For that matter, today’s gangsters are amateurs. They worry about the police. In the Twenties, they OWNED the police, and the mayor, and the judges. And yes, there were drive by shootings. They just used a different car and a different gun.
I understand. Certainly Mary Travers was significant to the sound and the success of the group. I know I thought she was drop dead gorgeous and had the hots for her back in the day, and her voice was divine. I left her out of my note only because she was more vocalist than music writer or arranger.
Yes, by some undefined, clearly supernatural means that defies citation. And is only apparent to our buddy SA.
Don’t worry. I’m coming to enjoy the sound of
<chirp>
<chirp>
**SA **making a substantive reply.
She didn’t do much writing or arranging, but I suspect that, in this particular instance, she may have had something to do with the change. 
But mostly, I thought you did it on purpose and wanted to acknowledge your clever joke. Sometimes things strike me very funny that no one else gets. Just give me your best “ok, weirdo” look and go on - that’s what everyone else does. 
But they weren’t LIBERALS, and they used POLITE LANGUAGE, so that was all OK, see?
No, I’m not discounting you by any means. Thanks for the compliment, but I wasn’t being clever. (Some would say I’m incapable of that, anyway.) Your point about the conjoined history of alcohol and organized crime is spot on. And you’re almost certainly quite right about Mary’s influence. Maybe for that very reason, I think this is an interesting and even an appropriate sidebar.
The original authors of the Hammer Song, Pete and Lee, were surely liberals by anyone’s definition. Their politics was left leaning so far that ‘socialist’ wouldn’t have been wide of the mark. That’s what got them blacklisted by McCarthy in the first place, their association with dirty Commies. So I think their membership in the vast liberal conspiracy is irrefutable.
But despite being card carrying liberals at the, shall we say, cutting edge of contemporary social change, they were in many ways a product of their own times. The phrasing “…all of my brothers…” came right out of depression-era protest songs a la Woody Guthrie. It had a liberal bent, and was used in the most inclusive and even expansionist way, as a reference to all fellow travelers toward freedom. It was a completely liberal statement uttered by people who were unquestionably ultra-liberals.
And yet it totally ignored fully half the population, and a half that had its own special history of oppressive usages, to boot.
Why? I’ll argue that it was merely oversight, a mental inertia even the most progressive thinkers are sometimes subject to. In 1949, womens’ liberation wasn’t a meme let alone a political movement. Pete and Lee just hadn’t thought of it yet, at least not in those terms. That came later, and indeed the recognition that it was necessary, as well as the means by which it could be carried forward, were both left to such as Peter, Paul and Mary to advance in the 60s as a further expansion of liberal philosophy.
For SA to denigrate liberals and malign the positive benefits liberal ideals have provided for mankind, given the actual history, just frosts me.
Like country music?
-Joe
Yeah, but give credit where credit is due; they cheated on their taxes.
Mary Travers was a plant, recruited by Whitaker Chambers to disrupt the left by homogenizing folk/protest music to a bland paste suitable for church basement outreach-to-youth meetings. A back story of a lefty “red diaper” childhood was created by a KGB blackmailed by pictures of J. Edgar Hoover and Malenkov. She was actually born in Germany, in 1937, the natural daughter of…but I’ve said too much. I usually do.
Say that like Edward G Robinson, see? yeah, see? yeah you mugs, see?
Irrelevant! Vietnam was obviously the result of conservative philosophy.
But I don’t self-identify as a liberal.
I think I need to start a new thread.
Back during the Cold War, both liberals AND conservatives were pretty hardcore when it came to being anti-communist. Their approaches may have been different, yes, but no one wanted to seem “soft on communism.”
ISTM that reinforces my point.
I’m Canadian, which by the standards of some Americans practically makes me a communist, yet I hate communism, and not for expedient political reasons, either.
Just sayin’.
Well, I don’t identify as a communist either, but thanks to McCarthy I do not feel like starting another thread.
C’mon 'luc, you’re supposed to be bashing SA here, not “outing” my heroes! Er, heroines. Damn you!
Now I have (sob!) nothing good remaining in my life. My fantasies have been trampled into the dust. My fondest memories are revealed as a transparent illusion. (choke)
I blame it all on liberal philosophy.
Exactly!
Well, women’s lib had actually been around for quite a while, just not under that name. But you’re correct that even extreme liberals like Seeger and Hayes didn’t give it much thought back then. Not knocking them, I’m a huge fan. It’s just a fact of how things were.
Others were worse, though, cf the Black Panthers. Wasn’t it one of them that pissed off the libbers so bad by saying something about women’s place in the Movement? Can’t think of the name at the moment…
luc - don’t be knocking Mary, now. :mad::mad: