Here's another song from Pete Seeger's American Favorite Ballads, a wonderful songbook still in print (see my post Pete Seeger Lives Here). I sure had fun with this one. Jesse James is that kind of iconic folk hero who goes down in ballads as a hero regardless of the facts. He robs the rich and gives to the poor, we sing. I changed a line to "He took from the 1 and gave to the 99." We need a lot more of that, only in the form of taxation -) The song portrays Jesse as a Robin Hood character. In reality he was something else - a Confederate sympathizer and a killer, but in the song he lives on as a hero. Damn that Robert Ford! Thank you, Billy Gashade!
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ps. I have updated the blog a few below this one - The US is heading for it's own Ukraine-like crisis to provide a link to the most stunning essay I have read in recent memory. It's about violence in America; it's by Chris Hedges and it resonates especially in the light of the US state of Geogia and it's apalling gun law and the anti-government actions of Nevada ranchers to which our government caved in.
The top two blogs on my site are being left as the latest blogs because I've linked them to a Pandora submission of "Pete Seeger Lives Here."
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ps. I have updated the blog a few below this one - The US is heading for it's own Ukraine-like crisis to provide a link to the most stunning essay I have read in recent memory. It's about violence in America; it's by Chris Hedges and it resonates especially in the light of the US state of Geogia and it's apalling gun law and the anti-government actions of Nevada ranchers to which our government caved in.
The top two blogs on my site are being left as the latest blogs because I've linked them to a Pandora submission of "Pete Seeger Lives Here."
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