{"id":399,"date":"2016-02-16T07:00:56","date_gmt":"2016-02-16T12:00:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=399"},"modified":"2024-05-12T06:46:37","modified_gmt":"2024-05-12T10:46:37","slug":"martian-love-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/martian-love-song\/","title":{"rendered":"Martian Love Song (Lee Hays\/Earl Robinson)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Martian Love Song\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/b043UFqV6lA?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m proud that I remember so many good songs\u2014but memory doesn\u2019t take orders, and I also remember some lousy ones. I had \u201cMartian Love Song\u201d firmly filed in that category, as an example of the kind of dreck I learned as a kid and will be stuck with till I die\u2014but when I got into this project I went over all the songs I could remember, culling the dreck, and culled this one, and then woke up one night with it going through my head, and a wave of affection swept over me. It was kind of like meeting a peculiar, socially inept old acquaintance whom no one else liked, and I had to take it by the <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-407 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Seeger-Gazette.jpg?resize=298%2C300&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Seeger Gazette\" width=\"298\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Seeger-Gazette.jpg?resize=298%2C300&amp;ssl=1 298w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Seeger-Gazette.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Seeger-Gazette.jpg?w=400&amp;ssl=1 400w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 298px) 100vw, 298px\" \/>hand and reassure it that it was just fine and I was happy to be its friend.<\/p>\n<p>So then I went back to the booklet for Pete Seeger\u2019s <em>Gazette<\/em> LP, which I assumed was the only place it ever appeared, to see what he said about it, and found to my amazement that the words are by Lee Hays of the Weavers and the melody by Earl Robinson, who wrote \u201cBallad for Americans,\u201d \u201cThe House I Live In\u201d and \u201cFree and Equal Blues\u201d &#8212; at which point I did a little more investigating and found that Robinson recorded it for Folkways as well, under the title &#8220;My True Love,&#8221; with the note, &#8220;it is an old folk song that we composed next week.&#8221; <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-405 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Earl-Robinson.jpg?resize=210%2C288&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"Earl Robinson\" width=\"210\" height=\"288\" \/>Pete&#8217;s notes add that it was composed &#8220;in preparation for that possible future time when venturesome space pilots from the Earth will go joy-riding with winsome Martian lassies\u2014and, undoubtedly, run out of fuel in the neighborhood of some deserted asteroid.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>To add a serious historical note: some writers who date the beginning of the singer-songwriter movement to Bob Dylan\u2019s arrival in Greenwich Village have invented a mythical pre-Dylan folk scene in which no one was writing new songs, or, if they were, they were only writing agit-prop protest lyrics.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_406\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-406\" style=\"width: 222px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\" wp-image-406\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Lee-Hays.jpg?resize=222%2C252&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"222\" height=\"252\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-406\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Lee Hays of the Weavers performs at the Old School of Folk Music in Chicago, January 13, 1958.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>This is a good example of what\u2019s wrong with that idea\u2014the Seeger-Weavers generation was full of songwriters, writing about all sorts of things. Nor were they stolid folk purists &#8212; Pete started out playing banjo in his high school jazz band and harmonizing on pop tunes, and there had been regular cross-fertilization between pop and folk, back to Stephen Foster and beyond.<\/p>\n<p>What is true is that by the turn of the 1960s a clique of younger singers and musicians who Dave Van Ronk (an enthusiastic member) dubbed the \u201cneo-ethnics\u201d was dismissing that stuff as horrible pseudo-folk and insisting that real folk music was what they were learning off old rural recordings from the 1920s. (The old rural artists had also sung a lot of pop tunes, but they didn&#8217;t know that.)<\/p>\n<p>Then Dylan came along, sounding like a neo-ethnic and hanging out with the neo-ethnics, and started writing, and became a rock star, and it was a major changing of the guard. There was still a lot of overlap, like <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/i-aint-marching\/\">Phil Ochs<\/a>\u2019s style, which comes straight out of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/tell-old-bill\/\">Bob Gibson<\/a> and has not the slightest whiff of neo-ethnicity about it, or <a href=\"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/urge-for-going\/\">Joni Mitchell<\/a>, or Judy Collins, or all sorts of people who grew up on the Weavers and singer-songwriter compositions like Seeger\u2019s \u201cWhere Have All the Flowers Gone\u201d and \u201cKisses Sweeter than Wine,\u201d not to mention \u201cScarlet Ribbons\u201d and \u201cSouth Coast,\u201d and &#8220;Scotch and Soda.&#8221; But Dylan became the defining figure for the historical transition, celebrated for cutting his ties with the older generation of folkies, and the continuity was largely obscured.<\/p>\n<p>Which goes some way to explaining why I might be the only person alive who remembers \u201cMartian Love Song.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An odd little object from the 1950s, performed by Pete Seeger on the album that set the pattern for Broadside magazine, with some musing on singer-songwriter history.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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