TASHY HEARS

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE

It was Christmas 1963 when my dad bought me a guitar. A year or so later the piano that had been at my aunt's house was also given to us. I had learned to play piano during an enforced stay away from home in the summer of 1963 but you will have to read that year in my “Tashy Did” life story to find out why.

It took a while to get the hang of playing that guitar but the summer of 1964, eight weeks with no school and we didn't go away, gave me all the time I needed. It was an acoustic guitar and I started learning from a book, Bert Weedon's guide to guitar playing or something. When I went back to school in September we had a new boy in our class and he brought his guitar to one of the music lessons. I was mightily impressed. He played “All my trials”, a particular favourite of the more subtle protest movement of the fifties and sixties. Afterwards I talked to him and he introduced me to a whole new world. The perceived trendiness of liking Bob Dylan was surpassed by finding out more about others. Dylan, in any case, was less than a year from going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965, amid much controversy.

So now I had songs to learn by Phil Ochs, who wrote the first song in this series, Malvina Reynolds, and ones recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary among others. I suppose there is a chicken and egg question here. Did I really only like folk songs, and folk songs aren't just protest songs, because I could learn to play them on my guitar or am I basically a lover of lyrics and melody rather than louder music? Judge for yourself when this ends but I reckon as of now at least 75% of these songs will be of a quieter, folksy nature.

I learned to play “Where Have All The Flowers Gone” pretty soon after that chat at school. It, in such simple terms, describes the total futility of war in the most gentle way. Pete Seeger, who wrote the song, was a man who spent his whole life fighting for the justice he believed in and was still doing it up to his death in 2014 at the age of 94.

Again, like “Changes”, this also made mother sad. She particularly mentioned the line where the soldiers have gone to graveyards, She had lived through 6 years of war where, on average, 200 British soldiers and civilians died each day. I grew up watching programmes like “The Valiant Years”, about a war that only finished some 15 years before and one through which both my parents and other family and friends had lived. Since then I have been totally opposed to war.

Toward the end of his life Pete Seeger used to end the last verse with the words “when will WE ever learn. It would appear we are still some way from being able to answer that question.

So many people have recorded this song that I didn't know which one to link to so in the end, as mother seemed to like my performance, I decided to make a brief comeback and record my own little version. I also decided to do something a bit different and record it all in one take, no auto-tune just as it was.

Hear it is