(The hell of Iraq and Afghanistan and their transcendent lack of goals and trail of broken people notwithstanding.) The least we can do is remember in a meaningful way that allows us to have a broader perspective and some sense of what has gone before that brought us to where we are, and can show us a better way. And if my radio show were on today, August 6, I would have played those two songs, and likely taken listener requests and suggestions for others that would have fit with them. Sure, it all commemorates things that were before my time, but so was much else I want to understand. I’ve certainly played it on the radio on Thanksgiving weekend. Stream songs including 'The Telling Takes Me Home', 'The Goodnight-Loving Trail' and more. Not that I am demeaning the iconic antiwar song that famously has the Thanksgiving connection. Listen to The Telling Takes Me Home by Utah Phillips on Apple Music. I guess I don’t get why so many radio stations can play “Alice’s Restaurant” every year on Thanksgiving, yet I know of none who played these two songs today. I still cannot play it without getting choked-up. It can also be used double-time at 178 BPM. It was a “Listener Favorite” track on “Tied to the Tracks” a few years ago. Utah on Enola Gay is a positive song by Utah Phillips with a tempo of 89 BPM. It, too, is a song about that day in 1945, and of a reconciliation, years later. The following tracks will sound good when mixed with Utah Phillips Enola Gay because they have similar. Stream songs including 'The Telling Takes Me Home. And I played the Small Potatoes song, written by Rich Prezioso, “1000 Candles, 1000 Cranes.” It’s on that group’s “Waltz of the Wallflowers” album. Listen to The Telling Takes Me Home by Utah Phillips on Apple Music. And there, among all the songs, is one called “Enola Gay.” It’s filled with songs written by him, with a bit of her touching storytelling about him, in her raspy speaking voice. It is Rosalie Sorrels’ “Strangers in Another Country,” her tribute to her great friend, the late Utah Phillips.
Today, while I was looking for a particular CD, I ran across one I had never heard, and didn’t know I had. It was the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, on this very day, 64 years ago. But this one had only two words: Enola Gay. Most planes had “nose art,” sometimes racy, sometimes cartoonesque, sometimes elaborate. The paint the plane did wear was just enough for the national insignia, and for the name of the pilot’s mother on the sides of the nose, forward and below the cockpit.
It didn’t need any paint to camoflague it on the ground, because neither the Imperial Japanese Navy nor the Japanese air command had any ability remaining to bomb the island of Tinian. In 1945, a 4-engine B-29 bomber of the US Army Air Corps took off from Tinian Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, on a mission to end the war with Japan. There is earth-shattering (literally) significance to today’s date, August 6.