Songs With Roots in History
Posted On December 10, 2013
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Some songs are about feelings (“Sea of Heartbreak“). Others are about situations (John Prine’s “Hello in There“).
And some are factual, almost reportorial. That’s the case with two of my favorite songs on war, The Band’s Civil War lament, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” which focuses on the horrific Battle of Gallipoli in World War I.
Anoter song of this sort is my ballad “Arlington.” The song grew out of an experience in the early 2000s. I was in Washington on assignment as a reporter for The New York Times, heading into the city from the airport on the Metro.
At the Arlington stop, a family dressed mainly in black got on the train. I heard them chatting about the funeral they’d attended (a Vietnam vet) and someone mentioned that the preacher noted Arlington was slowly running out of room. Fascinated, I did some sifting, sensing a story. But John Woestendiek of the Baltimore Sun had already done an amazing feature exploring this issue. The cemetery was hosting two dozen funerals a day (“gray veterans and fresh fallen”).
I began noodling in my favorite guitar tuning (dadgad) around the core question: “Where will they go when there’s no more room in Arlington?“
I did more homework on the strange history of the cemetery, which included some bizarre twists: “To spite that rebel Robert Lee, we took away his land.”
The song percolated for awhile as I settled on chords and melody lines. My Hudson Valley neighbor and friend Pete Seeger scribbled some ideas for shifts in lyrics in 2005.
A former New York Times videographer, Craig Duff, was smitten with the result and in 2006 we shot a video at the cemetery and produced a musical commentary for The Times on the history and future of this last resting place for America’s defenders. That version of the song was by my onetime band, Uncle Wade.
But I wanted to take another go at it. Dar Williams, who had heard it a few times (she’s a neighbor), offered to lend her voice. Ben Neill’s trumpet echoes over the phrase about the frequency of burials: “Bugles blow and caissons roll two dozen times each day. At that rate in 15 years, there’ll be no room to lay… in Arlington.“
Here’s a new video version, built around images from the Library of Congress:
What are your favorite songs steeped in specific bits of history?