The Lord make His face to shine unto you

[fpb]

I am listening to Joan Baez singing Johnny Cash's magnificent anthem to America, "City of New Orleans". It is one of her best performances and one of the greatest pieces of popular music ever composed. It is not even about the tormented city, just about a train named after it, and yet for some reason it is affecting me more about the tragedy of Katrina than anything I have seen or heard. Perhaps because Johnny Cash himself was a product - the greatest product, perhaps - of the rural south, perhaps because the song has something consciously valedictory about the landscape it describes, but I have tears in my eyes. God keep America; she is, in the end, a part of all of us, and all that we have to complain of her is dwarved by what we owe her.

Comments

And give you peace....

[avus.livejournal.com]

As someone whose people started showing up on this side of the pond in 1620, and kept coming -- most recent, my daughter-in-law, who's Irish -- I think we owe the world at least as much. You're right -- we are the world, because the world has given us so much of their best -- their people, their history & culture & customs.

[(Anonymous)]

The City of New Orleans was not written by Cash, but by Steve Goodman, a folksong writer from Chicago.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for letting me know that. Any other classics he wrote?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thanks for bringing Steve Goodman to my attention - I had never heard of him, and he seems to be a major figure (obviously, I've looked him up now). Funny that someone from chicago should have written Is it true what they say about Dixie?, but I guess it goes with Proud Mary being by Creedence Clearwater Revival - who were from San Francisco to a man - and, for that matter, for the finest Neapolitan song of the last fifty years, Don Raffae', being by Fabrizio de Andre', who was from Genoa.