course Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, the famous ‘To everything there is a season.’ I don’t count it among seasonal references because it’s not talking about actual natural phenomena, but uses the idea of seasons metaphorically: ‘a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance’ (3:4). These are seasons only in poetic terms. I also think that Pete Seeger’s appropriation of the verses, and his changing the ending line, ‘a time for peace,’ adding ‘I swear it’s not too late,’ lends the words a hopeful meaning that is simply not consistent with the message of Ecclesiastes, or with the Old Testament in general.

One of the few seasonally-based references in the text comes in verse 3:2, ‘a time to plant and a time to uproot.’ That is the translation in the New International version of the Bible. In the King James version, upon which Seeger based his song, the words are actually ‘a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted.’ This is one of the few places he changes the biblical text, rendering it as ‘a time to reap.’ I’m not sure the original text meant to reap, or to harvest, so much as to destroy what has been planted by uprooting or plucking it up. Ruining an enemy’s crops has always been an important tactic in warfare, and this could very well be what the passage is talking about. I know that sounds terrible, but consider the rest of the text.

There is a time to love and a time to hate; a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; a time for war and a time for peace. It doesn’t say that peace is the natural and preferable state of things, while war is an unfortunate occurrence–it says that there is a time for war. Remember that the ancient Israelites were a warlike, conquering people. The Book of Joshua, for instance, is mostly about wars of conquest in which competing nations were wiped out in veritable orgies of violence. Few people realize that the reason that God made the sun stand still in perhaps the most famous passage in Joshua was so that the Israelites could have an extra long day to slaughter their enemies. King David was a warrior king, famous for slaying ‘his tens of thousands’ (I Samuel 18). War and conquest is so standard a theme in most of the Old Testament that one can grow numb with the thought of the violence being perpetrated.

To take this ethos and try to turn it into a message of hope and peace is laughable. This is especially true when the passage in question comes from a book like Ecclesiastes, which is not about hope, not about peace, but about hopelessness and vanity. Those verses near the end, ‘Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man’ (12:13), are the dictum of the jealous, wrathful, vengeful warrior God who animates the entire Old Testament. This is not a book about peace and love, despite Pete Seeger’s best intentions, or those of a whole generation of folk singers who have recorded this song. I will be turning to other texts for inspiration as I write about the seasons.