Four O'Clock in The Afternoon

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Four O'Clock in The Afternoon

Digital

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Digital Download Files.
There are downloadable files associated with this product...

  1. A Tramp's Thoughts.mp3
  2. Annie Dunn.mp3
  3. Bess.mp3
  4. Dancin' Shoes.mp3
  5. Four Lane Highways and Mobile Homes.mp3
  6. Grandfather and Me.mp3
  7. Jacksonville.mp3
  8. Just a Little Meltdown.mp3
  9. Only Outlaws Will Be Free.mp3
  10. Taking Up Smoking.mp3
  11. Tamarack Tree.mp3
  12. The Mining Museum.mp3
  13. The Spirit of Justice.mp3
  14. Woman of Sumpul River.mp3
  15. zFour OClock in the Afternoon album info for digital download.pdf

Appears in: Digital Albums

“Four O’Clock In The Afternoon is a compilation of Favorite songs written several years ago. They are stories, historical accounts of people’s lives and events. The cover photo is a 1948 view of the Upstate NY dairy farm where I was born and raised. When I was a kid, all the neighbors milked cows. I easily knew everyone in a two-mile radius, five miles if you headed to Unadilla, even the names of the dogs.

Agribusiness brought us DDT, Paraquat and Malathion. They killed the birds and the bunnies and poisoned a few humans along the way. Now the cows are gone, as well as the families who were ancestored to the land, not because we didn’t know how to farm, but in the words of Agriculture Secretary, Earl Butz in 1968, “Get big or get out!” And he made sure that we got out. As my number came up in 1970, I felt that I had more in common with Vietnamese farmers than I did with the Wall St brokers who wanted to pay me to go kill them.  So I left the US for South America, then Africa, Europe, Asia and not to my surprise, farmers everywhere were all experiencing the same violence from multi-national agribusiness, many at the point of a gun and all subject to the market forces of Wall St.

The “Jacksonville” song stems from Bill and Hillary’s reign in Arkansas three decades ago. It is unfortunately a timeless metaphor for the disastrous impact of mining, drilling, incineration, plutonium enrichment and their relationship to military bases around the country and around the world. The US has become a gulag of over 2800 superfund sites that have ended and altered people’s lives, destroyed natural resources and made land uninhabitable. It is a colonization of the country by energy companies and their representatives in Congress and the White House.

Going beyond our borders, US military occupation has amassed circa 900 bases in 153 countries. The sun never sets on the US empire, as Orwellian perpetual war colonizes to control every ounce of gas, drop of oil, natural resources, export agriculture and the labor to extract it. As Henry Kissinger aptly put it, “If you control the food, you control the people; If you control the oil, you control the country.” Everyone is concerned with stopping terrorism. The easiest way is to stop voting and paying for it.”

1  Four Lane Highways and Mobile Homes           4:33

2  A Tramp’s Thoughts                                               4:13

3  Tamarack Tree                                                        4:26

4  Woman of Sumpul River                                      2:31

5  Spirit of Justice                                                      3:25

6  Grandfather & Me                                                7:13

7  Annie Dunn                                                            3:31

8  Taking Up Smoking                                               2:53

9  The Mining Museum                                            4:34

10 Jacksonville                                                           4:19

11 Only Outlaws Will Be Free                                  4:55

12 Bess                                                                        2:17

13 Just A Little Meltdown                                        6:13

14 Dancin’ Shoes                                                       6:56