{"id":457,"date":"2016-03-29T07:00:34","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T11:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/?p=457"},"modified":"2017-02-25T22:09:25","modified_gmt":"2017-02-26T03:09:25","slug":"johnny-half-breed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/johnny-half-breed\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnny Half-Breed (Peter La Farge)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Johnny Halfbreed (Peter LaFarge)\" width=\"474\" height=\"267\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/6SHuTunueQQ?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>Like childhood crushes, I would fall in love with particular albums, listen to them over and over for days, weeks, or months, then abandon them and move on. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-460 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Peter-LaFarge-LP.jpg?resize=270%2C267\" alt=\"Peter LaFarge LP\" width=\"270\" height=\"267\" \/>The love affair with Peter LaFarge lasted at least a few months, and maybe even a couple of years. I learned a bunch of his songs &#8212; &#8220;Stampede,&#8221; &#8220;Move Over, Grab a Holt,&#8221; and of course &#8220;Ira Hayes&#8221; &#8212; but this is the only one I remember all the way through.<\/p>\n<p>There was a moment in the early 1960s when some people in the New York <em>Broadside<\/em> magazine clique were mentioning him right up with Bob Dylan, who concurs, saying: &#8220;The guy who was best at protest-song writing was Peter LaFarge. We were pretty tight for a while&#8230;. Actually Peter is one of the great unsung heroes of the day. His style was just a little bit too erratic. But it wasn&#8217;t his fault, he was always hurting.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>LaFarge was admired by the other young Village musicians not only as a songwriter but as someone who had really lived the life: he&#8217;d grown up in the West, served in the Korean War, been a rodeo rider , and presented himself as Native American. That story got complicated, because he had no Native ancestry, though he had grown up with a lot of Indian friends &#8212; his father was a noted scholar of Native traditions &#8212; and had been adopted into the Tewa tribe. But until Buffy Sante-Marie appeared on the scene, he was the folk scene&#8217;s most outspoken advocate for Native issues.<\/p>\n<p>LaFarge had come to New York on Josh White&#8217;s suggestion, then became close to Cisco Houston, and his style drew on both of theirs, with his own dramatic additions. It&#8217;s not a style I can listen to for very long anymore, but for a while I was completely smitten.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Johnny Half-Breed&#8221; is fairly typical of LaFarge&#8217;s songwriting, which was workmanlike and tended to tell stories with straightforward messages. <img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-459\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Bitter-Tears-300x299.jpg?resize=246%2C245\" alt=\"Bitter Tears\" width=\"246\" height=\"245\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Bitter-Tears.jpg?w=300&amp;ssl=1 300w, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/02\/Bitter-Tears.jpg?resize=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 246px) 100vw, 246px\" \/>It only recently occurred to me that he probably wrote this one for Johnny Cash, who had recently recorded an album, <em>Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian<\/em>, with five of LaFarge&#8217;s songs on it, including the hit version of &#8220;Ira Hayes.&#8221; The timing is right, and the name, and Cash was presenting himself as part-Native, so it all makes sense.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, shortly after <em>On the Warpath <\/em>came out in 1965, LaFarge died of an overdose of thorazine. I&#8217;d always heard it was suicide, but there seems to be some doubt about that. On balance, he may have been more interesting as a person than as a musician, and I wish someone would get his story down. (In fact, maybe that&#8217;s another project I should consider&#8230;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A message ballad by Peter LaFarge, one of the most respected and least remembered topical songwriters on the early 1960s New York scene.<\/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-457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Johnny Half-Breed (Peter La Farge) - 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I had met Peter sometime in the early 1980s, by lucky happenstance: I was playing a street pitch on Holyoke Plaza in Harvard Square, he was a freshman in Harvard Yard, he'd been\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/11\/EW-and-Peter-Keane-at-passim-poster-1987.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1425,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/random-canyon\/","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":1},"title":"Random Canyon (Peter Stampfel\/Dave Van Ronk)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 12, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Dave Van Ronk regularly finished sets with this surrealist cowboy song by the brilliant Peter Stampfel -- one more among the many debts I owe both of them.","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/van-ronk-polydor.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4704,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/west-texas-waltz\/","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":2},"title":"West Texas Waltz (Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, accordion)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"August 14, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"This is kind of a ringer, since I haven't filmed a live video to go with it, but \"West Texas Waltz\" was the only song I ever performed on diatonic accordion, which kind of required a band, and for a moment I had the band... so I'm posting that version.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/08\/West-Texas-Waltz-EW-cassette-release-scaled-e1660431211470.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":3746,"url":"https:\/\/www.elijahwald.com\/songblog\/hey-now-baby\/","url_meta":{"origin":457,"position":3},"title":"Hey Now, Baby (Professor Longhair)","author":"Elijah Wald","date":"June 2, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"I first heard Professor Longhair on a terrific album of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival -- also the first place I heard Allen Toussaint and Earl King -- and it was love at first listen. 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