So as I waited for dinner to cook, I searched You Tube for some of his concert performances.
You gotta love You Tube, as you start nearing that mid century mark...
I watched him as he sang "Taxi", " W.O.L.D.", " Sequel" and "Thirty thousand pounds of bananas", "Cats in the Cradle" and of course " Flowers are Red"...
I listened to Harry Chapin a lot, growing up. He always seemed...real...
Him, Jim Croce, John Prine, Kris Kristofferson, Dan Fogelberg...
I think I may now have a clue why I battled depression, those many years ago...
But Harry...he also gave hope...
Long before benifits and causes were popular, he started campaigns against world hunger. His song " The shortest story" described the death and hopelessness of an African baby in a way nothing else ever has.
I have not read or heard of him described as a Christian, but in many ways, he was much more of a missionary than a troubadour...
I used to play guitar a long time ago.
" Play" is being used extremely loosely in this description. I knew about ten chords and could not tell you which key they belonged in. Most of the time, I had tuned the guitar by ear, and it would be kind to say I was tone deaf.
These were my good qualities. It became much worse when the facts of the equation, like a complete and utter lack of rhythm were factored in...
I played guitar when I drank, usually at family "Hootinanies".
My Uncle would play also, usually his guitar or "Git-box" tuned to a completely different key than mine and missing a string or two...
We drank a lot, back then.
But many of my favorite memories were out of tune, also...
I remember nights with aunts and uncles, grandmothers and moms, cousins and assorted in-laws and out- laws...
In most families, that is just a saying..
We sang George Jones and Hank Sr. We sang Conway Twitty and Patsy Cline. We sang John Prine, David Allen Coe and Hank Jr...
We sang Kenny Rogers and Harry Chapin...
All of us,somewhere ten percent, plus or minus, were three sheets to the wind...
There was a barrel outside, below the porch that we sometimes peed in.
My aunt Jamie, A.K.A. " Aunt Wilma" would go outside in the morning, to a quarter filled Rubber Maid trash can of urine.
I was not her favorite nephew. Many nights I would drive up to Corinth and steal her husband, leaving her with a houseful of children to tend too, as we drank our way from bar to bar.
The great thing about Corinth bars was that when you got " barred"( not if, when) it was only for the night. We would crawl home to her screaming and pass out during her tantrums. Day two started at about 10:00 a.m., whiskey in the morning coffee. It was always at least a two day trip.
Sometimes, I had to sleep in my car, but it was always at least two days...
We wrote songs. Some horrid, some halfway decent. I remember almost an entire night that my mom got along with everyone. Of course, three quarters of the way thru it, she demanded one of us drive her home. None of us were in any state to do that, so no one made a big deal of it when she went in our truck, in the middle of the night, to wait for someone to acquiesce her wishes...
She walked back in that October morning, shivering and angry. As we poured whiskey in the coffee, she got mad. If you drank that early inthe morning, she said you had a problem.
Ya think?!?
I have a cousin who was classically trained in violin. She laughed when we called it a fiddle. I remember her listening in a strange mixture of horror and awe. Eventually she just joined the absurdity and fiddled along...
The drinking quickly changed. The fun abandoned us, but the habits lagged behind.
Those were some pretty cool nights...
I think about " Flowers are Red".
It's a song about a child drawing flowers and trees using every color in his crayon pack and the teacher constantly chastising with the phrase " Flowers are red young man and green leaves are green. There's no need to see flowers any other way, than the way they always have been seen".
So the boy is beat down and sings those words to himself, as he colors and draws like his teacher taught. Eventually he goes to another classroom and the new teacher tries everything she can to get him to use all the other colors. The last stanza has him still coloring correctly, quietly singing the the first teachers words...
Harry Chapin protested common core forty years before it was created.
Most every songwriter that I listened to has passed. Truth be told, most died before I was twenty. As I perused You Tube, Dan Fogelberg popped up. I began watching one of his songs as he sat at a piano. I waited for him to move his hands on the keys, but it was just a still shot.
In flowing script, below his picture it said
" 1951-2007 "
We miss you...
I never knew he died. For some strange reason, I was sad.
I listened quietly to "Auld Lang Syne".
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