Songs For Swinging Survivors
His folk club was shut down by the police after only a year, however, for "various reasons", and Softley began singing in The Cock, a pub in St Albans, where he met a young Donovan Leitch, singing together on many occasions (He later cited Softley as a "major influence"). Donovan was soon snapped up by a record label and shot to stardom, but this enabled him to bring Softley to the attention of producers and record companies. He then worked with Peter Eden and Geoff Stephens, and his debut album Songs For Swinging Survivors, which was a purely folk record. The album featured only Softley and his acoustic guitar, and includes the songs The War Drags On, (Covered by Donovan on his 'Universal Soldier' EP), and Softley's own interpretations of Billie Holiday's 'Strange Fruit', and Woody Guthrie's 'The Plains of the Buffalo'. Softley does not look back on this time favourably claiming during production he had gone "through a lot of hells and no heavens, a terrifying amount of personal pain" to the extent that he quit the music business for over four years. During this time, he returned to life on the road until late 1967. Due to contractual issues he never received any royalties in the later years.
Read more about this topic: Mick Softley
Famous quotes containing the words songs, swinging and/or survivors:
“People fall out of windows, trees tumble down,
Summer is changed to winter, the young grow old
The air is full of children, statues, roofs
And snow. The theatre is spinning round,
Colliding with deaf-mute churches and optical trains.
The most massive sopranos are singing songs of scales.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Masts in the offing wagged their tops;
The swinging waves pealed on the shore;
The saffron beach, all diamond drops
And beads of surge, prolonged the roar.”
—John Davidson (1857–1909)
“I want to celebrate these elms which have been spared by the plague, these survivors of a once flourishing tribe commemorated by all the Elm Streets in America. But to celebrate them is to be silent about the people who sit and sleep underneath them, the homeless poor who are hauled away by the city like trash, except it has no place to dump them. To speak of one thing is to suppress another.”
—Lisel Mueller (b. 1924)