Happy Birthday Tom Glazer.  Innocent times. Sing along!

Every morning I hit up my music birthday list and tweet out a song. I do this for myself. I can start my day off with music.  I got a song to carry around all day.  Sometimes when things get tough I can sing the song in my head. Hopefully it makes a difference in days of my friends.

Music makes us happy. It lights up our nucleous  acumbans. It’s the same place that light’s up when people do cocaine. Music, for many of us, is our drug of choice for which there does not need to be any rehab.

So this morning it was Tom Glazer’s birthday.

To be honest I had no idea who Tom Glazer was but I knew his music.

“Glazer moved to Washington D.C. and began work at the Library of Congress.^[2] There he met Alan Lomax who worked for cataloguing American folk songs, and who was a great influence. Glazer began performing as an amateur and was invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to perform at the White House for soldiers working there as guards. He made a successful professional début at the New York City Town Hall in January 1943 during a blizzard, and in 1945 had a radio show Tom Glazer’s Ballad Box.^[1] His songs of the period, such as “A Dollar Ain’t a Dollar Anymore”, “Our Fight is Yours”, “When the Country is Broke”, and “Talking Inflation Blues” took strong social stands.^[1] Glazer’s songs were recorded by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, the Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Perry Como and Frank Sinatra. He was part of the strong folk music scene in New York in the 1940s, and with Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Josh White helped prepare for the commercially successful folk revival of the 1960s.^[1][2] “He wasn’t fancy,” Seeger reported after his death “He was just straightforward. He had a good sense of humor.”

These are the two songs I tweeted out this morning.

If your child ever sang “Battle Hymm of the Children” today they would be marched to the principals office, the police would be called and they would be featured on cable news, ripped apart by Nancy Grace,  Fox News would probably make sure you knew the parents were Democrats and the songwriter was a “Folk singer! A socialist from socialist times! Then somehow connect them with Hillary’s emails. Then the next morning would be the second story on Today Show (After Hillery’s emails). Matt Lauer will get all judgy with the parenting skills. Then we would all mourn that John Stewart who is not here to humanize the whole thing. In fact. I bet you he sings “On top of spaghetti.” with his kids.

So today in honor of Tom’s Birthday and our lost innocent times let’s have a sing a long! Sing with me! It will really make you feel better! Better than Prozac! Come on you know you want to.