I think I could turn and live with animals, they're so placid and self contain'd,….
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.
From Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” 9th edition 1891
As spoken by Pete Seeger, “Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry at Carnegie Hall, 1958.
The year was probably 1961, and I was sitting in the Checkmate Café, a coffee shop in downtown Baltimore when I first heard this album. It was as if a light bulb went off over my head. I bolted to the front to see what this record was. It was amazing! I had never heard anything like it before and I was knocked out. The music, the words of Walt Whitman, all of it! The record album itself was a big, thick, two part thing made by Folkways records, something I’d never heard of. It had a thick booklet with the words and interesting information, different than the normally hard to read record albums I’d seen before.
It changed my life! New music, new artists, stuff I’d never dreamed of.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the earth.
From Leaves of Grass, “Song of Myself” 9th edition 1891
As spoken by Pete Seeger, “Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry at Carnegie Hall, 1958.
The year was probably 1961, and I was sitting in the Checkmate Café, a coffee shop in downtown Baltimore when I first heard this album. It was as if a light bulb went off over my head. I bolted to the front to see what this record was. It was amazing! I had never heard anything like it before and I was knocked out. The music, the words of Walt Whitman, all of it! The record album itself was a big, thick, two part thing made by Folkways records, something I’d never heard of. It had a thick booklet with the words and interesting information, different than the normally hard to read record albums I’d seen before.
It changed my life! New music, new artists, stuff I’d never dreamed of.
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