>Posted on 01/25/2024 1:46:26 PM PST by ProtectOurFreedom
The singer turned her experience at the 1969 concert into "Lay Down (Candles In The Rain)," a top-10 hit in 1970
Singer Melanie Safka, who turned a 1969 performance at Woodstock into a hit song and a five-decade career, died Tuesday at the age of 76. Safka’s death was announced on her Facebook page with a letter from her three children, Leilah, Jeordie, and Beau Jarred:
Dear Ones,
This is the hardest post for us to write, and there are so many things we want to say, first, and there’s no easy way except to say it… Mom passed, peacefully, out of this world and into the next on January, 23rd, 2024.We are heartbroken, but want to thank each and every one of you for the affection you have for our Mother, and to tell you that she loved all of you so much! She was one of the most talented, strong and passionate women of the era and every word she wrote, every note she sang reflected that.
Our world is much dimmer, the colors of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today, but we know that she is still here, smiling down on all of us, on all of you, from the stars.
No cause of death was announced.
Earlier this month, Safka was in a recording studio working on “Second Hand Smoke,” an album of cover songs, for the Cleopatra label, Variety reported. Born Melanie Anne Safka-Schekeryk in Astoria, New York, Safka studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts before deciding to pursue a career as a folk singer. Her big break came at the 1969 Woodstock concert, which she described to Rolling Stone in 2019 as her first “out-of-body experience.”
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Actually, I was already a teenager. Wikipedia said December of 1971. I was 13.
So, yeah, I did want to see her new roller-skates.
I could never stand hippies, but I really did like “Look What They’ve Done to My Song.”
I remember as a kid, my parents made me wear a shirt, tie, and jacket, just to go to the airport to fly on a plane. Manners, respect for your community, and conduct, used to be an absolute standard. All gone to crap now, and playing with rollerskates gets you ten years behind bars. We are a mannerless punk authoritarian culture now. The lower the better as far as our culture.
One of my first jobs, I made friends with a WW2 vet who had photos from pre-war St. Paul, Minnesota. Even the roughest working class guys wore coats, ties and hats when they took streetcars downtown on Friday and Saturday nights.
He was a small guy, a Marine radio operator in the Pacific, still in sorrow about the big strong guys that didn’t make it. He believed that being small saved him multiple times
She denied that there was any purposeful sexual inuendo to the song. I was about 10/11 years old when it came out and I never saw it as a metaphor for sex or “naughty” but then I didn’t know much about sex at that age (OK a just a little as my mom tried to have “The Talk” with me but left a lot out and my older brother’s wife stepped in and filled me on what she thought I needed to know at that age).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brand_New_Key#Possible_sexual_innuendo
Her song “What Have They Done to My Song Ma” even though released, I think before or at the same time as Brand New Key, could well be about it and about how artists songs are either misinterpreted or used for commercials.
“My idea about songs is that once you write them, you have very little say in their life afterward. It’s a lot like having a baby. You conceive a song, deliver it, and then give it as good a start as you can. After that, it’s on its own. People will take it any way they want to take it.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r44Ach4mXE4
Look what they’ve done to my song, ma
Look what they’ve done to my song
Well they tied it up in a plastic bag and they turned it upside down
Look what they’ve done to my song, ma.
Look what they’ve done to my song, ma
Look what they’ve done to my song
It’s the only thing I could do all right and they turned it upside down
Look what they’ve done to my song, ma.
If you were not of age in 1970,
there is no way to explain it to you.
I had a brief chat with her at a club she was performing at in the 1980s IIRC although could have been the late 70s or even early 90s. She was nice.
Sigh, so true.
Woodstock was a bunch of un-American degenerates that the media has glorified for the last 50 years. Screw all of them.
Wrong. 180 degrees wrong.
Woodstock was part of a movement against a Democrat war machine (much like today) whose lies (Gulf of Tonkin, etc) and unquenchable greed got 58,000 of America’s finest killed.
I have no beef with the very brave men and women who served to fight and/or died in that damnable war, just with the Democrat globalist warmongers who profited so handsomely from it.
My mom grew up on a farm in Idaho, met dad at the University of Idaho, got married and Dad took her home back to NYS. Jeans (”dungarees”) were for farmers and Mom NEVER bought me a pair. Not one. I always went to school in dress slacks. I bought my own first pair of Levis at college in Fall 1969.
We always dressed up for church on Sundays. Suit or sport coat and tie were mandatory.
It was a much more civilized world, wasn’t it?
“She denied that there was any purposeful sexual inuendo to the song.”
That’s interesting, but hard to believe.
“If you were not of age in 1970, there is no way to explain it to you.”
Very true. The world simply didn’t exist before you were born and you cannot understand those eras before you were born.
Even in the videos I watched of her today, her niceness and genuineness just shines through.
I was old enough….I still don’t get it.
…
Yes indeed. What is weird about this to me is I had this minor encounter with her and not being a follower of her I put it our of my mind until I read this now and suddenly the memory floods back after some 30 plus years ago. I’ve met only a small handful of celebrities in my life but she was one of them.
I think I have downloaded all of her pop radio songs. I like ‘em, but I was always convinced she sang like a screeching caterwauler.
“...she sang like a screeching caterwauler.”
LOL...so she was decades ahead of her time!
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