Take me to Delaware, take me to
your home.
Let me know you where you live in understanding grown.
Take me to meet your family, and live among your friends.
Take me to Delaware, take me home again
Is the seacoast rocky, the water cold and clear?
I have never been there 'cause I've been here.
Come to Missouri, come with me to my home.
Come and know me where I live, in understanding grown.
Come meet my family, and live among my friends.
Come to Missouri, come you home again.
Can my brother play his fiddle and make his banjo ring?
Are we livin' in the middle? Do my friends love to dance and sing?
Interlude: Love, love, love, everybody's
got love, love, love,
everybody's got the gift of love, everybody's got love.
Come and listen, it is true, I'll do the same
for you
The Great Missouri Ocean will surprise you--it surprises me!
Love can happen anywhere that a heart is free,
Missouri or Delaware, wherever you may be.
If love is not the only thing worth livin' for,
It's the best thing I have found, I believe it more and more.
Come meet my family, and live among my friends,
Come to Missouri, come you home again.
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Take me to Delaware
Take me to your home
Let me know you where you live
In understanding grown
Take me to meet your family
And live among your friends
Take me to Delaware
Take me home again
Is the seacoast rocky, the water cold and clear?
I've never been there, 'cause I've been here
Come to Missouri
Come with me to my home
Come and know me where I live
In understanding grown
Come and meet my family
And live among my friends
Come to Missouri
Come you home again
Can my brother play his fiddle, and make his banjo
ring?
Are we living in the middle, do my friends love to dance and sing?
Come and listen, it is true
I'll do the same for thee
The great Missouri ocean will surprise you
It surprises me
Love can happen anywhere
That a heart is free
Missouri, or Delaware
Wherever you may be
If love is not the only thing, worth living for
It's the best thing that I've found, I believe it more and more
Take me to Delaware
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When I checked out what songs were left to record,
after the better-known songs had already been chosen, I didn't remember
"Candy from Delaware" at first. I really liked hearing the song
on Lee's demo tape, decided to choose it, and worked on learning it. As
I practiced it
and tried to figure out some of the words, wondering about some of the
unique and creative phrases in the song like "that Great Missouri
Ocean will surprise you, it surprises me," and "where I live,
in
understanding grown," I had a flashback. I remembered one late night
with Lee, Diana and I on the front porch when Lee sang that song and we
commented on the unusual wording and he asked us if we thought it was
better changing the sequence of the words for more clarity or
preserving the rhyme and rhythm. I think Diana and I had our opinions
and then Lee said how he thought he'd do it, and that was that, he knew
what felt right to him. I still love that line about the Ocean, which
seems so delicately humorous, ironic, and mysterious to me. I asked Lee
and he said something about teaching a guy at Denny's how to write a song,
a guy who was love-struck over this girl named Candy, and it was partly
a response to those who might say, compared to the East Coast, West Coast
(or Delaware), our Missouri lacks an ocean. So Lee kind of threw in that
twist about Missouri's surprising Ocean, without the slightest need to
be logical about it. After all, it's a song, it's poetry anyway, and that's
the beauty of it.
I believe this is a song about hope. It encourages
the listener to feel we should never give up on love. You know, no matter
how far away the other person may be, if we try hard enough, we can make
it work. Some lines are deceptively simple, with the repetition of "Take
me to Delaware," "Come to Missouri, come with me to my home,"
but there are really some strong feelings underneath. I believe it's a
deep conviction about the importance of home, family, and friends that
is emphasized there, with the implication we are not just isolated individuals.
Someone who loves us and is trying to decide about making a commitment
toward us needs to know us in context, to meet those we love, who've supported
us in so many ways. We are part of our environment, we are close to the
land, and the surrounding circle of friends and family and community that
is a big part of what makes us who we are.
The magic of sharing music with friends, in Lee's
world and mine, just has to be an important part of anyone getting to
know us. It's such a joy and such a blessing to share music with others
who love it too,
and want to join in it with you! That's why I couldn't resist inserting
that little portion of "Love, love, love" after his line about
how his "friends love to dance and sing," because that musical
sharing is so central to Lee's life and to the theme of the song. That's
why I agree with the philosophy behind asking the loved one to come to
Missouri, to come feel and experience firsthand the place where one has
"in
understanding grown" and gained wisdom over the years. Or on the
other hand, it also expresses the other side of that coin: if you love
enough, if your "heart is free," you can be open-minded, flexible
and unattached, and can go to Delaware. There you can more fully know
Candy, or the person so loved, in her own locale, her habitat, her place
of family and friends.
I truly think that's part of the reason this area's
called the "Heartland," not just because we're in the middle!
It's a place of the heart, expressing the idea that home is your land
area, your circle of extended family, your community--not just your own
house and immediate family. Lastly, of course, Lee speaks volumes from
the heart when he sings "if love is not the only thing worth living
for, it's the best thing I have found, I believe it more and more."
Who could say more than that?
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It was the eve of
New Year's Eve 1973, and I was sitting in Denny's at two or three in the
morning, drinking coffee with a young friend. He rather excitedly told me
a story of having just met a young woman named Candy, from Delaware, who
had recently been in Columbia visiting a friend of hers who was attending
college in Columbia. It was the end of the first semester and both young
women were getting ready to go home for Christmas vacation. Candy and my
friend, Don, had been hitting it off well and before she returned to Delaware
she asked him to come with her, no strings attached. He hadn't done so,
but for several weeks his mind had been buzzing with thoughts of this offer
that he'd turned down. Several cups of coffee later, our conversation drifted
to other topics, and he asked me, "How do you go about writing songs?
Where do you get your ideas from? How do you start a song?" (perhaps
not in those exact words). So I opened up the spiral notebook I usually
carried with me to the first blank page and wrote at the top of the page,
as a title--"Candy from Delaware." Then I wrote out a verse, beginning
with the lines, "Take me to Delaware, Take me to your home," and
handed the notebook across the table. He read the verse, looking a bit like
a cartoon character with a light-bulb caption over his head; surprised to
see his recent romantic adventure turned into a song topic. Then he looked
puzzled again. "OK, I see how that can work, but what comes next? Where
do you go from here?" Taking the notebook back, I reversed the dramatic
situation in the budding song, and wrote out a parallel verse, beginning
with "Come to Missouri, Come with me to my home." (A cheap trick
perhaps, but it can sometimes be made to work.) In the course of the next
hour I puzzled together the rest of the song.
Here's a further word about the phrase "the
great Missouri Ocean," which has caught listeners' ears as well as
puzzled them. Some months earlier, sitting in a window booth at that same
Denny's at a similar small hour of the morning, I was talking with a sailor
on leave, stranded for a few hours between buses. At some point in the
conversation he was complaining about the lack of an ocean here. I asked
him, "But what about the Great Missouri Ocean?" He looked at
me like I was crazy, and said, "What do you mean?" I pointed
out the window and said, "Look out there! What do you see?"
He stared out the window, across the sparsely-carred parking lot toward
the closed gas station on the other side and the big trucks rolling by
on Interstate 70, and said one word, "Nothing!" I grinned at
him, pointed out the window again, and he thought about it again. Then
he grinned back at me and said, "Oh! Now I see it. The Great Missouri
Ocean."
Two further notions: (1)
We live at the bottom of an ocean of air. (2)
The vast expanses of prairie between the Mississippi River and the Rocky
Mountains have been likened to an ocean of grass, and the state of Missouri
at one time had its fair share of prairie land.
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As for Lee, wow, I've known him a long time. I
guess I met Rena first, while she and I were both staying at the Missouri
Farm near Fulton, about 24 years ago, I think. That would be '79, but
I believe I met Lee in late '80 or early '81, when I started volunteering
at KOPN. He and Rena got together somewhat before that, I guess. Actually
I think Rena told me in '79 that she was hanging out with this folksinger,
songwriter guy. I also saw him at KOPN while I was a DJ for the "Carry
It On" show for approximately four years, at first by myself, and
some of the time with Diana Nomad, and later with Carol Greenspan and
Rose Wise for a short while.
I got to know Lee and Rena more, and I'm not sure
exactly when I started going out to their house for gatherings. My two
boys and their two oldest were close to the same age and hit it off pretty
well, and I loved Lee's music and singing with him. A few times he accompanied
me when I was performing at benefits, events, Earth Day, etc., as well
as the many times he offered his solo performances at such events over
the years. Diana and I would often go to the Chez Coffeehouse and listen
to him play with Bartholomew Bean, or sometimes singing along. More often,
at least once or twice for many years, I went out to their place at Happy
Hollow near Lupus and we sang and jammed and played on and on for hours
with whomever was there. Sometimes it was bigger gatherings, like a pot
luck with music, outdoors by the fire if the weather permitted, with a
number of musicians, ranging from Greg Renfro to Rick Aiken and Bartholomew
Bean, with numerous others joining in with voices, drums, maracas, tambourines,
like Sharon Feltman, Diana Nomad, and occasionally some of Lee's family.
Although Lee has many great songs, one of those I loved the most is the
wonderful "Love, Love, Love" song, which made a great sing-along
at many of these events. It has a simple
universal quality and is catchy but, even so, still has shifts in rhythm
and other uniquely original touches as so many of his songs do.
Other times it was a get-together like at Thanksgiving,
with lots of great home cooking, or Easter, a festivity lots of families
would come and enjoy, complete with Easter egg hunt for the kids, or sometimes
just an evening with a few of us. Several times, gatherings would dwindle
down to just Lee and Diana and I and maybe a couple others into the wee
hours
of the morning, swapping songs, some originals, some oldies like some
of Dylan's, or local favorites like Bob Dyer songs. Last May at Spring
Sufi Camp in the Lake of the Ozarks State Park, I enjoyed singing at the
kid's camp cabin, on a few folk-country numbers with Lee and Sarmad Bernstein
from Kansas City, who comes to Columbia for First Night. Most recently,
I jammed a little with Lee and John Schneller, just adding a few vocal
harmonies while they performed at Cooper's Landing on the Missouri River
the night of the early November lunar eclipse and "Harmonic Concordance."
What a delight!
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I met Carolyn in
1980, during that first year that Rena and I were together. In 1979 she
and Rena had both lived at the Missouri Farm, a branch of the Tennessee
Farm. Carolyn grew up in Columbia but had been away for many years. After
she returned, she became actively involved in local (and beyond) political
and social justice issues, and as participating members of the local community
we often found ourselves at events that presented an opportunity to play
music together or with larger groups of musicians, which we often did. She
has detailed this quite well in her parallel notes, so I'll not duplicate
her tale. I'm pleased that she chose to sing "Candy from Delaware"
and give it a shot of new life. Doubtless, as the years do pass, we will
continue our family and community friendship and find more opportunities
to play music together. |
MP3
Sample of Lee's Original
