Tag: Tip Of The Spear

Let’s start with a bold statement and then come back to the detail…..On Doug Mishkin’s new album Tip Of The Spear – his third album – there are (at least) two songs which probably will, and certainly should, be staples of folk clubs for at least a couple of decades: ‘Woody’s Children’ and ‘If They’d Been Black’.

By all accounts ‘Woody’s Children’ has already reached anthemic status in some parts of America. The originator of the phrase that gives the song its title is Pete Seeger who said that all folksingers after Guthrie were Woody’s children. Mishkin’s song goes a step further to say that we are all Woody’s Children. More than that, the song has been played regularly for nearly forty years on a WFUV folk radio show named ‘Woody’s Children’.

This is probably also a good time to mention that Mishkin describes himself as being, “born the night my mother took me to my first Pete Seeger concert” and having come of age “at the campfire where I first heard the songs of Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, and the rest of that crew”.

If that doesn’t tell you enough about Mishkin’s life-view, I’ll add that he has recently retired from a career as a lawyer in Washington DC, he’s an activist for affordable housing  and addressing America’s homelessness issues, he writes about issues of religious liberty, does house concerts to raise money for immigrant relief organisations and has, for many years, sung at civil rights and peace rallies.

If ‘Woody’s Children’ has been recorded anew and is refreshed on this album, ‘If They’d Been Black’ is as fresh, new and relevant as any of the songs of Seeger, Dylan, Paxton, Ochs et al were in the early to mid-60’s.

The song deals with the events – variously called a ‘violent assault’, a ‘riot’, an ‘insurrection’ – of January 6^th, 2021. Mishkin narrates the events and adds to them by asking us to imagine what might have happened differently if the insurrectionists had been black; he also answers it for us, “If they’d been black, they’d all be dead”. In talking about the song, he adds, “When it comes to telling the history of our country, we’ve violated the oath [to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth] many times in many ways. There are many morals to the story of January 6. This is one of them.”

It’s a song, though, not a polemic, so I’ll also add that ‘If They’d Been Black’ has got a more than decent melody, jauntily driving us along the story with resonant fingerpicking and lyrics that changingly recall others “This land’s not yours, it’s mine”.  This may be a song for now but it’s also one for the decades to come; listen for yourself in the link below.

If that’s not enough to whet your appetite for Tip Of The Spear, there are ten other tracks. After these two, you could, in the modern streaming style, move on to ‘Pour Me Another Year’, ‘Smitten’, ‘Tip Of The Spear’, ‘Egremont’ or ‘Who Knew’ to pick up on Mishkin’s range of influences … but you’d miss out on other tracks.

Listen to the album in full; note the contact link on the web page for gigs and house concerts; remind yourself that the folk songs of the sixties gave voice to both thoughts and actions; that they were sung live to an audience, and then by the audience in their own clubs. Remember that “the point is not to understand the world, but to change it”.

It’s that kind of album.

Mike Wistow

Artist’s website:  https://www.dougmishkin.com

‘If They’d Been Black’ – official video: