Lyr Add: Andy Goodman (To His Mother) (J Ritchie)

Subject: Lyr Add: ANDY GOODMAN (To His Mother) (J Ritchie)
From: Charlie Baum
Date: 06 Jun 20 - 11:57 PM

ANDY GOODMAN (To His Mother)
by Jean Ritchie

recorded by Lisa Null on her CD Legacies (Folk-Legacy CD# 145, now acquired by Smithsonian/FolkWays)


He was too young to know much about living
He was too young to have sighed a lover’s sigh
He was old enough to care about his unknown brothers
Old enough to care enough to die

Chorus:
And never, never tell them that you’re lonely
And never cry but at night and all alone
And when they ask what do you feel, then I will hear you tell them
A boy was here but it’s a man who has gone
A boy was here but it’s a man who has gone.

They asked me questions that had so many answers
Oh tell me what is it can grow without the rain
Oh tell me what is it can hurt without a teardrop falling
What can burn forever without flame?

Chorus

I was so young, I gave them honest answers
I said a rock can grow without the rain
A hurting heart can cry without a teardrop falling
True love can burn forever without flame.

Farewell young friend although I never knew you
The shame is mine and born upon my face
Please God you’ll know that there where your young life ended
Ten thousand more will rise to take your place.

Chorus


From Lisa's liner notes:

Andy Goodman (To His Mother)

In 1964, I went to Mississippi with my former journalist husband Henry Null, who I had married a year before. This was “Freedom Summer” during which thousands of Mississippi civil rights workers and northern volunteers participated in a campaign to register black voters, a process from which they had been excluded for generations. Although I’d been a college participant in the civil rights movement as secretary of southern Westchester County’s Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), this time around I was not an activist but an empathetic observer.

We stayed several days in Greenville with an old friend, Tom Oxnard, who was working for Hodding Carter Junior’s Delta Democrat-Times, an outspoken and liberal paper of some literary distinction. The bodies of two northern civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and one African-American CORE activist, James Chaney of Meridian, had recently been discovered buried in an earthen dam near the site of their murder. The publicity of the tragic deaths galvanized public attention and helped secure the passage of the Civil Rights act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965. It was a frightening and turbulent sojourn for us as well as for the friends we met through Tom Oxnard.

Almost ten years later, I learned this song for a program presented by the New York Pinewoods Folk Music Society honoring Jean Ritchie and her songs. I learned it from the first printing of Celebration of Life (Geordie Publishing: 1971, p. 63) but it disappeared from subsequent editions and eventually from public memory. Thanks to Charlie Baum for his indefatigable hunt for the song and a reference librarian from the University of West Virginia who helped us rediscover it.

I believe this is one of Jean’s most powerful songs. It ties ancient riddles found in the Yiddish “Tumbalalaika” with the outrageous death of a very young man helping to bring justice to an unjust world. There is no sloganeering here, no pat dichotomies. Out of Andy Goodman’s brutal death comes an inspirational rallying cry. I’ve altered one or two notes over time, but Jean, who heard the concert, said that was just fine. She told me she had known Andy Goodman’s mother and was deeply shocked by his death.

-----

Addendum from Charlie Baum: This may be Jean Ritchie's most obscure song. When we first approached her son Jon Pickow for permission to record it, his reaction was "I don't think Mom wrote that one." We had to find it in the Celebration of Life book. We had a later edition on our bookshelf, from which the song had been deleted. (There's a story there involving the Goodman family, who were friends of the Pickow/Ritchies, and I don't know the details.) I had to research for who had a copy of the first printing. Because Lisa and I had recently done archival research on the Louis Chappell collection at West Virginia University, they were our first choice to ask for a copy of the original, and the reference librarian there sent me a pdf of the pages that had been substituted for in subsequent printings of the book.

--Charlie Baum

Subject: RE: Lyr Add: Andy Goodman (To His Mother)
From: cnd
Date: 07 Jun 20 - 10:12 PM

Thanks for sharing, Charlie.

You can hear a recording of it online here: https://www.newcenturyirisharts.com/biographies/lisanull