One Innocent Man by Ted Silar on Amazon Music – Amazon.com
One Innocent Man is an album of topical songs, protests against all the evils in the world—the greed, the lust, the hate, the fear, all of man’s inhumanity to man. Or something like that. I have always sympathized with the down and out. Being, as it were, one. George Orwell wrote a book on the topic, I understand.
The album cover is Pieter Bruegel, the Elder’s 1568 painting, The Magpie on the Gallows. I always thought it was a happy picture, celebrating the triumph over death, or at least the persistence of life, what with its sublime landscape and its dancing people, but experts say the meaning is just the opposite. Oh, well.
One Innocent Man
In this song, I catalog every reason I can think of why capital punishment necessitates killing a few innocents, innocents caught up in the machinery like dolphins in tuna nets. Here and there. Once in a while. Executing murderers for murdering innocent people and then murdering innocent people so one can execute more murderers doesn’t seem the ideal solution to me. I think opponents of capital punishment ought to repeat this argument more than they do, because this is the argument that gets through. I mean, “Would you sacrifice one innocent man / to see a hundred murderers fall?”
Afghan Lullaby
These are the days of the refugee. I don’t have to imagine much to see a mother, on the road in Afghanistan, lying to her child, telling it they are safe, telling it the future is bright, telling it Daddy is coming soon, trying to sing it to sleep, while explosives shake the ground. I would like to translate Afghan Lullaby into an Afghan language. If I knew a translator.
Sally and Johnny
This song is about unemployment. How unemployment destroys people. How no-one seems to want to acknowledge it. How a family dreaming of nothing more ambitious than a normal, settled American life falls to pieces when the mills shut down. I wrote Sally and Johnny in the quatrains of a traditional ballad, the traditional form for such a story.
Cell Phone Call from Iraq
This song is full of small-town American life. A soldier, calling home from Iraq, is asking if things are still the way they were. “Cell Phone Call from Iraq” is in an old-fashioned, classic country style. I imagine maybe Porter Wagoner or Randy Travis singing it, pedal steel and fiddle accompanying. I am aware that the average Iraq War veteran listens to more rumbustious stuff. But I had in mind one of those older reservists called up at the beginning of the war, a 50-something non-com, with a wife and daughter back at home, plenty old enough to appreciate a little classic country and western music.
When I Get Rich
This song is about being in love and wishing you were rich. Fantasies of buying stuff, cutting a fine figure, showing up those peasants who used to look down on you, contrasted with “When you got no dough / you never know / when they’re comin’ for you.” A more-or-less bluegrass rendition sets the requisite jaunty tone.