Cherokee Queen (Art Thieme)

Subject: RE: Cherokee Queen
From: Art Thieme
Date: 02 Aug 00 - 11:30 AM

Thanks folks. The song has always been important to me and I was really glad I found a concert tape of me doing it that was O.K. enough to include on the CD.

Art

Subject: RE: Cherokee Queen
From:
Date: 02 Aug 00 - 04:13 AM

That's the way I see it Art and now I think I get it about the master. It means the white masters. I was thinking of all those stories where some hero plays a chess or card game with the devil (or god) with the fate of a person or mankind hanging on the results. I see the other interpretation of "dealing" now. I still can't think of the name of the Bergman film that deals with that subject! But I don't think it is relevant! I also agree with you Art about the ambiguity being an important ingredient. In your performance, Art, you don't try to sort out the ambiguity and I think that makes the song.

Murray

Subject: RE: Cherokee Queen
From: katlaughing
Date: 01 Aug 00 - 10:48 PM

That's kind of the way it struck me, too, Art. Sadness at both ends, the past and here and now. Not sure about teh Master referene, could be any number of things, possibly drink, the white way/man, the great spirit,..hard to tell.

katwhoislearningthissongtosing

Subject: RE: Cherokee Queen
From: Art Thieme
Date: 01 Aug 00 - 09:27 PM

To me, this song jumps back and forth between the sad past of the Trail Of Tears (where there was no road map) and the Native-American present often filled with disillusionment, alcohol, government betrayal (in the gambling game of cards/luck) that the tribe experienced in DEALings like treaties and broken promises. The writer of the song, Carl Oglesby, a former president of SDS---Students For A Democratic Society in the 60s---told me that he had grown up near Cherokee, North Carolina. This song has always seemed to be enhanced even more BECAUSE of it's ambiguity. It's a noir gem. I learned if from Utah Phillips in the early 1970s at Chicago's Earl Of Old Town folk bar on Wells Street. Carl Oglesby made 2 albums (LPs) for Vanguard Records. This was the best song on both of them.

Art Thieme

Subject: Cherokee Queen
From:
Date: 01 Aug 00 - 01:42 PM

I get my money's worth out of some CDs because I get stuck into certain songs and I have to learn them and understand them. The song "Cherokee Queen" in Arts "The Older I Get, the Better I Was" is my latest.

As I see it, it is taking place in two different times. The first line (Are you going my way....) seems to be in the present, whilst the part about the Indian brave lying in ambush seems to be in the past.

Anyone see it that way?

The part about playing the game with the master still puzzles me. It does remind me of an early Ingmar Bergman film.

Murray