This is a beautiful but very disturbing song. It turns out that it, and the other Woody Guthrie lyrics on the Klezmatics\' Wonder Wheel album, weren\'t recorded during Guthrie\'s lifetime, so I guess we\'ll never know what melody Guthrie may have thought of for the song.\n\nIf it sounds familiar, it\'s because it has a familiar structure. It\'s a cumulative song, one where each verse after the first has one more line or phrase than its predecessor. Think "Twelve Days of Christmas", "The Rattling Bog", or for prose, "The House That Jack Built" or "I Knew an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly".\n\n(I have to admit that being a big SCTV fan, I thought it was "Seven for the continents blowed up", but with closer listening I think it\'s "blown".)\n\nThe Klezmatics give these lyrics a sinuous Middle Eastern beat. I dearly wish some belly dance troupe would do a video dancing to it, but global thermonuclear war just isn\'t what people dance to. Like the fifth day of "The Twelve Days of Christmas", the 5:30 line stands out from the rest melodically.
This is a beautiful but very disturbing song. It turns out that it, and the other Woody Guthrie lyrics on the Klezmatics\' Wonder Wheel album, weren\'t recorded during Guthrie\'s lifetime, so I guess we\'ll never know what melody Guthrie may have thought of for the song.\n\nIf it sounds familiar, it\'s because it has a familiar structure. It\'s a cumulative song, one where each verse after the first has one more line or phrase than its predecessor. Think "Twelve Days of Christmas", "The Rattling Bog", or for prose, "The House That Jack Built" or "I Knew an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly".\n\n(I have to admit that being a big SCTV fan, I thought it was "Seven for the continents blowed up", but with closer listening I think it\'s "blown".)\n\nThe Klezmatics give these lyrics a sinuous Middle Eastern beat. I dearly wish some belly dance troupe would do a video dancing to it, but global thermonuclear war just isn\'t what people dance to. Like the fifth day of "The Twelve Days of Christmas", the 5:30 line stands out from the rest melodically.