The first review of a Bob Dylan concert ever published in the New York Times (maybe the first ever published anywhere) was written by Robert Shelton in September 1961, and it’s become a minor legend all its own. When Dylan first met producer John Hammond, Dylan immediately slapped the review into Hammond’s hand. By the end of that first meeting, Dylan was a “Columbia recording artist,” as they still declare at the start of his concerts today. Anyway, that’s a version of the lore.
I just realized today that, in that 1961 review, Shelton ends with a short description of the headliner of the bill that night — a Greenwich Village bluegrass band called The Greenbriar Boys. I got into them a few years go because the band’s mandolin player, Ralph Rinzler, went on to rekindle Bill Monroe’s career as his manager, and then went on to become one of the most important folklorists of the century.
Shelton even mentions one of the songs in the Greenbriar Boys’ repertoire, “Farewell, Amelia Earhart, First Lady of the Air” (the correct title is “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight”). The song is one of those tragic, tear-jerkin’ country ballads I always make fun of by adopting a phony southern accent and saying “That song always makes me cry!”
But in this case, it really does always make me cry. It’s become a real favorite of mine over the past two years — I even played it on the radio when I was on Dave Hull’s show in August. The Ditch Lilies, an all-woman Minnesota oldtime/bluegrass band, sometimes do their rendition of it at their gigs … if the audience is lucky. Here are the lyrics as the Greenbriar Boys sing them on their “best of” collection:
A ship out on the ocean, just a speck against the sky
Amelia Earhart flying that sad day
With her partner, Captain Noonan, on the second of July
Her plane fell in the ocean, far awayChorus:
There’s a beautiful, beautiful field
Far away in a land that is fair
Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart
Farewell, First Lady of the AirWell, a half an hour later an SOS was heard
The signal weak, but still her voice was brave
Oh, in shark-infested waters her plane went down that night
In the deep Pacific, to a watery grave. [Chorus]Well, now you have heard my story of that awful tragedy
We pray that she might fly home safe again
Oh, in years to come though others blaze a trail across the sea
We’ll ne’er forget Amelia and her plane. [Chorus]
OK now — here, at long last, is the real point. A biography of Charles Lindbergh’s wife has recently been released, and the author is making the rounds — I heard her on Minnesota Public Radio recently, for example. The book is called “Anne Morrow Lindbergh: First Lady of the Air.”
Hey! Amelia Earhart already has a claim on the knickname of First Lady of the Air! It’s right there, prominently placed as the hook in the chorus of a great song! Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a skunk! … why, if Anne and Amelia had met back in 1929, I’d imagine they’d have a tremendous wrestling match! The Lindbergh-Earhart SMACKDOWN! … maybe wearing jodhpurs and those boots …
Anyway, no, seriously, maybe Anne Morrow Lindbergh was called “the first lady of the air” too — possibly with the idea that her husband Charles was a kind of President of the air? And a little Googling suggests neither Earhart nor Lindbergh can claim to be the “first” First Lady of the Air. It seems one Harriet Quimby was given this title immediately upon becoming the first woman to fly across the English Channel back in 1913, at least 15 years before Lindbergh and Earhart became famous.
And so I … Is it only February 3? Thank God it’s not a leap year!
Editor’s Note: This is the third installment of The Celestial Monochord’s historic attempt to post every day during the month of February — almost like a REAL blog!
I had exactly the same response when I saw the title of the new Anne Morrow Lindbergh biography, namely, “Hey, that’s Amelia Earhart!”
I’m surprised, though, that you say nothing about the composer of the Earhart ballad, the wonderfully colorful Red River Dave McEnery (born in San Antonio, 1914). In his definitive history Country Music U.S.A. (1985) Bill C. Malone calls him “the grand master of the modern event song … who has written on such subjects as ‘Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight’ and ‘The Ballad of Emmett Till.’ [He] still turns out reams of topical material dealing with everything from Watergate to the kidnapping of Patricia Hearst.” One of McEnery’s last songs was titled “Shame Is the Middle Name of Exxon,” occasioned by an unhappy experience at a service station.
An interesting website dedicated to his memory will tell you everything (and more) that you need or want to know about McEnery. It also features the informative obit run by the San Antonio Express-News on January 16, 2002.
Thanks Jerry … yeah, I thought about mentioning McEnery, but decided I’d already well exceeded my quota for talking about things of which I knew little. I’ll have to check McEnery out — a compilation of his stuff is sitting there in plain view, right on Amazon, for example.
Kurt, Reading this entry prompted me to put my two copies of “Amelia Earhart” on the turntable for another spin. My 78 of Red River Dave (McEnery) and his Orchestra, the original, by the composer, strikes me as sad and full of pathos in its lyrics, but jaunty and almost upbeat in the way and especially the speed with which he sings it. Perhaps more than simply a metaphor for the human longing for peace in some magical afterlife, he actually did have hopes for her landing safely on a beautiful field in a far away land.
My other version of the song, by Jim Kweskin and the Lyman Family on Kweskin’s lesser known but excellent 1971 album “Jim Kweskin’s America,” is sung at a much slower tempo and – to my ears – is a deeper reading of the lyrics… or at least facilitates a deeper connection with the lyrics. I’d be fascinated to hear the Greenbriar and Ditch Lilies versions.
After reading Jerome Clark’s comments about the song being mentioned in his 1985 edition of Bill Malone’s seminal “Country Music USA” – and wanting to read what Malone had to say on the subject – I was disappointed to find no mention of either Earhart or McEnery in my 1975 edition of Malone’s book.
Finally, two bits of trivia related to the subject: On the label of Red River Dave’s original 1937 78 rpm recording (Continental C-3021-B), Earhart is spelled Erhart, and second, McEnery evidently had a gig performing at the 1939 New York World’s Fair and lore has it that his performance of “Amelia Erhart’s (sic) Last Flight” was the first song ever performed live on the then-infant media of commercial television.
A kind reader from the Netherlands informs me that the English band “Plainsong” released an entire LP dedicated to Amelia Earhart in 1972. It’s called “In Search of Amelia Earhart.”
I did not know that!
Thanks!