This
website archive collects together a good number of Malvina's song lyrics
and poems, both long published and previously unpublished, in an effort
to make the public more aware of the full range of her art. Before you
jump in and click on Song Menu or Poetry
Menu, however, please bear with us a moment as we offer a few words
concerning our goals and vision here...
Malvina
Reynolds’ Daughter, Nancy Schimmel (a songwriter and performer):
Many
of Malvina’s lyrics found elsewhere on the internet have been adapted
by other singers. The words on this site, however, have all been double-checked
with the original publications or manuscripts for correspondence to Malvina’s
original words. Some typos may have escaped our scrutiny, though, so if
you find any, please let us know.
Here I am with singer/songwriters Bonnie Lockhart and Aileen Vance singing and discussing a few of my mother’s songs on the Daily Antidote of Song, a program using music to help people get through the isolation during the epidemic.
My
guess is that my mother would have found going to a website and reading
song lyrics somewhat artificial--not because it is a website (I think
she would have enjoyed this way of communicating with so many people),
but because on this site you are reading what should ultimately be heard,
and moreover what should be heard sung, not spoken. When Malvina was a
student at the University of California, she took a class studying the
English ballads as though they were poems, with no music. She told the
professor she thought that the ballads should be studied as they had originally
been created. She volunteered to sing them to the class and the professor
agreed. When she was a student teacher trying to teach poetic structures
to high school students who showed little interest in poetry, she did
use the words of current popular songs as her texts instead of poems,
but these students all had the music in their heads already. If you come
to this web site to be reminded of the words to a song you once knew,
you will be in their position. But if you try to analyze lyrics of songs
you have never heard sung, remember that something important is missing.
E. Y. (Yip) Harburg, lyricist of 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' said: "Words
make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes
you feel a thought."
Charles
H. Smith:
Although
her topical attacks (such as the classic 'Little Boxes')
are perhaps easiest to appreciate, many of Malvina Reynolds' compositions
are exquisitely sensitive and richly allegorical: including a good number
that might nominally be considered "children's" songs. Take
for example 'Morningtown Ride,' one of the few
lullabies ever to become a number one pop hit (in England in 1966, as
recorded by The Seekers). One can hardly imagine a setting--a train full
of contentedly sleeping children chugging and puffing its way down-coast
through the night--that better lends itself to allegorical workings. Although
Malvina is on record as saying she composed this song as a comfort to
children afraid of being cut off from the world by going to sleep at night,
one wonders, with all her other agendas (not to mention her earlier academic
interests, including Greek mythology), what else she may have invested,
consciously or not, into this scenario. The creative listener, for example,
might take the song as a sly jab at organized religion, and its tendency
to turn its followers into content, but unquestioning, domesticates. On
the other hand, one might conclude she was poking fun at the average citizen,
portraying him/her as blindly goal-oriented and insensitive to the richness
of the ride itself, so mysteriously interposed among the basic interfaces
of time, space, and knowledge. Or again, and were she known to have had
any interest in theosophy (she didn't), what better metaphor for the voyage
of the soul after death, bound for reincarnation...
Such
interpretations, and probably a dozen more of like kind, come so easily
that it is difficult to dismiss this work as "just another children's
song": it has a bit too much backbone. Notice in particular how Malvina
concludes the song with the rather sobering lines: "Somewhere there
is sunshine, somewhere there is day, Somewhere there is Morningtown, many
miles away." Surely the deliberate use of the word "somewhere"
here--three times, where it is absent in the earlier verses--does not
help allay fears there might be storms to weather before the nirvanic
destination (i.e., "Morningtown") is finally achieved? And what
about this "many miles away" business: wouldn't the blind optimist
rather hear that it's "just around the corner," or some such?
From the perspective of her many years Malvina knew as well as anyone
that "sunshine" and "day" are not givens in the voyage
of life, they are earned. And yet the song seems hopeful. In the end it
may indeed send a message that is--to a child anyway--warm and comforting,
but we who sing this song to our children no longer find ourselves in
this blissful place, and must individually decide how to face up to often
troubling realities. Clearly, Malvina's own decisions involved cherishing
what was good about the world, while not merely avoiding, or turning away
from, what was not so good. One cannot ask more from one's heroes.
Enjoy!
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