What is your favorite war song?
Suzanne Lapierre
As opposed to anti-war song. Seriously. Folk music has always swayed a
little to far to the left for me. Sometimes war is the only logical
choice.Like now.
Cheers.
S
Jim Capaldi
This is one of best songs related to war. I was written by Communist poet
Natzim Hikmet after World War II. It says it all. . .
I COME AND STAND AT EVERY DOOR
I come and stand at every door
But none can hear my silent tread
I knock and yet remain unseen
For I am dead, for I am dead.
I'm only seven, although I died
In Hiroshima long ago.
I'm seven now, as I was then -
When children die, they do not grow.
My hair was scorched by swirling flame;
My eyes grew dim, my eyes grew blind.
Death came and turned my bones to dust,
And that was scattered by the wind.
I need no fruit, I need no rice.
I need no sweets, or even bread;
I ask for nothing for myself,
For I am dead, for I am dead.
All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today.
So that the children of this world
May live and grow and laugh and play!
Original Turkish poem by Natzim Hikmet
English translation by Jeanette Turner
Music by James Waters ("The Great Silkie")
Adaptation by Pete Seeger (1962)
Text (c) 1966 by Stormking Music Inc.
Music (c) 1966 by Folk Legacy Records
All Rights Reserved
"Suzanne Lapierre" <suzanne_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:la49utsuqg8mt472q...@4ax.com...
James N. Stewart
> little to far to the left for me. Sometimes war is the only logical
> choice.Like now.
OK! All together now,
And it's one, two three, what are we fighting for?
Don't ask me I don't give a damn, next stop is Afghanistan!
And it's five sixz seven, Open up the pearly gates,
There ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee! we'rer all going to die!
Well come on business men, don't move slow, you know this war is a mine of
gold!
There's plenty of money to be made, by supplying the army with the tools of
the trade.
Just hope and pray that if they drop the bomb, they drop it on the Talliban!
etc. etc.
Sounds fairly entusiastic to me.
Joe Fineman
--
--- Joe Fineman j...@TheWorld.com
||: The Balkan peninsula is the Europe of Europe. :||
J. W. P.
LOVE that one.
Mit der dumheit, kamfen die gotter selbst vergebbens.
JesiAna
Jesiana
"If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk, you can sing."
JesiAna
Guthrie's "Reuben James." And, from the Civil War, "Tenting Tonight."
Stephen L. Suffet
Greetings:
This is a tough one. I don't like murder, but I do like murder ballads.
Nor do I like war, although I do agree with Suzanne that at times -- very
rare times I should add -- it seems like the only logical choice. I do
like a lot of war songs, particularly ones that came from the soldiers
and sailors themselves. If I had to pick one for its absolute and raw
power, I would choose "John Brown's Body" in its many variants. I
particularly like the narrative stanzas, such as:
John Brown died upon the scaffold for the slave,
Dark was the hour they laid him in his grave,
God now avenges the life he gladly gave,
As his soul goes marching on.
He captured Harper's Ferry with his nineteen men so true,
He frightened Old Virginny 'til she trembled through and through,
They hanged him for a traitor, they themselves the traitor crew,
His soul goes marching on.
Another of the variants is a marching song sung by black soldiers
recruited from the ranks of emancipated and escaped slaves from Arkansas.
Two stanzas I recall from memory are as follows
Oh, we're the colored soldiers from the state of Arkansas,
We are fighting for our freedom, we are fighting for the law,
We can whup a rebel farther than a white man ever saw,
As we go marching on.
We're done with hoeing cotton, we are done with hoeing corn,
We are colored Yankee soldiers now, as sure as you are born,
When Ol' Massa hears us coimg, he will think it's Gabriel's horn,
As we go marching on.
Then of course there are Julia Ward Howe's lyrics, "The Battle of Hymn of
the Republic." I don't endorse the claim that there is something holy
about war, no matter how just the cause. But for pure poetry, few other
song lyrics come close. To wit:
I have seen Him in the watch fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps,
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps,
His day is marching on.
I have read a fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
"As ye deal with My contemnors, so with ye My Grace shall deal,
Let the Hero born of Woman crush the serpent with His heel,
Since God is marching on."
Shall we play graduate seminar in America literature and deconstruct
those two verses? :-)
Anyway, let me close by posting my own lyrics, written within a few days
of the September 11th attacks. Is it pro-war or anti-war, or perhaps both
at the same time? I'll leave you to decide.
"The New Battle Hymn of the Republic"
Music: "John Brown's Body" ("The Battle Hymn of the Republic")
Words: Stephen L. Suffet Š 2001
Stanzas only, low, slow, and dirgelike, without choruses.
Unaccompanied, or else accompanied by uileann pipes only.
An evil hand of terror has smitten our land,
Cruel war is thrust upon us, and united we shall stand,
But before we loose the dogs of war, the truth we shall demand.
May the truth go shining on!
Are our weapons so intelligent, are our bombs so smart,
The evil and the innocent our bombs can tell apart?
Or together will they perish once the bombings start?
May the truth go shining on!
And if we march to battle in the Good Lord's Holy Name,
How are we so different from the ones we choose to blame?
War is never holy; it is evil and profane.
May the truth go shining on!
And the ones whose souls are guided by the sacred Inner Light,
Shall we brand them all as traitors because they will not fight?
Shall we lock them into prisons and keep them out of sight?
May the truth go shining on!
And the one we call Bin Laden, oh may the truth be known,
We armed him and we trained him when we claimed him as our own;
Now he bites the hand that fed him, we have reaped what we have sown.
May the truth go shining on!
Will we who fight for freedom ourselves succumb to hate?
Our will our ranks be open wide to all who'd risk our fate?
The hand that smote our nation knew neither gay nor straight.
May the truth go shining on!
And when the battle's over, will those who now protect,
Be treated then with decency, with honor and respect?
Or will they suffer homelessness, depression and neglect?
May the truth go shining on!
Yes, although war is evil, we still may choose to fight,
The lesser of two evils may bring us through this night,
But let us not deceive ourselves that two wrongs make a right.
May the truth go shining on!
---- Steve
Steven Rowe
<suzanne_...@hotmail.com> writes:
>As opposed to anti-war song. Seriously. Folk music has always swayed a
>little to far to the left for me.
Hey, plenty of lefties have been in Foxholes!
Woody Guthrie did an entire album of pro-ww2, anti-fascists songs to go to
war by.
sr
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Ian Anderson
> Suzanne Lapierre wrote:
>
> >
> > As opposed to anti-war song. Seriously. Folk music has always swayed a
> > little to far to the left for me. Sometimes war is the only logical
> > choice.
Puts a whole new spin on the word "logical" . . .
You'd like a Britfolk group from the '80s called Strawhead. They specialised
in blaring war songs and historic "foreigner bashing" songs, all done
with a nasty synthesiser to make it even more offensive. When we did
an anagram competition in the early '80s (the one that produced the
legendary one of Peter Bellamy as "Elmer P. Bleaty" which he loved
so much he nearly adopted it), some wag pointed out that an anagram
of Strawhead was "Wardeaths", by which they've been commonly known
by a section of the folk public ever since.
(off topic - and yes, in the many-a-truth-is-told-in-anagrams game, my old
outfit the English Country Blues Band produced the Rubbishy Song &
Tune Cell, while Ashley Hutchings became Yah, Such Thin Legs . . .)
--
Ian Anderson
fRoots magazine
fro...@froots.demon.co.uk
http://www.froots.demon.co.uk/
remove anti-junkmail .off to reply
Stephen L. Suffet
> [snip]
>
> You'd like a Britfolk group from the '80s called Strawhead. They specialised
> in blaring war songs and historic "foreigner bashing" songs, all done
> with a nasty synthesiser to make it even more offensive. When we did
> an anagram competition in the early '80s (the one that produced the
> legendary one of Peter Bellamy as "Elmer P. Bleaty" which he loved
> so much he nearly adopted it), some wag pointed out that an anagram
> of Strawhead was "Wardeaths", by which they've been commonly known
> by a section of the folk public ever since.
>
> (off topic - and yes, in the many-a-truth-is-told-in-anagrams game, my old
> outfit the English Country Blues Band produced the Rubbishy Song &
> Tune Cell, while Ashley Hutchings became Yah, Such Thin Legs . . .)
>
>
My good friend Mitch once told me that "If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the
morning, I'd hammer in the evening, all over this world" was an anagram for
"Hail Satan, the All Powerful Lord of Darkness and Destruction!" Then one day I
sat down for 2 or 3 hours with some Scrabble tiles and discovered he was just
pulling my leg. :-)
--- Steve
David Rintoul
Rogers' The Nancy. It's about a group of working class Canadian sea dogs who
outclass a bunch of pompous powder haired naval officers, who "bravely run
away".
War is, at best, a necessary evil. Perhaps necessary, but always evil.
--
David Rintoul
david....@sympatico.ca
http://www3.sympatico.ca/david.rintoul
"In prosperity, our friends know us. In adversity, we know our friends."
J. Churton Collins
Dennis Brown
> As opposed to anti-war song. Seriously. Folk music has always swayed a
> little to far to the left for me.
How about the Star Spangled Banner?
> Sometimes war is the only logical choice.Like now.
That's what Bin Laden had concluded too.
--
Dennis Brown de...@ncf.ca
JmG
wrote:
>| That's what Bin Laden had concluded too.
John Adams, too.
J
--
The Office of Homeland Security [www.bongoboy.com]
Joe Fineman
> Mit der dumheit, kamfen die gotter selbst vergebbens.
Oh, and, while we're in German, "Freiheit".
--
--- Joe Fineman j...@TheWorld.com
||: If I could tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but :||
||: the truth, I'd _be_ God. :||
B J Mapson
news:9s25jp$skl$1...@suaar1aa.prod.compuserve.com...
> This is one of best songs related to war. I was written by Communist poet
> Natzim Hikmet after World War II. It says it all. . .
> I COME AND STAND AT EVERY DOOR
I'd have to agree. The first time I heard it I couldn't move for minutes
afterwards.
On a more historically military note, would 'Heights of Alma' count?
Roger
poly...@pacbell.net (Jerry Hollombe) wrote:
> Folk music has always swayed a little to far to the left for me.
Yes - that pesky folk music. But don't worry, there's always corporate
rock!
>Sometimes war is the only logical
> choice.Like now.
Uh, yeah, right...... <gag>
Gerry Myerson
Remember the war against Franco?
That's the kind where each of us belongs.
He may have won all the battles,
But we had all the good songs!
(Tom Lehrer, The Folk Song Army)
I haven't seen any Spanish Civil War songs mentioned in this thread,
surely there were some good ones (on the anti-Franco side).
Gerry Myerson (ge...@mpce.mq.edu.au)
LouKrieger
From: Gerry Myerson
I haven't seen any Spanish Civil War songs mentioned in this thread <<
OK, I'll mention one. How about, "Si Mi Quires Escribir."
Another classic unmentioned war song is "The Rising of the Moon."
Decelaraptor
little to far to the left for me. Sometimes war is the only logical
choice.Like now.
Well, it used to sway a little to the left for me til I became a leftie
myself;-) But I find war songs to have remained a guilty pleasure for
myself, especially Jacobite ones, so I'll mention a few of my favorites
here:
"Johnny Cope," "The Battle of Sherrifmuir," and "The Athol Gathering"
from the Jacobite Rebellion.
"Foggy Dew," "Rising of the Moon," and "Johnson's Motor Car" from the
Irish Rebellions.
"The Rifle" and "Johnny Broke Locks" from the American Revolution.
"The Regular Army-O" from America's westward expansion (truly a guilty
pleasure, if you know anything about it).
"Stand to Your Glasses" from World War's I, II, and the Korean War.
"Si Mi Quieres Escribir," "Viva la Quince Brigada," "Hans Beimler," and
"Freiheit" from the Spanish Civil War.
"D Day Dodgers," "Katiusha," "Stil, di Nacht," and "Rueben James" from
WWII.
And of course, "Fixin' to Die Rag" from the Vietnam War;-) Also,
Country Joe put the music to this Robert Service poem about WWI that is
my absolute favorite war song, "The Man From Athabasca."
I'm a touch hesitent about the last two as they're pirate songs, but
they do involve naval battles: "Henry Martin" and "High Barbaree."
"For I've had my fill of fighting and I've seen the nations scattered,,
And an army swung to slaughter, and a river red with gore,
And a city all a-smoulder and... as if it really matters,
For of late I'm prone to dreaming of my cabin on the shore...
And the dogs a-leapin madly, and the wife a-singin' gladly,
And I'll rest in Athabasca and I'll leave it never more,
I'll leave it never more."
bogus address
>> > As opposed to anti-war song.
> You'd like a Britfolk group from the '80s called Strawhead. They
> specialised in blaring war songs and historic "foreigner bashing"
> songs, all done with a nasty synthesiser to make it even more
> offensive. When we did an anagram competition in the early '80s
> (the one that produced the legendary one of Peter Bellamy as "Elmer
> P. Bleaty" which he loved so much he nearly adopted it), some wag
> pointed out that an anagram of Strawhead was "Wardeaths", by which
> they've been commonly known by a section of the folk public ever since.
I don't think I've heard them, but I have done a bit of that rubbing-
people's-noses-in-the-less-romantic-bits-of-history stuff myself (in
fact I am in the middle of constructing a CD-ROM largely devoted to
it) so they sound like my sort of act.
There was a Scottish experimental-industrial-noise band called Test
Department of the late 80s and early 90s who did a woderful hatchet
job on the Agincourt Carol in the same spirit. They used it as a sort
of ground bass in a performance about 90 minutes long in which the
tune went in and out of audibility among a melee of percussion, guitar
distortion, sample screaming and sundry electronic mayhem, with a slide
and video show of newsreels showing British war atrocities.
I'd had in the back of my mind for years that I'd like to do something
along those lines with Walther van der Wogelweide's "Palestine Song"
(the never-performed ending of which sounds like something a Sharonite
Zionist maniac might have come up with, except that Walther presumably
wanted to kill Jews as well). I got well and truly gazumped by Test
Department's show.
> (off topic - and yes, in the many-a-truth-is-told-in-anagrams game, my
> old outfit the English Country Blues Band produced the Rubbishy Song
> & Tune Cell, while Ashley Hutchings became Yah, Such Thin Legs . . .)
> Ian Anderson
An Inner Soda
> fRoots magazine
same farting zoo
omit frozen saga
Fiat orgasm zone
oozing fat smear
no. of ersatz magi
========> Email to "jc" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce. <========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data and recipes,
freeware logic fonts for the Macintosh, and Scots traditional music resources
j...@genetics.washington.edu
Jerry Hollombe <poly...@pacbell.net> wrote:
>
>How about "The Battle of New Orleans?"
Does that count as a war song? Bloodthirsty as the song is, the battle was
fought after the war was over. Unusual in being a battle between two
countries who were at peace with each other before, during, and after the
battle.
-----
Joe Felsenstein j...@genetics.washington.edu (IP No. 128.95.12.41)
Dept. of Genetics, Univ. of Washington, Box 357360, Seattle, WA 98195-7360 USA
kuei...@-remove-hotmail.com
Montrose as sung by Steeleye Span
The steeleye span song about the Black Douglas
Johnnie Cope
Rising of the Moon
Son of God goes forth to war (the harp that once on Tara's hall hung?)
Saga of the Green Berets
chas
JmG <jmg...@bestweb.net> wrote in message
news:7b7butgep1h6daka0...@4ax.com...
bogus address
> As opposed to anti-war song. Seriously. Folk music has always swayed a
> little to far to the left for me. Sometimes war is the only logical
> choice.Like now.
Here are two little tunes dedicated to somebody who thought with the same
logic (albeit in the lethality stakes fairly small potatoes even compared
to bin Laden, let alone Sharon, Bush or Blair). Nothing from this MS has
ever been published before, as far as I know. I think the minuet is the
more interesting tune, albeit minuets have a bit of an image problem these
days.
X:1
T:Duke of Cumberland's Minuet
Z:Jack Campin 2001
S:Mitchell Library MS 18106, F. Colquhoun (1752)
M:3/4
L:1/8
Q:3/4=60
K:G
g2 GABc | d2 b2 a2| g2 f2 g2 | e3 fga |\
d2 Td3 c | BdcfaB | cd c2 B2 |[1 A6 :|\
[2 A3 ||
bag| fded^cd | a2 g2 f2| gfefga | b2 a2 g2|\
f2 (b2 c'2)|{e}^d4 e2|(3agf {g}Tf4 | e4 g2|
d2 (3edc (3dcB | (c2 f2) a2| B>c (3dcB (3cBA| B2 d2 g2|\
(3bag (3gfe (3edc | a2 d2 c2|(3BAG TA4 |[1 G3 :|\
[2 G6 |]
X:2
T:The routing of the Rebels
Z:Jack Campin 2001
S:Mitchell Library MS 18106, F. Colquhoun (1752)
M:C|
L:1/8
Q:1/2=108
K:EDor
B |(AF)(ED) FGFB|AFED E2EB|AFED defe|dBdF E2z:|
b | agfe fgfb|agfe f2fg|agfe defe|dBdF E3 :|
F/G/| AFdF AFdF|AFdF A3 B|AFED defe|dBdF E2z:|
Duke William Augustus would have thoroughly approved of the idea of
blasting a whole country full of defenceless peasants with cluster
bombs in pursuit of a single murderous individual.
Harold Groot
>>How about "The Battle of New Orleans?"
>On 5 Nov 2001 19:57:08 GMT, j...@genetics.washington.edu wrote:
>Does that count as a war song? Bloodthirsty as the song is, the battle was
>fought after the war was over. Unusual in being a battle between two
>countries who were at peace with each other before, during, and after the
>battle.
Perhaps you should ask the families of those who died in the battle if
they consider it a war song. The date of the battle may have been
after the the date of the peace, but the participants fully believed
they were at war and the casualties were just as dead.
If you are going to go on about hairsplitting legal points than you
should probably eliminate all songs dealing with fights where one side
was in rebellion against the government and lost. If they lost, they
never had a "real" nation and "wars" are only fought between "real
nations", right? Oh, wait - better throw out songs about Korea and
Viet Nam too. Those weren't "declared wars" either. In fact, throw
out everything for the USA since WWII.
No, I think that we ought to include The Battle of New Orleans, just
as we ought to include songs of the Irish Rebellions and songs of The
American Civil War and lots of other songs. The casualties were real,
the property destruction was real, the horror was real. That's the
essence of it.
Ian Anderson
> > fRoots magazine
>
> same farting zoo
> omit frozen saga
> Fiat orgasm zone
> oozing fat smear
> no. of ersatz magi
>
Ah, you have the same anagram software as me. It used to be more
fun and challenge with the scrabble letters!
rgladu
WWII?
Hitler has only got one ball
Gerring has two but they are small
Himeler has something simler
But Goebels has no balls at all.
We'll wash all our laundry on the Zigfried line...etc
"Suzanne Lapierre" <suzanne_...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:la49utsuqg8mt472q...@4ax.com...
>
> As opposed to anti-war song. Seriously. Folk music has always swayed a
> little to far to the left for me. Sometimes war is the only logical
> choice.Like now.
>
> Cheers.
> S
JesiAna
Another favorite of mine. But then there are so many good Irish war songs and
hero songs..."Roddy McCorley" comes to mind, as does "The Minstrel Boy," and on
and on..
Sean Smith
Eschewing, for now, general reservations about war (though not
necessarily this one) and the whole question of folk music's ideological
slant, I'll give a nod to the shanty "O Agamemnon," which I heard done
by a group called Threadbare Consort yonks ago. Superbly bloodthirsty imagery:
Oh come my lads, for we're off to the main
O Agamemnon O
To fill our ships with the gold of Spain
Mars forever more
They say that 30 ships on the line
O Agamemnon O
From France and Spain on the seas do shine
Mars forever more
Those ships from France and Spain may shine
(chorus)
But they'll ne'er forget the year of '05
(chorus)
Then the guns did rattle and the shots did hail
And both ships fought with fire and flame*
*-probably misremembering this line, but you get the idea.
And the crimson blood from the scuppers did pour
And the blue seas rolled with the purple gore
We'll break their guns and topple their mountains
We'll make their blood to flow like fountains
Then from our decks rolled the British thunder
And that's the way we keep our enemies under
Sean Smith
stsm...@hotmail.com
Because some things
can't be helped--http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/6504 (New! Possibly
improved!);
Featuring "Daze and Quirks"
and
The Dumb, Stupid Baseball Hat Page
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I shall wrassle me up a future or die trying."
--Zora Neale Hurston
elefem
some "hair-clumping" himself. Being concerned with real casualties, real
horror, and real destruction are the essence of a war song, according to him.
By those criteria, many if not all anti-war songs would be war songs. I'm
inclined to think that this obliterates a useful distinction-- but perhaps I
need to consult the families of those who died.
Harold Groot
>In his haste to sneer at Joe Felsenstein's "hairsplitting", Harold Groot's done
>some "hair-clumping" himself. Being concerned with real casualties, real
>horror, and real destruction are the essence of a war song, according to him.
>By those criteria, many if not all anti-war songs would be war songs. I'm
>inclined to think that this obliterates a useful distinction-- but perhaps I
>need to consult the families of those who died.
If it pleases you to deliberately mistake the point and look foolish
in public, you are of course at liberty to do so.
Joe's point was regarding "legally at war" vs. "not legally at war",
and I merely showed the additional consequences of his own argument.
My own point was that the legal status of the nations was irrelevant.
(It turns out Joe had meant his post in jest, but that's a side issue.
We hashed it out in email.)
Certainly it seems obvious to me that "anti-war songs" do in fact have
war as their SUBJECT. They share this aspect with "war songs", which
also have war as their SUBJECT. The difference is in the POSITION.
This thread, if I recall correctly, was started with the question
"What is your favorite war song AS OPPOSED TO ANTI-WAR SONG." So the
distinction was not "Is this song about war?" but rather "Does this
song about war take a position for or against it?"
Hojo2x
Bonnie Blue Flag."
Wade Hampton Miller
Selsick
Live Wizardry.
Hugh
Tom and Jan Dietz
PhillyGuy
Battle Hymn of The Republic (rewrite of John Brown's Body, this is my
favorite
war song)
Onward Christian Soldiers (not very politically correct in much of any
universe anymore, but it's still is or was an effective, and great war
song)
and in the humor department, in heavy rotation before and maybe on
D-Day - yes reports are this was a morale builder (and tension
releaser), and used as one of many defiant psycher-uppers for the
troops:
"The Fuehrer's Face" - Spike Jones
In the optimism department: When Johnny Comes Marching Home
But if I included anti-war songs too, only BHOTR (above) goes in with
Masters of War, Johnny I Hardly Knew You, I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To
Die, (etc., etc.) in the quality department for me.
tom blumenthal
Donald Peterson
"St.Valerie" by Davey Steele (R.I.P.)and Battlefield Band
"Battle of Waterloo" by Old Blind Dogs
"Johnny Cope" by the Tannies
this has been a great thread during these times
Don Peterson
Nigel Stapley
"Donald Peterson" <don...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:714cfa1f.0111...@posting.google.com...
> "Christmas in the Trenches" by John McCutcheon
> "St.Valerie" by Davey Steele (R.I.P.)and Battlefield Band
> "Battle of Waterloo" by Old Blind Dogs
> "Johnny Cope" by the Tannies
>
1914" by Mike Harding must be in there with a chance...
--
Regards,
Nigel Stapley
(remove <gwrthsbam.> to reply)
CineStudy
Rick
Donald Peterson
immortalized by the Kingston Trio. {apologies if I missed it being
already mentioned on the thread.}
Don Peterson