Turn! Turn! Turn!, Byrds (1965)

While I'm on the subject of harmony groups one of whose members later joined Crosby, Stills & Nash, and since it's Pete Seeger's 90th birthday tomorrow, I might as well give the high five to my favorite Seeger song, the Byrds' version of Turn! Turn! Turn!

It was pretty well known at the time that the song was adapted from the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes by Seeger, which was quite odd for that time - or any time, really. Somehow in its mellow and melodious presentation, and with America's involvement in the war in Vietnam beginning with a vengeance, it all worked. Other than minor edits and changes in the order of certain words, the most significant revision Seeger made to the Biblical text was the "I swear it's not too late" that followed "a time for peace." He describes how it came about here.

Interesting how it got in the hands of the Byrds. When guitar virtuoso Jim aka "Roger" McGuinn was a mere slip of a boy - well a teenager actually - he was accomplished enough from playing acoustically in Chicago coffee houses to be asked to accompany the then-popular folk trio the Limeliters, who were based in L.A. but saw him perform during a visit to the area.

Although probably a natural talent, McGuinn studied hard to become proficient in the guitar and acquire a comprehensive grounding in the folk repertoire, enrolling in the Old Town School of Folk Music, where the Chicago folk music community congregated, and where he learned guitar from future Weaver Frank Hamilton. This served as his platform for subsequently mastering the 5-string banjo and his signature 12-string.

After he graduated from high school, he moved to California and for a time did work as an accompanist for the Limeliters, then for the Chad Mitchell Trio, and yet later for Bobby Darin. No slouch, he. During an interval when Darin retired temporarily from performing due to losing his voice, McGuinn was asked to work as a songwriter for Darin's music publishing company in the Brill Building in New York. In fact, McGuinn credits Darin with showing him the ropes of being a successful performer.

Moving on from there, McGuinn then recorded with the Irish Ramblers, Hoyt Axton and Simon and Garfunkel when they were still called the generic Tom & Jerry. What does any of this have to do with Turn! Turn! Turn!, the song McGuinn has said he would want to play on his 12-string Rickenbacker if he could only play one other song before he dies? I'm getting to that!

During this period, McGuinn arranged and played on Judy Collins' version of Seeger's song. Seeger had written it in 1959 and there is a 1962 recording of it on a rare live album from a Bitter End performance, Bitter and the Sweet. In due time McGuinn returned to California, intent upon establishing a solo career. He soon caught the eye of Gene Clark who, like him, felt that melding folk with the new rock beat that had blown in from England was the only response to the British Invasion's challenge to the folk music movement. Throw in young David Crosby, and soon the first three Byrds took off, later joined by Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke.

Happy birthday Pete!

The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Wimoweh, Mbube (1961,1952,1939)

"It has logged nearly three centuries' worth of continuous radio airplay in the U.S. alone. It is the most famous melody ever to emerge from Africa, a tune that has penetrated so deep into the human consciousness over so many generations that one can truly say, here is a song the whole world knows." - Rian Malan, In the Jungle, Rolling Stone, May 25, 2000

Under the heading of "I did not know that" comes the backstory to how the baby boomer generation - and several after that - had occasion to exercise their vocal cords to the Tokens' recording of A Lion Sleeps Tonight. Some call it a case study in music industry exploitation.

The other night I was watching a Pete Seeger documentary on PBS and there he was, singing what sounded like a version of A Lion Sleeps Tonight without the lyrics. Figuring maybe he had been the composer of the song the Tokens immortalized, I started poking around.

Not quite. The Zulu musician Solomon Linda, who died destitute in 1962, has that distinction. His group, the Original Evening Birds - that's them in the picture - had a major hit with the song, originally called Mbube (lion) in 1939. It sold very well in South Africa but, not knowing any better, Linda signed over the rights to his British-based record company for mere schillings.

Linda was illiterate, originally a shepherd in his native township but later just one of many blacks who made up urban South Africa's unskilled labor force. His group sang on the weekends wherever blacks were allowed to go in Johannesburg and their act became quite a sensation. His high-pitched stylings were sung over a four-part harmony, in an a cappella vocal style they more or less pioneered that came to be called isicathamiya (more recently familiar owing to contemporary groups such as Ladysmith Black Mambazo). He didn't write it down; it just emerged from him and after a talent scout discovered the group, was eventually recorded, selling roughly 100,000 units.

The musicologist Alan Lomax, when he worked at Decca Records, came into possession of a stack of the original 78s from Africa and thought his friend Seeger might consider adapting it for his then-group the Weavers. Seeger was indeed attracted to the hypnotic syncopated chanting and vocal gymnastics so he did adapt it for the Weavers and later sang it on his own. Having apparently misheard the Zulu lyric Uyimbube, Seeger named the song Wimoweh.

Like many folk songs, it has been reinvented repeatedly, recorded by scores of artists and used in scores of films. The most famous example of the former was the Tokens' version in which the arranger George Weiss added lyrics to the existing Weavers' melody. The most famous example of the latter was the song's use in the movie blockbuster The Lion King. As Rian Malan, whose fascinating tale of injustice Rolling Stone published in 2000, described it, Solomon Linda has been "buried under several layers of pop-rock stylings, but you could still see him beneath the new song's slick surface, like a mastodon entombed in a block of clear ice."

Well, there were people who felt that mastodon should be excavated. The overall story surrounding this song is too involved to recount here (do read Malan's piece), but the upshot is that people and corporations made money off song royalties - wittingly and unwittingly - while Linda and his impoverished heirs fell through the cracks. Through sheer determination on the part of family and copyright lawyers, subsequent litigation led to a settlement that has redressed some of the inequities, at least going forward. Though I'll continue to exercise my vocal cords to Lion, I'll never hear it the same way again.

Eight Miles High, The Byrds (1966)

The most evocative psychedelic record of the 60s, to me, is generally believed to be one of the first, Eight Miles High, written and performed by the Byrds. A cornucopia of complexity, it had many distinctive features, not the least of which were the spectral voices in alternating unison and harmony against the mesmerizing riffs of Roger McGuinn's then-unconventional 12-string guitar and Chris Hillman's throbbing bassline.

This is another one of those songs where just hearing the first notes triggers an immediate magic carpet ride back to my turbulent adolescence. The almost menacing intro, followed by "eight miles high, and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known" signaled a radical departure from the group's previous hits, such as Turn, Turn, Turn and Mr. Tambourine Man, which were Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan covers, respectively.

McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke and Hillman distinguished themselves with music that seemed a hybrid of British Invasion and contemporary folk. In fact, their first tour of the UK positioned them as America's answer to the Beatles. Unlike the Beatles, however, they all had cut their teeth in the California folk scene and, knowing next to nothing about amplified instruments, might have seemed an unlikely pioneer of this new genre. In the liner notes to the Byrds box set There Is A Season, Tom Petty writes, "Without a single member with a rock background, they came from folk trios, bluegrass, Christy Minstrels and beatnik coffee houses. It was almost like a lab experiment, mixing the elements and seeing what came out."

What came out in Eight Miles High was an acknowledged homage to John Coltrane and the emerging influence of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds' first foray into psychedelia was surrounded by controversy from the outset, with baffled radio stations banning the record in the belief that the title was referring to drugs - which it probably was to some degree. (As with so many of these songs, the real story of what the song was "about" takes different forms depending on the source. There's an entire discussion about the song's genesis that can be read online in Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock by Richie Unterberger.)

It's interesting to me now how unsettling I found the shifts in the output of many groups circa 1966. It might seem strange, but I still remember being filled with foreboding, at age 14, as I witnessed the metamorphosis of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Byrds, just to name three, from their comparatively clean cut origins to new realms that were fraught with allure, yes, but still on some level, danger.