Favorite Song #6

#6 Father and Son by Cat Stevens (from Tea for the Tillerman, 1970)

I didn’t hear Father and Son for the first time until late 1972, when someone played it (for reasons I don’t remember now) in my eleventh-grade English class. It became another example of the legacy of my secondary school education: the most enduring impressions that I came away with were not from any of the paid faculty, but rather from media events like films or songs or from books that I read, some within and some outside of the prescribed curricula. Later, I would hear it many times on the radio, played on the album-rock stations in South Florida. Father and Son, like my #7 song Dialogue, is itself a dialogue, this time between a father and his son. But only one singer, Cat Stevens, sings both roles, singing in low and high pitches to signify the father and son, respectively. The father in the song sees the son as an extension of himself who should follow his example and advice, while the son cries out for respect and support for his own independent decisions.

Father and Son also illustrated for me the crunch of pressure and anxiety that a young person can experience as he or she enters adulthood. It seems that almost any direction taken carries with it some dire consequence, with some loved one there who is only too willing to point out the folly in taking the “wrong” path. Why is it that we as a society put this incredible burden on our young, when in truth life can be a vast stretch of time within which one can change directions many times? It’s no surprise to me that so many young adults suffer mental breakdowns, with all of the conflicting expectations, imposed both from without and within, that they must deal with in some way. To be sure, there are certain specific pitfalls that can befall them about which parents would be unloving if they did not act or speak out to warn or protect them. But in a broader sense, everyone needs to be treated in a dignified way as individuals who need to make, as adults, significant life choices for themselves.

This subject has never been more compellingly illustrated than by this poignant but sad song. There are other songs of this genre, most notably Neil Young’s Old Man and Conway Twitty’s sweet tear-jerker, That’s My Job (one of my all-time favorite country songs). Cat Stevens produced some other songs I liked, such as Sitting, Crab Dance, and Oh Very Young. He later converted to Islam, abandoned his pop music recording career, but later came back. He has now apparently reconciled his faith with his music to the point where he is recording and performing again.

Next favorite song: #5