Sunday Morning Mellow Down featuring Jonathan Edwards Sunshine

      Normally on Saturday I feature a song by an artist that revs up the crowd for a major hoedown.

Jonathan Edwards

Yesterday I broke with that tradition and played the easiest, breeziest, mellowest mellowing down song from the entire rock and roll era.  Although in fairness, the song Shanty, despite it's lay down burden stoner appeal, is a song that revs up the crowd it just doesn't rev it up in quite the same way as Great Balls of Fire.
       Today I'm featuring Edwards song Sunshine.  It is a an angry song wrapped up in a sunny, happy sounding melody.  That combo is actually a time worn well proven hit producing formula.  Elvis's Hound Dog, Smoky Robinson's Tears of a Clown, & even Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want to Have Fun are songs that successfully capitalized on that technique.
       Edwards wrote Sunshine as a Viet Nam war protest.  The draft was on and young men were being chosen in a lottery to serve the country in a war that they didn't believe was necessary or just.  By 1971 Woodstock was well in the rear view mirror and our government was still stubbornly insisting that we could either win or at least preserve our nations honer.  Resentment that had been aimed at LBJ was now boiling over at Richard Nixon.  Many people suspected he was a vainglorious & corrupt man who refused to bring the war to a conclusion because he was in the grasp of what he described as "The Silent Majority".  Nixon used the phrase to describe the electoral majority that won for him the Presidency in the November 1968 election.  Ironically that phrase is from the 19th century and was used to describe how the dead would critically look upon the decisions of the living.
       The thing about the song is that it is not specific to Viet Nam.  It is an expression of anger towards callous male authority and could apply to an overbearing boss or father.  That may be what accounts for it's universal and contemporary appeal.  The lyric "He can't even run his own life I'll be damned if he'll run mine" really could apply to any young man feeling powerless against an autocratic patriarch.  He tells the sunshine to go away because it's much to warm and happy for him to bear in the face of an uncertain future under the thumb of an unworthy elder.  And on that bummer of a note I give you:

Sunshine by Jonathan Edwards