홀로아리랑 phone recording credit: Shaem Song. From a Music party in Gangjeong Village (Jeju Island) after the 2014 Jeju Grand March for Peace.
lyrics
A sound collage, with crickets from an evening walk in my hometown in the shadow of Loowit (Mt. St. Helens), after a summer in Korea, hiking, playing music, and working with villagers and activists on Jeju Island, trying to stop the construction of a US/Korean Naval base being built in small fishing and farming village, Gangjeong, against the wills of the villagers.
The music box belongs to my mother, and originally it was a gift to my great grandmother from her husband, who--as the story has been told to me--survived a shot in the head from a Japanese soldier during WWII. The music box melody is “Sukiyaki” (Ue o Muite Arukou", "I Look Up As I Walk"), a 1960s Japanese pop song that became very popular in the US. However, while it was largely appreciated as a love song in English, the song lyrics were originally written by poet Rokusuke Ei as a protest against continued US military presence in Japan after WWII, and a lament for the failure of student movements to stop the US military machine and Japanese government from continued collaborations.
Midway through the song, there is a recording of a Korean elder from Gangjeong Village singing “Lonely Arirang” (홀로 아리랑), accompanied by several Korean musicians and myself on the banjo.
This recording is from the end of International Peace For The Sea Camp, in Gangjeong Village, Jeju Island, South Korea, during the Summer of 2014. For several days, activists and villagers from Okinawa, Jeju Island, and Taiwan gathered together under the shadow of the ever growing Naval Base to encourage one another, share stories, and offer perspectives on effective ways to resist US military presence, particularly the destructive cultures and economies that sprawl from US bases and destroy indigenous culture and land-bases, as happened and continues in Okinawa.
Lonely Arirang, like Sukiyaki, is a love song, in this case a passionate declaration of allegiance to the islands, rivers and mountain ranges that make up Korea, deliberately referring to them as part of one Korea, despite the fact that the places named are currently politically broken apart and claimed by different governments (Japan, North Korea, South Korea) or, as in the case of Jeju Island, being occupied and destroyed by foreign, military and corporate agendas.
In 2012, when several foreigners were arrested for participation in a nonviolent protest against the base construction in Gangjeong Village, a police chief told us in broken English, “I am not arresting you, Samsung Corporation is.”
In the midst of a global war on nature and local ecosystems and human cultures, love songs for places, for home, are radical songs.
We are all connected, often times more deeply than we know or would like to know, by history, land and the decisions of the powerful around us in past and present generations.
The struggle for Gangjeong Village to retain its land and way of life free of a military base and the destructive culture it brings is the same struggle that Japanese students took part in decades ago against perpetual US military presence on their home turf. It is the same struggle that Lakota families from Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations are taking part in now as they dig deep into their battered history and use song and wisdom teachings to show young American Indians how to stand up to the Keystone Oil Pipeline.
And it is the same struggle we all join in when we listen to the folk stories of our own regions, and sing our love songs for home.
It is the struggle of the small people who belong to the earth and the heritage of the world’s folk singers and various micro-cultures and ecosystems, living with and honoring our relationships with the ground that bore us, against the arrogance of a few, removed from any sense of obligation to history or soil or one another.
And songs across the earth, such as Sukiyaki, Lonely Arirang, The Blackest Crow, Mole in the Ground, and Skibbereen remind us of our shared heritage and common mother, and invite us to swim again in the river of life and folk wisdom that our ancestors have left us, to feel them again, to feel the earth again, and to gain voices and power to resist the forces of forgetfulness and greed that are spreading like a plague, feeding on the hunger that comes from cultural and spiritual rootlessness.
“Destroy the old, and you destroy our memory of the past. Don’t you care about the people who lived and died before us? There is no future for people who worship the future and forget the past. Democracy doesn’t mean you can ignore the minority.”
- Shun Kazama, From Up on Poppy Hill
Seth Martin (aka Seth Mountain or 이산), is a roots musician originally from the Pacific Northwest
(US).
Continuing in the radical tradition of artists like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Utah Phillips, Martin has been living in Seoul since 2015. He regularly performs with Korean and foreign folk, indie and rock acts.
"Quite possibly the closest thing we have to Woody Guthrie."
--Bill Mallonee...more
supported by 8 fans who also own “Halfway Home (with Cheong Seon-nyo)”
A reminder of the importance of starting each day talking with our heavenly Father who is preparing for us an eternal home not built with human hands. Allan
supported by 6 fans who also own “Halfway Home (with Cheong Seon-nyo)”
"Without worship, a person shrinks." This song, and this whole album, helps to bring "life to these bones" and helps me to know how wide, and high, and deep is the love of God. Thanks. Robert Buck
