How to introduce my very favourite song in the entire world in this 8th blog of #mysongscapes – while finding some relationship to my own photography, as I promised in the first blog? And what can I say about Madame George, the genius 10-minute song from the genius album that is Van Morrison’s iconic 1968 ‘Astral Weeks’ that hasn’t already been said?
I’m not sure how one develops a taste for certain songs or types of music. Some of it is in our genes, I suspect, but much of it is in our exposure to music at periods in our lives where it gets into our bloodstream: snatches of songs our parents sang that we remember from childhood; songs, singers and musical groups heard on the radio – in my case, from the rich singer-songwriter era of the 1960s and 70s; music my kids listened to as they were growing up – reggae, hip-hop, rap, house, jungle and other strange musical genres I cannot name.
It’s clear to me that some people are simply more attuned to music than others; it forms a kind of soundtrack in their heads, whether the trigger is intrinsic or extrinsic. We sing to ourselves, we sing in the shower, we hum, tap our feet and listen to music in our cars. We go to concerts; we sing in choirs; we play in bands. Music moves us. To sit in the dining room of my late mother’s nursing home on entertainment night and watch the old melodies and lyrics light up the faces of people whose memories had long fled, it is clear that music resides in a wholly distinct part of the brain.
As for those folk songs of the 60s and 70s and more modern lyrics that evoke the stories that folk songs do so well, I’ve been a collector for many years and my CD mixes are in my car and in my kitchen (and a few friends’ homes too) where they are played regularly.
Why the philosophical preamble to Madame George? It’s just a song after all. The point I am trying to make is that this song, for some reason, speaks in a very deep way to my psyche, my consciousness, my soul… or whatever inner entity combines hearing and cognition with rapture. The music swirling around Morrison’s voice like a whirlpool is hypnotic, the lyrics mysterious – I never tire of either, but I’ve given up trying to divine what the words mean. They are all the more remarkable when you consider that they were written by a 23-year old Irish lad, living in Boston and fresh off the success of his first big song, 1967’s Brown-Eyed Girl. But in 1968 he was embroiled in a label dispute with Bang Records following owner Bert Berns’ death and looking for new management when a number of producers came to a Boston studio to hear the songs he’d been working on. One of them, Lewis Merenstein, upon hearing Morrison playing ‘Astral Weeks’ said: “I started crying. It just vibrated in my soul, and I knew that I wanted to work with that sound.” He took Morrison to New York and surrounded him with top-flight jazz musicians. John Payne is on flute; Richard Davis plays upright bass; Warren Smith Jr. is the percussionist; Jay Berliner plays acoustic guitar along with Morrison; and Connie Kay is on drums. A favourite part for me is the snare drum adding a military cadence to the line “Marching with the soldier boy behind”. The strings were dubbed later and Morrison hated them, but when I listen to their sweet sound ascend after he sings ‘the cool night air like Shalimar’ it seems to me that it adds necessary lightness, but then I love strings. The two recording sessions in September and October 1968 are the stuff of legend, but the musicians did their thing separately from Morrison, who recorded in a glass booth. Recalled Richard Davis fifty year later: “He was remote from us, ’cause he came in and went into a booth. And that’s where he stayed, isolated in a booth. I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, or we to him…And he seemed very shy…” Alchemy happened nonetheless.
And who was “Madame George” anyway? Based on the lyrics, some people think he/she is a drug-taking, cross-dressing transvestite with male customers. Morrison himself has said in interviews that Madame George was just “poetry and mythical musings channelled from my imagination” and the title character based on six or seven people. There are probably as many opinions about the song’s meaning as there are adoring fans who have been bewitched by it. The strangest thing about the song is that it’s titled Madame George but Morrison sings it throughout as Madame Joy. Later, he said: “The original title was ‘Madame Joy’ but the way I wrote it down was ‘Madame George’. Don’t ask me why I do this because I just don’t know. The song is just a stream of conscious thing, like Cyprus Avenue. It may have something to do with my great aunt whose name was Joy. Apparently she was clairvoyant…. that may have something to do with it. Aunt Joy lived in the area mentioned in connection with Cyprus Avenue. She lived on a street just off Fitzroy Street which is quite near to Cyprus Avenue.”
‘Astral Weeks’ is on myriad “Best Albums of all Time” lists and has its fans among music’s cognoscenti. Elvis Costello said it is “still the most adventurous record made in the rock medium, and there hasn’t been a record with that amount of daring made since“. Joan Armatrading credited it with opening her up to music. Bruce Springsteen said: “The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album. Of course there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again. But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be. There’d be no New York City Serenade if there hadn’t been Astral Weeks.”
Let’s listen. Turn your speakers up loud. Try to follow the lyrics, but shut your eyes when it comes to the incantations at the end, “the love that loves to love that loves to love that loves…..”
MADAME GEORGE, Van Morrison (1968)
Down on Cyprus Avenue With the childlike visions leaping into view The clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoe Ford and Fitzroy, Madame Joy
Marching with the soldier boy behind He’s much older now with hat on drinking wine And that smell of sweet perfume comes drifting through The cool night air like Shalimar
And outside they’re making all the stops The kids out in the street collecting bottle-tops Gone for cigarettes and matches in the shops Happy taken Madame Joy
That’s when you fall Whoa, whoa, whoah.. that’s when you fall Yeah, that’s when you fall
When you fall into a trance Sitting on a sofa playing games of chance With your folded arms and history books you glance Into the eyes of Madame Joy
Then you think you found the bag You’re getting weaker and your knees begin to sag In a corner playing dominoes in drag The one and only Madame Joy
And then from outside the frosty window, raps She jumps up and says, Lord, have mercy I think that it’s the cops And immediately drops everything she gots Down into the street below
And you know you gotta go On that train from Dublin up to Sandy Row Throwing pennies at the bridges down below And the rain, hail, sleet, and snow
Say goodbye to Madame Joy Dry your eye for Madame Joy Wonder why for Madame Joy, Whoa oh oh oh oh
And as you leave the room is filled with music Laughing, music, dancing, music all around the room And all the little boys come around Walking away from it all, so cold
And as you’re about to leave She jumps up and says, hey love, you forgot your gloves And the love that loves, the love that loves, the love that loves The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love The love that loves
Say goodbye to Madame Joy Dry your eye for Madame Joy Wonder why for Madame Joy Dry your eyes for Madame Joy Say goodbye
In the wind and the rain on the back street In the backstreet, in the back street Say goodbye to Madame Joy In the backstreet, in the back street, in the back street
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Say goodbye to Madame Joy And the love that loves, the love that loves, the love that loves The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love Say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye
Say goodbye goodbye, goodbye, goodbye to Madame Joy Dry your eye for Madame Joy Wonder why for Madame Joy The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love The love that loves to love, the love that loves to love Say goodbye, goodbye
Get on the train Get on the train, the train, the train, the train, the train, This is the train, this is the train This is the train Whoa, say goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye Get on the train, get on the train
Forty years after ‘Astral Weeks’ was released, Van Morrison launched a tour highlighting the album with two concerts in Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl on November 7th and 8th, 2008. The grand finale was Madame George. If he had once detested the strings that Merenstein dubbed over his song, he seemed to have resigned himself to the magic they added since I count a few cellos and at least one violin on the stage in the performance below.
Watching the video of Van Morrison performing the song in concert four decades later, the clear zenith of the remarkable song cycle that was ‘AstralWeeks’ with his jazz scat phrasing as he “gets on the train, the train, the train” before leaving the stage, I think two things. First, I wish I’d been there. Second, remarkably, on the very night he was performing ‘AstralWeeks’ in LA, I was at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, California listening to his daughter Shana Morrison, below centre, with Buffy Ford-Stewart, right, singing in a tribute concert to Buffy’s husband, the late California singer-songwriter John Stewart. I’ve written about my few years working with John’s music to create a stage treatment for it, but before writing this blog on Madame George, I hadn’t realized that Shana and her father were both singing in California on the same night, each paying tribute to remarkable music from the past.
What’s even more strange, after the show I listened to her singing Sweet Thing from ‘Astral Weeks’ a cappella in a post-performance jam session in a Mill Valley hotel room. She had recorded that song herself and has often sung with her father on tour.
Belfast
All of my ancestry is Northern Irish, as I wrote in my recent blog on Galway Bay; my maternal grandfather was born in the countryside near Belfast. If there is a central theme in ‘Astral Weeks’ it is the city of Belfast. Cyprus Avenue is a leafy street in the well-to-do section of the city – it was the other side of the tracks from the neighbourhood where Van Morrison grew up, as it would have been for my blacksmith grandfather out in the country 25 miles away near Banbridge. I had a look on Google Earth and today, as in 1968, it is a broad avenue lined with mature trees and the mansions are hedged for privacy.
But leaving Cyprus Avenue, we can revisit a few of the places that I saw and photographed during my trip to Ireland in the spring of 2008. There’s Belfast City Hall (1906) downtown.
We can take a walk through the ground floor of beautiful Queen’s University (1849).
But if you’re like me, you’ll need some flora with your music so let’s visit the Botanic Gardens with its statue of the Right Honourable William Thomson, Lord Kelvin at the entrance. He was Belfast-born but teaching at the University of Glasgow when he devised the absolute temperature scale which is named the “Kelvin scale” for him. He also worked on the laws of thermodynamics and on the installation of the first telegraph cables below the Atlantic Ocean.
I was photographing cherry blossoms that spring, which is pretty obvious.
The garden’s star attraction is the stunning Palm House. From Wikipedia, I learned that “the gardens’ most notable feature is the Palm House conservatory. The foundation stone was laid by the Marquess of Donegall in 1839 and work was completed in 1840. It is one of the earliest examples of a curvilinear cast iron glasshouses in the world. Designed by Charles Lanyon and built by Richard Turner, Belfast’s Palm House predates the glasshouses at Kew and the Irish National Botanic Gardens at Glasnevin, both of which Turner went on to build. The Palm House consists of two wings, the cool wing and the tropical wing. Lanyon altered his original plans to increase the height of the latter wing’s dome, allowing for much taller plants.”
We visited on May 3rd, and the tulips and wallflowers were at their peak.
Inside the glasshouses, there were fragrant spring bulbs and a profusion…
…. of hothouse plants like cineraria and salpiglossis.
Outside, there were families and little children and people walking dogs.
It was a delightful spring day to be in Belfast, the city where Van Morrison came of age. Where he grew up with his family in a 2-story brick terrace house on Hyndford Street in the city’s east end and first dipped his foot into music with his skiffle band, The Sputniks, at age 13, and his rhythm-and-blues band, Them, six years later. And from there, as we know, it wasn’t long before he was “on Cyprus Avenue, with those childlike visions leaping into view”.
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This is the eighth blog in #mysongscapes series of winter 2020 that combine music I love with my photography. If you enjoyed reading, have a look at the others beginning with:
It’s a big week for moon-lovers. Tuesday July 16th marked the 50th anniversary of the thrilling Florida blast-off of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on the three-stage Saturn V rocket, propelling the three astronauts, Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin into space. The astronauts sat in the Columbia command module. Attached to Columbia were a service module and the Lunar Module Eagle tucked away inside. The Lunar Module had two parts, a descent module with rockets for landing gently on the moon and an ascent module with its own rockets for returning to Columbia.
With the third stage of the Saturn rocket still attached, Apollo reached its orbital path just over 100 miles above earth. Then Saturn fired again, pointing Apollo on its route towards the moon in a move called the “translunar injection”. Finally, the Command and Service Modules detached from the protective compartment carrying the Lunar Module, flipped 180 degrees in space, and extracted the Lunar Module. At the same time, they jettisoned the third stage of Saturn V. Only 3-1/2 hours had passed since blast-off. Incidentally, you can follow these complex steps on a great video here.
For three days, Apollo 11 flew through space, reaching the moon’s orbit on July 19th, 1969. While pilot Michael Collins remained in Columbia, Armstrong and Aldrin transferred into Eagle and descended slowly to the lunar suface on July 20th. This part was broadcast live throughout the world. Does anyone of a certain age not remember where exactly they sat in front of a television beaming audio of Neil Armstrong and his “giant step for mankind”, then watching Buzz Aldrin clomping around in his bulky space suit? I was in my family’s living room in North Delta, a Vancouver B.C. suburb, along with various friends and neighbours. Even our parish priest was there. It was the most thrilling thing we’d ever seen. Armstrong and Aldrin would stay on the moon for more than 20 hours.
Forty years later, as I related in a recent blog, I would spend a few years working with the music of the late California singer-songwriter John Stewart (1939-2008) to develop a theatrical treatment of his songs. The former Kingston Trio member was a huge space fan, had become friends with John Glenn and Scott Carpenter during the Mercury 7 flights of the early 60s, and was watching the Apollo 11 landing with a song he’d composed all ready to be recorded. Later that week, ‘Armstrong’ was pressed as a single and sent out to radio stations everywhere. Though it met with disapproval from some station execs who wanted only to focus on the glory of the moon shot, John Stewart’s lyrics captured beautifully the universal awe that attended the landing. This is the video I made featuring his song.
I love photographing the moon. Winter, spring, summer, fall, eclipses …. I like nothing better than to point my lens skyward and feel connected to that silvery orb. So here are some of my images from the past eight years, with some fun facts about our only natural satellite. I’ll start with the only photo I made using our Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and an adaptor ring to attach my camera, on April 6, 2012. So close is the moon to earth – 384,402 km (238,856 mi) that I was unable to fit the whole moon into the photo. In terms of space-time, the moon is 1.3 light seconds from earth, compared with 8.3 light minutes from the sun.
Without a telescope, my little zoom lens camera manages to capture some of the moon’s topography, though not as clearly. This was a full moon on August 7, 2017. To photograph the moon, it’s a good idea to use a tripod, but my 50x fixed lens on my little old Canon SX50HS does manage pretty well.
How big is the moon compared to other planets in our solar system? Here is the list according to size of planets and moons in our Solar Galaxy, beginning with the biggest celestial body, our star, the sun. SUN-Jupiter-Saturn-Uranus-Neptune-EARTH-Venus-Mars-Ganymede-Titan-Mercury-Callisto-Io-MOON-Europa-Triton-Pluto. The sun’s radius is 696,342 km radius, earth is 6,371km, the moon is 1,731km. Put another way in another dimension for another country, the sun’s diameter is 864,400 miles, earth’s is 7,917.5 miles, the moon is 2,160 miles. So the sun is 400 times as big and as distant as the moon, and earth is 3.7 times as big as our moon.
Why do we see only one face of the moon… i.e. “the man in the moon” or the “near side of the moon” (unlike the Apollo astronauts, who landed on the dark side)? My son tried to explain this one night by slowly rotating a beer bottle so its label was always facing the same side of another rotating object on our deck. It may have been the wine, but I didn’t really understand then; having read about it, I can now say it’s the result of “synchronous rotation”. Moon orbit also gives earth its high and low tides. Have a look at this YouTube video, which is an excellent tutorial.
The moon was once part of earth. Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago (or 4.54 thousand million years ago, since billion means different things in different countries). According to the Giant Impact Hypothesis, the moon is believed to have formed slightly later, 4.51 billion years ago, originating as a debris ring when an astral body the size of Mars, named Theia, which was also orbiting the sun, hit either a glancing blow to young earth (proto-earth) or smashed into it head-on and ejected some of earth into space. Although some of the debris went into deep space, enough ejecta remained in the vicinity to begin accreting into a sphere that started its orbit of the mother planet, becoming earth’s only permanent natural satellite. Scientists have found Theia’s signature remains both in earth rocks and in samples of rock collected on the moon. The little bit of treed earth beneath the September 11, 2011 full “corn moon” below is a cliff of roughly 1.4 billion-year-old Precambrian Shield that forms the shore of Lake Muskoka, north of Toronto, where we have a cottage (and where I blog about my meadow gardens). In aboriginal tradition, each of the full moons was named for the season, September being the time to harvest corn.
In ancient times, the moon cast its light onto a world where darkness was the nightly norm. When I turn out the lights at our cottage and photograph the sky “by the light of the silvery moon”, it’s easy to see the natural advantage moonlight gave to those wanting to travel or work at night. I made the photo below this week, on the anniversary of Apollo 11’s blastoff. Sometimes, a partly cloudy sky illuminated by the full moon is even more interesting than a black velvet sky.
The night before, I was transfixed by the reflection of the nearly-full moon in the waves lapping at our shore below. I thought that dreamy vision would be a suitable accompaniment to the most famous song about the moon, Claude Debussy’s 1890 ‘Clair de Lune’, played by Francois-Joel Thiollier.
One moonlit night as I was turning out the lights to head to bed, I noticed our lamp silhouetted on the floor in our perfectly dark cottage. For some reason, this little image struck me and I photographed it. It made me reflect upon shadow and light, natural chiaroscuro, and our over-lit society.
But the light of the moon isn’t always an advantage. Full darkness is a way to hide troop movements (though D-Day apparently, needed a full moon for tidal reasons, not illumination) and criminal activity. When we were in Osoyoos, B.C. last September doing a little wine-tasting, we liked the vintages of Mooncurser Vineyards, below. “Osoyoos, the border town where our winery is located, has long been celebrated for the rich soil and brilliant sunshine. But during the gold rush, it was the dark of night that brought commotion to the area. Then, an unscrupulous procession of gold-smuggling miners returned stateside by the hundreds, if not by the thousands. All under the cover of night – trying to avoid customs agents at all cost. Often, the light of the moon would foil their plans, shedding light onto their surreptitious travels and activities. Need we say more about our name?”
But what about moonshine? Turns out that’s a derivative of “moonrakers”. And who were they? From Wikipedia: “This name refers to a folk story set in the time when smuggling was a significant industry in rural England, with Wiltshire lying on the smugglers’ secret routes between the south coast and customers in the centre of the country. The story goes that some local people had hidden contraband barrels of French brandy from customs officers in a village pond. While trying to retrieve it at night, they were caught by the revenue men, but explained themselves by pointing to the moon’s reflection and saying they were trying to rake in a round cheese. The revenue men, thinking they were simple yokels, laughed at them and went on their way. But, as the story goes, it was the moonrakers who had the last laugh.”
I have often walked by the light of the moon. In fact, on March 6, 2012, I made the photo below during a year when – out of a conviction that I need more physical activity than getting up from my computer afforded – I pledged to walk a mile per day and post on Facebook a photo made during my walk, accompanied by a little verse. I called the poems my “walking rhymes”. The rather boring photo below was made late at night on my street. Incidentally, in aboriginal tradition, that early March full moon would be a “sap moon”.
Another night, another moon I really should try sleeping soon… This sphere could be made of Ivory soap I wish I had my telescope!
What’s a “blue moon”? It’s reserved for those calendar months that see two moons, since the lunar month is 29.5 days. So blue moons will always be at the very end of the month. I love this song by Nanci Griffith, recorded many decades ago. Listen to ‘Once in a Very Blue Moon’.
This was my view from the cottage path on May 20, 2016. In aboriginal tradition, it’s called the planting moon or the milk moon. Here on Lake Muskoka, I call it the new oak leaf moon, the young pine cone moon.
In fact, I find it more interesting to give context to my moon photography, which means I usually frame it with the flora that grows here on our rocky granite shore. This was the moon shining down on the top of a towering white pine on August 1, 2015.
On October 4, 2017, I found pine needles to feature in front of the moon.
Sometimes, I draw back and photograph the moon shining on our entire little east-facing bay on Lake Muskoka. In fact, the lake is so big (120 km2 or 46 sq mi) that this is just a small part of the section of the area described on maps as East Bay. The scene below on June 22, 2013, featured the strawberry moon.
The moon is usually described as having eight phases: New moon, Waxing Crescent, First Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full moon, Waning Gibbous, Third Quarter, and finally Waning Crescent. Did you know that you can find the moon phase for any past date? The photo below was made from our screened porch at the end of a dinner that clearly featured some lovely wine. Knowing the date was September 23, 2017, I looked that up on this website and found it described as a Waxing Crescent. As for the other stuff on that site, I am a complete non-believer. Science is too interesting and magical in itself to confuse it with superstition!
Once every now and then, the moon puts on a show that draws us out of our houses to find a viewing spot. A lunar eclipse occurs when “when Earth’s shadow blocks the sun’s light, which otherwise reflects off the moon. There are three types — total, partial and penumbral — with the most dramatic being a total lunar eclipse, in which Earth’s shadow completely covers the moon”. (from space.com) Interestingly, in this week celebrating Apollo 11, the moon put on just such a show for many parts of the world, but sadly not North America. However, this winter I stood in front of my house shivering in temperatures that dipped to -20C to record the phases of the January 21st full lunar eclipse, below. That last red image is the colour of the moon in earth’s shadow, something the pre-science ancients called a “blood moon”. In the bible, it is written: “The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and notable day of the Lord.” – Acts 2:20.
Perhaps the most popular phenomenon to capture the public imagination in the past decade or so has been the “supermoon”. A so-called supermoon is a full moon that occurs when the moon appears to us at perigee, i.e. when the moon is closest to earth. Not all astronomers are fond of this supercalifragilistic hype. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of them, and has created a funny video to illustrate his point:
But there’s no question that when a full “supermoon” rises in the east over Lake Muskoka, it is a vision to behold. We went across the bay to my brother-in-law’s cottage on May 5, 2012, just so I could capture the full effect of the supermoon as it rose over the pines on the horizon, seemingly orange because of particles in the earth’s atmosphere.
It was worth it, wasn’t it?
On February 19 this winter, I marched down the street to Toronto’s Sherwood Park at the end of our block at dusk to make sure I didn’t miss the “supersnowmoon”. I sat alone shivering on a park bench, wondering where 73 degrees (longitude? latitude?) was as I peered at the trees lining the ravine.
Then, there it was, framing the leafless maples and elms.
I loved making this witchy moon photo.
Speaking of witches, let’s have a little etymology. Month, of course, comes from moon. But where does the word “lunatic” come from? According to Wikipedia: “The term ‘lunatic’ derives from the Latin word lunaticus, which originally referred mainly to epilepsy and madness, as diseases thought to be caused by the moon….. By the fourth and fifth centuries, astrologers were commonly using the term to refer to neurological and psychiatric diseases. Philosophers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder argued that the full moon induced insane individuals with bipolar disorder by providing light during nights which would otherwise have been dark, and affecting susceptible individuals through the well-known route of sleep deprivation. Until at least 1700, it was also a common belief that the moon influenced fevers, rheumatism, episodes of epilepsy and other diseases.” Today, though we joke about bad behavior under a full moon, “lunacy” has rightfully been consigned to the dustbin.
Back to supermoons. My most challenging supermoon photo shoot was on November 14, 2016, when I took the ferry from Toronto’s Harbourfront to Wards Island in Lake Ontario. I thought how wonderful it would be to see the moon rise above the city skyline. I parked myself on the rocky shore with a young Irish girl and together we waited patiently.
Alas, the sky darkened and the moon did not show. Could we have gotten something wrong? The Irish girl took her leave and, shivering in the cold, I waited.
My hands and feet finally felt numb, and I gathered my things together. On the way back to the ferry, I glanced up through the trees and there it was, my moon. We had been looking in the wrong direction. As I pointed my lens up through the lacy foliage, I felt relieved and strangely elated. The moon seemed to be saying, “See, I’ve been up here all the time. You don’t need a super-duper supermoon behind tall skyscrapers; you just need the comfort of me lighting the sky, as I have for almost as long as earth has been around.”
Happy 50th anniversary, Apollo 11. You brought the moon closer to us moonstruck folks on earth.
What follows is an adaptation and extension of an essay I wrote for my old website in February 2008, when I learned about California singer-songwriter John Stewart’s death. You’ll find that below in Chapter 1. The essay launched a personal journey that saw me working with John’s music to create a narrative treatment that would potentially bring his music to the stage. In the course of that journey and by some measure of serendipity, I shared the project’s theatrical potential with an Australian stage producer who encouraged me in the project. Later, we both spent time in Marin County, California with John’s widow Buffy Ford Stewart. That part is in Chapter 2. It is my fervent wish that some day there will be a Chapter 3.
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Chapter 1 – JOHN STEWART: POET WITH A GUITAR (adapted from an essay published in February 2008)
Singer-songwriter John Stewart died in San Diego on January 8, 2008 with his family at his side, by all accounts peacefully and without pain. He was 68 years old.
John Stewart 1939-2008 – Photo Courtesy Howard Bruensteiner
I like to think that if America’s poet laureate of the modern folk song had been given a chance to sum up his five-decade career, he might have struck a humble note, perhaps with the words from Mother Country, one of his best-loved songs:
“I was just another person, doing the best I could.” Then I imagine him smiling and adding: “But I did it pretty up and walking good!”
He called himself the “lonesome picker” and he was all of that: fiercely independent, solitary in his art and mildly disdainful of the corporate music machine. (He penned a song about Nashville titled Never Going Back – recorded in Nashville.) Working hard to pay the bills and keep his musicians around him, he toured small venues in the U.S. and Europe where an adoring cult of fans called the Bloodliners (who took their moniker from his stunning 1969 album California Bloodlines) would gather and cheer him on, then compare notes in chat rooms on the internet later. Those in the know shook their heads in wonderment that he wasn’t more famous, that he hadn’t really made it big after his early success. But in a way that solitary path was predestined, for he often seemed to embody the lyrics in his own songs, like ‘Ghost Inside of Me’, which Nanci Griffith covered on her album Clock Without Hands:
Every prayer I could be praying, every promise I’m betraying, Every price that I am paying, is like a ghost inside of me. Every road I could be taking, every dream I am forsaking, Every heart that’s out there breaking, is like a ghost inside of me.
For those of us who love folk music, John Stewart was much more than a lonesome guitar picker; he was a highway troubadour, a poet-of-the-prairie, a rider-of-the-rails and a painter-in-song of the vast American landscape. Artist Jamie Wyeth once said: “John Stewart has achieved in song what I attempt in paint.” In fact, it was while sitting in his Mill Valley home studio for weeks in the mid-60s, reading John Updike and staring at paintings by Jamie and Andrew Wyeth – including Jamie’s iconic Draft Age with its leather-bound lad…..
Draft Age by Jamie Wyeth (1965) Used with permission of the artist
….that John was inspired to pen the lyrics for one of the first LPs this music-lover ever owned, Signals Through the Glass. Here is my video adaptation of John’s song Draft Age.
“They were song movies,” he said of his first album, noting that the title came from a sentence in a John Updike novel: “We are all so curiously alone, but it’s important to keep making signals through the glass.” Released in 1968, one year after ending a six-year stint with the famous Kingston Trio, who had hired John fresh out of school to replace Dave Guard, compose songs for the group and play bango and guitar,
Signals Through the Glass featured John and his young singing partner, Buffy Ford, standing in a golden field behind the sun-refracting lens of John’s friend and musican, iconic rock photographer Henry Diltz. I was fascinated by a shot on the album of a smoldering, dark-haired Stewart standing behind Buffy with her long, thick bangs, straight blonde hair and kohl-lined eyes. They seemed the essence of the post-Seeger folk era, with some California hippie thrown in.
Rather than a simple acoustic treatment, John and Buffy’s debut folk album was lavishly orchestrated. “I was such an Aaron Copland fan,” said John on the liner notes, “that I wanted these songs to be set in a Copland-like symphony.” Listening to the album again today, I marvel at the lush, operatic force of the lyrics, as if all the folk songs he’d written for the Trio were just overtures for this symphonic celebration of Americana.
It was 1968, the year after the “summer of love”, the year before Woodstock and a tumultuous season of assassinations, of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The Vietnam war was raging and protestors were marching. I was living in Vancouver, just turned 21 and doing what young women did in 1968…. having fun, working at my first job, enjoying music (especially folk music) and celebrating flower power.
Signals Through the Glass became a favorite of mine, along with Phil Ochs’s Pleasures of the Harbor, Joni Mitchell’s Songs to a Seagull and James Taylor’s self-titled 1968 debut. I played the album over and over that year, lowering the needle repeatedly on my favourites: Santa Barbara, featuring Buffy’s bell-clear voice; Cody, the wild-haired “forgotten son of some old yesterday”; Holly on my Mind (“those lyrics just came from the sound of my 12-string guitar” said John); and July You’re a Woman, an anthem to youthful lust with a percussive, locomotive beat, a soaring trumpet in the background and John’s distinctive, vibrato-edged baritone:
I can’t hold it on the road When you’re sitting right beside me And I’m drunk out of my mind Merely from the fact that you are here. And I have not been known As the Saint of San Joaquin And I’d just as soon right now Pull on over to the side of the road And show you what I mean.
After that, I lost track of Buffy Ford and John Stewart for almost 40 years. It wasn’t until I heard on the news that day in January 2008 that he had died after an evening out with Kingston Trio member Nick Reynolds and their respective wives that I began my own archaeological dig through the buried history of one of the unsung geniuses of American music. In doing so, I discovered that I’d missed a lot.
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John Stewart was born in San Diego in 1939. His Kentucky-born father was a horse trainer and the family lived in racetrack towns like Pomona and Pasadena. Summers, he worked for his dad at the track, making a dollar an hour cleaning the tack and “walking the hots” (cooling down horses that have finished training). “That’s when I first started writing songs,” recalled John in an National Public Radio interview, “because there’s nothing more boring than walking the hots.” In a July 1979 interview with Rich Wiseman, he explained how the horse rhythm influenced his music.
“My father being a horse trainer, I grew up on the weekends and every summer on the racetrack, cleaning out horse stalls. As he’d work the horses, I’d go out to the infield and lie down with my ear on the ground next to the rail. I’d hear those horses coming around the clubhouse turn and then down the backstretch. The sound would get louder and louder. The rhythm was like this…(Stewart slaps his thighs to simulate beating of hooves).”
With Hank Williams and Tex Ritter playing on the tack room radio, it’s not surprising that horses became a major theme in John’s lyrics in songs like Mother Country with E.A. Stuart riding the old Campaigner, Sweetheart on Parade, stone-blind for the very last time. Listen to the horse trotting cadence of this 1969 song, which made a surprising and spectacular resurrection — literally, from a NASA vault of audio tape from the Apollo 11 moon mission — in 2019! (See my epilogue at the end).
Then there was Let the Big Horse Run from Phoenix Concerts, about Triple-Crown-winner Secretariat. And Back in Pomona from 1970’s Willard, in which John recalls the Blacksmith a-working in the blacksmith shop/And his anvil clanking and his coals were hot. All the Brave Horses and Wild Horse Road from Lonesome Picker Rides Again (1971) were elegies for John’s friend Robert F. Kennedy. But my favorite horse song is the rhythmic Golden Gate Fields from John’s 2006 album The Day the River Sang. In a voice as seasoned and craggy as well-aged scotch — reflecting his love of hanging out at the track photographing the horses — John sings about jockeys and junkies and two kinds of ‘horse’, each with the potential for grave danger:
And he’s looking for horse To get through the day That’s why he’s the shooter And he’s willing to pay The price of the monkey Who takes him away He’s a-betting on horses That don’t ever pay
Although he began his song-writing career at the age of 10 with a song called Shrunken Head Boogie, it was while he was at Pomona Catholic High School that he formed a garage band called Johnny Stewart and the Furies, covering Elvis and Buddy Holly tunes.
At 19, encouraged by the manager of The Kingston Trio for whom he’d already written two songs, he formed a male folk-singing group called The Cumberland Three. In 1961, when Dave Guard decided to leave the Trio, John was hired as his replacement and spent 6 years with The Kingston Trio, writing many of their best known songs. Here they are on the Andy Williams Show in 1966.
After leaving the trio in 1967 to go out on his own, he began singing with Buffy Ford, who’d been part of the singing group The Young Americans and was being pursued by The Jefferson Airplane. Instead, she joined John, leaving the Airplane to sign Grace Slick. John and Buffy married in 1975 and had a son, Luke, a brother to John’s three children from his first marriage, Mikael, Amy and Jeremy.
So it’s not surprising that images of children skip through some of John’s lyrics. There’s little Ludi and her black widow spiders and woodpecker mama from Signals. Young Ernesto Juarez – “remember my name!” – pops up in the bouncing road song Omaha Rainbow from California Bloodlines. But the quintessential song about childhood – possibly the best song ever written about childhood – is Pirates of Stone County Road, also on Bloodlines and other albums. It’s about little Henry on “a summer afternoon somewhere in Kansas, or Illinois or Oklahoma” and a make-believe pirate ship cresting the rolling waves of John’s beautiful lyrics:
Where we’d stand on the bow of our own man-of-war, No longer the back porch any more. And we’d sail, pulling for China, The pirates of Stone County Road, All weathered and blown. And we’d sail, ever in glory, ‘Till hungry and tired The pirates of Stone County Road Were turning for home
There are train tracks winding through his songs too, beginning with the almost operatic, history-infused Lincoln’s Train on Signals Through the Glass, about the train that carried Abraham Lincoln’s body from Washington D.C. to Springfield, Illinois. I created the video below to give the song a home.
On The Day the River Sang, there are two train tunes. Naked Angel on a Star-Crossed Train is about a songwriter’s inspiration while Midnight Train is a chugging locomotive of a song about trains carrying soldiers to and from battle, sometimes in coffins. In this one, John makes a pungent political statement: “El Presidente doesn’t care/Presidente has two daughters/You will never find them there.” Rosanne Cash, who considered John not just a close friend of twenty years but a wise mentor, had a hit with John’s Runaway Train.
Clack Clack from Willard (1970) tells of another funeral train, this time the slow-moving June 8, 1968 train carrying the body of assassinated presidential hopeful, Robert Kennedy, from New York to Washington D.C. As Robin Denselow wrote:
“John Stewart had first met Robert Kennedy in 1962 when he was Attorney General, while JFK was President. The Kingston Trio, then very major stars, were given a tour of the FBI Building in Washington, and were introduced to Kennedy at the end of it. Stewart and Kennedy got on remarkably well, the singer sent the politician a stack of albums, and the two began to see each other socially.”
“Stewart and Bobby Kennedy kept in touch, even after Stewart left the Trio in 1967 to concentrate on a solo career. He played and campaigned for Kennedy when he ran for the Senate, and then in 1968 the Senator rang with an even more serious request. He was running for the presidency, on an anti-war ticket, and he wanted Stewart to help, on what Stewart would later sing about as ‘The Last Campaign’.”
“When it came to actual campaigning, Kennedy’s main support came from John Stewart, aided by Buffy Ford. (See below). They travelled everywhere with him on the campaign plane, and acted as his opening act, singing, and keeping the attention of the crowd until they could break into the campaign song and get the maximum reaction for the television cameras as the candidate appeared.”
Later, John released an album called The Last Campaign (1985), a suite of songs about Bobby Kennedy, backed up by Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac. The songs in the video below were recorded in a live concert in Phoenix.
It was Bobby’s song That I wrote without trying, Every word, every word. Now that Bobby’s gone, This is my way of crying, When I heard, when I heard…
Metaphoric rivers also run through John’s lyrics in songs like Mucky Truckee River from Signals and Sister Mercy and The Day the River Sang from that 2006 album. A moody river features in Strange Rivers from Punch the Big Guy (1987), covered by Joan Baez a few years later……
The wind gusts through his songs too. As John said to an interviewer who asked about his metaphorical use of the elements: “The wind calls the sailor, it waves the flag, it brings the dust, it clears the storms, it is the messenger of the universe. There are cosmic winds, the north winds, and monsoons and southern wind.” Chilly Winds was a song John co-wrote with John Phillips of the Mamas & Papas in a rowboat in Sausalito Bay while Scott McKenzie (“If You’re Going to San Francisco, Be Sure To Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair”) handled the oars. John eventually recorded it with the Kingston Trio and it forms the name of the website containing his musical lyrics. The 1977 album Fire in the Wind contained not just the wind-blown title track but Seven Times the Wind, On You Like the Wind, Promise the Wind and Fire in the Wind. The lovely song Wind on the River (with Phil Everly harmonizing) debuted on Dream Babies Go to Hollywood (1980).
Prairies and grasslands seemed to fascinate John as well, in songs like Hearts of the Highlands (from The Secret Tapes); Wheatfield Lady from The Complete Phoenix Concerts(1974); and Dark Prairie and Nebraska Widow from Signals Through the Glass. Then there wasYou Can’t Go Back to Kansas from The Last Campaign, performed below live at a 1981 Tommy Smothers-hosted Kingston Trio & Friends Reunion concert:
With more than 400 original songs and some 60 albums to his credit over four decades, many musicians worked with John before making it on their own. James Taylor played guitar and Carole King played piano and sang backup on John’s 1970 album Willard. That album’s title song features an interesting back story that came to light as I was doing research for this essay. It turns out that Willard was a real person, Willard Snowden, an alcoholic, African-American handyman from the Little Africa community in Chadds Ford, PA. He worked for painter Andrew Wyeth in the Brandywine Valley and posed for many of the artist’s most affecting portraits.
John came to know Willard when he and Buffy spent time with Jamie Wyeth in the late 1960s. For me, this song reveals not just John’s musical talent, but his great depth of compassion. The compilation below contains the song, with drummer Russ Kunkel playing his knees and Chris Darrow playing fiddle.
Other artists covering John’s songs include Pat Boone, Burton Cummings, Ronnie Hawkins, Frankie Laine, Anne Murray, Lobo, Lovin’ Spoonful, Barry McGuire, Kate Wolf and Glen Yarbrough, among many others. As a young woman, I saw Harry Belafonte do a lyrical take in concert on John’s Missouri Birds from California Bloodlines (1969).
One of John’s close friends and collaborators was Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac, who wrote the song Johnny Stew for his pal after John lost his contract with RSO in 1980; John responded by penning Liddy Buck. Ironically, Gold the one song that actually went to Top-5 from John’s best-selling 1979 Bombs Away Dream Babies, on which Stevie Nicks sings backup, is my least favorite of all John’s outings, perhaps because the rock-and-roll style just doesn’t seem to suit the man I think of as a king of California folk. But it is the song many younger John Stewart fans know best.
For many weeks in the late winter and spring of 2008, John Stewart CDs dropped through my mail slot. However, I think one of the finest overall offerings is the last one, The Day the River Sang, recorded in 2006 when John was officially a senior citizen and, as I wrote above, exhibited a wonderfully rich old man’s voice. Appropriately, there’s an elegiac quality to many of the songs on this CD. New Orleans, co-written by Buffy, has wisps of Dixieland jazz and Delta blues backing bittersweet lyrics about not getting to see the Louisiana city before Katrina had levelled it. Broken Roses sees John riding “the tired road” of “weathered dreams” in a voice that brings to mind John’s friend Tom Waits. But perhaps because I spend my professional life in gardens and natural places, writing about them and photographing them, I have a special feeling towards the achingly beautiful Jasmine. You can almost smell the fragrance of the night-blooming jasmine and roses wafting through the lyrics, as John’s rugged voice takes him on a final walk through those California canyons. I chose that song as the soundtrack to a video homage of John’s musical career from 1960 to 2008.
In a reply to a fan on a Fleetwood Mac internet Q&A forum, John once said: “I tend to write about the same subjects, the resilience of the human spirit, the power of hope and the great American myths and realities.”
So thank you, John Stewart, Johnny Flamingo, old lonesome picker, for keeping tabs on the human spirit all these years, for infusing your songs with hope, and for immortalizing all those American myths and myth-makers, large and small, famous and humble. And I’m so happy that I became reacquainted with you and Buffy – your Angel Rain – once again.
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Chapter 2 – DAYDREAM BELIEVER: THE JOHN STEWART SONGBOOK
So that was the first chapter. The second chapter actually began the year before my John Stewart essay, on a beautiful spring evening in New York City. It was May 30, 2007 and I was in the city to do some photography. At the end of one long day in the Bronx, I decided to relax with dinner at my midtown Manhattan hotel followed by a Broadway show. A few hours later, I was in my theatre seat reading the program for The Year of Magical Thinking, Vanessa Redgrave’s one-woman play based on Joan Didion’s devastating memoir about the death of her husband.
A gentleman sat down beside me. We read our programs in silence for a few minutes, then he asked where I was from. When I said “Toronto” he smiled and said he’d be in Toronto himself in just a few weeks presenting a show at our symphony hall. He, introduced himself: Andrew McKinnon, a theatre producer from Sydney, Australia and he was in New York having meetings and looking at theatres for his productions. After the show, we walked together for a few blocks towards our hotels. I gave him my card and told him to call in mid-June when he came to Toronto. He said he’d arrange to have complimentary tickets to the show and hoped we could join him. We said goodnight and went our separate ways. One week later, I received an email from Andrew arranging for the tickets for the June 16th performance. Because I was out of town, our son went in our place and enjoyed the show with Andrew, who introduced him to the cast and enjoyed a drink with him later. Andrew returned to Sydney and we kept in touch occasionally by email, comparing notes from time to time on plays seen and books read.
Fast forward eight months to February 2008. By then, I’d purchased more than three dozen Kingston Trio and John Stewart CDs, including some of the more obscure ones from John’s business manager Paul RyBolt.
I’d written my John Stewart tribute essay (Chapter One, above) and put it online to many favourable comments from his legion of fans. Stepping into this world was a departure from my day-to-day work, where I’d photographed and written about gardens and nature for two decades by then, with newspaper columns and a flourishing freelance career. But I was always a music-lover, and the 1960s folk era was my time. I was a theatre lover too, and as I listened over and over to the songs I’d acquired, I began to imagine what a superb theatrical experience John’s music would make.
There was so much history wrapped up in his life and work, beginning with the Kingston Trio days. John was intensely aware of the political battles for civil rights being fought in the U.S. but had limited success convincing his partners. As Robin Denselow wrote in his 1990 book, When the Music’s Over, The Story of Political Pop:
“The Trio started off the sixties folk boom, and then got left behind, largely because Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane and Dave Guard all saw themselves as entertainers who shouldn’t mix politics with music. John Stewart, who took over from Guard in 1961, felt differently, but knew he couldn’t change their attitudes ‘because the Trio trying to be political would have been ludicrous. It would have killed the group. Just like when Culture Club came out in America with that record ‘The War Song’, and it just killed them dead, because it didn’t fit.’”
But John did usher the Trio into more political territory with 1962’s New Frontier. The title was from John F. Kennedy’s 1960 acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention; as a slogan, this “frontier of the 1960s” embodied his progressive aspirations for everything from social welfare to civil rights to space exploration. And he wrote what is arguably the most political song the Trio sang, Road to Freedom:
John’s own consciousness was awakened in March 1965, when he marched for three days behind Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Selma to Montgomery March, along with singer and civil rights activist Harry Belafonte and a large cast of singers, actors and entertainers. John told Robin Denselow, he joined…..
” ‘because if I was to have any credibility at all, I couldn’t just sit in Mill Valley, California, writing songs. You had to get into the fire, and I’m really glad I did, though it was very frightening. I stayed in this bombed-out church in Selma – the windows had been dynamited out, and we had to outrun the rednecks with baseball bats. It was like being in a war zone in your own country.’ “
At the conclusion of the march, as Denselow wrote, “Stewart left Montgomery lying on the floor of a car along with Yarrow and Belafonte, so they wouldn’t be seen by the Klansmen. They escaped unharmed, as did (Pete) Seeger, who had a nervous wait at Montgomery airport, where there was no police protection.”
Then there was his political campaign work with Bobby Kennedy; his long relationship with the NASA Mercury astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter; his love for Buffy and their 40-year long duet together; his children; and most of all, his celebration of the great American dream, big and small, in hundreds of affecting songs.
I sent the link to my essay to Andrew McKinnon on March 4th. The next day, he responded. He said he remembered Daydream Believer and Armstrong from his youth, and he looked forward to hearing John’s songs, especially the ones about Bobby Kennedy. I wrote back, confessing my hidden agenda. “I’m mulling over whether it would be feasible to write some sort of adaptation of his songs for the stage.” I went on: “I know that there are precious few musicals that generate one or two hummable songs, never mind thirty. I can’t tell you how often I’ve walked out of a musical and wondered what happened to the good music. I think I could put together (easily) a list of his songs that would be dynamite stage material. The trick would be in linking them somehow and I’m working on various themes from his lyrics that would become character-like: war, love, landscape, children, rivers, etc. Call it a folk opera.”
Then I started writing, working John’s songs into a loose theatrical framework that encompassed much of his 50-year career. I brought four of his characters to life and let them be the musicians who sang and strummed their way through his songbook. I introduced a muse and an angel (another of his songwriting themes) who related the history of the country to John’s songs. I called it Daydream Believer: The John Stewart Songbook, which had been his most famous and financially rewarding song. In 1967 just before the Kingston Trio disbanded, John wrote a trilogy of reflective songs about life in suburbia. When his friend and former Modern Folk Quartet member Chip Douglas came to John looking for fresh material for the pop singing group The Monkees, Jon chose one of those songs and it became a #1 hit for the group, staying on the charts for weeks. In the ensuing half-century, it’s also been recorded by Anne Murray, Pat Boone, the Four Tops, Shonen Knife and Susan Boyle. U2 has sung it on tour and it’s on every karaoke playlist. I put the script and two CDs in a binder and sent two copies to Australia. Then I left for Europe.
Six days later, as I was on holiday in Ireland, Andrew replied that he thought it had great potential, given the combination of John’s music and the historical events in which he took part. Then he said it was imperative that I contact Buffy, since her support for a musical would be critical. In May, I sent the script to California. Two days later, Buffy called me. A wave of relief washed over me as she said she had the script, but hadn’t read it yet. “I just wanted to hear your voice“. She was still in deep mourning, and promised to read it when she was ready.
Earlier that month, there had been a memorial for John at Pepperdine University in Malibu. Performers included John’s friends Timothy B. Schmit of The Eagles, Lindsey Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac, Davy Jones of The Monkees, the We Five and drummer Russ Kunkel. Rosanne Cash and the Mercury Astronauts John Glenn and Scott Carpenter spoke by video hookup. Trio member Nick Reynolds and Bobby Kennedy’s son Max spoke and there were performances by The We Five, Shana Morrison, Bill Mumy, Henry Diltz, Chip Douglas and John’s own band members, Dave Batti, Chuck , Dave Crossland, Bob Hawkins and John Hoke. And of course John’s family was there: Buffy, his children Jeremy, Amy, Mikael and Luke, and his grandchildren.
Photo courtesy of Howard Bruensteiner
In July, I heard from Buffy. She had received a letter from Andrew McKinnon who was promoting the idea of a play, and was ready to read the script. She said, “The first time I called you I thought I was ready to read it and just wanted to hear the voice of the person who had written a musical on my husband in only six weeks when I could still not get out of my pajamas.” A few weeks later, she invited us to attend a tribute show to John to be held that autumn in Mill Valley, California, then spend a few days at her home going through the script. We both agreed.
So it was that I arrived in San Francisco to meet Andrew on November 4, 2008, that historic day when Barack Obama was elected president. The atmosphere in the city was electric, and I recall falling asleep in my hotel room to the sound of groups of young people walking on the sidewalk below chanting O-BA-MA, O-BA-MA! For the next few days Andrew saw to his own business and in between we discussed the project as we played tourist on the cable cars and Fisherman’s Wharf and Muir Woods.
Then it was time for the tribute concert at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley. It was a magical evening, a love-in for John. And the songs I’d listened to dozens and dozens of times as I worked them into the play came alive on the stage, through the music of Buffy, John’s band and his friends. Chuck McDermott had been at John’s side for more than 25 years; he and Buffy joined forces on Dreamers on the Rise.
“Once, we were dreamers on the rise, We were the sun, where the sun never shines. And we were gold, where the night bird never flies. A long time ago we were dreamers on the rise.”
Dave Crossland and Buffy sang the stirring Cody, from Signals Through the Glass.
“Cody sang to me A song about the great Montana sky Cody sang to me And I could see Montana in his eyes And I could see Montana in his eyes.”
The John Stewart Band sang Never Going Back
“Every time I see that Greyhound bus go rolling down the line Makes me wish I’d talked much more to you when we had all that time Still, it’s only wishing and I know it’s nothing more So I’m never going back, never going back Never going back to Nashville anymore.”
Shana Morrison did a beautiful rendition of Runaway Train.
“I’m worried about you, and I’m worried about me The curves around midnight aren’t easy to see The flashing red warning, unseen in the rain This thing has turned into a runaway train.”
Buffy picked up her banjo and sang her own version of California Bloodlines
“Oh, there’s California Bloodlines in my heart And a California cowboy in my song Oh, there’s California Bloodlines in my heart And a California heartbeat in my soul.”
“Here we go round again Singin’ a song about Molly Dee Far away I know not where She’s the girl who waits for me”
Among the many other songs performed that night, there ws a tribute to Kingston Trio member and John’s dear friend Nick Reynolds, who had passed away a month earlier. The ensemble sang his favourite Trio song, Pete Seeger’s Hobo’s Lullabye.
“Go to sleep you weary hobo Let the towns drift slowly by Can’t you hear the steel rail humming That’s a hobo’s lullaby.”
For the finale, the theatre rocked with John’s Gold.
“When the lights go down in the California town People are in for the evening I jump into my car and I throw in my guitar My heart’s beating time with my breathing Driving over Kanan, singing to my soul There’s people out there turning music into gold”
The evening ended with a hotel room singalong, as John’s band members and friends strummed their guitars and sang their own John Stewart favourites and Shana Morrison gave us acappella versions of two of her father’s songs.
Two days later, Andrew and I were with Buffy reading through the script, listening to the music, making notes, pencilling in changes, watched over by one of John’s many paintings. Though Andrew came to feel his production talents were best suited for a different genre, he was so helpful in this process and continues to encourage the project.
The next afternoon, Buffy drove us to Bolinas on the coast. Though I didn’t include it in the play, Bolinas (1971) is favourite song for me, with beautiful harmonies and lyrics of California and those train tracks again.
Having listened to the song so many times in my office at home, it was lovely to be there walking at the ocean’s edge. Buffy and I shared a little moment of grace, knowing that it was John’s music that had brought us together.
Andrew flew back to Sydney and I returned to Toronto and started the hard work of marketing the play; sending the script and music to producers, often introducing John to them for the first time. It remains an ongoing project and a true labour of love. More than anything, it has been a privilege to spend these years immersed in John Stewart’s words and music.
Epilogue:
If you’ve seen the stunning 2019 documentary Apollo 11, you will have had the pleasure of listening to John’s 1969 song Mother Country as the astronauts in the command module return to earth. How did it happen?
“(Producer Thomas) Petersen was listening to this on-board audio when something caught his attention: while the three men were inspecting the condition of the lunar module, which Armstrong and Aldrin would be flying the next day, Aldrin casually said, “Let’s get some music.” And then Petersen picked up some faint baritone singing in the background. He initially took this to be a Johnny Cash song, but, after listening for more clues, he determined that what he was hearing was “Mother Country,” by the singer-songwriter John Stewart, off of Stewart’s then-latest album, California Bloodlines…..
“…..“Mother Country,” a bittersweet, not un-Cash-esque ballad about American heroism and the elastic meaning of the phrase “the good old days,” proved a perfect allegorical fit for the film. Miller and Petersen sought permission from Stewart’s widow, Buffy Ford Stewart, to use the song in Apollo 11, and she was happy to oblige; she and her late husband, it transpired, had been good friends in the 60s with some of the Mercury astronauts.”
For the young Kingston Trio member (John is second from right) who wrote These Seven, about the Mercury astronauts way back in 1962……
…… and for the 29-year old John Stewart who made sure Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin was taking his latest album California Bloodlines to the moon, it is a wonderful and appropriate achievement. If you have the chance, be sure to see the documentary. And on July 20, 2019, of c d, when we “saw a man named Armstrong walk upon the moon“. I’ll give John Stewart the last word.
At long last, I’m finishing up my journal of our spectacular (and I don’t use that word lightly) September trip to the American West. As you might recall, in my first blog we visited Grand Teton National Park, then I wrote about our magical journey through Yellowstone National Park with its otherworldly geysers and fumaroles.
As we exit Yellowstone’s East Gate through Sylvan Pass in the Absaroka mountain range, we soon find ourselves following the Shoshone River through the Shoshone National Forest, both named for the indigenous Shoshone people who inhabited the region. At the river’s edge are willows and September-blooming rigid goldenrod (Oligoneuron rigida). This area between Yellowstone and Cody (our destination for the day and overnight) is called the Wapiti Valley, wapiti being the Shawnee word for elk.
Our first stop out of Yellowstone (which has no private commercial businesses) is Pahaska Tepee, a mountain resort built in 1904 by Buffalo Bill Cody as a hunting lodge. The resort has the obligatory gift shop…
….. horses ready to be saddled for trail-riding through the forest……
…. and, most interesting to us, a little museum…..
…displaying artifacts of Buffalo Bill’s time there….
…. including something that’s still important for forest-firefighters in the Yellowstone ecosystem, the vintage version of a modern Fedco smokechaser, a backpack water pump.
Driving along the Shoshone River, I’m reminded of an historic story of mistaken identity. When John Colter (mentioned in blog on the Tetons) became the first white man to reach Yellowstone in 1807-08, he described a sulphurous-smelling river with frightening geothermal features, a place that skeptics nicknamed Colter’s Hell. The assumption was that this river was in geothermal-rich Yellowstone, but it was later deduced that the river Colter described was, in fact, the Shoshone as it traverses deep canyons near Cody, Wyoming. For the record, this part of the Shoshone just smelled to me like a lovely autumn day!
The rock formations – pinnacles or hoodoos – in the Wapiti Valley are spectacular and renowned, the product of erosion of lower rock layers contrasted with the relative stability of towers remaining when hard cap rocks protect softer sediment below. This one looks for all the world like a Shoshone chief.
The brownish rock of the cliff across the highway is volcanic breccia.
Six miles west of Cody, Wyoming, we pass by the Buffalo Bill Reservoir. You can see how the landscape here has changed from rugged mountain valley to rolling hills and sagebrush. Cody actually sits at the edge of the Bighorn basin in the centre of four mountain ranges: the Absarokas, Big Horn, Owl Creek and Bridger Mountains.
Soon we pull up to the main attraction in Cody: the Buffalo Bill Center of the West. The name is a little deceiving, because this is five museums in one: Buffalo Bill Museum, Plains Indians Museum, Whitney Western Art Museum, Draper Natural History Museum, and the Cody Firearms Museum.
Pretty much everything in the town of Cody – and certainly in the Buffalo Bill Museum in the eponymous Center of the West – focuses on the legacy and legend of William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), aka Buffalo Bill Cody. (As a Torontonian I was interested to learn while researching this that when Iowa-born Cody was a youngster, he lived for 7 years in what is now Mississauga, Ontario, the birthplace of his father, Isaac, and was christened in the small chapel that the Cody family built in 1839. The Dixie Union Chapel still stands at the corner of Cawthra and Dundas.) After moving his family to the Kansas territory in 1853, Isaac Cody was stabbed by a pro-slavery sympathizer at a political meeting. He died three years later and William, aged 11, began working to support his sisters and mother. He drove horses and wagons (but the vaunted Pony Express stories seem to have been exaggerated by him to enhance his showman’s reputation later). When the Civil War broke out in 1861 young William was attracted to the Kansas Redlegs, an anti-slavery militia, joining it in 1862 to avenge his father’s death. He later joined the regular Union Army and served until the war’s end in 1865, fighting in 16 battles. Married and back home in Kansas, he joined a company providing meals to the workers building the Kansas Pacific Railroad. With his natural riding ability and his army-acquired skill as a crack shot, Cody’s job was to provide the meat, i.e. buffalo steak. He went back to work for the Army in 1868, acting as a civilian scout in the Indian Wars. His skill at hunting bison for the railroad and also the army became legendary, earning him his nickname “Buffalo Bill”. It’s estimated he killed 4282 bison in the years 1867-68. He burnished his reputation through his friendship with another “Bill” folk hero of the old West, Wild Bill Hickok.
By the early 70s when he was in his late 20s, Cody had already begun making appearances in newspapers and adventure novels, and he, Hickok and two friends started producing and starring in their own stage plays, the Wild West Shows. But he was still riding as a scout for the Fifth Cavalry in the Great Sioux War, and in July 1876 in northwestern Nebraska, he shot a young Cheyenne warrior named Yellow Hair and brandished his headdress and part of his scalp as a grisly atonement for Custer’s defeat and death at Little Bighorn just weeks earlier. It is memorialized in this 1928 painting ‘First Scalp for Custer’ by Cody’s friend Robert Lindneux.
In 1883, he mounted the first circus-like production, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, in La Platte, Nebraska.
Ironically, in June, 1885, he even signed up Sitting Bull for an initial bonus of $125 and a wage of $50 per week. Despite Cody’s post-Indian Wars attempt to integrate his attraction using the very chief whose leadership helped make it possible to defeat General Custer in the Battle of Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull himself was killed 5 years later during his arrest by Indian Agency police.
Another feature of the museum is the Deadwood stagecoach, which had a stormy history in its career of 11 years, being repeatedly attacked for the gold and currency it carried.
One of the coaches was incorporated into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West tour, and when the show visited England for Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1887. “The highlight of the show came when several monarchs, including the Prince of Wales and the kings of Denmark, Greece, Belgium, and Saxony, hopped aboard the Deadwood Stage with Buffalo Bill in the driver’s seat and rode around the arena while the assembled Indians engaged in a mock attack.” (Buffalo Bill in Bologna, 1869-1922, Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes)
In 1893, he changed the name to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World, featuring a parade, cowboys, Indians, Turks, gauchos, African-Americans and others. He also launched the career of sharpshooter Annie Oakley (below) and her husband Frank Butler.
Despite his early skill at buffalo-hunting, according to displays at the museum, “Cody became an outspoken critic of the wanton slaughter of buffalos that began in the 1860s and led to their near extermination within two decades.” This is a taxidermy tableau in the Buffalo Bill museum.
Moving out of the Buffalo Bill Museum, I visit the wonderful Plains Indian Museum.
Of the myriad exhibits, I love the clothing. On the left is a deer hide-beadwork Cheyenne baby cradle. On the right is a girl’s dress adorned with elk teeth.
This tells the story of the relative ease with which the Cheyenne could migrate, once they had horses.
This hide painting by the Arapaho artist Eagle Robe, Eugene Ridgeley Sr., depicts the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, in which 200 Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mostly women and children, were killed by the 3rd Colorado Cavalry.
The Draper Natural History Museum features exhibits on geology and biology, including Wyoming’s native animals.
You can watch scientists working on specimens in the Draper Museum Living Laboratory Exhibit.
Isn’t this spectacular? A map made from 27,000 mosaic tiles!
And this stunning painting by James Everett Stuart of the Yellowstone Falls and Canyon, part of the Center’s collection, takes me back to our recent visit to this spectacular feature.
Our final stop at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West is Dan Miller’s Cowboy Music Revue, starring Dan, his daughter Hannah Miller, and Wendy Corr. Here’s a little flavour of their music:
The next morning, after an overnight in Cody, we head out onto the highway. Bus travel at 60 miles an hour makes photography difficult, but the four small scenes below give you an idea of what we pass by. The crop at top right is sugar beets. The formation at lower left is a mesa, a rise weathered away by millions of years of erosion. At bottom right is a farm field after harvesting. In Wyoming, 80% of water use is farming and agriculture.
Somewhat bizarrely, there’s a Museum of Flight and Aerial Firefighting in the middle of the high plains – and it’s our rest stop.
Wyoming is known for its bentonite clay deposits. This is the stucco facility of Wyo-Ben Inc. at Greybull. You can see the red bentonite on the slope beyond.
Below is a field of dented corn, used mostly for animal feed (it’s also good for grits). At far right, you can see the bright green of an alfalfa field.
Here are some more snapshots of agricultural scenes (I love the beehives, top left) and geological features in the distance, the beginning of the Bighorns Bottom left is sandstone; bottom right is limestone (I think).
Highway 14 takes us east over the Bighorn Mountains, the last of the Rocky Mountain ranges. We’ll be at 9,000 feet elevation at the top.
The scenery is spectacular; we stop and look across the range. The small tree/shrub at the left is Utah juniper (Juniperus osteosperma). We’re at about 6000 feet here. I believe the pinkish rock on the top of the slope in the distance is Madison group limestone. (But I could be wrong). Geologists refer to that sloping inclination as a monocline.
Here’s a closer look at the top. All those blackish dots below are Utah juniper.
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At our lookout, I spot a painted lady butterfly (Vanessa cardui) nectaring on rabbitbush (Chrysothamnus).
As we descend to the eastern side, we pass big grazing ranges. The Bighorns have skiing, snowmobiling, sheep and cattle grazing, and forestry – apart from their natural beauty. .
Looking east as we descend, we see the Tongue River Valley; hidden is the Tongue River, which has its source in the Bighorns and flows north to Montana. There is a long history of litigation between the two states, with Montana claiming that Wyoming farmers take too much of the Tongue’s water. The trees on the slope are Ponderosa pines (Pinus ponderosa).
We pass the Tongue River Elementary School in Dayton, Wyoming….
…and it sparks a memory of a song by one of my favourite singers, Nanci Griffith (written by her former husband Eric Taylor). It captures a little of the 19th century lore of this area (a little east into South Dakota), the story of Crazy Horse (whose memorial we’ll see tomorrow) and “young Mickey Free, who lost an eye to a buck deer in the Tongue River Valley”. (And no, that’s not a photo of Crazy Horse, whose likeness has never been seen in a photograph). Listen to the words.
Our first look at open coal cars comes near Dayton. Forty percent of America’s coal is mined in this area. In fact, the largest coal mine in the world is the North Antelope Rochelle Mine near Gillette, WY.
And then we arrive at the highlight of our time in Wyoming’s Cowboy country: the TA Ranch in Buffalo WY.
The ranch has a storied history in Wyoming cattle country lore, for it was the site of the bloody grand finale of the Johnson County cattle wars, between the corporate cattlemen and homesteading ranchers. (See my video below for more on that episode).
After lunch, we have a number of choices of activities, from taking a wagon ride…..
….. to taking a trail ride. I haven’t been on a horse since I was 10 or so, and the thought frightens me a little, but they look docile and the land is flat (and my husband is willing, and anything he can do….). Thanks to Robert Kelley for the photo.
I make a video from the back of my horse Commander, so I can remember the landscape and the experience better. Here it is!
We also have time to watch TA Ranch’s ‘horse whisperer’ Marchel Kelley work on training a frisky horse. Here’s my video of that experience.
We finish our day at the lovely Ranch at Ucross …..
….where we have dinner, then sit around the campfire, listening to Katie Wilhelm sing cowboy songs for us before bedtime. Here’s a Wyoming classic:
As I walked out one morning for pleasure,
I spied a cow-puncher all riding alone;
His hat was throwed back and his spurs was a jingling,
As he approached he was singin’ this song,
Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies,
It’s your misfortune, and none of my own.
Whoopee ti yi yo, git along little dogies,
For you know Wyoming will be your new home.
And a little video of Katie singing:
The next morning we awake to the last full day of our tour. It seems incredible that we have covered so much spectacularly beautiful natural territory in just 5 days, but we’re now leaving Wyoming and heading to the Black Hills of South Dakota to view the work of two men who decide to apply their talents to shaping nature (literally) in order to honour others. But first, a little scenery as we go: cattle near Ranchester, Wyoming….
… a coal mine near Casper….
….and one of many oil rigs in the area.
It takes us less than four hours to reach our first destination, the Crazy Horse Memorial. Details and background can be found on the website, but in essence, the sculpture is the work of the late sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski (1908-1982) and now his ten adult children, who continue to carve the 600-foot (183 metre) high granite mountain on land that belonged to the Lakota Sioux, fulfilling the pact between the Ziolkowski and the late Oglala Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear (1874-1953), who wrote to him in the late 1930s saying: “My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to know the red man has great heroes, too”. This was in response to the carving nearby of Mount Rushmore (1927-1941), memorializing Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln. Korczak Ziolkowski had been working – but not happily – as assistant to the head sculptor Gutzon Borglum; their relationship ended with a fistfight. The Crazy Horse Memorial honours the iconic Lakota warrior who led 1500 warriors to defeat General Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876, and was killed the following year after surrendering. Little Big Horn was the worst defeat for the army in the Plains Indian War, and the greatest victory for the Indians. As Chief Standing Bear said of the carving: Crazy Horse was to be seated on his horse with his outstretched hand over the horse’s head indicating,“My lands are where my dead lie buried,” in response to a cavalry man asking him where his lands are now.
After serving with the Army during the WWII, Ziolkowski began carving in 1948, using a scale model he’d made of Crazy Horse – something that can only be called an artistic rendition, since the warrior never permitted his photo to be taken. This is a plaster rendering of the ultimate design.
The final face details were finished in the spring of 1998.
Almost 70 years after its beginning, trucks, cranes and earth movers replace the rudimentary equipment Ziolkowski used in the first few decades.
On a personal note, about a decade ago I worked intensely with the music of the late California singer-songwriter John Stewart (composer of ‘Daydream Believer’ and 400+ more songs), the goal being to create a theatrical adaptation. During that period, I happened upon John’s tribute to Korczak Ziolkowski, a song I incorporated into my YouTube video on the Crazy Horse Memorial. John’s lyrics attempt to answer the question many have in gazing on this monolithic piece of art: why would someone devote his life to such a goal? Have a listen.
Our final destination needs little commentary, for the carved faces at Mount Rushmore form a renowned national monument, one that’s made its way into countless films and books. But if you were sneaking up on it from behind, you’d never know what awaits on the other side.
Move a little further and you see the first president of the United States, George Washington, peeking out over the Ponderosa pines.
We arrive at the front of Mount Rushmore and park; then begin the walk to the base of the mountain.
There are boardwalks that traverse the base of Mount Rushmore, and as I look up, I see a family of mountain goats peering down at the tourists. It’s a little ironic that we find the wildlife here, near the snack bar, when we didn’t see mountain goats in Yellowstone…..
Given the angles and the height, it’s tricky to see all the presidents from the lower flank of the mountain. But I adore the fact that I can see the aspens and pines below their faces. The carving of the president’s faces was completed between 1934 and 1939. When Gutzon Boglum died in 1941, his son Lincoln took over working on the presidential torsos, but federal funding ended that autumn, and the carving ended with it, well above the presidential waists.
Look at Lincoln peering through Ponderosa pine. It’s perfect!
And George Washington gazing down past trembling aspens.
Focusing on Washington’s ‘eye’ with my telephoto lens, I’m fascinated that Gutzon Borglum and his son Lincoln were able to create this reflection in the ‘iris’.
President Roosevelt is always in shade, so this is the best I can do with the Rushmore presidents…..
Soon it’s time to head back to the bus and make our way to our hotel In Rapid City, South Dakota. I’m delighted that our room at The Rushmore Hotel seems to evoke a little of our environment over the past six days. I know it’s only wallpaper, but it feels good to be falling asleep in front of aspens.
I can’t say enough about Tauck Tours and our host Murray Rose. Writing this blog, I’ve just returned from a week in Aruba. It was a fine getaway from winter; the sea was turquoise, the sky periwinkle-blue, the people lovely….. but I didn’t gain much knowledge of our planet, even as I relaxed with my books. This trip to the Tetons, Yellowstone and Rushmore filled my head with knowledge. And isn’t that why we travel?
