Songs of Freedom

This is one more small step in a long-delayed musical career, a collection of songs, some original, some based on the inspiration of artists and poets I admire, some snatched in shady deals under distant streetlights. I’m a magpie, a lyre bird, a thief in so many words. But I forgive myself, and I hope you do too, for at the roots of modern music there is a law of creative plagiarism, a principle discovered by Woody Guthrie himself, that you can take someone else’s song, change the words, change a few chords, change a couple of places where it goes up instead of down, or vice versa, and hey presto, that’s your new song.

Modern songwriting technique is a lot more original than Woody Guthrie. I never progressed beyond that, sad to say, for reasons that should be obvious once you get to know me. What would be wrong for instance in taking WH Auden’s “Refugee Blues” and actually playing it with the blues? In the end I went for something that Leonard Cohen would recognise, or Lou Reed even, except it has more chords than Reed would use and probably less than Leonard Cohen.

Mr Cohen, if you’re out there, play my song! Lou Reed, m’man, hear me!

**Work in progress. Excuse crude chord charts and stagey directions until I learn to write this down.

C and D Went F and G

Refugee Blues

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