Sixties Folk Rock’s Greenest Songs: #5–2
Gotta Get Down to It in the Top 40 Countdown: Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell
Part 13 of an eighteen-part series on Sixties folk rock 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. Happy listening!
5. Tom Paxton, “Whose Garden Was This?,” 1970
Written specifically for the first Earth Day celebration, “Whose Garden Was This?” strikes the apocalyptic note that we see in other songs of the era and that probably owes something to the opening chapter of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Like Silent Spring, Paxton’s song expresses concerns about declining bird populations and “silent” forests; while Paxton never mentions pesticides, after Carson every tree hugger worth his bark was aware of that threat. “Whose Garden Was This?” also hits common themes of the era in its concerns about air and water pollution: the river no longer running freely, the oceans no longer blue, blue skies now grey, the end of breezes (though I confess I’m not sure what sort of environmental apocalypse leads to the death of wind and zephyr!).
There is evidence too of artful crafting with words in “Whose Garden Was This?” Paxton manages to include appeals to four of the five senses, mostly in terms of absence: the smell of flowers, the feel of breezes, the sounds of birds. And then there are the recurring references to colors long gone — blues and greens reduced to grey — helping us see what is no longer there to be seen. The song also presents us with an interesting rhetorical situation, with a future speaker who has not seen the natural world as we know it in conversation with someone from our era — now grown old in the song’s time frame — who can still remember the extant natural world. It’s essentially a dramatic monologue, with the dramatic situation of a future world where paradise has been lost (hence the reference to the paradise lost of an Edenic garden), recalled only in photos and on records, and with an addressee who never speaks.
If we are looking for other literary influences in “Whose Garden Was This?” beyond Silent Spring and the Book of Genesis, we might glance in the direction of Paxton’s fellow Oklahoman Woody Guthrie. This is a topical song written for a specific occasion, like Woody’s Columbia River songs. And I can’t help but wonder about the recurring possessive pronouns in Paxton’s song — whose garden was this? Whose river? Whose sky? Whose forest? Is this an echo of Woody’s critique of capitalism, as evidenced for example in Woody’s “This Land Is Your Land” — where he says that the other side of the “No Trespassing” sign, the side with nothing written on it, that side was made “for you and me”? Did the sin of private ownership lead to the demise of the natural world? Talk about subversive content. For all the graceful lilt of the tune, Paxton, it seems, is dealing with some serious environmental themes here.
4. Judy Collins, “Farewell to Tarwathie,” 1970 (words by George Scroggie, circa 1850)
The poem by George Scroggie — a miller from Aberdeenshire on the east coast of Scotland — is a lament by a departing sailor, leaving friends and his beloved behind as he sets out on a whaling voyage. The ship is headed for Greenland, where “the land and the ocean are covered in snow,” a place “barren and bare” where the “king of that country is the fierce Greenland bear.” Their destination is described mainly in negatives: “no seed-time nor harvest is ever known there,” there are no birds to sing to the whales, and there is “no habitation” to be found, nothing to tempt one to “tarry long there.” And so as soon possible, envisions the embarking speaker, with “a ship bumper-full we will homeward repair.” It’s a poem full of earnest sentiments, and the melody is haunting and beautiful. That melody, in fact, is also the tune for the traditional “Waggoner’s Lad” and, via the Scroggie song, for Dylan’s “Farewell, Angelina.”
What is so brilliant about Judy Collins’s version, beyond the usual crystal clarity of her voice, is the inclusion of humpback whale song to accompany the lover-sailor’s lament. The story goes that bio-acoustician Roger Payne brought a reel-to-reel tape recording of humpback songs backstage to Collins at one of her concerts and urged her to do something with it. The song became the centerpiece of her 1970 Whales and Nightingales album; Payne had a smash hit the same year with his own original recordings of the whales, an album called Songs of the Humpback Whale. Undoubtedly both albums had much to do with the success of the ensuing Greenpeace movement to “Save the Whales.”
In Collins’s “Farewell to Tarwathie” the songs of whaler and whale make a rich counterpoint. According to the sailor’s lament, the whales are only a source of potential wealth; he embarks on the journey “in hopes to find riches in hunting the whale.” All the sailor’s compassion is reserved for the “fair lass” and the “companions” he leaves behind. It’s told completely from the human perspective, and of course we human listeners sympathize with his plight. But Collins makes it a duet, where the whales get their say and raise their voices as part of the lover’s lament. And we get that they, too, may be singing of such things as love and loss, of departure and sorrow, of the depths of our feelings for the ones we love and the places we call home. And it all becomes more poignant when we consider that human hunting is the source for the sorrows that the whales might be expressing. It’s their lament as well as the departing sailor’s.
3. Cat Stevens, “Where Do the Children Play?,” 1969
The chorus indicates a light touch in the rhetorical attack here — it’s the simple unanswered question of the title, but it follows a series of descriptions of modern innovations/depredations that eat away at the natural world: “jumbo planes,” “cosmic trains,” skyscrapers that “crack the sky” and “fill the air” (building “higher till there’s no more room up there”), roads that roll “over fresh green grass,” on and on “till it seems that you can’t get off.” (Is there a possible sexual pun there — without the natural world we can’t “get off” anymore?) Tied in with the sprawl of the architecture of modernism is a concomitant control of the human spirit: “Will you make us laugh / Will you make us cry / Will you tell us when to live / Will you tell us when to die.”
2. Joni Mitchell, “Big Yellow Taxi,” 1970
The classic refrain sums up the environmentalist theme: “They paved paradise, and they put up a parking lot.” The terms “deforestation” and “habitat loss” weren’t tossed around much in the Sixties, but no song ever better captures the all-too-common frustration we have all felt at the loss of wondrous natural places in the name of the almighty dollar. (I’m looking at you, Wal-Mart.) Mitchell was apparently responding to development in Hawaii, where a resort, including a “pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot,” had gone up. She was clearly acquainted with Silent Spring, as evidenced in this verse:
Hey farmer, farmer, put away your DDT now.
Give me spots on my apples,
But leave me the birds and the bees.
That’s a clever line, with “the birds and the bees” reference punning on sexual activity (in the era of free love) to point out the nature of the loss from excessive pesticide use — there would be no more reproductive success for too many species.
The final stanza always leaves me wondering about the shift from global concerns about destruction of natural environments to the seemingly narrower focus on a personal relationship — when she hears the “screen door slam” and a “big yellow taxi took away my old man.” It’s one more thing where it always seems “to go / that we don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.” But by placing that at the end, doesn’t that make the loss of her man seem like the ultimate loss — even bigger than losing the world? Maybe that was a gesture to keep the song from straying too far from the pop song’s traditional territories of young love and lost love. And it is telling that three of the four stanzas are clearly about our relationships with the natural world. That’s the love and the loss that commands the bulk of the speaker’s attention through the song.
1. And the number one environmental song of the folk rock era is . . . drum roll, please (but for Pete’s sake — Seeger, that is — no interminable drum or electric guitar solo) . . . deserving of its own fully developed post. So stay tuned.
