It's barely credible that just one man could have written - or co-written - so many songs that have been embedded in our culture for so long that they seem more like traditional airs with no known parentage. Including: If I Had a Hammer, Turn, Turn, Turn, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine, and Where Have All The Flowers Gone, which may have sparked Bob Dylan into writing Blowing In The Wind. But the father of them all - Pete Seeger - musician and political activist, has died at age 94, in hospital in New York.
Seeger gained fame as a member of The Weavers, the quartet formed in 1948, and had hits including Goodnight Irene. Never one to sell out, he left the group when they agreed to appear in a tobacco advert.
He continued performing and recording for six decades afterwards and was still an activist as recently as October 2011, when he marched in New York City as part of the Occupy Wall Street protests. Seeger was a major figure in 'folk' music, and played a leading role in getting the world to take the banjo seriously as a virtuoso instrument. But it is as a songwriter that he is immortalised.
The universal fuss our news media are making about the forthcoming Scottish Independence referendum is bemusing; even baffling. So many scribes and hacks revealing the gaps in their long-term memories, and never one mention of the last referendum, which was fiddled by Jim Gallaghan's Labour government, losing Labour that weight-shifting traditional Scottish vote in the subsequent election and ushering in the Thatcher years. Ultimately an own-goal for Labour.
We who do remember find the current air of excitement irritating, as if it hadn't already been that way back in the 'seventies. But Labour insisted that the yes vote must be, not a majority of the actual voters, but (just to complicate it) rather 40% out of the total number of those entitled to vote. And even before we got that far, the ballot paper question was not the expected, "Do you want independence?" but "Do you want devolution?"
"Do we want whaat?"
Devolution had not been debated or even publically mooted, and for too many of us it was a blank neologism. I guessed (correctly) that it could mean anything and nothing. To make matters worse, American avant-garde pop group Devo was currently riding high in the charts with a single and album ironically celebrating 'devolution' by which they meant the dumbing-down of western culture. Having supported nationalism (and nothing but) ever since I came to voting age, I voted no.
Richard C Morais
Alma Books Ltd
ISBN: 978-1-84688-241
ebook ISBN: 978-1-84688-273-9
First of all, this is an intimate examination of the ‘culture clash’ experience. You may find as I did, that reading it will have you re-visiting your own past encounters both as the “I” and the “us”, with a new clarity. Morais has an uncanny ability to inhabit the voice of his protagonist, who suddenly develops a colloquial streak, almost exposing a latent sense of irony, on arriving in hyper-active Manhattan - after speaking in nothing but literal terms of his simple upbringing in the cool, clear mountains and temples of Japan.
The language does a lot for the unspoken scenario - it’s the HD effect added to the already colourful descriptions as the Reverend Oda strives to turn adversity towards enlightenment. Morais' last novel, The Hundred-Foot Journey, made it on to the silver screen; I'd like to see this one get the same treatment.
