SONG OF THE DAY
“Kisses Sweeter Than Wine” by Jackson Browne & Bonnie Raitt (Where Have All The Flowers Gone: The Songs Of Pete Seeger, Appleseed Records, 1998). Written by [see below].
HOW I FOUND IT
This cover was the greatest (and maybe only?) fourth of July present I’ve ever received in my life! My dad emailed me this cover last month on that holiday, and, of course, I searched through my files and found out that I already owned the track. Man, I really need to go through my music. This task keeps hitting me in the face with treasures like this song!
I am a huge fan of the classic Jimmie Rodgers cover of this song, and used it at our wedding last month, but didn’t know about this cool, reggae-beat version by two of my favorite artists (and right under my own nose)! My dad heard this version on the “Over Easy” weekend morning show on Detroit’s classic rock radio WCSX 94.7 (a.k.a. one of the things I miss most about Detroit—radio in Connecticut sucks). Isn’t it great? I love that the song was finally covered as a duet between the man and his wife. Jesus, I would have killed to hear Johnny and June Carter Cash cover this arrangement. I’d like to hear more collaboration from Raitt and Browne, as their voices meld together so nicely. This is my favorite new windows open, car in the summer jam. Enjoy!
INTERESTING FACTS (a la wikipedia)
– “Kisses Sweeter than Wine” is a popular love song written by The Weavers in 1950, and a hit for Jimmie Rodgers in 1957 and Frankie Vaughan in 1958.
– In his 1993 book Where Have All The Flowers Gone, Pete Seeger described the long genesis of this song. Apparently the folk musician Lead Belly heard Irish performer Sam Kennedy in Greenwich Village singing the traditional Irish song “Drimmin Down” aka “Drimmen Dow”. Lead Belly adapted the tune for his own farmer/cow song “If it Wasn’t for Dicky” which he first recorded in 1937. Leadbelly did not like the lack of rhythm, which had been a part of many free flowing Irish songs, so he made the piece more rhythmic, playing the chorus with a 12-string guitar. Seeger liked Lead Belly’s version of the tune. Seeger and Lee Hays wrote new lyrics (Hays wrote all new verses, Seeger re-wrote Lead Belly’s chorus), turning “If it Wasn’t for Dicky” into a love song.
– Recorded by The Weavers on June 12, 1951 in New York City for Decca Records, this version reached #19 on the US Hit Parade.
– The music was credited to “Joel Newman”, the lyrics to “Paul Campbell”. Paul Campbell was a pseudonym for Howard Richmond, publisher of The Weavers. “Joel Newman” is likewise a pseudonym.
– In his 1993 book Seeger wrote: “Now, who should one credit on this song? The Irish, certainly. Sam Kennedy, who taught it to us. Lead Belly, for adding rhythm and blues chords. Me, for two new words for the refrain. Lee, who wrote seven verses. Fred and Ronnie, for paring them down to five. I know the song publisher, The Richmond Organization, cares.”
– The song was a #3 US hit for Jimmie Rodgers in 1957 and also a hit for Frankie Vaughan in the United Kingdom in 1958.
– Peter, Paul and Mary included the song on Album in 1966. Many singers, including Marlene Dietrich, Andy Williams and Alex Harvey, have also covered the song.
– As a songwriter, Pete Seeger is best known as the author or co-author of “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, “If I Had a Hammer (The Hammer Song)” (composed with Lee Hays), and “Turn, Turn, Turn!”
– His father, Charles Louis Seeger Jr., was a composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist investigating both American folk and non-Western music.
– His mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, was a classical violinist and teacher.
– His parents divorced when Seeger was seven. His stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was one of the most significant female composers of the twentieth century.
– His half-sister, Peggy Seeger, also a well-known folk performer, was married for many years to British folk singer Ewan MacColl.
– Half-brother Mike Seeger went on to form the New Lost City Ramblers, one of whose members, John Cohen, was married to Pete’s other half-sister, singer Penny Seeger.
– In 1943, Pete married Toshi-Aline ÅŒta, whom he credits with being the support that helped make the rest of his life possible.
– Seeger joined the Community Church of New York (a church practicing Unitarian Universalism) and often performs at functions for the Unitarian Universalist Association.
– Pete Seeger attended the Avon Old Farms boarding school in Connecticut, during which he was selected to attend Camp Rising Sun, the Louis August Jonas Foundation’s international summer scholarship program.
– Though Pete Seeger’s parents were both professional musicians, they didn’t press him to play an instrument. On his own, Pete gravitated to the ukulele, becoming adept at entertaining his classmates with it, while laying the basis for his subsequent remarkable audience rapport.
– Pete heard the five-string banjo for the first time at the Mountain Dance and Folk Festival in Asheville, North Carolina in 1936, while traveling with his father (then a director of Roosevelt’s Farm Resettlement program), It changed his life forever. He spent much of the next four years trying to master the instrument.
– His first musical gig was leading students in folk singing at the Dalton School, where his aunt was principal.
– He polished his performance skills during summer stint of touring New York State with The Vagabond Puppeteers, a traveling puppet theater “inspired by rural education campaigns of post-revolutionary Mexico”.
– Seeger took a job in Washington, D.C., assisting Alan Lomax, a friend of his father’s, at the Archive of American Folk Song of the Library of Congress. Seeger’s job was to help Lomax sift through commercial “race” and “hillbilly” music and select recordings that best represented American folk music, a project funded by the music division of the Pan American Union (later the Organization of American States), of whose music division his father, Charles Seeger, was head (1938–53).
– Lomax also encouraged Seeger’s folk singing vocation, and Seeger was soon appearing as a regular performer on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray’s weekly Columbia Broadcasting show Back Where I Come From (1940–41) alongside of Josh White, Burl Ives, Leadbelly, and Woody Guthrie (whom he had first met at Will Geer’s Grapes of Wrath benefit concert for migrant workers on March 3, 1940).
– Back Where I Come From was unique in having a racially integrated cast, which made news when it performed in March 1941 at a command performance at the White House organized by Eleanor Roosevelt called “An Evening of Songs for American Soldiers”.
– As a self-described “split tenor” (between an alto and a tenor), Pete Seeger was a founding member of two highly influential folk groups: The Almanac Singers and The Weavers.
– The Almanac Singers, which Seeger co-founded in 1941 with Millard Lampell and Arkansas singer and activist Lee Hays, was a topical group, designed to function as a singing newspaper promoting the industrial unionization movement, racial and religious inclusion, and other progressive causes. Its personnel included, at various times: Woody Guthrie, Bess Lomax Hawes, Baldwin “Butch” Hawes, Sis Cunningham, Josh White, and Sam Gary.
– As a controversial Almanac singer, the 21-year-old Seeger performed under the stage name “Pete Bowers” in order to avoid compromising his father’s government career.
– In 1950, the Almanacs were reconstituted as The Weavers, named after the title of a 1892 play by Gerhart Hauptmann about a workers’ strike (which contained the lines, “We’ll stand it no more, come what may!”).
– In the atmosphere of the 1950s red scare, the Weavers’ repertoire had to be less overtly topical than that of the Almanacs had been, and its progressive message was couched in indirect language—arguably rendering it even more powerful.
– The Weavers’s performing career was abruptly halted in 1953 at the peak of their popularity when blacklisting prompted radio stations to refuse to play their records and all their bookings were canceled.
– In the documentary film Pete Seeger: The Power of Song (2007), Seeger states that he resigned from the Weavers when the three other band members agreed to perform a jingle for a cigarette commercial.
– In 1948, Seeger wrote the first version of his now-classic How to Play the Five-String Banjo, a book that many banjo players credit with starting them off on the instrument.
– He went on to invent the Long Neck or Seeger banjo. This instrument is three frets longer than a typical banjo, is slightly longer than a bass guitar at 25 frets, and is tuned a minor third lower than the normal 5-string banjo. Hitherto strictly limited to the Appalachian region, the five-string banjo became known nationwide as the American folk instrument par excellence, largely thanks to Seeger’s championing of and improvements to it.
– From the late 1950s on, Seeger also accompanied himself on the 12-string guitar, an instrument of Mexican origin that had been associated with Lead Belly who had styled himself “the King of the 12-String Guitar.”
– On January 18, 2009, Seeger joined Bruce Springsteen, grandson Tao RodrÃguez-Seeger, and the crowd in singing the Woody Guthrie song “This Land Is Your Land” in the finale of Barack Obama’s Inaugural concert in Washington, D.C. The performance was noteworthy for the inclusion of two verses not often included in the song, one about a “private property” sign the narrator cheerfully ignores, and the other making a passing reference to a Depression-era relief office.
– Inspired by Woody Guthrie, whose guitar was labeled “This machine kills fascists,”  Seeger’s banjo was emblazoned with the motto “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender.”
– In 1998 Appleseed Records issued a double-CD tribute album: Where Have All the Flowers Gone: the Songs of Pete Seeger, which included readings by Studs Terkel and covers by Billy Bragg, Jackson Browne, Eliza Carthy, Judy Collins, Bruce Cockburn, Donovan, Ani DiFranco, Dick Gaughan, Nanci Griffith, Richie Havens, Indigo Girls, Roger McGuinn, Holly Near, Odetta, Tom Paxton, Bonnie Raitt, Martin Simpson, and Bruce Springsteen, among others.
– In April 2006 Bruce Springsteen released a collection of folk songs associated with Seeger’s repertoire, titled, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (which some reviewers noted that, oddly, contained no songs actually composed by Seeger).