At the risk of appearing insensitive, and possibly even committing treason, I must confess that I found the song written by Sir Paul McCartney in response to the tragic events of September 11 awful rather than awesome. But then he was the man who gave us Mull of Kintyre. Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to applaud him for getting together a cracking band and no doubt raising oodles of cash for the emergency services in New York. But “I will fight for the right to live in freedom”? Please – he had no more intention of parachuting into Afghanistan than I did!
Tom Paxton, on the other hand, wrote an extraordinarily poignant song with which just by looking at the words on screen – I first stumbled across them under discussion in a newsgroup, rather than by hearing them – you can imagine him holding an audience in rapt attention. Rather than waffling on about vague concepts, he makes his refrain out of the simple yet haunting image of the New York firefighters doing what firefighters do, not realising they were running towards their deaths: “Now every time I try to sleep I’m haunted by the sound, Of firemen pounding up the stairs while we were running down.” It’s many years since I’ve seen him perform or even bought one of his records, but as singer-songwriters go he was an early inspiration of mine alongside Dylan and Paul Simon, and it’s great to see he hasn’t lost his edge. Though I was disappointed that Tom doesn’t appear to have a web site of his own – the pages run by his booking agents Fleming/Tamulevich and Associates being the nearest thing to official – I was delighted, while ramblin’ along the superhighway in search of information, to come up with some superb sites. Here are three | record | labels and two | fans.
On the Google search engine, “Tom Paxton” brought up 9,590 results. I had a whale of a time checking out the top few pages. By the way, the inverted commas are essential, as they avoid more than 40,000 sites which just happen to have the words “Tom” and “Paxton” in them. As Tom has released records on various labels, there are several sites devoted to particular albums, usually accompanied by photographs and biographies. A word of warning – if you read too many of these biographies you might become cynical and think people have just been copying and pasting each other’s work. He is also represented on the Smithsonian Folkways site with information and sound samples. There are also of course more than a few fan sites. In the Flem/Tam biography, Pete Seeger is quoted as saying: “In a small village near Calcutta, in 1998, a villager who could not speak English sang me What Did You Learn In School Today in Bengali! Tom Paxton’s songs are reaching around the world more than he or any of us could have realised. Keep on, Tom!”
And indeed he is keeping on, and if you need further proof, on the Prairie Home Companion archive you can hear writer and broadcaster Garrison Keillor singing Tom’s World Trade Centre tribute, The Bravest. You can also find performances by Paxton himself. A Prairie Home Companion is a live show broadcast usually from St Paul, Minnesota, featuring music, sketches and spoof adverts to an audience of some 3 million people a week. The archive contains the shows, photos, scripts, lyrics and guest information from every performance since the 1996-97 season, and is a treasure trove of folk, blues, country, jazz and especially old-timey music. In just the past six months performers have included Gillian Welch, Andy M Stewart, Taj Mahal, Dave Van Ronk, Aly Bain and Leo Kottke. It might be considered a bit saccharin to some people’s taste, but if you can’t enjoy a bit of nostalgia during your mid-life crises, what’s the point in having an internet service provider?
I have already mentioned that I first heard of The Bravest in a newsgroup. The usual way to access these is with your email software, the most common probably being Microsoft Outlook Express. Rather than subscribing to a newsgroup in this way, you can also search for a subject in the Dejanews archive, which is now run by Google. Specialist sites also often archive newsgroups of interest to their surfers. It was a chance hit on a thread about the Tom Paxton song that lead me to Harmony Central’s guitar resources page. The thread had an unbearably complex address, which I won’t bore you with, but by stripping away all the letters and numbers past the first couple of forward slashes, I arrived at five A4 pages worth of links to resources for guitar players which should keep me amused for months to come.
Charanga, the software company behind the popular GuitarCoach series of PC CD-Roms, is giving away an extraordinary piece of software on its site. The ChordCoach is a must for budding guitarists – and a boon for guitar teachers for that matter. Download and run the program and you can look up a chord and see its various voicings, both in the standard visual format and in a bird’s-eye view of the guitar neck. Click on the chord symbol and you will hear how that inversion sounds. You can also organise chords into “chord sets”. For example, you can play Day Tripper – one of the aforementioned ex-Beatle’s more acceptable tunes – using C, F, D7, E7, A and G. Open the set – it is already provided in the download – and you can print out the chord symbols to distribute among your family, friends, band members or guitar students. There is no copyright issue because all it gives you are the building blocks, not the structure. A brilliant idea, with which of course you can save your own sets, for songs you have learned, songs you have written or just groups of chords you think work well together.
And just to show a bit of balance – in acknowledgement that there are other instruments worth playing and listening to as well as the guitar – a quick word of recommendation for Chris Haigh’s Fiddling Around the World site. Chris, who you might know from his work with a variety of bands – Zumzeaux, Tziganarama and Quicksilver, to name but three – has pages and pages of information on all kinds of fiddle music, from all around the world, including not only the more obvious styles such as Scottish and Irish, but also exotica from a variety of European, Asian and American cultures. The old-time section even has some fascinating stuff about different tunings. If only fiddles had frets!