Each morning since this wicked war began, I have spun the same 45 record on our dusty old turntable: Freda Payne’s "Bring the Boys Home," an isolationist anthem if ever there was one. Freda, best known for her bouncy drama of wedding-night impotence, "Band of Gold," recorded "Bring the Boys Home" in 1971 on the Invictus label. It never rose higher than #12 on the charts. But it’s a heartbreaker, one of the best antiwar pop songs because, like Jimmy Webb’s "Galveston" or Eric Bogle’s "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," it measures the cost of war on a human scale. An affecting mixture of Motown and dirge, the song begins with Freda’s lament:
Fathers are pleading Lovers are all alone Mothers are praying Send our sons back home You marched them away on ships and planes to a senseless war Facing death in vain
Freda and her backup singers beseech, implore, demand:
Bring the boys home Bring ’em back alive!
She imagines "all the soldiers that are dying…just trying to get home," and she ends with a beautifully furious question:
What they doin’ over there? When we need ’em over here?
Thirty years later, as brave American boys once again die for nothing halfway around the globe, our rulers still haven’t answered that question. But until the Department of Homeland Security confiscates seditious pop records, Freda Payne will keep asking. Bring the boys home…NOW!
April 10, 2003
