Having gone to the USA for my first, second, fourth and fifth choices, and Ireland for my third, Scotland for my sixth, and England for my seventh, I choose to go back to the USA for my eighth.
I keep hearing people talking of "the Woody Guthrie song" Plane Crash At Los Gatos Canyon...and I keep shouting at the radio..."No, no, no...!! Woody only wrote the words (as a poem)... Martin Hoffman was the man who came up with the melody"...*
I talked about this song with the great American folk singer Julie Felix (long exiled in England), when I interviewed her over a period of two and a half hours, back in 2004 ...or thereabouts. At the time, neither of us knew what a fascinating back-story lay in wait for us. And certainly neither of us associated the song with a second song: one that I will talk on at length (lower down the page), and attempt to Dai-ssect.
Incidentally, it is her version of Plane Crash At Los Gatos Canyon, I would choose over all the others... Here - astonishingly – is Julie, less than three months from her 80th birthday...performing the song LIVE in Hull in the UK... just 16 miles as the crow flies from my door.
Within two years of this, Julie would be dead...
*And thinking of how melody writer Martin's life unfolded, has led me to my decision to choose my next song to go under my Dai-ssecting The Song microscope...
It’s a beautifully poignant song, written by Judy Collins in memory of the same Martin Hoffman, a friend from Denver, Colorado, who had composed the melody for the 1948 Woody Guthrie poem entitled Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos). Martin had written it at a time in the late 1950s just before he and Judy became friends, and a couple of years before Judy’s career started to take off and saw her moving to New York City.
Please read these lyrics slowly, letting her words set in...
SONG FOR MARTIN (Judy Collins)
In Rough Rock, Arizona he lived for many years alone
A gangly kid from Colorado, who could sing the sweetest songs
I first heard Woody's songs from him in a cabin in the snow
Seems like it was yesterday but it was years and years ago
He moved to Arizona in nineteen sixty-one
Got a job at the Indian school - he was livin' in the sun
My life was movin' fast by now, I was always on the run
My country life was far behind and the circus had begun
[Chorus]
Marty, I know it got lonely out there
Coyotes cryin' at midnight in the cold desert air
The heart that sorrow broke in you can never be repaired
Mart, I know I let you down somewhere
I knew that me and Marty, we should have been good friends
I always knew the paths we walked were meant to cross again
We talked on the telephone once or twice a year
His voice was so familiar, his memory was clear
I'll never know what brought him to where he finally stood
A shotgun pointed at his head in a cabin in the woods
But somehow I could hear it, it struck my heart as well
For the unknown man who needs a hand
For the friend I'll never know
[Chorus]
Marty, I know it got lonely out there
Coyotes cryin' at midnight in the cold desert air
The heart that sorrow broke in you can never be repaired
Mart, I know I let you down somewhere
Now, when I bought Judy’s True Stories and Other Dreams album in 1973/4, this song jumped out at me. Recorded in 1972, with Judy herself playing sublime piano, it frankly ambushed me, and reduced me close to tears.
I confess though, that at the time, I had never ever heard of Martin Hoffman. But I still recognised a great song when I encountered one... even if I was unaware of its back-story just then. It would be quite a few years before I became fully aware of the song’s sad origins.
Now, please pin your ears back, and let this song perform its magic. I promise you that if you have never heard it before, you will now be haunted by it for years to come... just like I have been for the past 46 years.
How deeply touching was that, eh? And it’s made additionally heart-rending when you consider that Judy later lost her only child to suicide in 1992, when he was aged 33.
Let’s look at the song’s lyrics in detail... It opens with this line... In Rough Rock, Arizona he lived for many years alone
Rough Rock is in Apache County, Arizona, and as the county’s name suggests, is situated in land belonging to the Navajo Nation (Indian reservation) territory... so how I wondered, did Judy first encounter him, given that she was born in Seattle (1,261 miles from Rough Rock) and later when she was ten, Judy and her family had moved to just outside Denver, Colorado (closer, but still 554 miles away)? Well, the clue is in the next line of the song.
But first, let me paint a fuller picture...
Her dad was a blind piano player, and as a little girl, her house resounded to the sound of mainstream songs and classical music. Folk music was not on their family’s radar.
In those days she was something of a piano prodigy, only taking to the guitar in her teens, after climbing nearby Lookout Mountain and being mesmerised by locals playing folk music on their guitars in a big cabin up there. And it was there she first set eyes on a young chap wearing dungarees and playing guitar, and who blew her away...
A gangly kid from Colorado, (you see, he was not living in Rough Rock in those days... he was part of the Denver folk scene...)
Don’t you just love her choice of the word “gangly”? On the surface it is not an obvious compliment she is paying: had she been of such a desire, she’d have chosen a word like “wiry”, which means much the same thing, with the added bonus of implying “athletically tough”. But the word “gangly” by contrast, brings with it an additional meaning of “physically awkward/uncoordinated”.
Yet, I don’t see it as a put-down. Why not? Well, because it’s the last 6 words in that line that put it in a different and better light: viz... who could sing the sweetest songs.
Suddenly it conjures up a picture of a gangly Art Garfunkel with that gorgeous ethereal voice of his delivering those magical words of Paul Simon...
I rest my case...
And one of the songs Martin Hoffman sang was the aforementioned Woody Guthrie song, Plane Crash At Los Gatos Canyon. Indeed, it was the first Woody Guthrie song Judy ever heard. "It was like going up and getting an injection of this culture that I knew zero about," she told Chris Kornelis, in 2012.
As she says in the lyric... I first heard Woody's songs from him in a cabin in the snow (The place up the mountain where the Folkies performed) Seems like it was yesterday but it was years and years ago
She was so entranced by the music that she quickly bought a guitar and learned to play a more than adequate guitar accompaniment for herself, and began writing songs. And became famous locally.
She soon outgrew her 6 months-a-year residency at The Exodus Folk Club in Denver, and moved to New York City and, with her national career taking off like a rocket, in just a handful of years became an international star. Meanwhile Hoffman...
He moved to Arizona in nineteen sixty-one
Got a job at the Indian school - he was livin' in the sun
My life was movin' fast by now, I was always on the run
My country life was far behind and the circus had begun
Could it be that Martin was attracted to Judy? It would have been strange if he was not. She was a strikingly pretty (and of course, über-talented) young woman. But by 1958, the year of her 19th birthday, she got married and had her only child that same year... so one can assume it was unrequited love on Martin’s part. That marriage ended in divorce in 1965, but in 1961 she was probably a happily married young mother, and if Judy did keep a place in her heart for Martin, the sheer speed of events were such, that she forced him to the back of her mind. (For instance, in 1962, she made her debut at that mecca for all musical artistes, Carnegie Hall.)
Such heady fame...being lauded by all and sundry. Yes, all those prestigious bookings must indeed have felt like a “circus” to her. So I guess it was not unexpected that she largely put Martin to the back of her mind, just making a note in her diary to give him a phone call every six months or so. She was later to so regret not meeting him one-to-one “in person” instead.
But the first chorus doesn’t quite show that degree of sadness yet: just tells us that Marty’s “livin’ in the sun” – or at least, one half of that double entendre - did not last long. For she sings...
Marty, I know it got lonely out there
Coyotes cryin' at midnight in the cold desert air
The heart that sorrow broke in you can never be repaired
Mart, I know I let you down somewhere
That last line is the first indication of her feelings of guilt... she well knew that Marty carried a torch for her. And she was happy to keep him on the back burner of her life, knowing that maybe one day they would possibly deepen their friendship, and it would become something else...
I knew that me and Marty, we should have been good friends
I always knew the paths we walked were meant to cross again
We talked on the telephone once or twice a year
His voice was so familiar, his memory was clear
And then comes this next verse... I still recall how my mouth went dry with the shock – I just was not expecting it - as the words of the first two lines hit home...
I'll never know what brought him to where he finally stood
A shotgun pointed at his head in a cabin in the woods
Sublime lyric writing: two lines that say so much with such an economy of words.
And as my mind was still spinning, I listened to her third line, which reminded us that he was not the only casualty: she too had been wounded for life by her own failure to realise that Martin had been in the very darkest place imaginable, and that she had thus – in reality - walked by on the other side.
But somehow I could hear it, it struck my heart as well
For the unknown man who needs a hand
For the friend I'll never know
And then she reprises the chorus for the last time, and this time, both it and she, are wearing black mourning clothes...
Marty, I know it got lonely out there
Coyotes cryin' at midnight in the cold desert air
The heart that sorrow broke in you can never be repaired
Mart, I know I let you down somewhere
Is there a sadder song in the whole Folk canon? I confess I cannot think of one. And if there is, it surely cannot match this song for its hauntingly sweet melody and glorious delivery from the then 33 year old Judy.
And now, as I come to the end of this piece, I want you dear reader, to appreciate the delicious anecdote I will leave you with.
Back in Brooklyn in 2012, Judy marked the fact that it would have been Woody’s centenary, by joining in a celebrity concert where various artistes took a song each from the Woody Guthrie Songbook. And Judy’s song? That is easy, and no prizes for guessing: the first one she had ever heard.
And as she looked at the song on the sheet music, she read to her amazement "Deportee, Lyrics by Woody Guthrie, music by Martin Hoffman."
A full fifty years later, she thus found out for the first time that when Martin had sang that Woody “song”, he was singing Woody’s poem to his own melody...!! Thus Martin all those years ago had been the very antithesis of someone “blowing his own trumpet”: in fact he’d been so modest that he had not even mentioned that the bittersweet melody was his own creation.
How wonderfully self-deprecating is that?
In the Sermon on the Mount, our Lord said “blessed are the meek”. Certainly from the little I know about Martin Hoffman, my guess is that Marty would have been in the forefront of those receiving Christ’s blessing...albeit emphatically without Marty shouldering his way to the front of the multitude...!!
The pity though is that Martin cracked under the strain, and he left us at much the same age as Judy’s son... and also by his own hand.
So sad. But there is a moral to the story...
Remember folks... there is a Martin/Martina Hoffman everywhere. He or she could be living next door from you, across the road from you... indeed even inside our own houses. So always look out for people who may be suffering on the inside...even though their exterior is “all smiles”.
And Judy now knows this better than all of us, donating the proceeds from this song, and also the song she wrote about her own son’s suicide, to suicide prevention in the USA.
God bless her for that.
Dai Woosnam, dai.woosnam@folkworld.eu
Photo Credits:
(1) Dai Woosnam,
(2),(3),(5) Judy Collins,
(4) Woody Guthrie,
(6) Julie Felix
(unknown/website).
