Prelude to Folk Rock on the Way to Earth Day
Three Important Green Songs Predating the Modern Environmental Movement — And Folk Rock
(Part 3 of the seventeen-part series on songs of the Sixties and the rise of the modern environmental movement. Specifically, the series tracks the influence of environmentally themed songs from the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in late 1962 to the first Earth Day in the spring of 1970.)
Environmentalists have generally considered the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in mid-1962 as the event that marked the beginning of the modern environmental movement. The event that seemed to kick the environmental movement into high gear, in the US at least, came less than a decade later. That would be the first Earth Day in 1970, an event advertised as a nationwide teach-in on environmental issues. In between those two dates, of course, there was a whole lot going on — the assassinations of several political and civil rights leaders, the acceleration of both the Viet Nam War and the anti-war movement, the rise of hippie culture and its attendant celebration of youth, and the maturation of rock ‘n roll into an art form.
Elsewhere I’ve made the case (in “Why Sixties Folk Matters”) that rock’s maturation had much to do with its incorporation of folk elements in the hybrid form of folk rock that dominated the airwaves. In this series on “Tuning into the Natural World: Sixties Folk Rock and the Rise of the Environmental Movement,” I’ll be focusing on the environmentally-themed folk and folk rock songs in the lead-up to the first Earth Day. But just as there were inklings of environmentalism in the culture at large even before Carson’s landmark book hit the shelves, so too were there the beginnings of an environmentalist canon of folk song prior to the folk rock era. In the culture at large, landmark publications included Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac in 1949, Carson’s The Sea Around Us in 1951, Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World in 1953, and Sigurd Olson’s The Singing Wilderness in 1956. It was also in 1956 that Howard Zahnisser began drafting the Wilderness Act, which would not get passed by Congress until 1964. The late ’50s also saw the first demonstrations against nuclear power, with Albert Schweitzer, under the auspices of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, broadcasting a “Declaration of Conscience” against the use (and testing) of nuclear weapons.
Given that there were at least some parts of the culture showing interest in environmental concerns prior to the publication of Silent Spring, it’s not a surprise that some songs in the folk vein began to express those concerns. What is a surprise is that some of those songs are among the most lyrically sophisticated and interesting songs dealing with environmental issues in the folk genre — not just leading up to Earth Day, but ever.
Much has already been said about Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” written way back in 1940. Mark Pedelty, in an excellent reading of the song, explains that Woody was responding to the jingoistic banalities of “God Bless America” and “America the Beautiful,” and so he evoked the American landscape with much more specificity and variety than the lines from “God Bless America: “From the mountains / To the prairies / To the oceans / White with foam.” Woody celebrates “redwood forests” and “Gulf Stream waters,” “diamond deserts,” “wheat fields waving,” and “dust clouds rolling.” But the most noteworthy verses are the ones that are least known, the ones where Woody issues a challenge to the capitalist notion of private property rights:
As I went walking, I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said “No Trespassing.”
But on the other side it didn’t say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
That plea for access to the commons of the American landscape constitutes a more radical challenge to the American economic system than anything in any green song since. There is also a withering depiction of American economic inequality:
In the shadow of the steeple, I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
In short, “This Land Is Your Land” is a protest song grounded in the specifics of the American landscape. It gives us not a sanctified, sanitized, and prettified America, but an America the geographically beautiful and dramatic and sometimes gritty, set amid a political landscape with problems of inequity and injustice.
Another early classic, this one from Britain, is Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town,” written for a play in 1949, and best known by the Dubliners’ 1960s version or The Pogues’ version of 1985. W. H. Auden once defined a poem as “the clear expression of mixed feelings,” and “Dirty Old Town” qualifies. It’s about a love/hate relationship with an industrial town in the north of England. It’s a “dirty old town” where kisses are snatched by a factory wall, and spring comes in on a “smoky wind.” (That was originally a “Salford wind,” a reference to the city MacColl had in mind). The speaker would like to chop the city down like an “old dead tree” with a sharp ax of “shining steel / tempered in the fire.” But despite the smoke and filth of the city, the speaker finds love, or at least affection, amid this blighted urban landscape, and he can see clouds “drifting across the moon.” There is also excitement at hearing a “siren from the docks” or seeing a train “set the night on fire.” The song manages to capture affection for a home place even while critiquing the effects of industrialization in the grime of the city and the pollution in its air.
Interestingly, when literary ecocriticism first boomed in the 1990s, it seemed primarily concerned with wilderness and wilderness preservation. It was only in its so-called “second wave” that ecocritics shifted focus to urban nature and what Scott Hess has called “everyday nature” — in other words the ways that nature, rather than being something encountered only in retreat from the modern world, is inevitably woven into the warp and woof — which is fun to say — of our daily lives. But here, way back in the ’40s was Ewan MacColl in “Dirty Old Town” finding ways of appreciating the natural world even amidst the grimiest of cityscapes.
Appearing at about the same time as Carson’s Silent Spring was published in mid-1962, and on the cusp of the moment when the folk boom began to incorporate the rhythms, drive, and sensibility of rock, Malvina Reynolds’s “What Have They Done to the Rain?” offered a critique of above-ground nuclear testing:
Just a little boy standing in the rain,
The gentle rain that falls for years.
And the grass is gone,
The boy disappears,
And rain keeps falling like helpless tears,
And what have they done to the rain?
This is a bit maudlin, perhaps, with the little boy disappeared, and the rain falling like “helpless tears,” but the concern about the grass being gone makes the environmental concern overt. Note that the song could also be read as expressing concern about acid rain, though that was an environmental concern that arose well after the song was written. What we can see from Reynolds’s song is that the main environmental concern of the day was still nuclear war and fallout. But soon there would be a marked shift and the concerns shifted to worries about other sorts of fallout — the kind resulting from our whole modern way of life.
Works Cited
Hess, Scott, “Imagining an Everyday Nature.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 17.1 (Winter 2010): 85–112.
Pedelty, Mark. Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012.
