Eisler on the Go

Deborah Van Kleef sings the Woody Guthrie/Billy Bragg song, first recorded by Billy (with Wilco) on "Mermaid Avenue," here with an additional ending melody from Hanns Eisler's "Song of the Moldau." The song is on her new CD (http://cdbaby.com/cd/deborahvankleef). Woody wrote the lyrics around 1947 when the great Austrian leftist composer Hanns Eisler (http://www.eislermusic.com) was hauled before the US Congress and deported marking the beginning of the McCarthyite anti-communist purges. Woody, as a lefty, expresses his own fears in the words. Eisler's brother, Gerhard, also escaped the US, while his sister, Ruth, denounced them both... Seth Rosen and Gene Epstein (see Gene's Jazz Hot) back Deborah's vocals.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Deborah
• Van
• Kleef
• Cleff
• Cleave
• mandolin
• Hanns
• Eisler
• Billy
• Bragg
• mermaid
• avenue
• anti-communism
• Woody
• Guthrie
• Folk
• Music
• Wilco
• Seth
• Rosen
• Gene
• Epstein
• HUAC
• Ruth
• Fischer
• Gerhard
• Moldau
• sethro

[deborahvk]

Thanks for commenting.  It's good to hear from someone who actually is familiar with the background to this song.

Deborah

[grummeper]

Agree 100 %

5 *****

[Rongart]

After Bierman's "Hugenottenfriedhof" is this the second song with the word "Eisler" and the first song full about Hanns Eisler I know!

what a beautiful guitar-finish: am grunde der moldau wandern die steine!!!

[levdt]

Full marks to Billy and everyone else involved for rescuing songs like this for posterity. What a tragedy for Eisler, Brecht and all the other great German artists - initially exiles from fascism, then hounded out of the US by McCarthyism and condemned to live out their last years in the Stalinist museum of grotesque monstrosities that was the German Democratic Republic and which they tragically believed to be a workers' paradise.