Next Stop: Vietnam!

This morning the wise & warm country-music expert Bill Malone hosted one of his best shows ever on WORT-FM, a 3-hour special on Vietnam-era country & folk music. You can hear it via a link at www.wort-fm.org (click on Archive & search for Back to the Country, Sept. 15th).

His guest was UW professor & Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley, who culled excerpts from a new 13-CD UW Archives collection, The Next Stop Is Vietnam: 1961-2008 (available from the cool German label Bear Family Records, see www.bear-family.de). The boxed set includes North Vietnamese pro-surrender propaganda broadcasts by Hanoi Hannah as well as American pro-war propaganda by Nobel Peace Prize winner Henry Kissinger.

Here are a few of highlights from the show, which ranged from the ridiculous ("Goodbye High School, Hello Vietnam") to the sublime (Jimmy Webb's gorgeous "Galveston" - popularized by Glen Campbell):

* Johnny Cash's "Singing in Vietnam Talking Blues" - a tale of his eye-opening trip with June Carter to entertain U.S. combat troops, featuring a support-the-troops message with a protest spirit (the last word of the song is "peace").

* Merle Haggard's "Fightin' Side of Me" & "Okie from Muskogee" - Merle once admitted to an interviewer that he was more ambivalent about the counterculture than the latter song's lyrics suggest, noting "The only place I didn't smoke [pot] was in Muskogee." Lefty folkie Phil Ochs picked up on the redneck satire, performing "Okie" & praising Haggard on his weird Gunfight at Carnegie Hall (1970) live album.

* "Sam Stone" by John Prine, who'll probably perform it Friday (9/18) at the Overture Center in Madison. The chorus, from the junkie/vet's kid's perspective ["There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes / and Jesus Christ died for nothin', I suppose..."] always moves me.

* Several angry tunes by U.S. Vietnam veterans, including the defiant Agent Orange victim Jim Wachtendonk & compassionate bluesman Watermelon Slim.

We seem to live in the age of perpetual American warfare. Our nation's misadventure in Afghanistan feels a lot like Vietnam to me - 9 years & counting. Bring the troops home already!