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Since You've Been Apart

from Mother & Child Reunion by Deane Arnold & Susie Deane

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This Elliot Finch song has a really cool story. I hope I do it justice: Mom and Sarah wrote this for their album "An Evening of Elliot Finch" when they were about 15 years old. The album was a collection of musical parodies, a limited run sort of thing that they shared with their school friends. This one was making fun of the current pop music. They imagined that someone like Rosemary Clooney should sing it.

At some point, Pete Seeger visited their school, and someone gave him a copy. He liked this song and performed it on The David Susskind Show. He later recorded it on his 1968 album The Young Vs. The Old.

Okay bear with me, this is where it gets fuzzy for me: Mom and Sarah were kids when they wrote this, and they actually registered An Evening of Elliot Finch with the US Copyright Office. As a joke, mostly. When Seeger performed it on the Susskind show, a well meaning relative who didn't understand copyright or licensing encouraged the girls to sue both Seeger and Susskind for royalties. Seeger and Susskind were probably both baffled, and the whole thing fizzled. I suspect that good-hearted Pete included the song on his own album to ensure the proper sales revenue made it to Mom and Sarah. Which it did. Mom would occasionally get a check for 20 or 30 bucks over the years.

Flash forward 10 years or so, and Mom met Pete again at a Clearwater Revival festival, and she got up the nerve to approach him with a belated apology ("we didn't know what we were doing, we were just kids"). Pete greeted her with a huge hug: "SUSIE! How is Sarah?! Hey everyone, these two little girls wrote this wonderful song..." and proceeded to sing it to everyone in earshot. The funny thing is that our family is pretty sure that Pete never realized the song was a parody: when he performed it on the Susskind Show, he introduced it a a protest song.

I've reinterpreted this song to sound more like old style Bakersfield country music. I suggested that Mom sing it with a twang.

credits

from Mother & Child Reunion, released June 19, 2020
Susie: vocal, acoustic guitar
Deane: acoustic and electric guitars, bass, drums

Elliot Finch

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Deane Arnold Columbus, Ohio

I make music. When I'm not making music, I make art. I paint, I sculpt, and I carve pumpkins.

Most people like the pumpkins best.

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