#405: the New Seekers, "Free to Be You and Me" (1972)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mU8gDKN5sE

If "Free to Be You and Me" were a brand new folk song, I have no idea what I would think of it. Maybe I'd be a fan. It's jolly and bops along at a pleasant pace; the group vocal harmonies, male and female and young-sounding, are nicely done; the banjo is Kermit-esque, and judging by the fact that I no longer own my Bela Fleck & the Flecktones album, being extremely talented at the banjo is a much less effective path to my heart than playing it like you're a green felt puppet.

The lyrics are ... uncomplicated. "There's a land that I see/ where the children are free/ and I say it ain't far/ to this land from where we are". Now, it's a children's song, but my kids have never shown much interest in children's music, so I'd probably fail to adjust much for that. It's also direct enough to be a national anthem, were it interested in anything as artificial as nations, but there are no national anthems in my countdown. It could also strike me as hippie-dippy sloganeering, and I could start parodying it almost without noticing ("There's a shop that's very nice/ where the children are half-price....", perhaps, or modifying "Take my hand, come along/ Lend your voice to my song" into "Use the wi-fi on the street/ give a share to my tweet").

In fact, however, Free to Be... You and Me was a double album with illustrated book, created by actress Marlo Thomas "and friends" (Alan Alda, Mel Brooks, Carol Channing, Dick Cavett, Jack Cassidy, Cicely Tyson, young Michael Jackson....), selling hundreds of thousands of copies, and later turned into a 1974 TV special. It was for children, with lyrics at a child's level. I grew up with it. "Every boy in this land grows to be his own man/ Every girl grows to be her own woman" was not a vague, trite couplet in context; skits like "Girl Meets Boy" and "My Dog is a Plumber", and songs like "William's Doll" and "It's All Right to Cry", encouraged listeners to ignore gender stereotypes that didn't ring true to them, while other songs spoke up for eccentricity of other types.

Two funny Shel Silverstein songs were on the one hand subversively anti-grownup, but on the other hand anti-kids-acting-like-selfish-assholes (since a key to Shel's genius was that he didn't have to like kids; he just knew how to relate to a child's annoyed disdain for *anybody*). Manners and respect, snuck in dressed as mockery! Marlo's "Parents are People", meanwhile, was sweetly leveling. "Some mommies are ranchers, or poetry makers/ or doctors, or cleaners, or teachers, or bakers" was itself a forward thing to announce in 1972, but by insisting on the status of mommies and daddies as simple projections forward in time of prior children, it weakened any parent's insistence on godlike rightness and superiority -- and replaced them with a case for unexpected empathy.

So when I hear "Free to Be You and Me", I hear a song that I've known longer than I can remember; I can hear me being shaped, too, although I've taught the same lessons to my boys without this album at all. But beyond that, I hear a country being shaped -- not completely, not as an eternal triumph, but social progress nonetheless working its imminence with a smile and a wave. More than 90% of Americans "support laws that provide workers with paid time off to care for family members, such as a new baby or a sick child or parent" -- a question in which the "worker" doing the care is not gender-defined (now, wouldn't it be nice if those laws were in place?). Around 60% think gays should have the right to marry each other, which is more than double the number who thought so twenty years ago -- and when I was in school, the leading answer to "should two men be allowed to marry each other?" was "Naah, that sounds sooooo gay". I believe 60% exceeds, as well, the number who thought homosexuals should have the right to use the sidewalk without getting beaten up in 1970. Now the New York Times has switched to using "they" as a singular pronoun, not because Shakespeare did it (although it's a handy fact to grab for support), but because it's a gesture of respect to people who reject male and female identities altogether, to a degree even Free to Be... You and Me failed to quite imagine.

"For a land where the river runs free/ for a land through the green country/ for a land to the shining sea": where "America the Beautiful" is stately and oblivious, "Free to Be You and Me" uses its words in a cause of activism, and it too has seen progress. The Clean Air Act of 1970, expanded in 1990 to fight acid rain and ozone damage; the Clean Water Act of 1972 (toughened in 1977); 1973's phase-out of leaded gasoline, a toxic substance which damaged the brains of children even as it damaged the lungs of everyone -- no longer do American rivers and lakes catch fire, no longer does daytime Pittsburgh look like night-time from the permanent smog. The scenes in Mad Men where people toss their trash onto the grass are at once a factual depiction, and delightfully alien now (except at parades and rallies, sadly). Yes, I could fill a paragraph with terrible environmental news instead, but the progress was the unlikely part, and the hard part, and we live with, and should enjoy, its consequences.

Which isn't, again, why I love the song; I just do. But children are the people we try to fill with ideals, before they're too guarded, too cynical; and it's now, when the people who grew up on Free to Be... You and Me are middle-aged and in some cases have voting children of their own, that we see so many of its ideals and hopes at work around us, and perhaps miss how non-mainstream and challenging they were at the time. If it came out in 2017, I dunno, maybe it would strike me as vapid and *be* vapid. Maybe that's how social progress works. But "progress" is a label we affix to one line segment on a gigantic squiggle, so I'm inclined to think those of us who like its direction should keep trying to extend it further.