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On That Note: Don't Know Much About History



A key lyric in first minute: I initially assumed "No time to plead or even ask why" was a reaction of seeing Ruby shooting Oswald on live TV, but now I'm convinced it refers to Oswald being snuffed out without due process or obtaining any sense of personal motive.
 
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drlove said:


I'll add Cuyahoga which is about the the river in Ohio that was on fire back in the day.
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Excellent choice. This was on my list, too. That also was inspiration for songs like Randy Newman's "Burn On."

REM's "Cuyahoga" also has an undercurrent (bad pun, sorry) about displacement of Native American culture along with historic revisionism.
  • "Rewrite the book and rule the pages"
  • “Our father’s father’s father tried/erased the parts he didn’t like.”
Also, compare lyrics from first and third chorus/refrain sections (My italics for emphasis).

First chorus:
This is where we walked
This is where we swam
Take a picture here
Take a souvenir

Third chorus:
There is where they walked, swam, hunted, danced and sang
Take a picture here
Take a souvenir

Didn't mean to get so academic on that one. :)
 
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MeanDean said:
When this topic was discussed offline I wondered about the distinction between songs written about events from an historic perspective - like The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - written 100 years after the civil war. Versus CSNY's Ohio which now seems historical and is, but at the time was more a current events topic.

No one else seemed to care and I don't either really, just something I thought might bring some discussion and/or perspective to certain songs.
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Agree, good starting point for discussion. "Ohio" is an example of immediacy, written and released with a couple of weeks after it occurred. No way at the time to anticipate how it'd be viewed historically (the shootings or the song itself).
 
This song was written in 2011 with references to a Civil War battle (Hampton Roads is more commonly known as the showdown between the Merrimack and the Moniotr0, but it's really brilliant how it seems to reflect the current state of America.

 
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A story about one John Henry, who worked on the railroad (I hope I'm not stretching the boundaries of this thread's intention).
 
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Did anybody post this one yet...?



I also love this live version by Grace Potter...



I have never once believed this song was written in the 1960s. More like the 1860s...

 
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cyclones500 said:
That could be disputable, but I don't have enough definitive evidence against it (I haven't delved into that to any extent). The lyrics and the timing certainly fit.
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Saw an interview with Mickey Dolenz a few years back. According to him, Boyce & Hart absolutely wrote it as a protest song, but had to be kind of sneaky about it to avoid pissing off the network.
 
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