I was not aware of this song and did not know that Tom Rush was born in Merrimack County.
Oh wait. He wasn't. Poetic license...he did live there and later came back to Deering which sorta kind should actually be part of Merrimack County. Hillsborough County and Rockingham don't scan quite so easily, I admit. Merr'mack gets down to two syllables more easily. And his K-8 childhood seems to have been spent there, which counts for something.
The video gets tiring because of how it is filmed, but is very much reminiscent of my childhood.
Rush was very much in that tradition of prep school (St. Paul's, Groton), then Ivy League (Harvard, like Pete Seeger) then deciding he wanted to be authentic, so he started singing Woody Guthrie songs and traveling around to coffee houses in backwoods places like Bryn Mawr and Cambridge.
So I should hate the guy, but really, I have always liked him.
Rush gave a concert in my (Massachusetts) high school gym - I think probably in 1966. He was still very much a true folkie then (as you can tell from his early LPs). But I saw him again as an undergrad at UNH and liked his more commercial adaptations very much. His version of Joni Mitchell's Urge for Going was initially a favorite bootleg tape that Boston DJs (AM radio, of course) played over and over by popular request until the LP came out.
ReplyDeleteEllie and I saw him at a club in Boston in the late 70's and again at the Tupelo in Derry a few years back. He's very entertaining! I think his appearance at UNH was before my time, sponge-headed ScienceMan!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the video. I grew up in Methuen 43 to 57. Now I live in north central rural Ohio, the other side of the Appalachians, in an area that looks just like the video, except for the pines.
ReplyDeleteMy family is still all over southern NH and northeaster MA.