talkin' about my generation

[lauradi7dw]

After a segment on public radio's Marketplace show this evening dealing with the Mondavi wine company there was a short instrumental interlude. As is often the case, it was a clever tie-in:
"Spill the Wine," a late 1960s pop song by War. They didn't play enough of it to hear lyrics - you just have to know the song to get the joke, and people who know the song are going to be boomers, for the most part.

In a long article about songwriter Carolyn McDade in the most recent UU World magazine, there is this bit:
>>Carolyn McDade is the first to say her songs are not for everybody. She doesn’t expect them to appeal to men, mixed groups, or even younger women. (A couple years ago one anonymous UU blogger, calling her songs overly sincere, drippy, and maudlin, launched an online conversation among anti-fans.) Her music is slow and flowing, often pitched for lower women’s voices. The lyrics are heavy in metaphor, thick with poetry, and you won’t find a male pronoun anywhere. Water, grass, birds, and breath recur as themes. If her songs seem to some earnest, strident, and at times to have an almost translated quality, it’s not by mistake.

“I write love songs to social movements,” she says. She writes to feed the circle of women activists she moves among, the hundreds of women mostly in their fifties and older who sing in her choruses. Her audience is a generation of women who grew up with church as a vital part of their lives, who raised one another’s consciousness in the 1970s, and who came out ready to change the world.<<

I'm one of the women described above. I was familiar with her folky movement songs in the mid-1970s when I was hanging out with feminist bands. Somewhere I probably still have the LP of the Arlington Street Women's Chorus (?) that she directed. And now in middle age I do love the hymn "We'll build a land."

http://www.uuworld.org/life/articles/35893.shtml