Amboy Dukes – "You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire" (1968)

What you gonna do 

When the bubble bursts?

[NOTE: I never in my wildest dreams envisioned having NINE grandchildren (and counting).  Quite a few 2 or 3 lines posts feature one or more of them – here's the first one to do so, which was originally published in August 2016.]

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On July 22 at 6:00 am, my very pregnant daughter Sarah woke up and immediately knew it was time to eight, skate, and donate to the hospital before her bubble burst and my first grandson fell out.

So she and husband drove to the hospital (which is twenty minutes away if all goes well), dealt with the usual I-need-to-see-your-insurance-card hospital bureaucrats, and got to a labor and delivery just in time for Sarah to deliver my grandson Jack at 7:10 am.

My grandson Jack on the day he was born

There was no time for the hospital staff to give Sarah an epidural anesthetic, so she had to tough it out au naturel.

But she handled the whole thing – as she had handled her entire pregnancy – with total aplomb.  In fact, I think it’s fair to say that Sarah is about the aplombest new mother you ever did see.

I for one was very happy at Sarah and Jack’s timing because I was about to leave town and drive to Cape Cod for my annual summer vacation.  My grandson’s birth delayed my departure by a few hours, but I didn’t complain a bit.  (My mother’s comment on my decision to hit the road: “How could you leave that pretty little boy?”)

The three-week-old Jack

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I thought long and hard about what song to feature in this very important 2 or 3 lines.

I could have featured one of the 89 songs I found with “Jack” in the title: e.g., Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack,” The Who’s “Happy Jack,” Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road, Jack,” John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane,” or the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” to name just a few.

Another option would have been to feature a song by a musician who shared Jack’s July 22 birthday: e.g., George Clinton, Bobby Sherman, or Don Henley.

The lyrics of “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire” are very marginally related to the content of today’s 2 or 3 lines, but that’s enough given what a killer song it is.

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The Amboy Dukes are best-known for their 1968 hit, “Journey to the Center of the Mind.”  It was what I like to call a stick of dynamite.

The band’s follow-up single, “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire,” which failed to crack the top 100 in the U.S., is almost as good.  But it had totally escaped my notice until a couple of weeks ago.

“You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire” was never released on an Amboy Dukes LP, but was included as a bonus track when the group’s second album was released on CD.  (Saints be praised!)

Click here to listen to “You Talk Sunshine, I Breathe Fire.”

Ian Dury & the Blockheads – "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" (1979)

Hit me with your rhythm stick!

Hit me! Hit me!

Das ist gut!  C'est fantastique!

[NOTE: If you read the 2000-plus 2 or 3 lines posts that have been published to date, you’ll learn a lot – as the following "Golden Decade" post from July 2013 proves.]

Polio epidemics were unknown before the 20th century.  But improvements in urban sanitation practices – especially better sewage disposal and cleaner water supplies – reduced childhood exposure to the polio virus.  That meant that fewer children developed a natural immunity to the disease.

The year I was born – 1952 – was the peak year for polio in the United States.  There were 58,000 reported cases of the disease that year, which resulted in 3145 deaths and 21,269 cases of mild to severe paralysis.

Elvis gets his polio shot

The Salk and Sabin polio vaccines began to be widely administered shortly after that, and there were fewer than a tenth as many polio cases in the U.S. in 1957 as there had been in 1952.  In 1961, there were only 161 recorded cases.

The Americas and Europe were declared polio-free in 1994 and 2002, respectively.  Today, polio remains endemic only in Nigeria, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.

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A number of well-known musicians who came of age in the sixties – including Judy Collins, Donovan, Neil Young, and Joni Mitchell – were infected with polio when they were children.   

Mitchell was bedridden for weeks, and was told she might need an iron lung to breathe.  Her unusual guitar chord technique is a result of her left hand being weakened by polio.

An iron lung ward in Boston in the early 1950s

The British musician Ian Dury, who was born in London in 1942, contracted polio during a 1949 epidemic.  After spending 18 months in a hospital, Dury was sent to the Chailey Heritage Craft school for disabled children for three and a half years.  

The staff at Chailey didn't believe in babying their patients – austerity and discipline were the order of the day.  And so, according to Dury, was sexual abuse.  "A lot of the staff were pervs," he said.  "No buggery, but a lot of enforced wanking."  

Click here to read an article that describes the late Dury (he died of cancer in 2000) as "the highest profile visibly physically disabled pop artist in Britain," and credits him with producing "a compelling body of works exploring the experiences of disability." 

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The most famous – or infamous – of Dury's many original songs that reference physical or mental disability is "Spasticus Autisticus," which was released in 1981.  

The United Nations had declared 1981  to be the "International Year of Disabled Persons."   Dury wasn't buying that.

"Spasticus Autisticus" is a shoutout to "you out there in Normal Land."  It doesn't shy away from the embarrassing physical limitations that result from polio and other crippling diseases:

I widdle when I piddle

'Cause my middle is a riddle . . .

I dribble when I nibble

And I quibble when I scribble

It was all too much for the BBC, which declined to play the song.  

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"Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick" went to number one on the British singles chart in January 1979.  (It displaced "Y.M.C.A." by the Village People, which is reason enough for all of us to be eternally grateful to Dury).

Ian Dury

The song's music video represented a "coming out" for Dury.  He appeared in it wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, which revealed his polio-withered left arm.  

The physical ravages of polio didn't prevent Dury from being quite the ladies' man.  He got married to a fellow Royal College of Art student in 1967, and fathered two children.  In 1973, he went to London to pursue a musical career, and cohabited with a teenaged fan for several years.  In 1987, he hooked up with actress Jane Horrock.  (The two had met while performing together in a London play.  Dury also appeared in several movies in the eighties and nineties.)  And in 1996, after learning he had colorectal cancer, Dury married sculptor Sophy Tilson.  

Dury was a brilliant and distinctive lyricist.  Andrew Lloyd Webber asked him to write the lyrics for Cats, but Dury turned him down. 

"I can't stand his music," he told an interviewer.  "I hate Andrew Lloyd Webber.  He's a wanker, isn't he? . . . [E]verytime I hear 'Don't Cry for Me, Argentina' I feel sick, it's so bad."

Click here to listen to "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick."

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

Husker Dü – "Books About UFOs" (1985)

Walking down a sunny street to the library

Checking out the latest books on outer space

[NOTE: The only that has really changed since this post was originally published in June 2018 is that my local library no longer makes any effort to limit how long people keep books or DVDs.  If you’re old-fashioned enough to bother checking items out rather than just walking out the door with them willy-nilly, there’s no need to return them on time because the library went “fine free” in 2021.  (Too bad this policy hasn’t been extended to parking on the streets in my neighborhood – we have to feed the meters from 700a to 1000p six days a week.)]

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I’ve decided that it’s time to come clean about my substance abuse problem.  I’ve kept my addiction a secret long enough:

My name is 2or3lines, and I'm an addict.  I currently have 36 library books and DVDs checked out, with another 14 on hold.  

Do those numbers suggest to you that I have a problem?

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When I was a kid, my hometown public library allowed you to check out no more than six library books at a time.  During the summers, I would sometimes go through six books in one day and pick up another six the following day.  (We’re talking relatively short and simple books written for middle-schoolers – not “War and Peace” or “Great Expectations.”)

When I was a kid, the public library
was my home away from home

When I was a working man, I was able to keep my addiction to library books under control because I had a limited amount of time to spend reading.  As long as I had two or three books handy, there was little risk that I would run out of something to read.  (I subscribed to the New Yorker back then, when it was still readable – that gave me another reliable source of reading material.)

*     *     *     *     *

I believe the computerization of my public library is largely to blame for my addiction.  

A trip to the library used to mean a rather haphazard trip through the stacks – not the most efficient way to track down desirable books.  But once the library catalog became available online, it became much easier to search for books.

And I wasn’t limited to the books that were on the shelves in whatever branch I was visiting.  I could search the holdings of all of the library’s branches – the county where I live operates twenty branch libraries (not counting the branch at the county correctional facility) – and reserve as many books as I wanted.  And once a book I had selected was available, it would be delivered to any branch I chose, and I’d get an e-mail inviting me to pick it up at my leisure.  (The same was true of CDs and DVDs.)

My current library stash

If I wanted a popular new book, it might take quite a while before my name made it to the top of the waiting list.  While most books became available within a few days, you could never be sure.  This encouraged me to reserve more books than I could read in the short term – I hate to run out of books!

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My hometown library allowed you to check out books for only two weeks.  You could renew them for another two weeks, but that was it.

My current library has a three-week checkout period, which can be renewed twice.  So you can keep most books for up to nine weeks.  [NOTE: My library now automatically renews most items three times – so you can legally hold on to them for up to twelve weeks.]

For a library-book hoarder like me, this is the equivalent of free crack.  Even when I have a big stack of books at home, there’s no reason not to check out even more books – after all, I have nine weeks to get to them.

Here's a next-level tip: large-print books can be checked out for twice as long as regular books!

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I used to not bother checking out television series on DVDs.  My library allowed you to keep DVDs for only one week.  

That’s reasonable if we’re talking about a movie that can be watched in one sitting.  But what about a twelve-hour TV series?  It’s possible to binge-watch your way  through twelve hours in a week, but it’s not easy if you have a full-time job and a couple of kids underfoot.  Plus I hate to have to rush through a good series.

Recently my library changed its policy on DVDs.  Movies can still be checked out for only seven days, but TV series can be taken home for three weeks – and they can be renewed for two more three-week periods.

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Of course, there’s no charge for checking out books and DVDs from the public library.  When something is free, people may overconsume it.  (Economists refer to this as “the tragedy of the commons.”)

Most people don’t overconsume library books – in fact, most people don’t read books at all.

But people who spent a good part of their formative years at the local public library – my parents both worked, and it was a lot cheaper to drop me at the library once I got old enough than to hire a babysitter – and who have recently retired consume library books like the crowd at an Insane Clown Posse concert consumes drugs, beer, and Faygo sodas.

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I like a nice, fat 19th-century novel as much as the next guy.  (Anthony Trollope is simply the best.)  And some contemporary “literary” novels are truly remarkable – you should really check out Julian Barnes, Herman Koch, James Salter, Edward St. Aubyn, and Lionel Shriver.

But there’s nothing like a good modern crime novel.  I’m not sure whether the best American crime novels (like those by Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos) are better than those by the best Scandanavian authors (like Karin Fossum, Henning Mankell, and L. G. W. Persson), but they’re all great.

From an article about modern crime fiction in The Guardian:

At its best, crime writing offers unique insights into society, psychology and human behavior.  It can be both engaging and literate; compelling and well-written.  It can be innovative and surprising, but what it can't be, it seems, is feted in the same way as literary fiction. . . .

This is perhaps the rub: crime writers know that the people who matter are the readers, not the critics.  But it's high time that the critics – and the award panels – began to truly sit up and take notice of the importance of good crime writing.  

Amen to that.

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The books I’m currently sitting on include some fiction classics (David Copperfield and a book of short stories by Dostoyevsky) and new literary novels by Julian Barnes and Hideo Yokoyama.

I also have some travel guides for France and Belgium and a couple of books about World War I.  (The itinerary of the group trip I'm going on in July includes a number of World War I-related sights, with some Gothic cathedrals and lots of Belgian beer thrown in for good measure.)

Most of my current stash of library books consists of crime novels.  For example, I’ve got several of George Simenon’s Maigret books – Simenon is perhaps the most underrated popular novelist of all time – and a couple of John MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels (which are a bit dated, but still interesting).

I also have the Jens Lapidus “Stockholm Noir” trilogy, three of Lars Kepler’s Joona Linna books, and Jo Nesbø’s Macbeth, so I’m well-stocked with Scandanavian crime novels.  

Then there's John Sandford’s two most recent books – one from his Lucas Davenport series and one from the somewhat related Virgil Flowers series.

However, I don’t have any books about UFOs.

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“Books About UFOs” was released on Hüsker Dü’s 1985 album, New Day Rising.

The critics loved New Day Rising.  I love New Day Rising.  Case closed.

Click here to listen to “Books About UFOs.”

Click here to buy it from Amazon.

Stranglers – "Straighten Out" (1977)

I’ll tell you things

That’ll make your curls

Straighten out

[NOTE: I always think I know where I’m going when I sit down to write a 2 or 3 lines post.  But every so often, I take a sharp turn en route and end up at a completely different destination.  That’s what happened with this “Golden Decade” post, which originally appeared in May 2020.] 

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I took a long bike ride on Sunday, and planned to write a post about the history of the rail trail I rode that would include photos of flowers, old buildings, and train cars that I took while on the ride.  But then I stumbled upon something that took me in a very different direction.  

What this post ultimately ended up becoming is interesting, I think, but also very sad.  So if you’re not in the mood for something like that today, feel free just to skip to the end and listen to today’s featured song.

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On November 18, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln took a Northern Central Railway train from Baltimore to Hanover Junction, Pennsylvania, where he connected to a Hanover Branch Railroad train that took him to Gettysburg:

Lincoln’s Gettysburg train
at Hanover Junction in 1863

The next day, Lincoln attended the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, and delivered the most famous speech in American history – the 271-word Gettysburg Address. 

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Lincoln passed through Hanover Junction one other time.  On April 21, 1865, a Northern Central Railway train carrying the martyred president’s coffin left Baltimore and passed through Hanover Junction on the way to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

There it was carried by hearse to the State Capitol, where approximately 10,000 mourners filed past the coffin that night.

The next day, the coffin was placed on a train that carried it to Philadelphia, New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Chicago before  arriving at Springfield, Illinois on May 3.

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The Northern Central Railway ceased operations in 1972, and the 41-mile stretch of its right-of-way that ran from Baltimore to York, Pennsylvania, eventually became a rail trail.

A replica of a Lincoln-era train
at Hanover Junction

The Pennsylvania portion of that rail trail is officially known as the York County Heritage Rail Trail.  On Mother’s Day, I rode the southern half of that trail from New Freedom – which sits just above the Mason-Dixon Line – to Hanover Junction and back.  

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There are quite a few benches along the rail trail where tired hikers or bikers can stop and rest.  Nearly all those benches have small plaques commemorating a friend or family member who has passed away.

I happened to notice one such plaque that was a little different:

“End of watch” has two meanings when used by law enforcement personnel.  It usually refers to the end of a police officer’s shift, or “watch.”  But it can also refer to the date of the death of an officer who was killed in the line of duty.

Here’s an account of Officer David Tome’s death from a local newspaper:

David Tome died doing what he loved – being a police officer.

Those who knew Tome said he was a dedicated officer with Northern York County Regional Police, a great husband and father of two and an all-around likeable guy. . . .

While re-creating a fatal crash from earlier in the week, Tome was struck and killed Tuesday by a vehicle on Route 15, near Clear Springs Road in Franklin Township.  Tome and two other officers had set up orange warning cones in the middle of the right southbound lane of Route 15 about 9 a.m. when he was struck.

York County Coroner Barry Bloss said Tome's family is struggling to understand the death.

"They are absolutely devastated," he said.

Tome, 31, graduated from Spring Grove Area High School in 1996. His wife of seven years, Dody, was his classmate. The couple has a son and a daughter.

Tome became a police officer after graduating from Harrisburg Area Community College's 83rd Police Academy in 2003. He served as a regional officer for the past five years.

[Police chief Carl] Segatti said Tome was a good officer with a strong work ethic.  He loved and enjoyed his job in the uniformed patrol division, where he specialized as an accident reconstructionist, Segatti said.

Officer David Tome

The two other officers who were there at the time of the crash are doing as well as can be expected, Segatti said.  The police department closed Wednesday to mourn the loss of a fellow officer, he said. . . .

Fellow police officers have taken the death rather hard, a reality check that the job is often dangerous and deadly, several law enforcement representatives said.

"We like to think we are tougher than the average citizen out there," Segatti said. "We are when we have work to do.  But we have the same emotions as everyone.  We just don't have the luxury to show them."

Tome was struck by a 2006 Saturn Vue driven by Joanna Seibert of Dillsburg.  Seibert was shaken up by the crash and taken to Gettysburg Hospital for observation, police said.

Through a family member, Seibert declined to comment Tuesday.

Based on a preliminary investigation, Seibert hit the brakes and tried to stop before hitting Tome.  The impact sent Tome's body over a guardrail and down an embankment, killing him instantly.

An autopsy conducted Tuesday at Lehigh Valley Hospital determined Tome died of multiple blunt force trauma.

 Officer Tome's fellow officers pay tribute to him 

Based on the location of the injuries, it appears Tome was hit from the back or the side, indicating he either did not see the car coming or saw it at the last second, Bloss said.

By the time Tome heard Seibert skidding on the highway, it was too late to get out of the way, he said.

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Joanna Seibert was convicted of vehicular homicide in the death of Officer Tome.  This account of her November 30, 2011, sentencing is from another local newspaper article:

A Dillsburg woman convicted in a crash that killed a police officer was sentenced today to . . . 1 year minus a day to 5 years minus a day in York County Prison.

The judge rejected a request for house arrest for Seibert, who is pregnant.  She's due to deliver in mid-February, so Kelly ordered her to begin serving on March 14.

Seibert, 40, was convicted Oct. 12 of homicide by vehicle and tampering with evidence in the 2008 accident on Route 15 near Dillsburg in which Northern York County Regional Police Officer David Tome, 31, was hit and killed by Seibert’s SUV.

The sentencing came after two hours of emotional testimony from Tome’’ and Seibert’s families this afternoon.

Jamie Bell, Tome's sister, said there are mementos and monuments to Tome in York County, “but they're all we have. There's no David.”

She said she hadn't heard from Seibert since the crash and didn't care to hear from her today. “I am not going to forgive you,” Bell said. “As far as I'm concerned, you can go to hell.”

Seibert said she thinks about Tome every day and that if it would ease the family's grief she would trade places with him.  “But that cannot happen,” she said.

Tome was starting work on an accident reconstruction on Route 15 south near Clear Spring Road in Franklin Township south of Dillsburg when he was hit and killed on Oct, 21, 2008.  Seibert was speeding and tailgating the vehicle ahead of her and had been using her iPhone and applying makeup.  [NOTE: Seibert maintained she was distracted by something in her eye.]  

Prosecutor Tim Barker has called those three factors, speeding, tailgating and not paying attention, “the trifecta of death.”

In court documents, Seibert said she is pregnant and had asked the court to sentence her to house arrest.  Defense lawyer Ed Spreha said house arrest is appropriate because of a serious medical condition discovered in the fetus.  Spreha said the baby has been diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening condition that will require Seibert to relocate to the Philadelphia area for monitoring during the rest of her pregnancy. . . .

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You might suspect Seibert and her lawyer of exaggerating the seriousness of her unborn baby’s condition in hopes of persuading the judge not to send her to prison.  But you would be wrong.  

Seibert gave birth to a daughter with a congenital diaphragmatic hernia, or CDH – the “potentially life-threatening condition” mentioned in there article above – in February 2012.  

The little girl died six weeks later, on March 15.

Seibert had originally been scheduled to start her prison term on March 14.  But after her baby was born, a judge delayed her reporting date until May 9.

She eventually served ten months in prison. 

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Most of the comments that were posted in response to a newspaper article announcing her early release expressed outrage:

– A wife without a husband, two children without a father for s lifetime, and the person who robbed them of him serves less than a year.  This disgusts me. . . . This punishment in no way fits the crime. 

– This is bullshit!!!!!  This wasn’t even her first offense of reckless driving!!!!!  She should have had to do life in prison . . . . Just sickening.

– This worthless bitch needs to rot in hell.

A few – very few – of the comments were more forgiving:

–It would be interesting to see how all those quick to judge (of course you have never made a mistake, needed a second chance, driven distracted . . . you’re all saints) would feel if the killer was your family member as opposed to the victim.  There are always two perspectives.  You could be changing a radio station tomorrow and hit someone . . . does that mean you deserve to fry, rot in hell, etc.?

– Pray for her, her family and Officer Tome’s family.  If you judge, you will be judged!  We all are guilty of something!  Let ye who have not sinned cast stones!

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I had no idea what I was getting into when I decided to post a photo of the rail-trail bench with the plaque commemorating Officer Tone.

But once I started telling the story, I didn’t feel that I could stop in the middle of it.

The deeper I got into it, the worse things got.  Unfortunately, that’s the way life goes sometimes.

There’s really no good way to end this post, is there?

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Today’s featured song was a non-album B-side released by the Stranglers in 1977.  (If a song as good as “Straighten Out” wasn’t good enough to be included on one of the Stranglers’ albums, imagine how good the songs that did make the cut were.)

The Stranglers in 1978

I first heard “Straighten Out” on  Steven Lorber’s legendary “Mystic Eyes” radio show in the summer of 1980.

Click here to listen to “Straighten Out.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Kingston Trio – "A Worried Man" (1962)

I'll be home tonight

So I won't be worried long!

[NOTE:  If you had asked the ten-year-old 2 or 3 lines to name his favorite record album, he would have said The Best of the Kingston Trio.  To date, 2 or 3 lines has featured no fewer than five tracks from that album – I can’t think of an album that’s been featured on my wildly popular little blog more frequently.  "A Worried Man" became the first Kingston Trio recording to achieve that distinction way back in April 2011.] 

*     *     *     *     * 

The singer of "A Worried Man" is wrong – he'll have plenty to worry about when you get home tonight.  

For one thing, Bobby's in his living room, holdin' hands with his gal Sue.  

And Nicky's at his big front door, 'bout to come on through.  

In other words, that Sue of his is giving it up to half the guys in town!  

*     *     *     *     *

This song brings to mind a foam beer "koozie" I saw at a convenience store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, many years ago.  (The Yankees used to hold spring training in Fort Lauderdale, which is why I was there.)  It read as follows:

Definition of a worried man:

A wife, a mistress, a mortgage payment --

All one month overdue!

I regret that I did not buy that koozie.  It would have completely captured the current zeitgeist -- both the breakdown of traditional family values and a troubled economy, n'est-ce pas?

(I did buy a different koozie.  It read "Every man needs a wife -- you can't blame it all on the government."  So the trip wasn't a total loss.)

*     *     *     *     *

You may be asking yourself, "KINGSTON TRIO???"  I admit, this song is a bit of a departure from the usual fare on 2 or 3 lines.  But I like to mix it up – be spontaneous – go with the flow – throw the occasional breaking ball to a right-handed hitter when the count is 3-2 and the bases are loaded.

The Best of the Kingston Trio (which was released in 1962) is one of the first LPs that I remember my family owning.  

When my parents bought a Magnovox console stereo in the early 1960s, they bought a lot of jazz records, which were of little interest to me.  But I loved The Best of the Kingston Trio and Mitch Miller and the Gang's Sing Along With Mitch record.

The Mitch Miller album was a lot of fun to sing along with, and I still remember most of the songs on that LP.  Here's an example of the charmingly archaic lyrics the album featured:

That's where my money goes
To buy my baby clothes
I buy her everything
To keep her in style (well, well, well!)
She wears silk underwear
I wear my last year's pair
Say boys, that's where my money goes!

(There may come a time when I forget my name and my childrens' names and every other important fact I know – but I will never forget those lyrics.)

The songs on the Kingston Trio record were a little more contemporary and interesting.  Several of them were about criminals – like "Tom Dooley."  (I think my junior high boys' chorus sang that song, along with "There Is Nothin' Like a Dame" from South Pacific.)

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It's hard to believe just how popular the Kingston Trio was back in the day.

They released their first album in 1958 and it went to #1 on the Billboard album chart.  

The Kingston Trio issued 18 more albums between 1959 and 1964 -- an average of three albums per year.  Five of those albums went to #1, five were either #2 or #3 albums, and three others made the Billboard top 10.  They had four albums in the top 10 simultaneously for five weeks in 1959!  (That is positively Beatles-esque.)

Purists sneered at the Kingston Trio because they were so successful, accusing them of prostituting folk music.  The group never claimed to be real folksingers, but they made folk songs wildly popular here and abroad.  

Eventually, the Trio expanded its repertoire to include songs like "It Was a Very Good Year" (which later became a hit for Frank Sinatra) and "Scotch and Soda."  They recorded music by young songwriters like Hoyt Axton and Rod McKuen – remember Rod McKuen? – and were one of the first American groups to perform a Jacques Brel song in English.  Last but far from least, they popularized the famous anti-war ballad, "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" 

Today's featured song is one of their more light-hearted ones.  It uses the chorus of the old folk song, "Worried Man Blues":

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

It takes a worried man to sing a worried song

I'm worried now, but I won't be worried long

But "Worried Man Blues" -– which was recorded by the Carter Family, Woody Guthrie, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, among others – is about a man who is in prison . . . not a man returning from a business trip to find his wife engaging in extramarital shenanigans.  

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Click here to hear "Worried Man Blues" performed by the Stanley Brothers.

Click here to hear the Kingston Trio's very different take on that song.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.