| The picture has nothing to do with the rest of the post - it's just some produce from my garden, artfully arranged on my fancy countertop. I recently came across a very nice version of something called "The Hammond Song" by The Roches. It's a new arrangement with a hundred women singing, each from their own home, of course. Here it is . And here's the original version. Even though I had heard the name, I didn't know anything about the Roches. It turns out they were a group of three sisters from Park Ridge in the suburbs of Chicago. Their first album as a trio, featuring "The Hammond Song" was their biggest success. Here is the first part of the lyrics:
Who's talking to whom in this song? I looked at some comments, and most people seemed to think that it is a mother who is warning her daughter not to go away with a guy who lives in Hammond. (I assumed that it was Hammond, Indiana, because that's the only place of that name I know, and it's quite close to here.) The mother is saying that leaving with him could destroy their relationship. One comment suggests that it's older sisters who are talking to their younger sister. In any case the nature of the situation is the same. But in fact, the subject of the song is a fight with a record company, who wanted the group to wear hip clothes and promote their new album. Here's one of the sisters explaining what led up to the song being written: We were embarrassed. We wanted to get out of the whole situation. We had a friend in Hammond, Louisiana who ran a kung fu school. We left our apartment and told the record company, "We're not promoting the record anymore, we're leaving for a while." That was two weeks after the record came out. Maggie wrote "The Hammond Song" about the whole experience. Aside from the song itself, which I really like, it teaches us an interesting lesson: we know a lot less than we think. The meaning of the song seemed pretty clear to me. I share a societal environment with The Roches, and I felt I knew the situation they were describing. In fact, when I was in college, my parents were afraid that I would marry my girlfriend, and they were thinking, "We can't let him throw his life away," even though they didn't tell me that at the time. But the song is actually about something totally different. And if this can happen with something practically contemporary, certainly when we read the literature of the past, and all the more so the Bible, there is always a possibility that we have entirely misunderstood it. |
| Created on 3 September 2020, updated on 29 September 2022 by Samuel Ethan Fox |