[The discussion of freedom brings us around once again to the discussion that came up before. Can't recall whether it was here or on one of the Usenet groups -- why were there so few folk songs to come out of WWII? The only tunes of that era of which I can think are those of the big band or jazz singers.]

A little more Dylan:

This song wasn't written in Tin Pan Alley, that's where most of the folk songs come from now, this song was written somewhere in the United States.

I never noticed, but now that you mention it, we have songs from lots of other wars but not that one, as far as I know, and it's hard to see why. Maybe there was a general loss of interest in the folk tradition for just a short period around that time, before the revival of the 50's and 60's and thereafter. I suppose that's not much of an explanation, just another observation. Here's another one: we are looking at this as Americans (US and Canadians) and our people fought in the war but we did not see it in our own cities etc. Maybe the Germans, or the French, or the Russians might have songs about that time?

BTW, I found this site looking for the words to "Northwest Passage," which I have heard on the radio a couple of times by Stan Rogers. I notice there are some Canadians in this thread, maybe they can help? And maybe if I spring for $15 or so and buy the CD it will have words on the liner?

And there used to be a radio station from Canada that I could get here in the lower 48, and I used to enjoy listening to O Canada at mignight. I even thought they had a great recording of God Save the Queen. Maybe it's easier to enjoy other people's national songs, as I don't know the countries well enough to find fault with them. A lot of USA citizens (Canadians note that I did not make the mistake of saying Americans )say they don't like our national anthem, and claim that their problem is musical, when actually it is probably political. I'm not a professional musician, and I can sing it, so I don't see what the big problem is.

I learned a little about the country of some of my ancestors when I worked in Amherstburg in the 1960's. One of the most interesting comments I can remember about war - we had a little problem going in Asia at the time - came from a gentleman who happened to be sitting next to me in a restaurant; he said that when he was a boy, he used to hear about what terrible people the Boers were (he might as well have said the Carthaginians or the Assyrians and it would have sounded about the same to me, being about 22 years old at the time, so I really noticed)and eventually he found out that they weren't really all that much different from the rest of us. The problem with not going to the war, OTOH, is that if one side loses, a lot of people from that side can end up in concentration camps. Actually, in this particularly bloody century, far more people have been killed by their own governments than by their external enemies, so we have to keep watch of them, too. We have been fortunate not to have had much trouble of that kind in the US or Canada, at least in the 20th century, but we're not immune entirely or permanently. It seems to me that whatever we might want to do, there is somebody right there waiting to tell us that it's bad and we shouldn't do it, and to try to pass a law to put us in jail right now if we don't stop.

Well, enough of that, time to go back to singing. [G] again

Moi aussi, je me souviens. Au revoir pour maintenant. RWH