Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:09] Speaker B: This is the Nathan's and Roncast, the podcast about the songcraft and musicianship behind the songs we love. And today is part two of our conversation with Spook Handy. Spook talks about how Woody Guthrie had the idea for the song this Land Is yous Land, and how Pete Seeger helped him edit the song into the song. You know, today. He also talks about the important role that property rights played in the writing of the song.
[00:00:32] Speaker C: Spook played with Pete more than 50 times. And he talks about his interactions with the folk music legend. He talks about how Pete used old melodies to address current circumstances, thus making the new song sound familiar. Here's part two of our interview.
[00:00:49] Speaker B: Judging by some of Woody's other work, his critique of America here is rather mild. But apparently Pete seemed to see right to the heart of what Woody was saying. What was the critique? What was Woody saying?
[00:01:03] Speaker A: I would say that Pete and Woody were both patriots. Pete and Woody both loved America. They were not against America. They thought that America could do better. And so if we go back to the beginning, it was Thomas Jefferson, when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, drew on sources that came before him, the Enlightenment, and even all the way back to the Greeks. And in those sources were identified not three, but four inalienable rights. Three that we know. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But there was a fourth one, property. Now, if you go back to the time of the Greeks, or even still at the time of the American Revolution, but before that, you know, before capitalism really took off, you knew the guy who made your table or you made it yourself. These things had personal value. They weren't IKEA things that everybody has the same table that's made by a machine and you just screw it together. Possessions, told who the person was. You built your own house. You did all this and all that. But by the 1700s, property became also the owning of other human beings. And Thomas Jefferson, as much of an enigma as he turned out to be, he's the only signer of the Declaration of Independence who did not free his slaves upon his death. And yet he put in a couple things in the Declaration of Independence that were very important in the freeing of slaves, in the end of slavery, ending of slavery. And that is, he wrote that all men are created equal. And he left out the word property. So if we fast forward, we get to a point where we're getting into the late 1800s and early 1900s, and capitalism is roaring, industrialism is roaring, and we now have people working 60 hours a week in factories and not having Personal ownership in the stuff that they're making. And people who loved America and loved the vision of it believed that the next step was something that resembled communism, and that included not owning personal property. So now, where Woody came down on that, I cannot say. But you can go from one end of the spectrum to the other, where one case, he might not have believed in private property at all. I'd be surprised about that. What's more likely is that in the 20s and the 30s and into the 40s, open space in America was being privatized. So there was a time when you could get on your horse and go out to Oklahoma and have thousands and thousands of square miles of unclaimed open space where the buffalo roamed. And, you know, you could set up camp, cook a meal, and go on hunting and all that stuff like that. But you'll see in lots of stories, including this song, fences were going up, walls were going up, dividing American people from the American landscape. And so there was a movement in that direction to be kind of against the sign that says private property. Now, Pete Seeger being the incredible genius he was on so many levels, he was also a genius performer, a genius storyteller. And I had just been hanging around him for about a year or so. And we were playing at a benefit concert for a fellow who was running for city council in Cold Spring, N.Y. and Pete sang this land is your land. And in the middle of the song tells a story. And he kept it short, but he told the story that Woody Guthrie searched high and low looking for words that rhymed with property. And he came up with not one word, but two words, stop me. And so he sings the line was a great high wall there that tried to stop me was a great big sign there said private property. And on the other side, the sign said nothing. That side was made for you and me.
[00:04:39] Speaker C: I love that.
[00:04:40] Speaker A: It's a nice verse. It says something. But to know the story behind it is like, wow, that is mind blowing, man. It is wild. So. So it brings us to a whole entire philosophy and a whole entire understanding of history of public space and property rights in America.
[00:04:56] Speaker C: One of the rights that I think of as related to, like, national land or state land and the right to have access, even if your land doesn't touch the public land, specifically, there was a right to have access that I always knew about as a kid growing up in Arizona, because you could hike through the desert and, you know, you could walk through someone's property to get to that national land. If you were close Enough. And I always appreciated knowing that I could walk through somewhere as long as I respect that property and be a nice human to other humans. It was always okay.
[00:05:28] Speaker A: Now, this is a wonderful thing, because if we can do that, then we have a more cohesive society. So instead of singing a song that says, I have the right to tell you not to come on my property, which you probably do, but he's promoting something that's more communal, something that's more shared, something that's more about the connectedness between the people who live in a community or in a society. So in a way, it's building up as opposed to tearing down. And if you look at the entirety of the song, I say that this song that I learned in kindergarten is in many ways one of the most subversive songs that has ever been written. Because if you look at the word subvert, it means to turn over or turn under, like you're digging up the ground and flipping, flipping it over. And I will accept that and I will profess that America is founded on a principle, many principles, but one of them is that all people are created equal. But we were not founded on the principle that this land was made for you and me. However, I learned that in kindergarten because of the song. And to this day, there are serious political divisions about whether we believe that as a nation, that this land was made for you and me, or whether this land is only for certain people, whether that be because of the color of their skin or their religion or their economic power. It's a real question. But I grew up believing that, and that is woven into my DNA, that this land was made for you and me so now let's learn to live in harmony. And I learned so much about this stuff. Like, you know, how do you live in harmony? Well, we find consensus. How do you do that? Et cetera, et cetera. What is consensus? How is that different than majority rule, so on and so forth? Because if we're gonna have a common nation, a common land, a common society, common culture, we need to learn how to live in harmony.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: It seems like so much of society over the last few years, especially starting with the pandemic, just our inability as a society to come to that kind of consensus, to figure out how to live in harmony. And certainly today, politically, everybody is still at each other's throats.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you, if you ask me who won the American Revolution, I would ask you which American Revolution you're talking about. Because if you're talking about the war for political independence, well, Obviously, America won, that we have an independent country with an independent Congress, so on and so forth. But if you talk about the idea that people can govern themselves versus being governed by a monarch or a pope or an industrial tycoon or governed by money, that battle has never been settled. And there have been since the beginning, people who want to consolidate power and consolidate resources and have control over other people. So I think that that's a tension that will probably always exist. This song indoctrinates how you like that, indoctrinates into young minds from the very beginning that, well, this land was made for you and me.
[00:08:17] Speaker B: What about the idea of intellectual property in terms of. Pete had something to say about the respectful using of other people's creative work. Can you speak to that?
[00:08:26] Speaker A: Yeah. So when Pete was around, things were quite different than they are now. One is that it was easier to put your name on stuff that no one else had previously put their name on and claimed the copyright, the right to copy it. And it was also a lot easier to be compensated for the work that you did. Today, it's very difficult to get compensated for the work that you do in the artistic worlds. So what Pete did and what Woody did, even more so I think Woody taught this to Pete is that you can take old melodies and hopefully soft melodies that are in the public domain and build on them. Now, this is profoundly important to understand. When Pete wrote, for instance, where have all the Flowers Gone? First of all, he got the idea from a Ukrainian poem that was essentially about men going off the war and dying and leaving their spouses behind to do all the work. And how is it that boys grow up always going whack, whether it be with a stick on the ground or with a sword on another person's neck or with a gun, and girls are more domestic and think about stuff like collecting flowers. That was a poem that led to the idea of the song. But behind that. Now, I've never heard Pete tell this exactly this way. I've pieced things together about what he has said. He often talked about boys growing up and wanting to go whack. That's what he said. And I'll tell you, I have a nephew who's now 7, but when he was 3, the nicest, smartest, cutest, politest kid, and he would still find a stick and smack a tree with it. He eventually was given a golf club, a baseball bat, a tennis racket, and he started going whack with those things. So the idea is that if there's any truth to this Idea that boys have this innate desire to go whack, to hit things. Well, we could do it in a constructive way. Why not put an axe in our hands and get us to chop wood and maybe build something? So here's the genius of it. The melody of where have all the Flowers Gone? Is derived from an Irish lumberjack song. Now, I don't know if Pete ever did that on purpose, if he was intentionally thinking, here's a melody that is already associated with going whack, and I'm going to write a song about going whack in a way that promotes peace. I'm going to write a song that promotes peace that still talks about going whack. So we're going to have the going whack melody, but it's going to be a song about peace. The idea behind this is that we don't have to invent things from the beginning. And so this goes back to the very first thing Pete said to me was actually a question. He asked me, do you know what Founder's Disease is? He invited me to the festival. It was actually Indigenous Peoples Day 2003, although very few people called it that at the time. And I got to the festival, and not knowing much about Pete Seeger or even what he looked like, I had to ask someone to point him out. And he was standing about 15ft away from me, surprisingly, by himself. And I walked up to him and I extended my hand, and I said, hi, I'm Spook Handy. And I expected him to shake my hand and say, hi, I'm Pete Seeger. But instead, he put his hands in his pockets and he bent down about 2 inches to my level. He was 6 foot 2 at the time. He used to be 6 foot 3, but he was now 84 years old. And he looked me in the eyes, and I immediately saw this person I'm meeting for the first time had these incredibly brilliant blue eyes shining with wisdom, compassion, intelligence. And he wasn't just looking into my eyes. I felt that he was looking through my eyes and looking to see who this person was that called himself Spook Handy. And he asked me, do you know what Founders Disease is? And I was lucky enough to be smart enough to say, you tell me, because. Because I had heard it before. I said, you tell me. And he said, founders Disease is when the same people who founded an organization 30 years ago are still running it today. And with that, he turned and walked away. And that was the entirety of our first conversation.
[00:12:23] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:12:24] Speaker A: And I stood there as if I was struck by lightning. Wondering what the heck was that?
[00:12:32] Speaker C: Wow.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: But. But knowing by trusting that that was going to be one of the most important conversations I ever had in my life. So over the next 10 years, when I, you know, had the fortune, I played with Pete more than 50 times. And we talked on the phone for hours, probably hundreds of hours. And, you know, we. We were backstage together and at festivals and stuff like that. Over the years, I would get clues about how to conquer Founders disease. And one of them is, you start off by learning the old ways, learning the old songs. Learn the old songs. Learn then the different ways that they were sung by different groups of people, but change the words to keep them up to date. Write new verses about the world we live in today, and write new songs that everybody can sing. So what you're doing is you're not reinventing folk music. Or if you want to apply this to carpentry or to cooking or to child rearing, same thing. Learn what people have tried before, see what works. See if things have to change to adapt to the current circumstance and make those changes. And you build on that. So the same thing happens with respectfully borrowing from what has been before us, because we're the most effective in presenting our messages when they're both familiar and unique at the same time. Sailing down my golden river Life and sun are all my own Yet I was never alone Deck the halls with bowels of Holly. You know, there's a song that Pete wrote, beautiful song, Deck the Halls with Bowser Holly. Or you can go with the descending diatonic scale. Think of the song Joy to the World.
It's just a descending scale, but it's got a little bit of rhythm.
So here's a song that's immediately familiar and unique at the same time. Pete was not just about being a musician. He was not just about writing songs. He was about making the world a better place. And music was a powerful tool he knew how to use to do that. And so if you want music and new songs to be effective, find a way that they can be both familiar and unique at the same time. And so we borrow from melodies that have gone before us, and we change them up to make them work for the current circumstances.
[00:14:54] Speaker B: That's fascinating. How do you apply Pete's lessons toward your work going forward?
[00:14:58] Speaker A: Well, a couple things. So I wrote a song that was very, very proud of. I wrote it on the day after election day, 2016. It's called always have a Song to Sing. And it builds on the hammer of justice, the bell of freedom, and the Song that we sing, that song about love between all of our brothers and all of our sisters. And so here you go. That's what Pete said in another song. He said, regardless of the color of our skin or the shape of our eyes or the language that we speak, and I've added to that, or who we love or how we identify. So picking up on what's gone before, using what works and adapting it to today, we have issues, prejudices, and all kinds of stuff like that that are not just about race and color and language. They're also about people's sexuality and their identity, you know, so we. We add that in. Now, when I wrote the song, I thought it had a great melody, but I remember Pete asking me, so I wrote this in 2016, and sometimes I would play songs, my original songs for him. And one song I sang and he said, that's a nice song, spook, but how are you going to get people to sing it?
You know, I said, I don't know. What do I do? He said, listen to what other people have done. You know, one of those things might work or try something new that no one else has done. So I've always had that thought. And when I was, you know, way past the creative process, I tend to write three minute songs in five minutes, but it takes days or weeks or months to polish them up. And so I was looking at the melody of the chorus and, you know, the melody's not that easy to sing. It's a little too complicated. So I had to simplify it and I understand that, you know, oh, I wrote this great melody, you know, wow, look at this. I can write a great melody, but what is the use of that in that particular song? There's other songs that have great melodies that are great for people to listen to, but this is a song for people to sing. And so it was important to recognize the function of the chorus and to simplify the melody so it would be easier for people to sing along to. So that's one of the ways that that philosophy has reached into my songwriting. The same thing lyrically, you know, the very song I'm singing about right now, always have a song to sing. And I sing about the hammer of justice. Well, the hammer of justice came out of the labor movement and actually came out of the civil rights movement within the labor movement. And that's why they used the symbol of the hammer, John Henry's hammer, which was the symbol of the working man. It's even in the hammer and sickle. Not to be confused. That If I Had a Hammer has anything to do with communism, but the fact that hammer has to do with work, with labor. And the civil rights movement needed people to do work, and so we had this hammer to do the work. But the hammer is also in the courtroom is the hammer of justice, you know, so we're taking images that are already in the culture and adapting them to the circumstances at the time. So I'm going on and taking the hammer. By the way, just in case people aren't familiar, Pete and Lee Hayes together wrote if I Had a hammer in 1949. And it's a song that tells us that we have the tools to shape our society. We have the hammer of justice, the bell of freedom, and a song to sing, a song about love between our brothers and our sisters all over this land. And I'm going on and saying this is my viewpoint, but it's my song, and I'm saying that the song is the most important thing. That song of love is the most important thing. So may we always, always, always have a song to sing.
[00:18:13] Speaker B: Well, I think that's a good note to end on, unless there's anything else you wanted to say that we haven't touched on already.
[00:18:18] Speaker A: Well, there's tons of stuff to say, but what I see you guys are doing is you're helping carry on the tradition, too. You know, your music is rooted in stuff that's come before, so it's got familiarity in it, but you're taking it in new directions. And even doing this podcast here is really cool because you're getting people to, you know, not just be listeners, but you're addressing their curiosity. And it's a wonderful thing also to connect your own music that you've created yourself with music that has come before you. And there's no way in the world that you're not influenced by this land is your land, whether you know it or not, whoever you are.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: So I appreciate being invited onto your show. I'm actually very happy to be invited on and talk about Woody, and I'll talk about Pete, and I'll talk about my own stuff anytime.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: It's an honor to have you.
[00:19:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Thank you for coming on. It is an honor. You're a selfless soul who really just tries to bring people together out there in the world through music.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: I'm going to end on this note. One of the last songs that Pete wrote is a song called Keep the Flame Alive. And if you listen to it, on the surface, it's about keeping the fire in the fireplace. Going. But if you listen deeper, it's the flame of liberty, it's the flame of folk music, It's a flame of what you and I are doing. And so I'm going to end thanking you folks and telling you, and I wish everybody that we may continue to keep the flame alive.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: Here's Spookhandy's song Vote, which he describes as an accidental hit folk song. It's the song that first got him invited to play with Pete, which sparked their longtime collaboration.
[00:19:56] Speaker D: Vote don't you never mind the weather. Get your foot in the boot and pull down the lever Boat for worse, all for better. Let your voice be heard.
Now that's a lot of words, folks. So I'll teach you the first half.
The first half is Vote. Don't you never mind the weather. Get your butt in the booth and pull down the lever. Let's give that a try.
Vote don't you never mind the weather. Get your but in the booth.
Vote for worse or for better, Let your voice be heard.
Vote for worse or for better, let your voice be heard. Let's try all together, both. Don't you never mind the weather. Get your butt in the booth and pull down the lever.
Worse, all the better. Let your voice be heard.
Wow, you guys are like the best audience I've had.
No, wait a minute.
No, you know, you know, I played this nursing home earlier, this.
You guys have something to live up to.
When politicians come to town and kiss babies till their noses turn brown. You can bet your $5 they want your vote so speak your mind to cult Believe it or not this world has become a big melting pot. It's easy to get yourself lost in the box. Cause the world's made up of all kinds of people. So never mind the rabbit in your fucking booth and pull down the lever.
Worse, all the better, let your voice be heard.
We got fuzzy headed pink slub and carriage on the farmer boy skin hanging neo Nazi face fashion paranoid spat cats sit back scoffing at the tabloids. Yep.
And there's cross burning homophobic churchgoing family types Black burning anti war give the poor mortar types out of school know it all clip claver prototypes the world's made up of all kinds of people. So never mind the weather get your butt in the moon A worse, all for better Let your voice be heard.
You know, when Pete Seeger heard this song the first time, when he heard that last verse, he got a little concerned because he thought that those words were going to offend like half the people in the audience.
But when he heard the next verse, he was relieved because he found out that the other half would be offended also.
Equal opportunity for everybody.
We got men hating, aggravating, right wing feminist, pro life clinic burning, gospel preaching terrorists, city dwelling unemployed folks who can't stand it no more sky joking, river killing, free market advocates, tree loving, owl hugging pro environmentalists, urban folk high on dope Raising up the clinch is the world's made up of all kinds of people. So don't you never mind the weather Hitch bug in the moon and fall down the lever boat for worse or for better Let your voice be heard.
Now farmer Josh lives up on the mountain, Grows his own food, Drinks from mother Nature's fountain and only gets down in the town around woke up and all the pretty young gals from the nearby high school Stop by his farm cause they think he's so cool Chewing on wheat grass, spitting out philosophy he says looking at life cosmologically we're all cells in the body of the Almighty and with godlike nature we create our own real.
But down here on earth that's a different ball of wax. We gotta eat and pay all kinds of taxes and form governments that have laws that pass Cause the world's made up of all kinds of people. So nevermind the weather. Get your butt in the booth and pull down whoever flows for worse or for better. Let your voice be heard. You gotta sound like you're having a lot of fun out there. I think he outdid that nursing home I did last week.
We'll sing it one more time. Cause you see there was this. I played at this bris about three weeks ago.
We'll see if you guys can top that one more time.
Don't you never mind the way the worse are the better. Let your voice be heard.
