A Time to Every Purpose

A very beautiful and righteous version of the great song.

To Everything

This made the hair on my arms stand on end when I heard it.

Five Hundred Miles

This song has been on my mind.  It seems to me such an essentially American song: simple, strophic, tuneful, and mournful, sharing its themes -- of a trip taken far from home, of loneliness, of a kind of exile imposed in equal measures by the exigencies of circumstance, and by those arising from personal shame and pride -- with other great American songs (like "Poor Wayfaring Stranger," for instance, or Woody Guthrie's "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad").  It's supposed to have been written by Hedy West, a singer on the Greenwich Village folk scene in the late 1950s-early 1960s, who based it on songs sung by her Appalachian grandmother, and wrote it from the point of view of a railroader.

 My friend Rodak has recently made me a Peter, Paul, and Mary convert (which didn't take much), and here is their almost-heartbreaking version of the song:  

Here is Joan Baez's winningly ingenuous version.

And perhaps my favorite, by the Australian group The Seekers, which sounds slick in comparison to the simplicity of the others, but whose beauty can't be denied.

Happy Fourth of July to all my American readers.

Not an hour of the night goes by

This song is one of the most beautiful and heartbreaking I know: "Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär" (If I were a little bird), a folk poem set by Robert Schumann. I've always loved it, and once sang it for a dear friend while we were driving from the suburbs back into New York City. She told me afterward that she found it so beautiful that she almost crashed her car.

While looking for a clip of it, however, I found many performances of the original folk song, which is exactly the same as Schumann's version, with the exception that it's in a major instead of a minor key -- which makes it a shockingly different song with an entirely different meaning. Here is a delightful performance.

The translation:

If I were a little bird
and had two little wings,
I would fly to you.
But since it cannot be,
I must stay here.

Although I'm far from you,
in sleep I'm beside you,
speaking with you.
But when I awaken,
I am alone.

Not an hour of the night goes by
that my heart doesn't awaken
And think of you,
and imagine that, many thousands of times,
you give your heart to me.

Above: "Solitary Tree" by Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), one of the greatest artists of German Romanticism.