In 2016, Chris Cornell performed “Wild World” as a guest with Yusaf / Cat Stevens.
Chris Cornell, who was born on July 20, 1964, had one of the most recognizable amazing voices in rock music. He showed the range of his talents in his solo work as well as his work in the bands Soundgarden and Audioslave. While the below performance with Yusaf / Cat Stevens may seem like an unusual pairing, together they create a sweet live version of Stevens’s “Wild World.”
Yusaf Islam, whose performance name used to be Cat Stevens and now also goes as “Yusaf / Cat Stevens,” released “Wild World” on his 1970 album Tea for Tillerman. The song about a lover leaving is one of both sadness and hope. The singer addresses a departing lover: “And it’s breakin’ my heart you’re leavin’ / Baby, I’m grievin’ / But if you wanna leave, take good care.”
But it is not an angry broken-hearted song. The singer wishes the former lover well (“I never wanna see you sad, girl”), while warning that you can’t get by with just a smile in the “wild world.”
Yusaf / Cat Stevens wrote “Wild World” about the end of a relationship with a woman. He has explained, “I was sending out a warning signal that even though things may look great…you have a lot of fancy clothes and whatever else you want out of life. But don’t forget there’s dangers, too. My message was to her, but also probably to myself, because I was now entering into a new phase of success.” In more recent years, he has noted that he always thought the original version of the song was “too commercial,” and even re-recorded “Wild World” in another version.
In this live performance from The Pantages Theater in Los Angeles, Chris Cornell lends his voice to capture both the joy and mournfulness of the song. Check out this October 6, 2016 performance, less than a year before Cornell’s tragic death on May 18, 2017.
As in the excellent movie Lincoln (2012), we generally picture Abraham Lincoln full-grown as the great president. So it is easy to forget that he grew up as a child living in the wilderness dealing with normal family issues. One of the struggles of the young Abraham’s life was that he and his father Thomas Lincoln were very different.
Michael Burlingame’s detailed two-volume biography, Abraham Lincoln: A Life (2008), noted that many contemporaries of the Lincolns reported that the father and son did not get along. The friction may have been partly created because Thomas lacked ambition and disdained the fact that his son sought to educate himself.
The young Abraham was not afraid to speak up around strangers to ask precocious questions, and his father would often whip the young boy for his assertiveness. One time, the young Abe received a beating for releasing a bear cub from one of his father’s traps.
As the young Abe grew into a man, he continued to dislike his father. When Lincoln became a lawyer in Springfield, Illinois, he never invited his father to visit him.
And, when Thomas was dying in 1851 and asked his son to visit him, the son refused, telling his step-brother to tell Thomas, “if we could meet now, it is doubtful whether it would be more painful than pleasant.” Lincoln did not attend Thomas’s funeral or put a tombstone on the grave. Two years later in 1853, though, Lincoln named his fourth son after his father. The beloved child would soon be nicknamed “Tad.” (Burlingame, pp. 10-11.)
Fathers and Sons in Song
It is speculation to wonder how Lincoln’s relationship with his father affected his later life. But the father-son struggle helps us humanize a man we know as an icon etched in stone. His father-son dynamic is not unusual, as sons strive to find their places in the world. And this struggle occasionally appears in films like Field of Dreams (1989), as well as in popular songs such as Harry Chapin‘s “Cats in the Cradle.”
One of the best father-son songs is by Cat Stevens, now known as Yusuf Islam. The beautiful “Father and Son,” which appeared on Tea for the Tillerman (1970). Yusuf Islam originally wrote the song for a play that was never completed.
The song is a conversation between father and son where the son tries to explain to his father why he is leaving. When Yusuf Islam recorded the song, he had only experienced being a son. But by the time he did the following performance, which appears to be from 2015, he was a grandfather, giving the song new meaning.
Bruce Springsteen has spoke openly about his own difficulties with his father Douglas “Dutch” Springsteen. He has captured that complicated relationship in songs such as “Adam Raised a Cain,” from Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978), “My Father’s House” from Nebraska (1982), and “Independence Day,” from The River (1980). The latter song, like “Father and Son,” is about a son leaving his father.
Springsteen’s “Independence Day” is slightly more bitter than “Father and Son.” The bitterness may come from the fact that Springsteen had a rockier relation with his father than Yusuf Islam did. But it is also a heavyhearted father-son conversation.
In the above video from 1980, Springsteen begins by telling the audience how the music he heard on the radio inspired him to seek a different life, just as Lincoln’s books inspired him. Similarly, as in Lincoln’s message to his dying father, the singer in “Independence Day” tells his father “Papa go to bed now, it’s late. / There’s nothing we can say can change anything now.”
As Springsteen learned as he got older, the sins of the father also makes the man that the son becomes. So, for this celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, remember the man’s first years with his father. One may look back on Thomas Lincoln for his faults in the way he treated our beloved Abraham Lincoln. But the father, struggling to carve out a place for his family in the wilderness, did something right because his son turned out pretty well.
Ultimately, the son Abraham, perhaps remembering Thomas’s lack of ambition or remembering his own beatings, carried his concerns for the suffering of others with him when he left on his own Independence Day and when he went to the White House. And although Abraham Lincoln had a long way to travel for his own education, maybe The Great Emancipator contained a little of the boy who saw a suffering bear cub and freed it, knowing he would face his father’s wrath but defying his father anyway.
{Photos via: me, taken around the 1990s. The statue is located at New Salem, Illinois. The farm is the place of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in Hodgenville, Kentucky.}
What is your favorite song about fathers and sons? Leave your two cents in the comments.
In response to popular demand, Chimesfreedom continues its periodic discussion of the best gospel songs by pop singers. In this Post, we consider one gospel song overwhelmingly identified with one pop singer, another gospel song that is recorded by many singers, and finally, a beautiful song about being an agnostic that deserves a place next to other songs of faith.
“Morning Has Broken,” Cat Stevens.
This song is so associated with Cat Stevens — now Yusaf Islam — that for a long time, I thought it was one of his original songs. But the Christian hymn first appeared in 1931, and the music goes back even further to the nineteenth century as a traditional Gaelic tune, “Bunessan.”
“Morning has Broken” is a simple song with a simple message of being thankful for each day: “Praise with elation, praise every morning / God’s recreation of the new day.”
Alfred E. Brumley wrote “I’ll Fly Away” in 1931. He was picking cotton when he came up with the song. As he later explained: “I was dreaming of flying away from that cotton field when I wrote I’ll Fly Away.” Many believe the song is the most-recorded gospel song of all time. If true, it is not surprising because it is a beautiful song.
A number of country singers have recorded the song, including Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, Charley Pride, Jim Reeves, and Alan Jackson. Etta James does an uplifting version. Kanye West does an excellent version too. I especially like Alison Krauss’s version, and in particular this version with Gillian Welch from the film O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000).
One might dispute including “Let the Mystery Be” from Iris DeMent’s Infamous Angel (1993) album in a discussion of Gospel songs because the song reflects DeMent’s agnosticism rather than faith in a higher power. Yet, the song only could have been written by someone who was raised in a religious environment.
DeMent grew up in a Pentecostal family where she was not allowed to listen to non-gospel music, and the song brings out the division between her upbringing and her adult beliefs. But “letting the mystery be” takes a leap of faith too. And, as in many of the best gospel songs, it highlights a beautiful struggle in a beautiful song.
Some say they’re goin’ to a place called Glory and I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact. But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory and I don’t like the sound of that. Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly. But I choose to let the mystery be.
(2008), noted that many contemporaries of the Lincolns reported that the father and son did not get along. The friction may have been partly created because Thomas lacked ambition and disdained the fact that his son sought to educate himself.
