PAUL WINTER'S WORLD OF LIVING MUSIC:
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WORLD OF LIVING MUSIC:
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Words by Pete Seeger, 1964.
Music from 'Woman Tawry Lang', collected, adapted and arranged by Lousie Bennett Coverley
©1965 (renewed) by Stormking Music Inc.
"All Mixed Up" is a very incomplete little song I cooked up in November 1964. The words, I suspect, try to squeeze too much into too small a space:
1) It was an Oklahoma schoolteacher, of Choctaw background, who insisted to me that "okay" was a Choctaw word. In Choctaw, the language of trade in the Southeast, "oke" meant "it is" or "it is so". She said that Andrew Jackson learned it during the Indian wars, and signed "O.K. Andrew Jackson" on state papers.
2) It was Mark Twain who asserted that this would be an uninteresting world if everyone agreed with everyone else: "It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse-races."
3) "The rule about rules" is for me the most important line of the song.
4) The French Parliament was arguing in the 1920s about women's suffrage. One member said "After all, there's only a small difference between men and women", and the whole Parliament rose with one voice: "Vive la difference!"
In early times, human beings lived in separate tribes with separate languages and separate folkways. It was unthinkable to adopt another tribe's way of dressing, eating, singing. But several thousand years ago around the Mediterranean Sea, different cultures started to borrowing from each other on a large scale. Words, architecture, foods. From Africa. From Asia. After the Roman Empire fell, the tradition of borrowing continued in Europe. The windmill came to Holland from Persia in the Eleventh Century. Soon after, gypsies brought the guitar to Spain. Ghenghis Kahn's warriors brought the fiddle, and perhaps pasta, though Marco Polo, ninety (eighty?) years later, is usually credited with this.
So now you can see what led to the song "All Mixed Up". Where did I get this tune and melody from? In 1932 I first got bitten by the Caribbean music bug. "The Peanut Vendor" from Cuba was on all the airwaves. More than sixty years later I'm still captivated by the rhythms, the agile melodies. In 1991 I discovered that it was Louise Bennett, Jamaican folklorist, who in 1952 sang me a song which is almost identical to this melody: "Woman Tawdry Lang".
The following news item got me started writing "All Mixed Up": "Two enterprising Brooklynites, Alan Nussbaum and Jerry Fishman, have organized a fleet of 'Chow Chow Cup' vans to dispense Oriental food to Occidental neighborhoods. A Chinese tune by a Japanese composer played on Swiss chimes heralds the van's arrival. Food is served in a 'Chow Chow Cup' made of tasty noodles."
Maybe Americans have found it easier to latch on to new traditions because we are an uprooted people. But as compensation, we've often developed the ability to put down new roots very quickly.
The most American story I know: "A man asked where he could find a restaurant serving pizza. He was directed down the street, and when he got there, it was a Chinese restaurant. He went in anyway, and sure enough, they had very good pizza. He asked the waiter, 'How come a Chinese restaurant serves pizza?' The waiter replied 'Well, you see, we have a large Jewish clientele.'"
You and I are descended from a lot of people who spoke many beautiful languages, who had many magnificent folk traditions, brought to these shores from other lands. There's no reason we should forget them completely.
But with radio and television, the slick magazines, the jukeboxes, there seem overwhelming pressures on all sides to forget and forego these old traditions and accept the commercialized culture which is handed out to us so cheaply. That is, they say it is cheap. Often the price of accepting it is to abandon some of the most wonderful things in the world - the traditions which our parents and grandparents have handed on to us. We sell our birthright for a mess of pottage.
