Remembering Folk Songs

Tommy Towery

LHS '64

December 21, 1963

Dec 21, 1963 - Went and bought Grandmother's present then I went to a dance down at the Navy Reserve.  It was a Post dance.  Fifteen people were present.  We danced, ate, and sang folk songs until 11:00 P.M.

After that I met Dag and we went riding around in his '63 Impala SS hunting a party.  Couldn't find one so I came home and now I'm going to bed.  Night-Night.

Comments made in my book in 1988 about this entry:

The highlight of the evening was the folk songs.  This was the period of folk music.  It was the time of The Kingston Trio; Peter, Paul, and Mary; the Smothers Brothers; The Chad Mitchell Trio and the other singers whose names have long been forgotten.  Of all the groups that were popular during that period, the Kingston Trio was my personal favorite.  I spent many hours learning the words to "Tom Dooley" and "The M.T.A." songs.  I bought a cheap guitar from somebody and tried my best to learn how to play it.  Using a group of cords I affectionately called "the dirty dozen" I could strum through most of the popular folk songs if other people sang along.  If they did sing, they had to sing loud.  It had to be loud enough to cover up the music, for I was not a very good guitar player.

I tried.  I tried hard.  I practiced day after day but never got any good at it.  Years passed before I found my perfect musical instrument for the folk era.  It was one that I could handle without being embarrassed.  I tried to learn the banjo, the twelve string guitar, the piano and organ and passed over all of them.  The tambourine emerged as the instrument for my contribution to the folk scene.  My destiny was to be the tambourine man.  Besides the kazoo, it was the only instrument I ever found that I could play.  I didn't want to be the kazoo man, so stuck with the tambourine.

That night I didn't have the tambourine.  That night the guitar was the instrument of choice, and songs like "Tom Dooley" were sung over and over, despite the cords that were missed or could not be found.  My short fingers did not wrap completely around the guitar neck to finger the right notes properly, but it didn't matter.  We were still having fun and the others did not mind.  There were gentile people in the folk music era.

Folk music was a social event and everyone could join in.  It was especially at home on hayrides or around campfires.  It could be mellow or explosive, depending on the crowd and the mood.  It could be gospel or backroom ballads.  Some songs were heavenly while others were raunchy sea chanteys.  Whatever the mood, whatever the tune, the group could join in.

Some of the best songs we sang came as spur of the moment verses like "Hey loddy, loddy, loddy. Hey loddy, loddy, low."  This song was the place to add the sometimes off color verses like "I know a girl who lives on a hill, she won't do it but her sister will."  It was naughty, but not really dirty.  It was a lot like "Louie, Louie," the song that the Class of '64 claims as its class song.  That was the dirtiest song of our era.  The words were so slurred that no one ever really knew for sure what they were but right after the song first came out pieces of paper circulated in the classes of Lee with the alleged lyrics on it.  "Every night at ten, I lay her again," etc.  It did not meet today's criteria for dirty, that's for sure.  Even if it was dirty everyone sang along just the same.

Today, Christmas time and Christmas parties are about the only times where a group can stand around and share the songs as we did during the folk period.  I even tried to write my own music, as most folk singers did.  My songs were never heard in public but it didn't really matter to me.  It was the beginning of the inner self period.  You could sing what you wanted to, how you wanted to sing it.

The Wayback Machine

"Tom Dooley "

The Kingston Trio

1958

"Tom Dooley" (Roud 4192) is a traditional North Carolina folk song based on the 1866 murder of a woman named Laura Foster in Wilkes County, North Carolina by Tom Dula (whose name in the local dialect was pronounced "Dooley"). One of the more famous murder ballads, a popular hit version recorded in 1958 by The Kingston Trio reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart, was in the top 10 on the Billboard R&B chart, and appeared in the Cashbox Country Music Top 20.

The song was selected as one of the American Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the National Endowment for the Arts, and Scholastic Inc. Members of the Western Writers of America chose it as one of the Top 100 Western songs of all time.

Hope everyone has a Merry Christmas this week and you get to enjoy your friends and relatives during the holidays.

Last Week's Questions, Answers, And Comments

Barbara Hood Diamond, LHS ‘66, "I don’t recall participating in a progressive dinner in earlier years, but my 92 year old neighbor just asked me to help organize a progressive dinner in our neighborhood, which is now scheduled for the end of January with a Mediterranean Cuisine theme. Maybe like a lot of things, it will be coming back for newer generations. Thanks for the memories Tommy."

Barb Biggs Knott, LHS ‘66, "I don't remember ever attending a 'progressive dinner' but it sounds like it would be a lot of fun especially around the holidays. I think I would have enjoyed it. I don't think the group at St. Mark's Lutheran Church ever did that."

Barb Biggs Knott, LHS ‘66, "The Mashed Potato was a favorite song and dance. I remember being in the hay loft of my grandpa's dairy farm with one of my friends watching my grandpa dance to songs we played like that as well as the Monkey and the Locomotion dance. It was a memory I've never forgotten."