Mark's Notebook

After 34 Years, His Antiwar Song Is Still Not Out of Style

New York Times

By Andrew C. Revkin

In 1971, with Australia embroiled in Vietnam alongside the United States, Eric Bogle sat down to write what would become one of the most admired songs about war: "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda."

"I wanted to write an antiwar song but didn't want to denigrate the courage of the soldier," Mr. Bogle recalled in an interview on Wednesday before a show at the Manhattan nightclub Satalla. "There was too much of that 'baby killer' stuff going on."

Now 61, he is the archetypal touring folk singer, burly and balding and bearded, with a remarkably similar-looking sideman, John Munro, and a repertory ranging from wrenching to raunchy.

But at every stop, the audiences, many having grown gray along with Mr. Bogle, await the tune he wrote 34 years ago.

The song is in the voice of an innocent rural lad who joined the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, or Anzac, in 1915, was handed a tin hat and a gun and was shipped with 17,000 others to the killing shores of Suvla Bay, where they were "butchered like lambs at the slaughter." The refrain recounts how at every turn - when troops were dispatched, when the maimed came home, when the dead were buried, when the dying veterans marched - some martial band played "Waltzing Matilda," the unofficial Australian anthem.

The song, almost independent of Mr. Bogle's career as a folk performer, took on its own life as an antiwar standard. In a telephone interview from his home in Beacon, N.Y., Pete Seeger called it "one of the world's greatest songs."

Mr. Bogle's songbook is as variegated as folk music itself (details are at ericbogle.net). Songs range from a searing account of an apartheid prison hanging to a satirical romp on the nasal style of Bob Dylan and audiences' persistent habit of asking Mr. Bogle to play a Dylan song. (He doesn't play any.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/05/arts/music/05folk.html

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008