What is the first green song you remember hearing? Who played or sang it?
Hawaii Where Everything Grows
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What is the first green song you remember hearing? Who played or sang it?
Hawaii Where Everything Grows
Thinking, thinking….”Inch by Inch” and “Oats, Peas, Beans and Barley”…all because I am an awful gardener. I love the term “green songs”, gets on thinking about it a little bit more.
I sang lots of songs about nature at Camp Fire Girls summer camps in the forties and fifties …”Peace of the River,” “Wind, Wind, Heather Gypsy,” “Desert Silv’ry Blue” and others. My mother, Malvina Reynolds, wrote “What Have They Done to the Rain” about fallout from nuclear testing in 1962, appropriate again, alas, after the tsunami, “The Cement Octopus” about freeway overgrowth in California in 1964, “The Desert” in 1960. You can find her lyrics at http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/MALVINA/songmenu.htm
Joan Baez’s performance of “What Have They Done To The Rain” introduced me to
this deeply moving song, and the questions and awareness the song communicates.
In the early 1990′s, children’s poetry expressing concern for our natural
environment was the primary motivation to begin work on my “Color Me Green”
songs for children.
Girl Scouting brings back some memories… Barges, I Love The Mountains, One Bottle Pop all have some ideas of the beauty of nature or a desire for a clean earth. An old favorite is also This Pretty Planet by Tom Chapin, and of course, The Garden Song by Dave Mallett (Inch by Inch).
Amy, I love those songs and in fact, we revise “I Love the Mountains” with GITC teachers every year to teach months and seasons! (“I love December, when snow is falling down….”)
And here is a nice surprise- in The Green SongbookGITC teachers rewrote “One Bottle of Pop” for the song “Help Keep It Clean” !
If we get lucky enough to make a Volume II someday, I’m coming to you for favorites! Thanks for sharing.
Happy Earth Day,
Jess