As the 2008 presidential race begins to take shape, video-sharing websites are all the rage. They’re certainly an attention-grabbing technology, judging from the fuss over that notorious anti-Hillary Clinton/Apple mash-up ad on YouTube.
Yet there is nothing new under the sun. The history of political satire stretches back at least to the time of Menippus of Gadara, that wild-and-crazy Greek from the 3rd century B.C. Then — to skip ahead a little — someone invented the record player and along came the Goldwaters.
Shortly before the 1964 presidential election, four college-aged men recorded an album of political humor and novelty songs called “The Goldwaters Sing Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals.” For the album cover, they put on matching red sweaters emblazoned with AuH2O — the chemical symbols for gold and water. Then they toured the country in support of a certain conservative candidate who earned 27 million votes and lost.
Their tuneful efforts might easily have been lost, too. But now, thanks to the miracle of downloadable music files, The Goldwaters will live on in digital eternity. Herewith, we give you the greatest right-wing folk group ever to pluck a banjo: Download Side 1 and Side 2 of “The Goldwaters Sing Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals.” Or try a single song, “Win in ’64.”
“They were our Peter, Paul, and Mary — plus Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger — all in one,” says Lee Edwards, a Goldwater biographer who was the campaign’s deputy director of public relations (as well as the man who had the foresight to save the LP that we’ve digitized). “They were especially active at the convention in San Francisco, playing at YAF parties and all over the place.”
Like today, the 1964 presidential campaign was well underway more than a year in advance of the election. Mark Clark Bates, the head of the Nashville office of Billboard magazine, was already a Goldwater man. So he convened a pro-Goldwater folk group to appear at rallies and record an album. He and his brother Buford recruited local guitarist Bob Green, who drafted the rest of the group: Fred Quan on banjo, Jim Vantrease on bass and lead singer Ken Crook (whose interview with Conelrad.com is the source for some information in this article).
Only a political junkie will understand all the jokes on this album, now more than 40 years old. Lyndon Johnson is the most frequent target of the Goldwaters’ mockery, followed by Bobby Baker, who was LBJ’s right-hand man and a figure with close ties to the mob.
The lyrics of “The Goldwaters Sing Folk Songs to Bug the Liberals” routinely contradict Official Public Memory. Though partially rewritten and rerecorded after the Kennedy assassination, the album gives no indication of universal grief over the end of Camelot. Mere months after JFK’s murder, the Goldwaters deliver a damning dirge about the abandonment of the invasion force at the Bay of Pigs. They celebrate the end of Kennedy’s “New Frontier.” They even knock Bobby Kennedy for his youth and inexperience, and pull up a small news item, long forgotten today, about the attorney general’s falling in a swimming pool and “showing off at parties.”
About halfway into a record that runs less than 30 minutes, it hits you: The names have changed, but the issues and complaints are much the same. When the Goldwaters call Johnson two-faced for wearing a “pink tie at the U.N.” but “boots and spurs” in Texas, it recalls Hillary Clinton breaking into a drawl when she speaks down south. G. Mennen “Soapy” Williams, the arch-liberal governor of Michigan who was famous for wearing green-and-white polka-dot bow ties, was another generation’s Dennis Kucinich or Jerry Brown.
Many conservative grievances remain unchanged, such as farm-price supports, spending on our enemies (“Foreign aid is nothin’ but a giveaway / you can’t buy friends,” to the tune of “The Old Gray Mare”), and the liberal media (“freedom of the press is slipping away / every day / because of managed news”).
There’s even a complaint about a stolen election. Unlike 2000, however, Republicans were on the outs in 1960. The Goldwaters credit Kennedy’s margin of victory to “dead people voting” in Cook County, Illinois. The Nashville folksters go positively Jacksonian — i.e., Jesse Jacksonian. “This time we’ll be watching,” they sing, “It won’t happen again.”
Musically, the Goldwaters were competent pickers and harmonizers. They built their act on old folk tunes, such as “Reuben, Reuben,” “Tom Dooley,” “The Red River Valley.” They changed the words but kept the music, probably because the songs were in the public domain. It allowed them to avoid licensing fees as well as the time and trouble of writing and learning originals.
After the election, the Goldwaters broke up, never to be heard from again — until now.
— Michael Long is a director of the White House Writers Group. John J. Miller is NR’s national political reporter. They are often seen lurking together in D.C. concert venues.