Artist Pete Seeger

Release Dangerous Songs!?

Year 1966

Label CBS # 62751

Format LP · Album

Country USA

Language English

Songs here 2 in the archive

1966 · Album · CBS # 62751 · USA

Less well-known anti-war / protest from Seeger, the song "King Henry" on Dangerous Songs!? (CBS # 62751). It featured in Broadside Magazine # 58 under the title "I Mind My Own Business" , p. 4. Seeger noted: "the quote in the 5th verse is from an actual letter from a US 'adviser' to his wife, a week before he was killed in Viet Nam". It's dated 1965, and to the tune of "Old Ballad Melody".

It looked at the perspective of a soldier drafted to war and killed in action (K.I.A.): "drafted in sixty-three... he wrote this last month, last week he was dead" . It argued that the war was virtually unwinnable: "we'll have to flatten the country... all gutted and spattered with napalm" - a reference to Napalm B - a jellied gasoline mixture, with polystyrene, benzene, and gasoline. Declared a war-crime since 1980, the US government extensively used this weapon during the Vietnam conflict, dropping 388,000 tons on Indochina between 1963 and 1973.¹²³ The song also noted the prominence of T.V. ("television war") - a reflection on both the media portrayal of the war, and the delivery of war images directly into the homes of Americans in the 1960s: "on T.V. some general says 'we must be tough'" .

The songs