Since the economic crisis is so bad, many young people are being forced to take jobs in the military to avoid living on the streets or in homeless shelters. I can only add one word of advice. Do whatever it takes to endure and avoid ruining or ending your life forever.

The generation four years before me and prior used to split to Canada to avoid Vietnam but now we have an all volunteer army, although “volunteer” is often not what these young men and women are. They are really economic refugees, sort of like Woody Guthrie called his people, Dust Bowl Refugees. So many of these kids are economic refugees, but we need to think up a good name for the guys joining for that reason. Economic Refugees sounds so bland. Anyone have any suggestions on what to call these guys who are forced to join the military for economic reasons and the abysmal absence of jobs?

This is an antiwar song that I bet many of you have never heard. Written by the talented artist Patrick Sky who was quite a interesting guy in his youth — and is still quite interesting today if you are into his current passion for a different kind of music. This is one of the most intense antiwar songs I’ve ever heard. I’d never heard it before I ran across it on Youtube when I was watching a good many of the songs that came from Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest show of the 1960s on Youtube, including this one of a very young but extremely talented Patrick Sky.

Go to his website and buy something if you can. He says he has never gotten a dime of royalty money from the album that this song appeared on, which is called Songs that Made America Famous. There are two voice singing this song. One is Patrick Sky and the other is Dave Van Ronk, whose name will undoubtedly be familiar to old folkies.

The link to Seeger’s educational television series Rainbow Quest above has some great performers. Many of these songs have appeared on Newport Folk Festival Records that were on the Vanguard label, which I think was one of the better labels because they seemed to do minimal processing of the sound on the recordings so on a good stereo, one can hear “hear inside” the venue on a good stereo system. Now for the song, the first in this series. Expect more to come: