Long, Long Time -- December 1, 2020

I mentioned earlier I would come back to this. 

And so I have. 

Long, long time:

• Jerry Jeff Walker: Long, Long Time, 1989 -- for the backstory:  
• Linda Ronstadt: Long, Long Time, 1970 -- for the whole story; 
• Linda Ronstadt: Long, Long Time -- song facts;

In the first video, Jerry Jeff Walker talks about his friend Gary B. White. The two of them were in a band together. While the former was writing Mr Bojangles, the latter was writing Long, Long Time which Linda Ronstadt made famous. Gary White is mentioned in this wiki entry.  

It's always fun to read the social media comments at YouTube. For the first linked video, one example:

Thanks for posting this. It's wonderful to hear the background story of this great composition. Jerry Jeff Walker shifted a couple of lines, still makes sense though. All cover versions of this song has slight variations in the lyrics. After listening to Larry Santos & Rod McKuen cover versions also, I'm convinced that it's Linda Ronstadt's version that really launched the song. Funny how even a good song needs just the right mix of great voice and arrangement to truly shine.

Now, compare that to Linda Ronstadt and the version that made her and the song famous.  

Long, Long Time, Linda Ronstadt

I addition to everything else, what always amazes me is how someone like Linda Ronstadt "discovered" this song, and then sang it the way it needed to be sung. As someone said, she sang it as if she had written the song herself and had actually lived it. 

And then finally, this comment over at the third link:

Gary [White] was originally from Texas. 

He and his wife, Annie, were good friends of mine in the sixties. 

We lived in Greenwich Village and used to hang out at The Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street. It was next to The Gaslight Cafe, a mecca of the Folk Music scene. Just about everyone got their start there. 

Gary is a great singer-songwriter who played bass, guitar and piano. He used to belong to a band called Circus Maximus with Jerry Jeff Walker. [See wiki entry for Circus Maximus.]

Gary wrote a lot of other beautiful tunes. Linda was on the "scene" back then, and also a good friend of Gary's. They all three moved to California, Laurel Canyon. They asked me to go with them. How different my life would have been if I had. I never saw him again, but sometimes think about them and wonder how they are. Some people you just never forget! They were great people. :)

What amazes me about Jerry Jeff Walked: passed himself off as Texan. He hailed from New York (1), and best I can figure it, Texas was his fourth home, after Florida (2) and Louisiana (3). 

What a great country. 

I  have a cross country trip scheduled with my wife later this year. I'm going to drive her nuts with all this trivia. She doesn't like country music until she listens to it and then loves the tunes I find for her. LOL.

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Socrates and Plato

Socrates never wrote a thing. Plato, his student, wrote everything down. Reading Plato, one does not know when one is reading Socrates or reading Plato. 

That was the first thought I  had when I happened upon this video about half way through:

Todd Snider, Jerry Jeff Walker, et al 

Todd Snider absolutely adored Jerry Jeff Walker and told all the stories we otherwise might not know.

Had it not been for Plato, we may not have known that much about Socrates either.