John wondered why I didn’t print the lyrics to Waist Deep In The Big Muddy if I was going to use a Pete Seeger song. I thought of Flowers first is the simple answer.
But since it is a pointed reference to the current “unpleasantness”, here’s a link to the lyrics at the University of San Diego, a Catholic institution and home of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice.
Go by and check out their news section on the main page. Mrs. Kroc would be proud.
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Thanks for the linked lyrics, Bryan. I had to be reminded that Seeger’s song came at the end of “a medley of anti-war songs,” as the link states, but I vividly recall the finale of the song itself. What made it especially dramatic was how the camera work was coordiinated with the gradually escalating, marching-drum rhythmn of rhe siong itelf.
You have to know that in this period, 1967-68, the Smothers Brothers show and one or two others had become so popular with the 20-something newly married types that many social events, at least in the cities where I lived, were scheduled around them. The nex day, people at work almost always talked about what had happened the night before.
This is how I, at least, over all the years have remembered the night Pete Seeger sang “Waste Deep in the Big Muddy.”
The song was given no particular or special introduction. It began low and soft, as if the rhythmic beat of it was coming from a distance. Seeger was on stage with his guitar, alone, fully visible in the frame of a stage camera’s full-body shot. The first stanza or two were sung in a low key, low tempo way.
The song itself was unfamiliar and so nothing about it seemed remarkable as it began. Slowly at first, so slowly it was almost imperceptible, it seemed as if the camera began to creep forward. Seeger’s voice also began to rise. The beat of the song began to become louder, more inisistent. The camera lens soon framed Seeger from the knees up, then from the waist up, and then, surprisingly, it came even closer.
His voice rose in sync, each stanza growing louder and even more urgent. As the end lines of every stanza were repeated over and over (“… knee deep in the Big Muddy/But the big fool said to push on”) one became aware, suddenly, that something really extraordinary was happening. The camera had long since passed the usual comfort zone. Now it was showing an almost uncomfortably close-up view of Seeger. The rhythmic beat of his guitar and the timber of his voice grew even larger and more passionate. It seemed to fill the room.
By the time Seeger reached the final stanza, the audience seemed electrified. Certainly, we at home were. Seeger’s passion had become white hot, the rhythmic beat of his guitar chords accusatory. When he reached the last two — by now familiar — lines, the camera had come so close that the TV screen at home framed only his face.
Having neard a crescendo, you could sense the song’s climax was at hand. We, or at least I, thought I knew what was coming next. Yet, I couldn’t help but hold my breath. And then the expected line with its unexpected word change suddenly exploded, as it seemed, over the entire nation:
“And the DAMN fool says to push on!”
Go to black.
And I whooped and I yelled and I cried and I could breathe again. And up and down the street where I lived, I could hear my neighbors doing the same.
I got goosebumps for weeks afterwards whenever I thought about that moment. I still do. Without a doubt, it was one of the finest moments in television history, one of the finest moments in modern American social protest.
Ironically, CBS canceled the Smothers Brothers show immediately afterwards, allegedly for violating network “taste” (censorship guidelines. Oddly, that did not dimnish the triumph of the moment. It seemed to make it even more, well, holy.
We had the sense a president who wouldn’t listen and a government that continued to send our youth to die in an unjust war had been brought down low, right then and there, by a song.
P.S. Sorry about the typos. I was in a rush to spill my memories.
At the time I was “participating in electromagnetic wave propagation studies” or whatever the government used as “cover” for reconnaissance flights, generally around the Pacific and associated waters. Television was not part of the deal for most of the time I was in the Air Force, and the Internet wasn’t available, so the BBC and VOA on shortwave was what we had for news.
Wow, what a great song. However, slightly before my time.
Where have allof the song writer gone? I heard a song by John Melloncamp – a protest song, but that’s about it.
Guess protest songs do not make money.
Don’t despair, Van, the songwriters and performers are starting to react. The corporations don’t want to issue them yet, but that will change.
It takes a while, but entertainment does catch up with society, even when it doesn’t want to lead.