![]() ![]() I want to stop right there and say what is obvious. We tend to make Bible people into heroes. Now it doesn’t say this, but I think Jacob is afraid. In chapter 32, we find Jacob waist-deep in the Big Muddy. You may be wondering what all this has to do with Jacob. I say this now because people who claim to be great leaders aren’t always right. And Richard Nixon was running for president with a campaign promise of providing “Law and Order.” Waist Deep in the Big Muddy became one of the popular songs of the time. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been shot. At that time, we were waist-deep in the Viet Nam War. I don’t know if this happens every forty years or so, but I was a teen in 1968 when a folk singer named Pete Seeger came on the Smother’s Brothers (my favorite show) and sang a song about a platoon of Marines crossing the Big Muddy by the light of the silvery moon. It seems like the whole country is waist-deep in the Big Muddy. Dads coming to their aid with leaf blowers to blow the tear gas back. We have this COVID thing going on for six months now. It is now 2020, and this summer I feel as though we are all about waist-deep in the big muddy. Then there is a gurgling sound and the captain is no more. The sergeant can barely see the captain ahead of them pushing on. Next, they are neck-deep in the Big Muddy and the moon goes behind a cloud. They’ve been out all night and are exhausted. ![]() They go a little further and the sergeant notes how strong the current is and how the men have heavy backpacks. Push on.” A few yards further, they were all waist-deep in the Big Muddy. ![]() So, the sergeant whispers, “Are you sure?” The captain says, “Don’t be a nervous Nelly. ![]() It was dark, the men grumbled, and no one could see to the other side. We cross it here.” So soon, they were all knee-deep in the Big Muddy. But, the captain says, “I know this river. And the sergeant takes out his map to see how they all got lost. There’s a was captain, a sergeant, and about two dozen grunts. Overall, this is probably a better album than the similar Dangerous Songs! from 1966, with a higher number of trenchant observations and a little less finger-pointing.Back in 1942, a platoon of Marines in basic training was practicing a night patrol down in Louisiana. Side two is more traditional for Seeger, strictly acoustic material including a couple of traditional songs interspersed among some less-than-subtle protest material, including "My Name Is Liza Kalvelage," its lyrics taken almost verbatim from a television news story about San Jose housewives picketing a nearby napalm storage yard, and "Those Three Are on My Mind," about the murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1963. You'll be hard-pressed to actually hear the bass player most of the time. (The opening "Oh Yes I'd Climb" adds a middle-of-the-road string section for good measure!) The electric instruments are actually most tasteful in their integration, if not downright wimpy. Just two years after Seeger supposedly threatened to take an axe to the power supply during Bob Dylan's electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, side one of this album features Seeger and his acoustic guitar backed by electric guitarist Danny Kalb (of the Blues Project) and a rockish rhythm section. One of Pete Seeger's most well-known protest albums - he provoked a storm of controversy when CBS censors would not allow the singer/songwriter to perform "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," a Vietnam parable based on an actual incident that occurred during World War II when a soldier who couldn't swim drowned when his commanding officer forced him to ford a river without knowing how deep it was, on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour - Waist Deep in the Big Muddy and Other Love Songs is intriguing for other reasons as well. ![]()
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