A friend sent me a link to this video, and I’m so impressed it’s broken me out of quite a long posting silence to share it with both my readers!
It’s Perpetuum Jazzile, an a cappella group, singing Toto’s famous song, Africa, but a version of the song that puts in a thunderstorm (“… I bless the rains…”) as part of the arrangement. I repeat: a cappella.
If you haven’t seen or heard this, play it now. If you have, play it again. What a terrific performance!
This morning, thanks to diarist greendem on DailyKos, I watched Pete Seeger, along with Pete’s grandson and Bruce Springsteen, lead the crowd at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday in singing “This Land is Your Land.” Pete fed the crowd the words, as he has done so many times before, and the crowd and the choir sang along.
I had listened to Pete and to the Weavers as I was growing up in the late 40′s and the early 50′s. At one point, their music was “top of the pops” — Goodnight Irene, to name just one, got lots of airplay on commercial AM radio stations. I love Pete Seeger, as a musician and as a human being, for what he has done to help this country and its great land.
Over the years, I began to think that in my younger days I had heard and sung “This Land is Your Land” maybe one or two too many times. Familiarity bred undeserved boredom, alas. Of course, the version I knew was the “pretty” one about the natural wonders of this country — not to be undervalued — but after a while, it was easy to think of it as “that old song.”
I also didn’t realize there were “other” verses to the song. (H’mm. Pause for thought.)
But it’s been a long, long time since the days when I heard that song. And, since those years, President Kennedy, Dr. King, and Senator Bobby Kennedy were assassinated; the cold war got colder and then backed off gradually; life got harder and harder in this country for working people, with very few reversals in the trend. Above all, the country didn’t feel like mine at all, but as though its governing powers moved on, without regard to what citizens and voters wanted; and the old songs had been heard no more, at least not on mainstream media.
Pete Seeger has never stopped doing what he believes in — check here for details — and I remember well his successful campaign to get the Hudson River cleaned up, when I still lived in the Northeast. He doesn’t seem to have forgotten how this land is his land, too, and has taken many citizen actions in its support, not least continuing to play his music everywhere and as often as he can.
I hadn’t watched the celebration program on Sunday, so when I saw greendem’s diary post this morning, I sat down with my headphones on to listen to Pete and the others sing with the crowd, introduced by Bruce Springsteen. I thought not much more about it than that, a chance to see the great Pete again, a personal hero in action, still going strong.
And to my amazement, partway through, I found myself in tears. Not out of nostalgia. No, for the first time in way too long, with Obama’s inauguration imminent, after so many, many years, I actually felt that this land was once again my land, too. Thank you, Barack Obama, candidate, and thank you Howard Dean, for your 50-state strategy, and thank you, DailyKos, for your help organizing support for candidates and getting out the vote, and keeping the facts, the polls, and the news coming, and thanks to the voters of America who voted for Barack Obama, so that we can have a President Obama being sworn in tomorrow, one who’s willing to listen and who can act with brains, savvy, grace and despatch — and a huge popular mandate! And thank you, Pete Seeger, for convincing me once more, after a very long dry spell, of the truth penned by Woody Guthrie, that this land is my land, too. It’s been a long, long time, too long, since I felt that way.
This is the greatest and most cheerful piece that has emerged during this whole election season!
Watch the video! This is a great piece of zydeco music, and if it doesn’t get your toes and your hands tapping and clapping, I don’t know what will!
Watch the video, follow the link, download the mp3 (and learn about the Whirlybird)… watch some great gumbo being made, and watch some people having a fine time singing, dancing, and playing music!
Sing along (French or English — the words are in the piece)! Dance around the room!
This is truly great stuff!
I watched the Straight No Chaser rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas a few days ago. If you haven’t yet seen it, you should. The Views count was somewhere over 600,000 then, but I wasn’t paying particular attention and had no reason to note the number exactly. I watched it again the next day and the count was over 900,000. Later that day, over 1 million. The next morning it was a million and a half. The next morning, today, just now: 2,410,735. And most of this boom has been produced by word of mouth or of email; a link was sent to me by a friend, I watched it, became enthralled, and sent links on to other friends, who told me later they watched, loved it, and sent links to others they knew, and so on.
Since the count doesn’t seem to update when you merely press the Replay button that appears when the video finishes — at least, your page doesn’t refresh right then to show it — I will assume that it’s actually been seen many more times than the count shows. I’ve pressed Replay at least once each time I’ve watched it. Not only does it bear re-watching; on second and subsequent viewings the video is already loaded into memory and any feed jumps are eliminated.
To the right of the video is a section, About This Video. A link invites you to buy it on DVD. The story of the video itself is an interesting one, and worth reading.
Buy the DVD? I would, in a heartbeat, but alas, the DVD is sold out due, as the DVD info page points out, to “unprecedented demand.” You betcha: two million tallied views of this track alone in just a few days. It’s being reprinted; should-be-available date January 21, 2008.
A little further down on the same page, you can look at other albums, available now, from Straight No Chaser.
Go ahead, watch The 12 Days of Christmas. Again, please.
Update: Dec. 20, just watched again. 3,388,883.
Update: Dec. 25, just watched again. 5,409,156.
Update: Dec. 31, just watched again. 6,356,265.
