On a Song: "Last night I had the strangest dream..."

　

　

　

Charles Lloyd is a great artist. He plays flute and saxophone. His jazz band is called "The Marvels" and it seems to me that the musicians in his band are also exceptionally accomplished. A few years ago, Charles Lloyd and the Marvels released a CD called I Long to See You. It is an excellent recording in all respects. Lloyd is an old man now, well past 80 years old, and, although he can play intricate passages with ease, there is an appealing simplicity about his best work. He can accomplish many things on his instrument that are beautiful and that I am incapable of describing in mere words.

On I Long to See You, Lloyd and his band cover the song "Last Night I had the strangest dream." I’ve known this anti-war song all my life and assumed that its simple and gorgeous melody, very much like a hymn, was traditional. Certainly, the rough-hewn, but moving lyrics, seem to harken back to another era, perhaps, the late nineteenth-century or, even, before. But, in fact, the song was written in 1950 by a Canadian radio personality named Ed McCurdy.

McCurdy was born in Pennsylvania in 1919 and began his singing career as a crooner. Sally Rand, the famous strip tease and burlesque artist, was impressed by McCurdy’s ability to warble romantic ballads and she hired him for her revue. He was said to have pushed her on a swing while singing a love song directed to the famous fan dancer. Later, McCurdy moved to Vancouver where he hosted several radio shows. He wrote many folk songs and, often, appeared at the Village Vanguard in New York City.

In 1980, McCurdy moved to Nova Scotia. For many years, he was a staple character actor on Canadian television. He died at the age of 81 in the year 2000. He is best known for "Last Night I had the strangest dream", although he wrote many other memorable songs. The anti-war ballad has been covered by everyone from Johnny Cash to Simon and Garfield (and Charles Lloyd whose version features Willie Nelson singing the lyrics).

The song seems related to the folk song "Joe Hill’: "Last night I dreamed I saw Joe Hill alive as you and me/ I said ‘Joe you’ve been dead ten years.’/ ‘I never died," said he". In fact, the ballad stanzas and the rhythm of the lyrics are identical. However, the melody of "Joe Hill" is slightly different, a bit more mournful and minor-key. The flat declarative assertions of "Last night I had the strangest dream" are deflected into political allusion in "Joe Hill" and the effect of the two songs is quite different. (The lyrics to the song that begins "I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night..." were written by Alfred Hayes as a rabble-rousing poem in 1930 – the melody was written in 1936 by an African-American blues-man and jazz musician named Earl Robinson at the Leftist and inter-racial Camp Unity at Wingdale, New York.)

When the Berlin Wall was torn down in 1989, Tom Brokaw was broadcasting live. He directed his camera-crew to pan across the Wall into East Berlin where a children’s choir was singing. The song that they were performing was "Last Night I had the strangest dream". No doubt, the children knew the song as part of their Communist indoctrination – it was an anti-war protest song, could be mobilized against the Americans in favor of the peace-loving North Vietnamese, and, like Negro spirituals, dramatized the malaise at the heart of Capitalism. But, at that moment, it didn’t matter: the children were singing against the Wall and, therefore, war and, as at Jericho, the wall came tumbling down. (It goes without saying that walls and war are kissing cousins – you don’t need a wall unless you have enemies. In its rhetoric, the Trump administration is the most bellicose American regime to exist in my lifetime and I was born in 1954. Other presidents went to war, but they weren’t necessarily proud about it. Trump, who is a coward and afraid of war, constantly threatens it.)

The lyrics to the song are exceedingly simple, even austere. The speaker dreams that the "the world had all agreed/to put an end to war." This is accomplished in a "mighty room" that is "filled with men." The men are presented a written pledge that they consent to sign: "And the paper they were signing said/ They’d never fight again." When the pledges have all been signed, a million copies are made. Then, the men "all joined hands and bowed their heads/And grateful prayers were prayed." Here "prayed" rhymes with "made" and the clumsiness of the lyric seems almost intentional – "prayers were prayed"; this is bad poetry, but the visionary sentiment transcends the verse’s awkwardness.

There are people in "the streets below" who dance "round and round." Why are they "below"? "Below" what? Presumably, the people are "below" the mighty room" where the peace pledge is executed. This suggests that the poet’s dream invokes a heavenly realm, some place that is far above us. As the people rejoice, dancing "round and round", we learn that "guns and swords and uniforms/ were scattered on the ground." The initial verse is, then, repeated and the song ends.

The tone of the poem invokes a temperance meeting. War is not ended by divine fiat or by angels snatching weapons from combatants. Men end war by signing a pledge, that is making a contract with their fellow men not to fight them. It is all homely and endearing. If we want to end war, we must look to ourselves and our fellow human beings. We must make a compact with them to not fight. War must not be ended by divine decree – men must end war peacefully by making a covenant among themselves to eschew violence. Immediately, such a covenant has the effect of inducing joy in the great multitude of human beings – at least, in the modern world, people who have been induced to fight to the death for the benefit of others. The emblems of war are abandoned, left strewn on the ground.

Viewed from the perspective of McCurdy’s song and lyrics, the end of war is a simple, even, obvious thing. Indeed, war exists as a perversion of the human imagination. If we analyze human affairs correctly, war (which is mass murder as Tolstoy reminds us) seems utterly inexplicable, an enormous and monstrous waste of human resources. The question is not whether war can be ended, but why it has taken humankind so long to reach this fundamentally obvious covenant against mutual slaughter.

"Last night I had the strangest dream..." reminds us that we should tirelessly work for the good of our fellow human beings. Everyone knows that this is perfectly, evenly, indisputably true – and, yet, it seems, that none of us are willing to take even the first, halting steps toward creating a world without war. I’m writing this essay, but this exercise is more aesthetic than ethical. McCurdy’s poem and song shows us the way, but we remain all too willing to look the other way.

What if we were to convene a group of twenty citizens, meeting not in a "mighty room", but on the patio in someone’s back yard or in a rec room downstairs? What if each person were asked to write down ten projects that would be unambiguously beneficial to our community and fellowship? Then, what if the lists were collected and compared and the three items that occurred on every person’s list (and I am sure that, at least, three projects would overlap on all writings) set forth as the consensus of this fellowship and a mandate to do good in accord with those three objectives? And what if means were, then, deployed to take modest steps toward realizing those objectives that unanimously can be accepted as good and worthy? Would this be a first step to the end of war?

There are recruiting posts where you can sign up to serve in the Army or Marines or Navy. Why shouldn’t peace have its own recruiting posts, its own volunteers, its own army. Would those soldiers of peace sing together "Last Night I had the strangest dream..." If you can enlist for war, why can’t you enlist for peace?



Note: nothing in this essay is particularly original. I am aware that the official Peace Corps song is "Last Night I had the strangest dream."