Agent Orange
1982 · Folkways FW 8563 · USA
- Artist
- Peggy Seeger
- Title
- Agent Orange
- Release
- From Where I Stand: Topical Songs from America and England
- Year
- 1982
- Label
- Folkways # FW 8563
- Format
- LP · Album
- Language
- English
- Country
- USA
- Genre
- Folk · Contemporary Folk
- Primary theme
- Post-War
Annotation
Peggy Seeger, born in New York (17 June 1935), and half-sister to the famous Pete Seeger. She released the contemporary folk song "Agent Orange" (Folkways Records # FW 8563), which looked at the defoliant used by the US during the Vietnam conflict, a chemical which had long term negative health effects, and is frequently referenced in the post-war songs. There are two major sections to the song. In the first part, we hear about the story of a man volunteering to fight in Vietnam because he thought "that Uncle Sam was right". The second part of the song gets down to the agent orange issue, which the narrator describes as "some fancy tricks". The recurring theme is that the Vietnam veteran did in fact die in Vietnam - through agent orange giving him cancer many years later - although he did not know it at the time: "It killed me in Vietnam and I didn't even know". It also gave his son a birth defect:
Annotation by Justin A. Brummer
About the artist
American folk singer, born 17 June 1935 in New York City; long based in Britain. [Source: Wikipedia]