Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Saturday Night at the Oldies: ‘Green’ Songs

I was going to cover 'strange' songs tonight, but then I remembered it is St. Patrick's Day. 

Remember The New Christy Minstrels?  Here is Barry Maguire belting out their 1963 hit,
Green, Green."  It was sanitized, well-scrubbed hootenany stuff like this that caused a lot of my generation to pick up guitars and then find our way back to the more authentic material.  Check out this video of a live performance at an Arizona university.  This was before the '60s became the '60s. But by '65 the cultural as opposed to the calendrical  '60s had arrived with a vengeance and the same Barry Maguire came out with The Eve of Destruction.  Topical songs and social protest came to displace songs about Tom Dooley and workin' on the railroad . . . .

Joan Baez, Green, Green Grass of HomeRed Foley does a great job with this 'green' song.

Hoyt Axton, Greenback Dollar. Here is the Kingston Trio's cleaned-up collegiate version.  Fretkillr's  killer amateur version is modelled on Hoyt Axton's.

Hoyt Axton, Greensleeves

Jim Lowe, Green Door, 1956.

Roy Buchanan, Green Onions.  A guitar-slinger's version.

Finally, a song about the lean green.

And now to bed.


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