After years of searching, I found Pete Seeger’s 1959 tribute to Lead Belly, a unique rendition of Pete’s well-known 12‑string guitar instrumental, Living in the Country.
Pete introduces Track 4, I Knew Leadbelly, as follows:
This friend of mine, who died just ten years ago this December, was during his life very little known outside of a narrow circle of people who loved his music. His music never got on the hit parade, until after he died. Six months after he died, his song, Goodnight Irene, sold about two million copies. Huddie Ledbetter didn’t play very fancy guitar, but what he played was so powerful, he couldn’t help but impress people; very straightforward.
What follows is a one-minute Lead-Belly-like instrumental that gracefully transitions into a 1¾ minute version of Living in the Country as I heard it for the first time in the ’60s. For that story, click here.
Pete Seeger in England is a 2016 re‑release by Fellside Recordings of two previous albums, Pete Seeger in Concert Vols. 1 & 2, recorded October 4, 1959 at the St. Pancras Town Hall, London, and a recording made of his concert in February 1964, at Free Trade Hall, Manchester. The recording is also available on Amazon. You can hear the beginning of the track on Amazon's UK website, here: I Knew Leadbelly.
The legendary American Folk singer’s career had been seriously knocked off course by the McCarthy witch-hunts into Unamerican Activities in the USA affecting artists believed to be communists. At
one stage Seeger was facing a ten year prison sentence, but he managed to visit the UK in 1958. The concert was recorded and issued by the Folklore label which emanated out of the Dobell’s record shop on Charing Cross road in West London. In 1964 he was back again and at one concert, at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he was recorded again.
Both concerts on this DOUBLE CD FOR THE PRICE OF ONE set are typical Seeger material of that time. He talks about his friends Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie and champions new songwriters like Tom
Paxton and Malvina Reynolds. The concerts also give a wonderful insight to how Seeger worked an audience and had them eating out of his hand. His ability to engage the audience is an object lesson for young performers. The Folklore LPs had limited circulation and the Manchester concert has never been heard before. The booklet comes with an informative essay about Pete Seeger by Joe Stead.
Oh the Lord looked down from his holy place
Said, “Lordy me, what a sea of space
What a spot to launch the human race.”
So he built him a boat for a mixed up crew
With eyes of black and brown and blue
And that’s how come that you and I
Got just one world with just one sky
Chorus:
We’re in the same boat, brother
We’re in the same boat, brother
And if you shake one end
You’re gonna rock the other
It’s the same boat, brother
Oh the boat rolled on through storm and grief
Past many a rock and many a reef
What kept ’em goin’ was a great belief
That they had to learn to navigate
’Cause the human race was special freight
If we don’t want to be in Jonah’s shoes
We’d better be mates on this here cruise
When the boilers blew somewhere in Spain
The keel was smashed in the far Ukraine
And the steam poured out from Oregon to Maine
Oh it took some time for the crew to learn
What’s bad for the bow ain’t good for the stern
If a hatch takes fire in China Bay
Pearl Harbor’s decks gonna blaze away
Reading this morning's newspaper (January 29, 2017) I wrote a new verse:
When the ice cap melt overfilled the seas
When the shorelines surged with refugees And the courts were filled with desperate pleas While fires made the smokey air And rising floods made life despair Oh it took some time for the crew to learn
What's bad for the bow ain’t good for the stern
... When one group shouts a loud hooray
The other group can’t just walk away
I thought We're in the Same Boat, Brother was an early civil rights song by Huddie Ledbetter, the folk singer better known as “Lead Belly.” It turns out to be a civil rights song – and much more.
I couldn’t make out all the words from Lead Belly’s recordings so I
turned to the World Wide Web expecting to find the lyrics without any
difficulty. However, after much searching, I found only recordings and
videos of the song by Lead Belly and an even larger number by Bhupen Hazarika, a popular Indian singer of whom I had never heard. Finally I found a forum
where a few people were carefully listening to Lead Belly’s recordings
and piecing together the lyrics line by line. And then, more than four
years after the original inquiry was posted, someone posted the
authoritative lyrics from The Collected Reprints from Sing Out!: The Folk Song Magazine, Volumes 7-12, 1964-1973 pp. 110-111.* And this source showed the song was not a folk song, not written by Lead Belly, but rather by E.Y. Harburg (words) and Earl Robinson (music). It was written amidst the strife of World War II and was featured in Norman Corwin's hopeful CBS radio program, Unity Fair,
which aired on July 3, 1945, just days after the signing of the United
Nations Charter on June 26. (You can hear the song at minute 22:00 of
the show, sung by the One World Chorus.)
Still, I couldn't figure out the chords to play on the guitar. I searched for sheet music and finally found a song book entitled 12 Negro Spirituals published in Denmark! Most vendors who showed the booklet said it was "not available." One seller, in the UK, would sell it for about $10 plus $25 shipping. So, expecting that it would be available from one of the larger university music libraries, I requested it via inter-library loan. When finally it arrived, it bore the stamp of Det Fynske Musikkonservatorium, now the Danish National Academy of Music, and was sent airmail from Esbjerg, Denmark. I felt guilty for the expense!
* You can order a copy of the song from Sing Out! magazine.
Bhupen Hazarika did more than anyone to internationally popularize "We're in the Same Boat Brother" (which he typically sang as "We are on the same boat, brother"). In many of the related accounts, the song is incorrectly attributed to Paul Robeson. When Bhupen Hazarika was studying at Columbia University in New York City, he knew Paul Robeson and might have learned the song from him. Paul Robeson undoubtedly knew Earl Robinson, who wrote the music for the song; Robeson recorded other Robinson songs such as Ballad for Americans and Joe Hill.
Here is some additional background information from various sources.
Introductory notes:The Collected Reprints from Sing Out!: The Folk Song Magazine, Volumes 7-12, 1964-1973, pp. 110-111
Composed originally in the waning days of World War II, this song was a popular folk-style appeal for the United Nations. Leadbelly was enthusiastic about the song and sang it constantly. The composers are a distinguished team. Earl Robinson, many of whose songs have appeared in these pages, is composer of “Joe Hill,” “Ballad for Americans,” “Lonesome Train,” “House I Live In,” “Black and White,” and scores of other works. E. Y. “Yip” Harburg is best known for the libretto to “Finian's Rainbow.” He is also author of the lyrics to the songs in the film version of “Wizard of Oz,” and lyricist for that depression classic, “Brother Can You Spare A Dime?” Harburg and Robinson also collaborated on “Free and Equal Blues.”
The usual relationship between folk music and the composer is where the latter discovers some of the beauty and excitement in a folk song and says to himself , ‘I can do something with that.’ So perhaps he arranges it simply or complexly, for an interesting group of instruments, or even a full orchestra, moving the folk song onto a new level. Some composers immerse themselves in a folk style so well that they don‘t find it necessary to quote exact tunes, but create new works while still giving the feeling of folk derivation. Men like Vaughn Williams, Bartok, Villa Lobos come to mind.
As a composer I have taken part in all these processes. But it has been my particular fortune to also have the opposite happen. Huddie Ledbetter, (perhaps the king of all the folk singers), not only took sections of the “Lonesome Train” to sing, but liked “The Same Boat, Brother” well enough to make it his own. If you listen to his recording sometime you will hear the folk process at work, in reverse so to speak.
Yip Harburg and I met in Hollywood early in 1944 and out of this came not only some movie scores but songs like “Free and Equal Blues” and “Same Boat.” The latter received an early climactic performance in San Francisco over the CBS network at the formation of the United Nations. Since then it has had no similar large scale performance. But it has made its way around nevertheless, through hundreds of copies distributed by the Y.W.C.A. plus the inexorable folk process. Still a good idea for singing.
Introductory notes:Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist, by Harold Meyerson, Ernie Harburg, p. 217.
Another [high point in Yip’s career as the bard of left liberalism] was to come the following spring after the San Francisco conference that established the United Nations. Radio producer Norman Corwin put together a live broadcast from San Francisco that CBS carried nationally. It was entitled “Unity Fair,” and Yip provided the songs and some of the script as well. The broadcast was almost an anthology of Yip’s popular front work: it included performances of “The Son of a Gun Who Picks on Uncle Sam,” Meet the People’s “It’s Smart to be People,” and a new Robinson-Harburg folk song, “The Same Boat, Brother.” The new entry was directed against postwar isolationism and intended to promote a one-world perspective—indeed, it was given its inaugural performance by the One World Chorus.
Here are links to various recordings.
Unity Fair radio broadcast, July 3, 1945, performed by the One World Chorus at minute 22:00 of the show.
Every time I heard Living in the Country I said to myself, I must dig out that unique recording I have of Living in the Country, the one with that powerful, rhythmic, bluesy introduction that dramatically shifts into the light-aired melody everyone is familiar with. The one that Pete Seeger attributed to Huddie Ledbetter, that I recorded off the WQXR radio show, Folk Music of the World, programmed by Robert Sherman, in the late 1960s. It was the first time I heard it, and it became my aspiration, my obsession. I had to learn how to play it on the guitar. I even bought a 12-string. I listened to that tape repeatedly in high school and college, and then stored it away. And although I have heard many performances and recordings of Living in the Country by many artists, none of them approach that first one I heard by Pete Seeger. And although I said many times I should retrieve that tape, I never found the time.
A few years ago, my sister asked if I wanted my father's old Wollensak 7" reel-to-reel tape recorder. I said yes, anticipating that I would use it to play back that old recording. After all, it was the machine I had used to record that radio show in the first place. But the old Wollensak just laid there, gathering dust. I didn't even know if it still worked.
When Pete Seeger died I could put it off no longer. I looked for those old 7" reel-to-reel tapes – in my old storage crate in the attic, in my cartons of old books, in my box of high-school treasures. Not there. I gave up. And then, days later, I spotted them on the book shelf above my desk. I had retrieved them some years ago and placed them there – so they would be handy.
I opened the old Wollensak and cleaned off four decades of grime, only to find there was no take-up reel. It took me a few days before I set about finding one on eBay: $3.00 (plus $5.94 for shipping) from a seller in Orlando, Florida. Then I had to wait several days for the auction to close, and more until finally the package arrived. But I had found not one but two of my old 7" reel-to-reel tapes and it would likely take hours to find that particular recording. I was too busy.
I don't know what inspired me today to drop everything and listen to those recordings. And I got lucky – Living in the Country was one of the first recordings on the first side of the first reel. I was pleased.
I retrieved my bag of audio cables and adapters from the basement, a carry over from my college days when I thought myself knowledgeable in such matters. I connected the Wollensak's outputs to my computer's inputs in every conceivable configuration, to no avail. Audacity recorded hums and buzzes. Watching the afternoon tick by, I gave up and held a microphone in front of the Wollensak, a reversal of the process I had used to record the radio show (using a microphone in front of the radio speaker) some 45 years ago.
The quality of the recording is poor, but still conveys the essence of this unique arrangement.
The host of the radio show provides a brief introduction to these two versions of Living in the Country. The first version is from a
London recording made in 1959. I searched the web but was unable to find a better quality version. (See update below). It starts with Pete Seeger talking
about Huddie Ledbetter and he seems to attribute Living in the Country
to him. Indeed, "Living in the Country" is likely a reference to "Goodnight Irene," Lead Belly's #1 hit song of 1950, that has the line, "Sometimes I live in the country." It is unlike any other recording of Living in the Country,
starting with a powerful, rhythmic, blues section that breaks into the
lighter melody with which we are so familiar. The second version is the well-known
"whistling" version that appears in numerous recordings by Pete Seeger
and other artists.
You can listen to my recording of Living in the Country from the Folk Music of the World radio showhere.
But that's not quite the end of the story. You see, I've been trying to find the lyrics to Living in the Country for as long as I've been trying to play it on the 12-string. I thought I saw the lyrics printed in an issue of Sing Out! magazine, but the lyrics did not turn up in a search of it's archives. To the best of my recollection, here they are.
Living in the Country
I'm living way out in the country
I rarely come into the town.
It's always so lovely, delightful,
I wish that you would come around.
Oh, please, won't you come away with me.
We'd be so happy living in the country.
Work all day,
Laugh and play,
Sing this song to you.
Perhaps I will retrieve my old 12-string from the attic.
Update June 19, 2019
I recently found Pete Seegers 1959 recording, I Knew Leadbelly which was recently re-released, as described here.
