#777 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Friday October 20)
Good morning,
MUSIC
When I was a child in the mid-60s, I was in thrall of my Aunt Seemah, an adult who, when she visited, played games, sang songs, and told stories with the kids. These were days of hippies, protests, tie-dye, free spirits, folk music, and poets.
To me, Seemah was the embodiment of the times. She was a free spirit, unencumbered by children (although she later had a daughter—whom I believe was the first baby I held), always speaking her mind, an adult with a child’s sensibility and sense of wonder. She was never without her guitar and a willingness to play anything from traditional standards to Burl Ives to current folk music. I remember her singing a song called “Everybody Loves Saturday Night,” with each refrain in a different language (hence, everybody!). But where she made the most lasting impression was singing ballads. I don’t remember which Joan Baez tune she played that stuck with me until I saw Joan on a tv variety show. She bore more than a passing resemblance to Seemah. I don’t think I ever conflated Seemah and Joan as the same person, but I clearly identified them as related. To see one is to be in the presence of the other.
One of Joan’s greatest songs, one that she sings to a former love about days gone by, not with grief but with remembrance, is Diamonds and Rust. It is a song that tells a story, shares emotion, and is told in a melancholy, yet not sad, method. Sung from a day after which whatever pain that accompanied the break is gone, it speaks to looking backward for a moment from the perspective of distance and time. I love it. This is from a TV show in the 70s and just might be the one that I remember in those deep, cob-web recesses of my mind!: Diamonds and Rust
POETRY
Poem (To F.S.)
By Langston Hughes
I loved my friend.
He went away from me.
There’s nothing more to say.
The poem ends,
Soft as it began, --
I loved my friend.
FINALLY
As Howard Kroll and Ed Weiss corrected me, it was Nellie Connally, and not her husband, Governor John Connally, who turned to JFK in the motorcade on November 22, 1963 to say, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”
Have a great weekend,
Glenn