Songs for Memorial Day

Honoring fallen soldiers--and protesting some of the wars they fought--with songs by (among others) John Prine, Joni Mitchell, The Kinks, Phil Ochs, Bob Marley, Leonard Cohen and Dire Straits.

Plus Johnny Cash, Linda Ronstadt & Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Iris DeMent and Richard Thompson. Not the usual collection, or (in some cases) sentiments, and in no particular order. First, our usual cartoon. Then share, comment, subscribe (it’s still free).

John Prine unveils “Sam Stone” in very early TV appearance.

A little-known early Joni Mitchell song, “The Fiddle and the Drum,” performed by A Perfect Circle.

Neil Young created the best (among the few) full albums protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Living With War. Here’s the key cut, “Shock and Awe.”

The Byrds, after Gene Clark and David Crosby flew the coop, still produced a couple of great albums, and songs (originally penned by Croz) such as “Draft Morning,” here with an extended ending.

Emmylou Harris & Linda Ronstadt collaborated on the beautiful “1917,” by David Olney, as a woman takes pity on a soldier and sleeps with him.

Perhaps The Kinks’ greatest album from 1969, Arthur, explored World War II in three songs, including one that applies to all wars, “Some Mother’s Son.”

No one in our era wrote more anti-war songs than Phil Ochs—even the little-remembered U.S. invasion of Santo Domingo earned a fine tune. But several tackled more universal antiwar themes, such as “One More Parade.”

Also expressing a more timeless and universal message, the master Bob Marley denounced “War,” in this searing live performance in 1977.

Not specifically an “antiwar” song but a depiction of the sad treatment and fate that met even one of the most illustrious soldiers, Ira Hayes, the Native American who helped raise the flag in the famous photo on Iwo Jima. Johnny Cash was proud to do this Peter LaFarge classic and drew wide praise from Native Americans.

Jackson Browne’s “Lives in the Balance” offered a broad sweep in 1986, here live with Crosby, Nash and longtime collaborator David Lindley.

Iris DeMent with a haunting take on the Vietnam “Wall in Washington.”

Steve Earle, perhaps the best lefty troubadour/rocker of our time, explored “Rich Man’s War” at the height of our folly in Iraq.

Dire Straits reached a mass audience with the title track of their 1980s album “Brothers in Arms.”

As noted, there were few powerful songs protesting the Iraq War, but guitar ace Richard Thompson did deliver “Dad’s Gonna Kill Me”—Dad apparently being G.I. lingo for “Baghdad.”

Again, not precisely antiwar but a poetic depiction of resistance in France, Leonard Cohen’s early “The Partisan”—sung here, movingly, in Paris.

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Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels (on escapes under the Berlin Wall), the current The Beginning or the End (on MGM’s wild atomic bomb movie), and The Campaign of the Century (on Upton Sinclair’s left-wing race for governor of California), which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. His new film, Atomic Cover-up, just had its world premiere and is drawing extraordinary acclaim. For nearly all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he served as longtime editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.