Earth Music


Earth Music is an album by the American rock band The Youngbloods, released in 1967. The album did not reach the charts.

History

Similar to their first album, the songs were a mix of originals and covers, ballads and rockers. Jesse Colin Young wrote three of the songs alone, the ballad "All My Dreams Blue", the hard rocking "Long and Tall", and the humorous "The Wine Song". Jerry Corbitt contributed the ballad "Don't Play Games" which features a string section, and cowrote "Dreamer's Dream" with Banana. "Fool Me", written by Banana, is a bass-heavy song more similar to "garage rock" of the middle 1960s than the folkier material normally associated with the Youngbloods.
Cover songs on the album include "Euphoria", a song originally done by the Holy Modal Rounders and written by George "Robin" Remailly. Other covers included two fifties classics, Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and Chuck Willis's "I Can Tell". Tim Hardin's "Reason to Believe " was one of the earliest cover versions of the popular ballad. "Sugar Babe," erroneously credited to Young/ Lomax, is a folk song about gambling and drinking that had been printed in American Ballads and Folk Songs, by John A. Lomax and his son Alan Lomax, published in 1934. In a note below "Sugar Babe," the Lomaxes state: "words and melody reprinted from the second volume of English Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians, collected by Cecil Sharp, edited by Maud Karpeles." That book was published in 1932.

Legacy

In a retrospective review for Allmusic, Lindsay Planer calls the album "a blend of captivating songwriting with an infectiously fun delivery" and feels that there are "a handful of equally definitive sides scattered throughout Earth Music."

Track listing

Side one

  1. "Euphoria" – 2:15
  2. "All My Dreams Blue" – 3:17
  3. "Monkey Business" – 2:49
  4. "Dreamer's Dream" – 3:35
  5. "Sugar Babe" – 2:08
  6. "Long and Tall" 4:05

    Side two

  8. "I Can Tell" – 4:29
  9. "Don't Play Games" – 2:12
  10. "The Wine Song" – 2:24
  11. "Fool Me" – 2:57
  12. "Reason to Believe" – 2:25

    Personnel