What are you listening to?

"Banks of Marble" - Ewan McLennan
This song was written in 1949 by Les Rice, a farmer from New York State, USA. It deals with the perverse injustice, exploitation and inequality Rice saw all around him. Pete Seeger wrote about Les Rice and this song: “Like most small farmers, he was getting intolerably squeezed by the big companies which sold him all his fertilizer, insecticide and equipment, and the big companies that dictated to him the prices he would get for his produce. Out of that squeeze came this song.” I heard this first being sung by the incomparable Utah Phillips when I was a boy. I took it up recently on realising how starkly relevant it is to our times. Hope hides out in the final lines…

I've traveled 'round this country
From shore to shining shore
It really made me wonder
The things I heard and saw

I saw the weary farmer
Plowing sod and loam
I heard the auction hammer
Just a-knocking down his home

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the farmer sweated for

I've seen the weary miner
Scrubbing coal dust from his back
I heard his children cryin'
"Got no coal to heat the shack"

But the banks are made of marble
With a guard at every door
And the vaults are stuffed with silver
That the miner sweated for

I've seen my brothers working
Throughout this mighty land
I prayed we'd get together
And together make a stand

Then we might own those banks of marble
With a guard at every door
And we might share those vaults of silver
That we have sweated for
 
I don't know why but i like this russian song, I sent it to my mother and she also liked it, even if we understand nothing (first comment made an approximative traduction)
:-D
Thank you! That's what I really am missing nowadays! People just sitting together and singing old folk songs. At our family meetings we always did that. Now they are reduced to nearly nothing. And until now I did not find other people who just want to sing in a group. And also I got another little input to start playing accordion again . . . .
 
The day that children over six years of age were required to wear masks in France.
This song brings tears to my eyes every time I listen to it...


"Since it is true that they constrain us
From 6 years old the rules are the same
So we'll have to tell them
It's a brown morning that they inspire us
Just a look from my mother
I'm upset that a cloth is taking away my air

I've been told that we're at war
That we are the soldiers of the school
So we'd like to tell them
We're going into battle
We're going to make the classes of the unsmiling
A little haggard But united
The contingent of reckless kids

Just a little more restraint
For less joy
For less laughter
For less right

Since all the great ones have the fever
That you can't see on your lips
While we learn to read
The words we can't see
It's the access to knowledge that expires
In the fog the noise of the chains
In the yard a little less oxygen

They say it's to save grandma
That my face is covered
We would like to tell them
Grandma and Grandpa would rather we breathe
All those hugs we can't give
Even less love, it is sanitary "

Lyrics Ingrid COURREGES and Florian MARTINEZ

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
 
A cover version of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" played on the Ukulele by Jake Shimabukuro. Aloha
❤️


 
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