***Songs To While The Time By- The Roots Is The Toots- The Music That Got Them Through World War II-Peggy Lee Backed By The Benny Goodman Band- Duke Ellington's I Got It Bad

 

 

Over the past several years I have been running an occasional series in this space of songs, mainly political protest songs, you know The Internationale, Union Maid, Which Side Are You On, Viva La Quince Brigada, Universal Soldier, and such entitled Songs To While The Class Struggle By. This series which could include some protest songs as well is centered on roots music as it has come down the ages and formed the core of the American songbook. You will find the odd, the eccentric, the forebears of later musical trends, and the just plain amusing here. Listen up-Peter Paul Markin       

Additional Markin comment for this series:

Whether we liked it or not, whether we even knew of it or not, this is the music that went wafting through the house of many of those of us who constitute the Generation of “68. Those of us who came of age, personal, political and social age in the age of Jack Kennedy’s Camelot and who slogged through that decade whether it be in civil rights/black liberation struggle, the anti-Vietnam War struggle or the struggle to find one’s own identity in the counter-culture before the hammer came down.

This is emphatically the music of the generation of ’68 parents’ generation, the generation that survived the dust bowl hard times of the 1930s Great Depression. Survived by taking the nearest freight, Southern Pacific, Union Pacific, B&O, Illinois Central, Penn Central, Empire State, Boston and Maine, or one of a million trunk lines to go out and search for, well, search something that was not cold-water flat, rooming house, tumbled down shack, and get out on the open road and search for the great promised American night that had been tattered by world events, and greed. Survived the Hoovervilles, the soup kitchens, the scroungings of the trash piles of the urban glut, the rural fallow fields, and that gnarring hungry that cried out in the night-want, want that is all.  Survived the look, the look of those who in their fortified towers tittered that not everybody was built to survive to be the fittest. Survived too to slog through the time of the gun in World War II, either carrying one on the shoulder in Europe or the Pacific or waiting at home hoping to high heaven that some gun had not carried off sweetheart Johnnie or Jimmy.          

It wafted through the large console radio centered in the living room of my house via local station WDJA in North Adamsville as my mother used it as background on her appointed household rounds. It drove me crazy then as mush stuff at a time when I was craving the big break-out rock and roll sounds I kept hearing every time I went and played the jukebox at Doc’s Drugstore over on Walker Street down near the beach. Funny thing though while I am still a child of rock and roll (blues too) this so-called mushy stuff sounds pretty good to these ears now long after my parents and those who performed this music have passed on. Go figure. 

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I Got It Bad 

 

The poets say that all who love are blind
But I'm in love and I know what time it is
The good book says, "Go seek and ye shall find"
Well, I have sought and my, what a climb it is!

My life is just like the weather
It changes with the hours
When he's near I'm fair and warmer
When he's gone I'm cloudy with showers

An emotion like the ocean
It's either sink or swim
When a woman loves a man
Like I love him

Never treats me sweet and gentle, the way he should
I got it bad and that ain't good
My poor heart is sentimental, not made of wood
I got it bad and that ain't good

But when the weekend's over and Monday rolls around
I end up like I started out just cryin' my lil' heart out
He don't love me like I love him
No, nobody could, I got it bad and that ain't good

So bad, so bad

I got on it so bad, so bad though folks with good intentions
Tell me to save my tears
I'm glad, I'm mad about you, I can't live without you
Lord above me make him love me the way he should

Like a lonely weeping willow lost in the wood
The things I tell my pillow
No woman should
I got it bad, bad so bad and that ain't good