I say a little prayer

I want to show this video and play this song for two reasons. First, I loved this single back in the day—late 1967—which is odd, I guess, because I was 12 years old and into Dylan and the Beatles, not lady singers of Brill Building tunes. (I also loved Dusty Springfield's "Wishin' and Hopin'," 1964, another David/Bacharach tune.) 

Second, lyricist Hal David intended the song as expressing the perspective of a worried war bride (or girlfriend) whose man is serving in Vietnam. I wonder if many who enjoyed the song back in 1967 understood that? I never heard the song that way, exactly, though I was moved by it.

Now that I understand the writer’s intent, the song seems even more compelling to me. It makes me admire David (and Bacharach and Warwick) even more. What a great song and great sentiment, making the war and its evils real and tangible and particular.

Looking back all those years ago, it seems to me that the country had a weirdly unhealthy awareness of that war. People of my generation all knew people who had died or the wives and girlfriends and family of guys who had died in Vietnam. I recall one of my teachers, a beautiful, tall young woman with red hair and kind eyes—Mrs. Cornelius—suddenly seeming sad, her efforts to teach us suddenly joyless. Eventually, I learned that her husband had been killed in that distant jungle, and I was saddened to think that she was doing her job, perhaps out of necessity, despite her loss. And, to that extent, with people everywhere experiencing or witnessing proximate tragedy, Americans on the home front genuinely felt the war, I guess. Yet, somehow, for me, the war often seemed to be a thing ignored and denied, as I looked around me at the unimpeded flow of loony busyness and endless crass commerce and wild striving. 

The song still moves me; but I think of it differently now, as a piece of beautiful recognition and realism. That Dionne Warwick was an African-American makes the song even more poignant somehow.

 

The moment I wake up
Before I put on my makeup
I say a little prayer for you

 

I was not aware at the time—too caught up in Beatles or Buffalo Springfield or Dylan, I guess—but, a year after Warwick’s hit, Aretha Franklin did a cover of the song. I’m not sure how much thought she put into it—it came about more or less by accident—but I have to say that I prefer her soulful version, with her inspired singing and churchy piano accompaniment. 

I keep thinking of these recordings these days. They made real the tragedy we were in.

Like the long-ago Vietnam War, this Covid crisis is so obviously going down wrong. We lost 58,000 Americans in Vietnam, and, largely, we kept doing the same frantic, crazy things as before, and dark reality managed to poke through only imperfectly. As I write this, three times that number of Americans have died miserable deaths of Covid-19, and over a far shorter period. And it seems to me that, for many Americans, and for our "leadership," the reality of that horror is denied or rejected, a fact that promises to extend the Covid horror far further into the indefinite future.