“We Will All Go Together When We Go” - Tom Lehrer (circa 1965).
“We Will All Go Together When We Go” - Tom Lehrer (circa 1965).
“500 Miles” - The Brothers Four (circa the early 1960s).
My mom saw the Brothers Four at Carnegie Mellon University probably around 1965; I wonder if the show sounded anything like this.
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” - Joan Baez (1963).
Another performance whose power is heightened by the crowd’s accompaniment. The first time I heard this song, which would have been back in the summer of 2002, my last in Pittsburgh, I got goosebumps.
“If I Had a Hammer” - Peter, Paul, and Marcy (at the Civil Rights March on Washington, 1963).
“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” - The Chad Mitchell Trio (1962).
As would be expected given the nature of folk music, there’s a fair amount of overlap in the material performed during the U.S. folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s: a YouTube search for “500 Miles,” “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” “If I Had a Hammer,” or the very beautiful song included above, ”Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream,” is certain to yield versions by various members of the folk community (The Weavers, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul, and Mary, etc., depending on the song). The interpretations are pretty similar, for the most part, but a close listen can reveal subtle differences: in the Chad Mitchell Trio’s version of “Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” from Live at the Bitter End, the crowd can be heard be heard singing softly along—giving further weight to the song’s already powerful pacifist sentiment.
“My Country ‘Tis of Thy People You’re Dying” - Buffy Sainte-Marie (circa 1965).
“Now that the Buffalo’s Gone” - Buffy Sainte-Marie (1964).
In a November 26, 2009 interview with Democracy Now! reporter Amy Goodman, Sainte-Marie, who is of Native American (Cree) heritage, gave some background for the song, which remains one of her most powerful:
“Oh, wow, that was on my first album, alongside ‘Universal Soldier.’ ‘Now that the Buffalo’s Gone’ is about something that was going on in Jamestown, New York. The Seneca reservation was about to be flooded in order to build Kinzua Dam. And there were alternative sites for Kinzua Dam that would have saved everybody, except a sweet few, a whole lot of money. But it kind of blew the whistle on that.
“I wrote it not to make anybody mad, but to acknowledge the fact that a lot of people who are part Indian really would like to know and would care, so again and again it says ‘you, dear lady, and you, dear man.’ It’s trying to explain something to people who don’t usually get to know anything about Native American stuff, because you never hear about Indian people. The only time you hear about Indian people, like, for instance, Wounded Knee, when Nixon was president, what you’d see in the media was some Indian with a gun who was defending his land against things that shouldn’t be going on.”
“Five O’Clock World” - The Vogues (1965).
The set couldn’t be more perfect set for a group from Pittsburgh (more specifically, Turtle Creek a/k/a Turtle Crick).
“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” - The Silkie (circa 1965).
“You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” - The Silkie (1966).
Briefly touted as the British answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary, Hull’s The Silkie are known less for their fairly pedestrian, if pretty, covers of Dylan numbers (e.g. “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time”) than their version of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” which went Top 10 in the U.S. in 1965. Produced by John Lennon and featuring Paul McCartney and George Harrison on guitar and tambourine, respectively, the Silkie’s version sounds more conventionally Beatles-y than the more stripped-down original, albeit with a Searchers/folk vocal (Sylvia Tatlers’ ethereal voice bears striking similarity to Naomi Yang’s).
